http://www.zombietime.com/hitchens-hedges_debate/
With Video. Lots of video.
Hitchens: It's exact equivalent of the evil nonsense taught by Hedges
and friends of his, who say the suicide bombers in Palestine are driven
to it by despair. Have you read the manifestos of these suicide bombers?
Have you seen the videos they make? Have you seen the manifestos they
put out? The propaganda that they generate? These are not people in
despair. These are people in a state of religious exultation. Who are
promised everything. Who are in a state of hope. Who are in a state of
adoration for their evil mullahs. And for their filthy religion. It's
this that makes them think they have the right to kill others while
taking their own lives. If despair among Palestinians was enough to
create psychopathic criminal behavior, there's been enough despair for a
long time, and enough misery to go around. It is to excuse the vicious,
filthy forces of Islamic jihad to offer any other explanation but that
it is their own evil preaching, their own vile religion, their own
racism, their own apocalyptic ideology that makes them think they have
the right to kill everyone in this room, and go to paradise as a reward.
I won't listen, nor should you, to anyone who euphemizes or excuses this
evil wicked thing.
....
Religion consists now, we find, no longer of moral absolutes. It used to
be, when I debated with religious types, they would say, 'Yes,
circumcision is good; masturbation is bad. We know this, because God
tells us so. Hacking of the genitals of a child with a sharp stone is
divine; touching them with a hand -- not so great.' We know -- so we
knew where we were. We were absolute. Now [gesturing towards Chris
Hedges] it's all relative. Now it's all completely relative. It's made
up a la carte and cherry-picked by mediocre pseudo-intellectuals who
want you to believe that the following thing that would have happened --
in the year, in the month of the year that the liberation of Iraq took
place, that finally, after an endless thesaurus of United Nations
resolutions condemning every aspect of its regime, that Iraq was free
from the proprietorship of Saddam Hussein -- that was March, 2003 -- do
you know what would have happened in April, 2003? Iraq was going to be
the chair of the United Nations Special Committee on Disarmament. Some
people think that would have been a better outcome. More humane, more
legal, less troubling, altogether more dealable with. Just as Iran and
Libya have just been re-elected to that very Committee on Disarmament at
the United Nations. I ask you: You pick that kind of relativism, you'll
also find you're dealing with a very surreptitious form of absolutism,
which is only capable of describing as fascistic relatively comical
forces (who I've denounced up- and downhill all my life in the United
States), but cannot use the word totalitarianism about the religion that
actually conducts jihad, actually organizes totalitarianism, actually
inflicts misery, pain, unemployment, and despair upon millions of
people, and then claims what it has done as the license for suicide and
murder. A perfect picture [gesturing towards Chris Hedges] has been
given to you of the cretinous relationship between sloppy moral
relativism, half-baked religious absolutism, and the journalism that
lies in between.
--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
"When they put out that deadline, people realized that we were going to
lose," said an aide to an anti-war lawmaker. "Everything after that
seemed like posturing."
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
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