Moses is obviously important. Some might say seminal. The roles he played, he was strong, brave, a diplomat, he had tremendous leadership skills, and when he had to be, he was able to make whatever decisions the situations called for. And he is accorded an important role in what the development and history of Judaism.

Jesus is also important. He was a teacher and a preacher. He had a small cast of merry men, others who somehow could afford to walk around the countryside and listen to Jesus give what must have been a number of quite similar talks, otherwise, how would they have remembered any of it?

The time of the year when Jews really go to town on remembering Moses and the role Moses played is Passover. And the book Jews read then is called the Hagaddah. What makes Judaism and Christianity significantly different is how they treat their seminal figures.

In the Hagaddah, Moses is mentioned how many times? I ask because if you don’t already know, you’ll no doubt be surprised.

The answer is Moses is mentioned only once in the Hagaddah. Nor do we know where he is buried. But in the Hagaddah we find God, Elijah, the Pharaoh, Rabbis Eliezer, Joshua, Elazar, Akiba, Tarfon, and Rabban Gamliel. We hear the story of what happened leading up to the plagues, and what happened after, and then what happened when we left Egypt. And we learn of four different types of children, and we learn a few things about slavery and freedom.

In the New Testament, however, it’s Jesus this and Jesus that. Jesus is everywhere. He’s obviously the star of the show. He’s not just the star, he’s being elevated even higher than that. He’s being deified in print. And then over and over again stories are told that drive the point home, that Jesus is whoever they’re saying he is.

Saying it once somewhat equivically would have been enough for me. The fact that it’s so freaking repetitious tells me the authors were very insecure about something. It’s almost like a liar telling his story over and over so many times that he figures you’ve got to believe him.

Who said if you repeat a lie enough times, people will believe it?

Anti-Mullah blog gives a partial list of leftist puke organizations who accept funding from the Islamic state of Iran.

Remember, if there is “peace” and “justice” in the name, they are commie traitors. With their petro-dollars, the Mullahs can buy heaps of love from the pukes — though most of them do it gratis.

If they are young and graduated from university, they were re-educated, or their hippie parents filled their minds with shit. But the worst are the old hippies and commies themselves. Clueless, they are programed to destroy the traditional values in American society. They love Obama and are his real base.

Check out the list here.

We all know about how prevalent anti-Semitism is among liberals, and how loathe liberals are to admit it. Ever want to read more about it. Where it comes from? What its history is? What keeps it going? How it affects us and our society and Israel and theirs? Then read the following. I took it verbatim from an exceptional book on Christian anti-Semitism published in 1993. This except is pre-9/11, so it contains little about what we’ve all been experiencing lately, but it’s still clear, pertinent, timely, and well worth reading.

Liberal Antisemitism

Although there can be fierce argument about the new forms of antisemitism, they are relatively easy to identify. The majority culture is pervaded, however, by another, subtler form of antisemitism, whose existence is often denied, especially by Jews. This form of antisemitism is not explicitly ideological. It consists of a prejudice disposing those who harbor it to think somewhat badly of Jews without necessarily finding specific religious, racial, or political justification for doing so. It also disposes people to give undeserved credence to the arguments of more overt antisemites. The pervasive liberal mentality of our time is the background radiation left by the distant big bang of the Christian myth of the Christ-killing Jews.

Liberal antisemitism is often unconscious and indignantly denied when attention is drawn to it. With very few exceptions, everyone brought up in a Christian (or sometimes a post-Christian) home shares some degree of anti-Jewish prejudice, subtly conditioning their reactions to Jews even when the adult conscience repudiates such prejudice. Those who are alert to its existence, because they have confronted it in themselves, can recognize that it is far more widespread than many Jews suppose.

Liberal antisemitism is not always explicitly Christian, but it depends upon the traditional Christian interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, generally cited by liberals as the finest statement of the ethics they subscribe to. As we saw, this interpretation sets Jesus against his own people and tradition, and it sets the perfectionism of his ideal against the practical realities of political and national life, judging the latter by the former. Politically, this leads liberals toward pacifism, the ethic of loving the enemy and turning the other cheek being applied to relationships between states, which do not seem to have been in Jesus’ mind at all. Among liberals, religious and otherwise, it is taken for granted that the Old Testament teaches revenge and hatred and that it is an outmoded book to be discarded except for its historical interest and literary beauty. As a guide to personal and corporate life, it is no longer taken seriously in the liberal world.

Even those who are no longer attached to Christianity frequently retain the impression that the Old Testament teaches an outmoded and barbaric morality, ethically superseded by the teaching of Jesus. Jews are supposed to be vengeful, and incapable of forgiv ing those who have injured them. THey are supposed to be very interested in money and outstandingly skillful at amassing it. Such attitudes have a much wider influence than it is comfortable to admit.

Liberals, however, woiuld be shocked and horrified to be told they were antisemitic. Such an admission would be incompatible with the liberal self-image as someone exceptionally righteous and ethically motivated. Indeed, it sometimes seems that in such circles to call someone an antisemite is a worse offense than being one.

Enlightenment views of Jews remain widespread in liberal circles. Under the influence of such ideas, Jews are not attacked on religious grounds, though there is still an echo of Christian moral superiority, but rather for insisting on their national identity instead of merging with the majority culture as simply one religious group among others. Today, anti-Zionism is the most vigorous descendant of the old Enlightenment view, expressed so clearly by Clermont-Tonnerre during the French Revolution. Everything for Jews as individuals, nothing for them as a nation. Clearly, liberals still share the Englightenment opinion that Jews ae only acceptable in modern society if they reform themselves according to liberal ideals, abandoning their sense of themselves as a nation or people, and contenting themselves with being “Frenchment of the Mosaic persuation.” The Napoleonic bargain is likewise still embraced by many Jews anxious about their reception as fellow citizens in modern society.

