Q&A: Christopher Hitchens

But let’s presume that most people who claim to be moderate Muslims, or in fact, moderate believers of any stripe, would be open to hearing alternative views such as yours.

But they don’t ask me. I told you I get Catholics and Rabbis wanting to debate me on a regular basis. [But there are] people who don’t take up the challenge. Mormons don’t and Muslims don’t. They just don’t. They don’t think there’s anything to discuss. They don’t want someone to come and say, “You know what? The Koran is not a holy book, and Muhammed was not spoken to by god, there is no god, there is no messenger.” They’re not going to have that — that’s how moderate they are! What I have to say to them is, are you a Muslim or not? And by the way, while we’re at it, don’t define yourself as a fellow citizen of mine. Don’t you realize you’ve already transgressed? This is why society is made of Muslim and non-Muslim. They’ve won the first battle. But I won’t have that. If I allowed that, what else would I have to allow? A Jews-only state in the Middle East, what would be wrong with that? A Protestant-only state in Northern Ireland, what would be wrong with that? Diplomatic recognition of the Vatican as a country, they’d have to allow that too. All of this poison and nonsense would have to not only be allowed but to be praised as a gorgeous mosaic of multiculturalism, instead of a very dangerous tribalizing and Balkanizing of the things most precious to a secular democracy.

But when you are explicitly addressing a group of people let into the continent and claiming that they’re all a problem, the majority of them —

No, I didn’t say that, but there is a problem arising from the importation of extremists from their own country. It’s the same in Holland and large parts of France, people have come from North Africa, from villages where bride prices, dowry and circumcision of females is commonplace. You don’t get that everywhere in, say, Marrakesh, or if it’s in Pakistan, you don’t get it in Lahore or Peshawar. But the villages where it does happen have now reproduced themselves. Let me make it clear to you what I’m saying. There are people bringing practices — cousin marriage, honour killing and genital mutilation would be my three nominations, first of all — that are considered very dubious in their countries of origin. And they’re also bringing something that summarizes all of them, and intensifies them and refines them into one single point: the idea of holy war. That they have the right to do this, and the right to claim the supremacy of their own religion, and to spread it by violence — we will rue the day we let this happen. You can rue it now, or rue it later. I will rue it now. You will not be pleased when you look into the face of these people again and see what they’re demanding — you change your life to please them. And in the name of what? By what right? Because they think they have the message of god? I’ll never accept that. And I’m not going to take it from any other religion. I’m not going to take it from His Holiness The Pope, or Bishops in the United States telling people who to vote for.

In a review of God Is Not Great, Ross Douthat makes a criticism I thought was interesting. He says that in your book, you’ve only included two quotations from religious intellectuals born since 1800, both taken from the same C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. pamphlet. On the one hand, I think it’s —


That’s true. I mean, I’m trying to think… I don’t quote Niebuhr, or any of them. I’m not very impressed by any of them. I quote Lewis against his beliefs; I quote Lewis against the soft option. And I praise him for his moral courage. I don’t even remember what the second quotation is.

Well, I know the one about —

I quote him on spiritual authority, I remember enough of that.

There was the injunction saying that if Jesus was not the son of god, then he had to be a liar.