A friend on facebook posted the video below and asked for comments:
I sent my friend the following email (proper names redacted):
Religion
Book Review: A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad
A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto
Cross-posted at zenpundit.com
Previously, I read and reviewed Brynjar Lia’s Architect of Global Jihad
Jim Lacey has produced an English digest version of al-Suri’s influential magnum opus comprising approximately 10% of the original Arabic version, by focusing on the tactical and strategic subjects and excising the rhetorical/ritualistic redundancies common to Islamist discourse and the interminable theological disputation. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach.
Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011
Here is a quote of the day, as an ave atque vale to a contentious, smart, learned, moralistic, opinionated and unique man of letters.
My father, a Royal Navy commander, was on board H.M.S. Jamaica when it helped to deal the coup de grâce to the Nazi warship Scharnhorst on December 26, 1943–a more solid day’s work than any I have ever done.
From Benjamin Schwarz’s eulogy, which is very good. Hitchens’ essays for the Atlantic were always worth reading.
Hitchens had a good understanding of the concept of the Anglosphere:
[P]roperly circumscribed, the idea of an “Anglosphere” can constitute something meaningful. We should not commit the mistake of “thinking with the blood,” as D. H. Lawrence once put it, however, but instead emphasize a certain shared tradition, capacious enough to include a variety of peoples and ethnicities and expressed in a language—perhaps here I do betray a bias—uniquely hostile to euphemisms for tyranny. In his postwar essay “Towards European Unity,” George Orwell raised the possibility that the ideas of democracy and liberty might face extinction in a world polarized between superpowers but that they also might hope to survive in some form in “the English-speaking parts of it.” English is, of course, the language of the English and American revolutions, whose ideas and values continue to live after those of more recent revolutions have been discredited and died.
That is from his essay An Anglosphere Future. It is very much worth reading, or re-reading.
As a Catholic I regret Hitchens’ typically violent animosity against my religion and Christianity in general. He was usually unfair in this regard. But Hitchens was a slugger, who picked his enemies and went after them, and he was not interested in fighting fair, he was interested in winning. So be it. I ask the God he did not believe in to grant him abundantly the mercy we all rely on, and to impose only the gentlest of Divine admonishments upon this talented and tumultuous son of His. Judge not lest ye be judged, and I will be the last to judge Mr. Hitchens or anyone else in the court reserved for the Divine judge. Hitchens’ fellow English man of letters, and fellow literary debater, dirty fighter and hard-puncher, St. Thomas More, at the end, when the death sentence had been handed down, told the men who had unjustly condemned him that he hoped one day they would all be merry together in Heaven. I hope the same for Hitchens, and for Orwell — Hitchens’ literary hero and mine — and for many others. May that day be far off for many of us. But for Hitchens it is now.
Rest in peace.
You Must Love Whittaker Chambers, But You Must Not Drink Too Deeply Of His Perfumed Pessimism; Or, Be Happy For The Struggle Will Be Dire But The Victory Will Be Sweet
I had a chat with a friend today. He mentioned Whittaker Chambers, and that he sometimes thinks that Chambers was right, that we were on the losing side of history, and the fight itself is the only reward.
I mentioned something I believed Chambers had said, that all we could do was to preserve the “fingers bones of the saints” through the coming Dark Age. I wrote to him after I’d had a few minutes to mull our conversation, and to noodle a little on the Internet. Below, lightly edited, is what I sent.
******
I recalled the Chambers quote incorrectly. He did not say “finger bones of the saints” as I have been misquoting him for years now.
Here is the passage which I remembered erroneously:
That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.
(From William F. Buckley’s memoir of Chambers, here.)
Damn, that is beautiful.
Freedom & Fear
I started following what I called “The Affair of the Danish Mo-Toons” way back at the very beginning of that particular imbroglio, followed by the ruckus last year over “Everybody Draw Mohammad” and now we seem to have moved on to the Charlie Hebdo fiasco – a French satirical magazine dared to poke fun at the founder of Islam … by putting a cartoon version on the cover of their latest issue, with the result that their offices were firebombed. I think at this point it would have been fair to assume that representatives of the Religion of Peace would respond in a not-quite-so peaceful manner, so all props for the Charlie Hebdo management for even going ahead with it – for even thinking of standing up for freedom of thought, freedom of a press, even freedom to take the piss out of a target. (The following is what I wrote last year – still relevant to this latest case)