Liberals are inclined to be pacifists, or at least to regard resort to arms by nation states as almost never justifiable. On the other hand, they are less shocked by the terrorist activities of groups they regard as politically deprived of their rights. American liberals especially tend to believe that if you adopt a forgiving and tolerant attitude to your enemies, they will be won over to friendship. In the Middle East, such expectations are apt to prove delusory.

Semi-Christian liberals are readily influenced by the diffuse antisemitism of Christian culture as a whole to dislike Israel for two reasons. Modern Israel is easily identified with the Jewish establishment that liberal Christianity believes Jeus opposed, and it is resolved to defend itself by force of arms, including reprisals where necessary against its attackers, whereas Jesus taught the forgiveness of enemies. Worst of all, Israel is believed to possess nuclear weapons and is presumably prepared to use them in a sufficiently exreme situation. The wide popularity of books puporting to reveal Israel’s nuclear secrets is instructive, especially in view of the fact that belif in the existence of an Israeli nuclear option has evidently contributed to peace in the Middle East by deterring further Arab attacks on Israel. For nuclear pacifists, including some well respectied scientists, Mordechai Vanunu, who betrayed his country’s purported nuclear secrets to the press, is a hero.

For the liberal pacifist mind, it would be much more ethical for Israelis to become the victims of Arab genocidal hate, a phenomenon in any case difficult for the liberal mind to take in. In this context, we should not be surprised that Israel briefly regained in liberal circles the popularity it lost by winning in 1967 by suffering the Scud attacks of Iraq in 1991 without retaliation, in order to please America.

The liberal attitude is in these respects a clear descendant of the ancient notion that the Jews should be preserved, but in misery. More generally, liberalism denies national identity to Jews, like the ideas of the Englightenment from which historically it is descended. It calls for their toleration as individuals with human rights, while according little or no legitimacy to Jewish consciousness of being a nation or people. Thus liberalism has an inherent tendency to anti-Zionism, reinforced by the new image of Israel as militarily strong and perhaps at times ruthless in the means it adopts to survive in a hostile and highly dangerous environment.

-from “Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate by William Nicholls”

Islam’s Dirty Little Secrets

For Arabs, keeping slaves is a time-honored tradition. That was one of the main reasons Muslims moved to Africa in the first place. They went there to take slaves. Soon they had a booming slave business and were sending slaves everywhere. Meanwhile, they were exporting the family business, “Convert or off with your heads!”

Now, much of Africa is under Islam’s umbrella. Parts that aren’t are experiencing what the world now calls genocide (Darfur, Sudan). Or ethnic cleansing (don’t forget Israel - where the Jews are still Jewish). For Muslims, it’s all in a day’s work.

Why do I mention this? Because in much of the Arab world, slavery is still one of their little dirty secrets. Even in big fat rich Saudi Arabia where money is no problem, they still are so cheap they’re willing to import women all the way from the Philippines and turn them into indentured slaves…

Slavery No Big Deal In Saudi Arabia

JAKARTA, July 8, 2008 (AFP) - Saudi Arabian families are abusing female migrant workers to the point of slavery and Riyadh needs to respond with sweeping labour and justice reforms, a major rights group said Tuesday.

US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a new report released in Indonesia, the home country of thousands of female migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, that in the worst cases the women were ‘treated like virtual slaves.’

‘In the best cases, migrant women in Saudi Arabia enjoy good working conditions and kind employers, and in the worst they’re treated like virtual slaves. Most fall somewhere in between,’ said Nisha Varia, the group’s senior women’s rights researcher.

The 133-page report entitled ”As If I Am Not Human’: Abuses against Asian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia,’ was compiled after two years of research and 142 interviews with domestic workers, officials, and labour recruiters in Saudi Arabia and the workers’ countries of origin, the group said.
It concluded that few of the abusers were ever brought to justice and migrant women who dared to complain risked counter-charges of adultery, witchcraft or moral degradation.

Witchcraft and ‘moral’ crimes such as being in the presence of unrelated men were punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment and 60 to 490 lashes so many abused women decided not to seek justice.
Out of 86 domestic workers interviewed, HRW concluded that 36 faced abuse that amounted to forced labor, trafficking or slavery-like conditions.

Some of the cases were horrific.

‘For one year and five months… no salary at all. I asked for money and they would beat me, or cut me with a knife, or burn me,’ Sri Lankan domestic worker Ponnamma S. was quoted as telling the rights group.

Haima G., a Filipina domestic worker, said her employer called her into his bedroom one day soon after she had arrived and told her she had been ‘bought’ for 10,000 riyals (2,670 dollars).

‘The employer raped me many times. I told everything to madam. The whole family, madam, the employer, they didn’t want me to go. They locked the doors and gates,’ she was quoted as saying.
Eventually she escaped to the embassy where she waited nine months for justice, only to be told that the case had been thrown out of court and she would be sent home.

Nour Miyati, an Indonesian domestic worker, had her fingers and toes amputated due to daily beatings and starvation. Charges against her employers were dropped despite a confession after a three-year legal process.

‘Employers often take away passports and lock workers in the home, increasing their isolation and risk of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse,’ HRW said in a statement.

It said Saudi labour laws excluded domestic workers, so many were forced to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week — often without pay — for years.

Thousands of domestic workers took shelter each year at the social affairs ministry and their respective embassies. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Nepal accounted for the bulk of the women.

The ministry was supposed to help negotiate payment but it often sent the workers home ‘empty-handed’ because their earnings were used to pay the employers to release them.

‘The restrictive kafala (sponsorship) system ties migrant workers’ visas to their employers and means employers can deny workers the ability to change jobs or leave the country,’ HRW said.
HRW’s Varia said the government had spent years considering labour reform ‘without taking any action.’

