Christopher Hitchens in Toronto

Wednesday I went to Holy Blossom Temple to hear Christopher Hitchens speak. There are many layers of weirdness in that, which I hope to cover later in this post. For those who don't know Hitchens, he is a well known left wing thinker who shocked everyone when he supported America's war on Iraq. I've read, and enjoyed, many of his articles (but I haven't read his books). Hitchens is a contrarian. I think I have penchant for contrarians much like Genet (and the real Genet) has a penchant for the underdog. I think that's in great part why I like Michel Houellebecq too. The two tendencies might be related. I find myself agreeing with almost everything Hitchens says, which is kind of scary, though yesterday I was willing to challenge him on some points.

He didn't seem to think the absence or presence of WMDs should have made a difference in the decision to remove Hussein from power and even characterized the current focus on WMDs as stupid. I don't think it's stupid, even though I agree that it may not really matter in the end: the removal of tyrants should make everyone happy. Nevertheless, it remains true that many people were convinced that WMDs were the big reason for the war. They think this because that's what they were fed by the government and the media, regardless of the overriding humanitarian and political aspects of regime change. The immanent threat was emphasized by the Bush administration, not the eradication of Baathism, that ghastly “marriage of stalinism and fascism”, as described by Hitchens. At best this is confusing. Not everyone is smart and an expert on the Iraq war(s) like Lemon, therefore things need to be explained. If they have merit, your plans will stand up to public scrutiny, Wolfowitz.

Hitchens was introduced to the audience by David Frum, the son of Barbara Frum, famed Canadian journalist and broadcaster. He was also a white house speechwriter, and notoriously, the author of the phrase “Axis of Evil” that everyone loved (to hate). Almost incidentally, because he had to actually remind himself of it, Hitchens touched on Iran, the third member of the axis after Saddam's Iraq and North Korea. He admitted that a few years ago, Iran was to him a glimmer of hope in the region because reformists were gaining power peacefully there. So much for that. If I remember correctly, a large portion of the flak Bush (and Frum by proxy) received was because of the inclusion of Iran as a part of the axis of evil. Today it would seem that Frum is vindicated somewhat.

David Frum was nevertheless annoying, even though he said great things about Hitchens, about his courage to go to hot spots in the world, which he called physical courage, and his moral/intellectual courage to take an unpopular stance, and a seemingly contradictory one. Frum's fake modesty was in full force when the rabbi introduced him as a public intellectual and he tried to distance himself from this, claiming that “public intellectual sounds like public lavatory” and that such things (intellectual discourse? thought?) should best be done in private. I wonder what he was doing speaking to a packed synagogue.

This brings me to the issue of listening to intellectuals ramble on in place of religious worship. I find it really fantastic that intellectuals, even those whose opinions about organised religion aren't positive, are invited to speak by clerics in a religious establishment. I've never heard of this being done in any other religious denomination. I can't picture this event happening in a church, a mosque, or other temple of any kind so props to the Jewish faith here: never have I more wanted to wear a kippah. (The event was funded by the deep pockets of Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz. It is not lost on me that I'm jobless partly because of Schwartz's Onex, which controls Cineplex Entertainment, which acquired my former company, leading to my layoff. I don't care: I was able to come to this event without having to get up early the next day to go to work. And I was going to change jobs anyway. This has been a major digression). To add more, the event was open to the public, so goyims like me were allowed in, and we did so in large numbers, even causing a line-up outside the temple.

There were awkward moments. Starting with me, of course. I rarely go into any religious establishment, so this was bizarre. I had a very dark blue jacket of some rough material that could pass off as vaguely military if colored differently (a Gap purchase). If there is ever to be a Canadian middle-class white suicide bomber, I felt as if I looked like one. And I'm French, which makes me that much more likely to be an anti-semite and a bomber in Canada. There was security present at the door, and I was relieved when they asked me to open my bag and show them the contents.

France was, as it always is in anglo discussions of war, the object of discontent, if not ridicule. David Frum tangentially brought up the topic of the riots in France and enthusiastically suggested this was a sign of islamo-facism. David, islamo-facism is so far a negligible cause of the violence in France. (We'll see if this remains the case.) The jobs are scarce enough, the social barriers (racism at the forefront) are high enough, and the media is pervasive enough to explain the violence without the added impetus of radical Islam. This week's Economist is with me on this one. I think he mentioned this only because it was a mostly Jewish audience. Some comments were made about the French government's inability to deal with the problem, which everyone laughed at. Hitchens said something about France lacking an exit strategy. Newsflash: La Courneuve isn't Fallujah. Is that why it's funny? I wonder how many people in the audience were French.
I hope to post something else about the France situation (racism, secularism, anti-semitism, riots, socialism, integration or lack of it) later.

The most awkward moment came when Hitchens, not caring one bit that he was in a synagogue, a contrarian to the core, praised some kind of secular institution in the middle-east and welcomed further secularisation. Part of the audience started clapping. I would have clapped too, except that we were in a synagogue. People really have no tact. Both David Frum and the rabbi clambered to recover from this apparent faux-pas by, respectively, suggesting that truths can be discovered between the lines of the most sanguinary religious texts, and that the “new” old bibles of Holy Blossom were interesting reading. Sorry guys, I don't think you're going to convince him.