More Q&As: Read recent interviews with Camille Paglia, Seth, Lynda Barry, Michael Pollan, Reif Larsen and Pasha Malla.There’s a certain disdain in the terms people use to describe Christopher Hitchens. “Bad boy” and “rock star” are quite popular, not least because they subtly suggest that the long-time columnist, literary critic and political commentator’s ardent and passionate mode of arguing — some might even say bullying — masks a lack of substance.
After spending the better part of an hour in the well-appointed 18th-floor bar of the Park Hyatt, trying to find criticisms of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything that had a hope of sticking, I have one observation to offer: Hitchens freely acknowledges evidence that could undermine his argument, and has substantial respect for those who do the same. Were he a mere showman, or worse, a propagandist, he might try to control the line of questioning so as to avoid being placed in any kind of negative light. But Hitchens never avoids questions that draw him towards controversial or difficult topics — if he makes statements that seem dangerously off-the-cuff, it’s because he’s always willing to clarify or expand on them until his position is clear.
(In fact, he insisted that he would never retreat from any question, and offered to continue our interview until I was satisfied.)
Hitchens’ reason for being in Toronto was to deliver a lecture at the Royal Ontario Museum called “The Three New Commandments,” where he drove believers to distraction with a close reading of the three (!) instances of the Ten Commandments in the bible, their oddities and the discrepancies between them. In our wide-ranging discussion, he was candid, sometimes theatrically indignant, but always ready to go where other pundits fear to tread.
The Walrus: A lot of people have asked you about the perceived aggression in God Is Not Great, in the way you state your case.
Christopher Hitchens: When the book was published, I said to my editors and publishers, I don’t want to do the usual bien pensant book tour — Vancouver, Toronto, New York, et cetera, et cetera. I want to go to the other camp, and ask them to debate with me. And if they will, I’ll never refuse a challenge, and if they won’t, I’ll never stop reminding them of it. But they didn’t. So the book is written directly to get people to come out to play, which is a much better way of engaging people and indeed, winning them over, than trying to finger-fuck them. I think people know when they’re being got at in that way. As a result, the places to which I’m most often invited are resorts of faith, places of faith, campuses of faith. It’s a very rare month where I don’t get asked to at least one fight, whether it’s a Christian campus or big synagogue.
Which seems wise, especially since they’re the people who spend the most time thinking about it.
And I’ll bet you these guys do not invite Obama-type protestants to come debate. They don’t respect people who come tip-toeing. And nor, by the way, should they. They want to debate with me because they think if they can beat me, they’ve really won an argument. Whereas if they have a discussion with someone who is sort of a compromised liberal social gospel Christian, there’s nothing to talk about. There’s no nourishment. Everything dissolves into a kind of goo. I’m very glad that I sprayed what I did in the way that I did.
In the interview you did with Rabbi David Wolpe in November, you said that “The Europeans have imported into the center of their society the resources and the population of a future Jihad, something that wants to take away everything they’ve got, change all their laws and alter all their customs. And it’s on the future of that struggle upon which everything will depend.”
You can see it here, too. I said the Europeans, but it’s true of Ontario also. It’s not yet true in any major part of the United States except perhaps New York, but that will change soon enough. When I was a kid in England, immigration was a controversy. We were talking about upholding the rights of British passport-holding Asians in Uganda who were thrown out by Idi Amin, or in Kenya where they were being purged because they weren’t African enough. And I thought, well, one, we have a legal obligation to them; two, they’re being terribly persecuted; and three, we’d be very lucky to get them, because they’re a fantastically talented, educated population. We were very lucky to get them. What I had not noticed, and people like Hanif Kureishi and Nadim Aslam and to an extent, Salman Rushdie, started pointing out, was that the guys who are coming from the backlands of Pakistan, these people would be considered very, very reactionary in Pakistan. And they’re colonizing cities in Yorkshire. A lot of people captured in arms, with Taliban uniforms in Pakistan, have Bradford Yorkshire accents. We didn’t see this coming, and it’s not going to get any better. It’s getting certainly much worse. And you think it’s not going to happen to you? Think again, it is going to happen to you. And it will be smuggled through your customs by multiculturalism. I’ve just been reading Ezra Levant — very good book. I very much applauded his stand against this, how dare they call it a human rights commission. I like the way he talks and the way he thinks.