‘It’s now time to make these changes, which include covering domestic workers under the 2005 Labor Law and changing the kafala system so that workers’ visas are no longer tied to their employers,’ she said.

‘The Saudi government should extend Labor Law protections to domestic workers and reform the visa sponsorship system so that women desperate to earn money for their families don’t have to gamble with their lives.’

More than eight million migrants work in Saudi Arabia, including 1.5 million domestic workers, most of whom send money back home to their families.

Arab Cesspools Popping Up Everywhere

It’s understandable, when your princes are busy jetting around the world secretly funding Jew-baiters and Jew-haters, it’s hard to keep the buses running on time, much less the toilets unclogged (with Korans).

After a while, the sewage has a way of biting you in the ass, if you know what I mean?

Hamas is swimming in their own shit. The Palestinians were used to having mud on their face, so this is no biggie for them. They don’t smell much different either. But for the same stink to stick to the Palestinian’s benefactors, and then for the world to notice, that’s a fate worse than death for Muslims who go nuts when we make fun of Mohammed, or send them a likeness of a dog.

Imagine what would happen if they started to see themselves the same way the rest of us see them?

Saudi Prince Orders Inspection of Crappy Situation

JEDDAH–The Civil Defence yesterday sounded a warning of a serious situation developing at the sewage lake in east Jeddah.

A committee of Civil Defence, Jeddah Mayoralty, police and Saudi Electricity Company officials, which inspected the concrete dam, found dangerous leakage from the sewage level having risen to 6.5 metres.

The team inspected a distance of four kilometres alongside the dam, crossing walled yards, houses and earth dykes towards the districts of Al-Ajwad and Wadi Al-Dharr.

Prince Mish’al bin Majed bin Abdul Aziz, Governor of Jeddah had ordered the inspection.

The officials climbed atop the dam to determine the water level and concluded that 6.5 metres was dangerously high – three months ago the level was 4 meters.

The officials found no cracks or holes in the dam but there was noticeable seepage from the dam because of the pressure flow. The seepage appeared to be from underground.

The danger posed by this is that the seepages was taking take the course of the valley towards Al-Ajwad District through the tunneling of the pipes connecting the eastern part of the highway with Al-Safa District.

The committee’s findings on Sunday were to be sent to Jeddah Governorate. However, their inspections would continue.

There is a proposal to construct a new dam three kilometres behind the current dam, towards the west at a narrow point in the valley. This is to prevent pressure from building up and causing underground water seepage from the current concrete dam.

Sources said that the Civil Defence had warned in previous reports about the fragility of the dam and sought a speedy solution to the problem.

There were four guards stationed at the dam site on Sunday; one of them was a Saudi while the others were of other nationalities. The Saudi guard said he and some expatriates were appointed for the job by a private security company two days ago, with a monthly salary of SR1,500 . He said he was surprised to find that his guard house is an old tent that “nobody can live in.”
Meanwhile, residents in the east of the highway are in fear over the dam collapsing.

One resident, Sultan Al Otaibi, said they were awaiting word from the mayoralty or the authorities concerned about action to be taken to stop the seepage.

Al Otaibi said the groundwater table has risen to an unprecedented level in the surrounding districts. Besides the pools of water formed were breeding mosquitoes, he said, complaining that the municipality’s insecticide spraying operations have stopped, compounding matters.
The Municipal Council is scheduled to hold an extraordinary meeting under the chairmanship of Dr. Tariq Fad’aq to draw up recommendations to the mayoralty about the crisis developing at the septic lake and the precautionary dam.

Most meteorologists are weather weenies whether they realize it or not. Water matters, weather matters, and how the climate is changing (getting warmer?), sea level rising, and rainfall patterns are changing matters to lots of people.

For instance, lots of people who live in deserts are getting a rude awakening. Soon we’re going to hear of either massive water collection projects going up or property values going down. In Nevada and Arizona, for instance, people continue to build where no one in their right mind would build.

But in Israel it’s a different matter. Thanks to the Brits, the United Nations and the Arabs, the Jews have been making due with a tiny dry piece of desert. Meanwhile, most Muslims and everyone under the anti-Semitic spell feel the Jews still control too much, be it too much land, too much water, too many jobs, too many whatever. Whenever Jews appear in more than ones, liars start lying. After all, that’s what liars do. And why do they lie? Because.

So, not trying to aggravate the situation, I just thought I’d mention the water situation in Israel isn’t one of those things you should just take for granted…

‘Current water crisis is unprecedented’

Ehud Zion Waldoks | J’Post

“This is the worst crisis since records started being kept 80 years ago,” Water Authority head Uri Shani declared Tuesday morning at a special press conference in Tel Aviv. “Like most countries, Israel is dependent on rainfall and the amount of rainfall is decreasing. There is a drop of 100 million cubic meters per year.”

Shani described a situation of increasing damage to Israel’s main natural water sources. The Coastal Aquifer “has dropped below its black line,” which means that it will suffer rapid damage, possibly irreversible damage, Shani said.

The water level in the Mountain Aquifer was currently a meter above its Lower Red Line, but was also expected to reach its bottom limit - the Black Line - by this year. He added that water levels in the aquifers had never been this low.

Shani predicted that Lake Kinneret would reach its Black Line by December 2008. The Kinneret dropped below its bottom limit on Monday, 213 meters below sea level. The lake’s Black Line is 214.87 meters below sea level.

Shani said that the forecast predicts next year will be even worse and the year after that might be just as bad unless more rain falls than expected.

The Water Authority has taken a number of measures in various directions to ameliorate the crisis.

Their main effort to meet Israel’s current water needs has been to “borrow on the future,” Shani said.
To that end, the Water Authority has started pumping water from tributaries that feed into the Kinneret, water which was supposed to reach the Kinneret by 2010. In addition to the main effort, Shani said polluted wells would be purified and desalination plants would increase their output.
The authority has also undertaken a series of measures that will go into effect this week, measures that would limit the use of water for gardening and raise the price of water for that purpose.
The price will nearly double from NIS 3.90 per cubic meter to NIS 7.40 and maybe higher.

From that price hike and the additional NIS 1 billion the government budgeted earlier this month, the authority will invest NIS 12 billion in infrastructure, desalination and sewage treatment for agriculture in the next five years.

The press conference also marked the launch of a public relations campaign to be carried out by media, television and billboards to encourage the public to conserve water.

Omissions and Emissions

Leaving something out is just as important as sticking something in. It’s criminal not to warn someone that the person you are getting involved with has priors. Especially if that person is a sex offender. You’d think employees at a Catholic school would know this by now. Apparently they don’t. Morals just don’t matter to people of that cloth. What’s their problem? Have they been so busy lying about the Gospel for so long, they can’t tell the truth about anything anymore?

You would think the people providing recommendations would have mentioned that the dude in question was into statutory rape at a Catholic school. But for some reason, the Catholic school employees failed to pass that information on to the next school that hired the Catholic rapist who couldn’t keep his hands off the merchandise. Students are often sexy, that’s a fact. But the schools you send your kids to should know how to protect those sexy kids from the teachers. And after everything that’s happened, you’d think Catholic schools would know this better than anyone. But sorry folks. As a result, anyone who used to work at a Catholic school is now suspect. And probably should be. Just as it’s okay to be leary of certain Muslims. Sometimes a little bit of profiling can go a long way. So profile away…

El Sereno volleyball coach fired after sex abuse suit is disclosed

Renato ‘Ray’ Lopez Jr., 44, was dismissed by officials at Wilson High in El Sereno, who learned that he allegedly had a sexual relationship with a student at his previous school.

by Richard Winton | Los Angeles Times

A girls’ volleyball coach at Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno was fired after officials learned about a lawsuit alleging he had a sexual relationship with a student at a Catholic school, where he resigned under pressure.

Wilson Principal Roberto Antonio Martinez said he terminated Renato “Ray” Lopez Jr., 44, from his coaching position for the Wilson Mules volleyball team after learning of the allegations involving a female student at the coach’s prior school, Sacred Heart of Jesus High School in Los Angeles.

Martinez said he was unaware of the allegations until he was contacted by The Times and that he did not know if anyone checked the coach’s references with his previous employers. Martinez said Wilson High’s athletic director knew Lopez and that the school district had done a criminal background check.

Martinez said that as a non-teaching staff coach, Lopez was never supposed to be alone with his student athletes.

The dismissal comes after a series of recent arrests of Los Angeles Unified School District administrators, coaches and teachers for allegedly molesting students and possessing child pornography.

Details about the latest case came to light in a lawsuit filed by the female student, now 23, in Los Angeles County Superior Court against the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and Sacred Heart of L.A. In the lawsuit, she states that she was a 17-year-old junior in 2003 when she began the more than year-long sexual relationship with Lopez, who was more than 20 years her senior.

The relationship apparently continued through the girl’s senior year when he coached her in volleyball, basketball and softball.

She also worked for him at an El Sereno trophy shop he owns.

Lopez refused to comment on the litigation when contacted at the shop. “I have nothing to say,” he said. In his resignation letter to Sacred Heart, he adamantly denied the allegation and said nothing had occurred between him and the girl.

Sacred Heart investigated the allegations after two other female students reported the sexual misconduct to the school in November 2005. Lopez denied it but was placed on administrative leave.

The young woman, who The Times is not identifying because of the nature of the allegation, initially denied the relationship with Lopez, but after further questioning by officials acknowledged the sexual contact.

Lopez was never charged criminally.

The young woman initially told archdiocese officials that she was 18 when the sexual relationship began. Archdiocese officials reported that allegation to the Los Angeles Police Department’s child sex crimes unit in November 2005.

The young woman told police that she was 18 when the sexual acts began. But she later alleged in her deposition that Lopez had molested her when she was 17.

“She didn’t say she was 17 to the police because she didn’t want him to go to prison back then,” said David Ring, the young woman’s attorney.

J. Michael Hennigan, an attorney whose law firm represents the archdiocese, said a retired FBI agent, Paul H. Breen, who investigated the accusations against Lopez for the archdiocese, “deemed the allegation credible.”

“We wanted to terminate him because credible is our standard for termination,” Hennigan said.

Sacred Heart Principal S. MaryDiane Scott told Lopez in December 2005 that the archdiocese wanted to fire him but said that she was willing to support him if nothing sexual had occurred between him and the student. According to the principal’s notes, he replied, “Sister, nothing happened.”

Top archdiocese officials in March 2006 told the school principal that she had to “let the teacher go,” as parents complained that more than four months had passed without any information from the school about what was going on with the case, according to e-mails obtained in the litigation.

Lopez was allowed to resign by the principal on March 9, 2006, after more than a decade at the school.

In January, the young woman sued the school and archdiocese alleging sexual exploitation, negligence and infliction of emotional distress.

Ring said she filed the suit in part because she was concerned that he was coaching at Wilson.

The archdiocese attorneys in March denied all the allegations of misconduct on the part of the school or archdiocese.

Please read this post first: The Sensitivity Trap…Brits’ PC Idiocy on Islam

The Lord Works in Strange Ways

Talking about toilets, the recent Arab/Iranian/Hamas anti-Israel gambit involves biological warfare.

Along the Gaza coastline Mediterranean Sea currents flow north. Utilizing this simple fact, ever since Hamas took over Gaza, it has transferred all raw sewage to the ocean, figuring it would destroy Israeli cities to the north, including Tel Aviv.

Instead of destroying Israel, the result has been, Hamas turning Gaza into a toilet. The place stinks. No one can go swimming.

But for people who talk shit and who crap all over their Jewish neighbors, this recent turn of events makes sense.

The Lord works in strange ways…

Gold prices always increase with people’s insecurities. When people are afraid that war, or the cost of oil, or a teetering economy will unleash all kinds of ills, the price of gold goes through the roof. So here’s a story about our times, and how the cost of gold has affected an affected guy in Hong Kong.

A Palace of Gold Is Sold Off For Its Melt Value, but Not the Throne

by JONATHAN CHENG

HONG KONG — At $800 an ounce, the golden bathroom sink had to go. At $1,000, say goodbye to the golden horse-drawn chariot. But don’t even think about touching the golden toilet.

Global economic uncertainty over the past few years has pushed gold prices into the stratosphere, and few people have felt that rise as much as Hong Kong entrepreneur Lam Sai-wing has. He has spent the past decade constructing a palace of gold, decked out in six tons of the precious metal. In recent years, the palace has become an attraction mainland Chinese tour groups couldn’t miss, and a boon for Mr. Lam’s retail jewelry business, Hong Kong-listed Hang Fung Gold Technology.

Since gold prices hit four-digit territory earlier this year, Mr. Lam has been taking apart his hall of gold as quickly as he once raced to construct it. He is melting down golden chandeliers, armchairs and armored knights and selling gold by the ton to fuel growth plans that include hundreds of new retail outlets in mainland China. But even with the selloff, one thing is certain: The toilet stays.
“I don’t care if gold hits $10,000 an ounce,” Mr. Lam says. “I’m not melting it down.”

As far as Mr. Lam is concerned, the golden toilet is more than a Guinness World Record-certified, 24-karat, fully functional flushable throne.

Mr. Lam, a former goldsmith, came up with the toilet gimmick in 2001 as he was pushing his jewelry-manufacturing business into a fierce retail market. The come-on worked so well that he quickly added ton after ton to his glittering hall. At its peak, Mr. Lam’s collection included a golden king-size bed, a 5-foot-8-inch-tall traditional Chinese statue of the “Guan Yin” goddess of compassion, and the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. He named his 7,000-square-foot display the Swisshorn Gold Palace.

As a boy growing up in Cultural Revolution-era China, Mr. Lam, now 53 years old, was obsessed with gold. He says he found himself transfixed with one sentence in Vladimir Lenin’s writing: “When we are victorious on a world scale, I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.”

Lenin’s words alluded to a socialist utopia with no need for money, but Mr. Lam read them as an indictment of the poverty-stricken existence he found himself in. He rarely had meat to eat, and after he turned 7, Mr. Lam struggled to help his single mother and six siblings sell bananas and peanuts.
“Life, it was tough,” Mr. Lam said in a recent interview in his gold-bedecked office, decorated with golden pillars and statuary.

At age 22, Mr. Lam escaped from his impoverished hometown of Chaozhou, fleeing by foot for nearly a month before swimming across a river to Hong Kong, he recalls. When he arrived, Mr. Lam looked up some relatives and got himself an apprenticeship as a goldsmith. He soon set up a small wholesale jewelry business.

When China began opening its economy in 1979, as part of a sweeping reform movement, Mr. Lam was among the first to open a factory there, a jewelry manufacturer of about 100 workers in the southern city of Dongguan. By 1998, Mr. Lam was readying his company to go public, and to launch a new retail venture.

“Building a gold toilet, I realized, was the perfect way for me to put into reality something that has been in my head since I was 16 years old,” he said. Besides, he added, gold prices were so low they could only go up; buying gold at $200 an ounce would hedge against inflation. “It would be like an investment, plus we could let people see it for an admission fee, and we could use it to launch our brand,” he says.

Not everyone was on board with the plan. His board of directors balked at the idea, and his friends called him crazy. But Mr. Lam had his way, and construction — headed by Mr. Lam — began. The toilet became a smash hit.

Mainland Chinese tours made it a highlight on their itinerary, and before long, the hall was drawing as many as 100 tour groups every day. The jewelry gift shop — the company’s first retail outlet — reeled in about $100 million a year in sales for the company at its peak, while sales of Hang Fung’s jewelry lines pushed company profit to new highs by 2003. The attraction even drew Communist officials from mainland China, fascinated that a capitalist haven like Hong Kong could have realized Lenin’s dream without having first created a socialist utopia.

“The first time I saw it, I thought, ‘How wonderful — how absolutely wonderful,’” one recent visitor told a Taiwanese television crew as he and others crowded around the toilet. “There’s just so much gold everywhere. Never did I think I could see so much gold, not even in my wildest dreams.”
Competitors have set up gold showrooms of their own, but none as flashy as Mr. Lam’s.

Tse Sui Luen, a high-end rival, has constructed its own showroom. The place has a precision-timed tour modeled after a Disney World attraction, introducing visitors to the company’s founder (a “sparkling legend”) before whisking them by a workshop of laborers fiddling with custom jewelry under bright lights and into the gift shop. “You want to keep it like a tourist attraction,” says TSL’s chairman, Erwin Huang.

When gold hit $980 an ounce in March this year, Hang Fung unloaded a ton of gold, and later slimmed down by two more tons, reaping about $64 million in the process.

“This latest rise in prices has been incredible,” Frank Wu, Mr. Lam’s chief financial officer, said as workers hacked away at the furniture downstairs. The price of gold came down from a March 18 peak of $1,003.20 an ounce, to $848.90 on May 1. Since then, it has bounced back yet again, to $925. This past week, it has been around $880.

If prices rebound, Mr. Wu says, the company will sell more. But not the commode.

“The toilet and the Guan Yin statue are the most valuable pieces,” Mr. Lam says. “The Guan Yin is a goddess, and she is to be worshipped. As for the toilet, that’s the cornerstone of our company,” located though it is in the golden bathroom of the golden palace. “It’s an icon. It will never be taken apart.”

First read: Allah Caused the Iowa Floods

Bertha Becomes Season’s First Hurricane
The strengthening storm is about 845 miles east of the northern Leeward Islands.

MIAMI — Hurricane Bertha continues to strengthen as it moves over the central Atlantic Ocean. As yet, no one is blaming this storm on the gays. No one has blamed the Jews, saying they’re trying to kill themselves to get sympathy for Israel. Muslims haven’t said it’s Allah’s work, trying to drown the Jews because they insist on living legitimately in the Jewish State. No one has implied God is behind whatever evils lurk in Bertha’s winds. But give the crazies time.

As of 11 a.m. EDT today, the Atlantic season’s first hurricane was centered about 775 miles east of the northern Leeward Islands. National Hurricane Center forecasters say Bertha is expected to turn in the general direction of Bermuda.

Maximum sustained winds have increased to speeds of 90 mph with higher gusts. Some strengthening is expected during the next 24 hours, and forecasters say Bertha could become a Category 2 hurricane later Monday.

Bertha is headed west-northwest at about 15 mph and is expected to slow down in the next couple of days.

Dead Sea tablet suggests Jewish resurrection imagery pre-dates Jesus

by Ofri Ilani | Haaretz

The premise that the Messiah died and was resurrected after three days is considered the foundation of the Christian faith, one which differentiates it from Judaism. Through the generations, this belief stood at the center of the debate between Christians and Jews. But now, a mysterious tablet from the time of the second temple has led researchers

 to believe that this premise of messianic resurrection is not unique to Christianity, but rather existed in Judaism years before Jesus was born.The tablet, which has been dubbed “Gabriel’s vision” because much of its text deals with a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, was discovered eight years ago, but a large part of it is illegible and researchers have had difficulty interpreting its meaning.

Israel Knohl, a professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has offered a new interpretation of this text recently, which has sparked interest in the Christian realm. Knohl’s interpretation could shed light on the history of Jesus and the way Christianity grew out of Judaism.

“Gabriel’s vision,” a previously unknown prophetic text written in the first century B.C.E., was written on a large gray limestone tablet. In the center of the text, which includes quotes from the Bible and prophetic verses, there is an image of the angel Gabriel. The tablet was not discovered in an organized archaeological excavation, therefore the location of its discovery is not clear. Some believe it was found in Jordan on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea.

The New York Times reported recently that the tablet was bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months.

“I couldn’t make much out of it when I got it,” said David Jeselsohn, the owner, who is himself an expert in antiquities. “I didn’t realize how significant it was until I showed it to Ada Yardeni, who specializes in Hebrew writing, a few years ago. She was overwhelmed. ‘You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone,’ she told me.”

Yardeni and fellow researcher Binyamin Elitzur published a long analysis of the text in the Hebrew-language history and archaeology quarterly “Cathedra”. However, Professor Knohl interpreted one of the words in the text differently, changing the meaning of the text entirely.

“This is a revolutionary text,” Knohl said when presenting his research at a conference marking 60 years since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls held this week at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. “The text changes the way we look at the historical Jesus, and provides a missing link connecting Judaism and Christianity,” he added.

“I identified a previously unrecognized Jewish notion that the blood of the messiah is necessary in order to bring about national redemption. The idea of a tortured messiah who was resurrected three days after his death was adopted by Judaism before the birth of Jesus. The main ideas of the Jesus myth existed in Judaism,” Knohl went on to say.

In the “Gabriel’s vision” text there are 87 lines. Toward the end, on the 80th line, there is an unclear sentence containing the words “shloshat yamin” (three days). The next word is broken up, and when the text was first published, three dots were used in its place. However, Professor Knohl recognized it as “Hayia”, which he interpreted to be the command form of the work “Hai”, to live, concluding that the text is describing the angel Gabriel as someone who raises from the dead the prophet leader named “Minister of ministers” three days after his death. He associates this minister with a historic figure-a Jewish leader named Shimon who declared himself king and led a failed rebellion against Herod in the year 4 B.C.E. until he was killed by Herod’s army.

Farmers in Lebanon threaten protest

BEIRUT–Lebanese farmers threatened to take to the streets if the government refuses to backtrack on its decision to cancel the Export Plus Program. After a meeting with outgoing Economy and Trade Minister Sami Haddad, the farmers’ syndicate said the government had no intention to reintroduce Export Plus, a program introduced by the Investment Development Authority of Lebanon few years ago to finance the export of Lebanese agricultural products to Europe and the Arab world.

Haddad claimed that Export Plus only benefited the merchants instead of the farmers. The minister insisted that the government has every right to open the market to foreign competition, adding that consumers will be the first to benefit from unrestricted competition. The farmers are also demanding the reintroduction of the agriculture calendar, a process that bans the import of agricultural products in Lebanon during certain seasons. The farmers warned that they would not hesitate to carry out a “revolution” if their demands were not met soon.

Hurricane Katrina and the Iowa Floods

Where are all of the Hollywood celebrities holding telethons asking for millions to help Iowa and helping the folks affected by the floods?

Why isn’t the Federal Government relocating tens of thousands of Iowans to free hotels in Chicago?

Why hasn’t the media predicted we’ll soon learn everyone’s been covering up the truth about the thousands of dead bodies?

Where is all the media asking the tough questions about why the Federal Government hasn’t solved the problem? Asking where the FEMA trucks (and trailers) are?

When will Spike Lee say that the Federal Government blew up the levees that failed in Des Moines?

Where are Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks? How come no one’s embarrassed to be an American when a natural disaster hits White America?

When will Governor Chet Culver say that he’s going to rebuild a “vanilla” Iowa because that’s the way God wants it?

How come no famous reverends said God did this to punish Iowans because they believe in something sinful, like Jesus?

How come no famous liberals said the Federal Government flooded its own cities to get the people’s minds off those infamous wars over there?

How come all those inept mayors haven’t been blaming Obama and his supporters for not supporting Whites in times of dire need?

Where are all the looters stealing high-end tennis shoes and big screen TV sets?

Where is the hysterical 24/7 media coverage, complete with reports of cannibalism?

Where are the people declaring that George Bush hates white and rural people?

How come two weeks after the floods began we stopped hearing anything else about the floods in Iowa?

In Jimmy Carter’s book on fly-fishing, “Sharing Good Times,” he writes fondly of fellow fly-fishermen similarly to the way he fondly wrote of fellow anti-Semites in “Peace Not Apartheid,” another one of his many forgettable books. What I can’t forget is that Carter expresses anti-Semitism as eloquently as he expresses philo-fishermanism. You may agree as you read Carter’s words:

“Fly-fishers are extremely protective of the fish, the pristine water, and the surroundings, and pride themselves on honoring all the protocols and customs that have developed during several centuries. We have been thrilled to take our place among these practitioners of the art.”

You see, Carter appreciates how fly fishermen hunt trout, just as he appreciates how mad-dog Muslims hunt Jews.

It’s enough to make Carter lovers everywhere want to vote for another Democrat.

Check out: The Jimmy Carter Un-Presidential Library

The Nobama Girl sings the truth about B. Hussein Obama.

Remember this one by Obama Ho?

Remember Oil for Food?

How the corruption and dirty dealings went all the way to the top even in the United Nations? As if that should have surprised anyone.

And remember how leading into the war in Iraq, when we Americans were aghast when we learned how Russia, France and Germany based their alliances and decisions on lucrative concessions obtained in that country?

It seems, we the little people are naive to how the world works. Forming alliances and fighting over such petty things as concessions is not new nor is it rare. This is how the rich co-mingle with the powerful, and how those who govern are governed by those who are rich and powerful.

In case you might think there’s something new or underhanded about this, you might want to Google the following article, “Concession hunting in the age of reform: British companies and the search for government guarantees; telegraph concessions through Ottoman territories, 1855-58.”

If I knew my history better I’d list hundreds of similar situations, but instead, I decided to focus on Iran, since Iran’s in the news a lot these days. Although Russia and the West constantly hunted and clashed for concessions throughout the Middle East, Near East and Far East throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, I feel it’s important to point out how fierce the competitions was between France, Germany, Britain and Russia when working out deals with the Ottomans going back even before oil was discovered there.

The Muslims were constantly dealing with the West, and the warfare, although often small and by today’s terms, almost petty, was fought constantly over such things as who gained privileges and a leg up when looking for deals with all kinds of public works projects, and with deals with banks, and who got to build the railroads, and everything having to do with the vast tobacco business.

Back then, that’s what hegemony in the region was all about. That’s what coup d’états were over. That’s why tribal chieftains were ousted and others put in place. Those were the reasons we helped elevate the likes of this shah or that king to various thrones. This is how business was done back then. And whether you like it or not, on some level, that’s still how business is done. Why? Because it’s business.

Business has always been competitive. It’s about relationships, power, money, and it’s rare that governments aren’t involved, and as we’ve seen, it’s even rare now that the United Nations isn’t involved. Corruption is far more common than you might think. What’s rare is the naivete with which Americans view the world. We still think oil should not be part of the equation when dealing with Muslim countries. But how can oil be kept out of the equation?

Oil rich Muslim countries are going to use the oil weapon as long as it holds sway over us. And we’re going to respond in kind. Whether you like it or not, that’s just how it is, so get used to it.

Oh, and anyone who thinks all the wars in the Mid-East started with the establishment of Modern Israel, is equally as foolish. Long before the Jews owned any guns, the Arabs and Muslims were warring with one another. They’ve never gotten along. Why? Because that’s just how it is.

Sure, it’s been great for them ever since Modern Israel was added to the mix. Muslim leaders have continually done their best to rally support behind them based on Arab and Muslim enmity for Jews, and although millions of people continually fall for these shenanigans, that’s all they are. They’re just tools, vehicles, smokescreens, means toward various ends.

So anyone who thinks they’re going to be able to solve the problems of the Middle East by finding peace with the Palestinians is remarkably foolish. Just as anyone who thinks oil can be removed as a factor when making decisions regarding Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia is also an idiot. This is just how it is, so get used to it.

by Alexander Linklater

For most of his 40-year career, Christopher Hitchens’s notoriety has been confined to highbrow journalistic, literary and political circles. In the last 15 years, he has been familiar to readers of Vanity Fair and the Atlantic, and to viewers of the American current affairs shows that invite him on to say outrageous things in stylish phrases. His aptitude for the iconoclastic flourish—describing Princess Diana and Mother Teresa at their deaths, for example, as, respectively, “a simpering Bambi narcissist and a thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf”—sustained his currency as an intellectual shock troop of the left. Then, with his support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and for George W Bush’s re-election in 2004, the left itself became a target of his polemics. But whichever side he took, he continued to file what were essentially minority reports to a specialist audience. Only God was able to promote him beyond such factional interests by providing the subject of a bestseller. While Hitchens has authored 16 books, including works on Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, the Elgin marbles, George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, his assault on religion in God is not Great was the first occasion for which a publisher had arranged a serious US book tour.

Now his proselytizing atheism has granted him something like the status of a household name. But why does this insolently charismatic, upper middle-class Englishman seem to attract, and repel, so many people? It may be something about the way in which he combines a raffish, old-fashioned intellectual showmanship with an eye for the big story. His current battle against faith is the biggest of his career—it is the earliest argument he remembers having as a child, and the one that will be with him to the end.

Christopher Hitchens’s apartment is curiously unchanged in the 13 years since I first visited him in Washington. A portrait of him and his wife, screenwriter Carol Blue, is still unframed. There is little art on the walls, few travel mementos; just bookshelves, a spacious living room, a modest kitchen and an annex for the alcohol. The aesthetic is not so much utilitarian as uncluttered of anything that would distract from the essentials of his life: reading, meeting people, drinking, laughing, arguing, writing.

It’s around 3am, there’s a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the table and Hitchens is regressing. I’ve come to trace a pamphleteer’s journey through the ideological left—from the convulsions of 1968, through the inversions of 1989 and into the moral convolutions of Iraq. But as our first conversation unravels, Hitchens guides me back to one of his old strongholds—the 17th-century contest between king and parliament of the English civil war.

For Hitchens, the Cromwellian revolt represents not just the foundational struggle for parliamentary rule, but the great rejection of divine right. Relishing its triumphal Protestant music, he launches into a recital of “The Battle of Naseby,” Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 19th-century eulogy to the decisive encounter, in 1645, of the English revolution. (Hitchens’s memory is encyclopaedic. Ian McEwan has observed that it is as if everything he has ever read or heard is “instantly neurologically available.”)

In God Is Not Great, he declares himself a “Protestant” atheist. He claims that the liturgies of the King James Bible and Cranmer prayer book provided, at once, a poetics to embrace and a belief system to reject. He plucks a secular vocabulary from the literary canon and rips away its religious roots. But he is no optimistic Enlightenment rationalist. He identifies himself with Thomas Paine’s disillusion at the French terror, and Rosa Luxemburg’s famous warning to Lenin about the inexorability of one-man rule. He retains, however, from his Marxist youth an intellectual absolutism and a disdain for liberal dilemmas and trade-offs—hence a brutal assault on Isaiah Berlin’s genteel liberalism in a 1998 essay. And there is an undertow of violence in his arguments, an inability to empathise. He is, for example, incurious about what religious belief feels like, or what meaning it has for millions of people—even though, unlike his co-anti-religionist Richard Dawkins, Hitchens concedes that religious feeling is ineradicable.

As with other public polemicists, arguments for or against any issue become arguments for or against him. His starting point is always confrontation, his procedure to wrestle out contradiction, his endpoint a position of certainty. It’s that preternatural capacity for certainty, carried through the velocity and elegance of his writing, which has made him the most scintillating and disturbing British journalist of the ‘68 generation. He is not exaggerating much when he says: “The world I live in is one where I have five quarrels a day, each with someone who really takes me on over something; and if I can’t get into an argument, I go looking for one, to make sure I trust my own arguments, to hone them.”

He has often said that the rudimentary impulse which first drew him to 1960s Trotskyism was less sympathy for the underdog than detestation of the overdog. And the more bread-and-butter concerns of socialism—redistribution, tax, welfare and so on—have never detained him for long. It’s in the universal arguments about liberty and progress that Hitchens has played his showman’s hand.

Two recent books by British journalists—What’s Left? by Nick Cohen and The Fallout by Andrew Anthony—have described their respective authors’ disillusionment with liberal baby-boomer responses to the Iraq war, Islamic extremism and multiculturalism. But they both follow a path trodden by Hitchens. His attacks on Bill Clinton in the 1990s, including his willingness to expose his friend, the Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, were early signs of a broader fallout with old comrades. And in the aftermath of 9/11 and then his advocacy of the Iraq invasion, many friends became enemies. Alexander Cockburn, a former colleague on the Nation, published a piece in his newsletter describing him as a “lying, self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic, cynical contrarian.” Several ex-friends declined to discuss the matter with me at all. Robin Blackburn, a big figure of the British far left for 40 years, refused more in sorrow than anger, seeing the recent positions Hitchens has taken as a kind of illness: “I hope he gets better soon.”

Views of Hitchens among liberal media or academic figures tend to take one of four lines: that politically he’s a busted flush (though still a fine literary critic); that he was seduced by the chance to partake in real power in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion; that he did a “Paul Johnson” mid-life flip from left to right; or that he’s simply a vain contrarian who likes a fight and has got a bigger audience picking one with old comrades than by going with a consensus. There are also more sympathetic interpretations that see neoconservative foreign policy ideas converging with a late flowering of his leftist internationalism.

But his are certainly the manoeuvres of a factional mind. In a 2003 attack on Hitchens in the London Review of Books entitled “‘No Bullshit’ Bullshit,” Stefan Collini came close to the mark when he said: “With Hitchens’s work, one gets the… sense of how much it matters to prove that one is and always has been right: right about which side to be on, right that there are sides and one has to be on one of them; right about which way the world… is going… and right when so many others, especially well-regarded or well-placed others, are demonstrably wrong.”

Hitchens is clearly not a busted flush in the sense that his work is now more widely read than it ever has been. Editors continue to commission him in abundance. He also has many alliances within Washington circles and Iraqi factions. But in terms of being consistently correct on the various positions he has taken over the years, his is a torchlight procession of one. He is unperturbed by this, considering his positions to have been consistent with old principles. It is others, he says, who have retreated into reaction and conservatism. “What I’m spending a lot of time on now is the rise of the reactionary left. I’m identifying and combating that,” he says.
***

It’s not that Hitchens thinks there was ever a single point of view that could have carried someone through all the twists of world affairs since 1968, or 1989, or 9/11. But he does believe that there was always a correct way of thinking about things. Over Bosnia, he once told me he could predict which way everyone on the left would split. For someone of my own—Thatcher—generation, the idea that people could take positions based on an obscure matrix of a priori arguments, sounded unfathomable. He stands by the remark. “I knew how it would break. I could have told you that Richard Gott would be with Milosevic, that Perry Anderson would stay out of it, that Misha Glenny would be pro-Bosnia.”

If there’s anything that still identifies Hitchens as a man of the radical left, it’s that he’s willing to take this kind of thinking to its logical conclusion; to declare there is a map of positions that everyone should have navigated correctly since the fall of the wall. “Wanna hear?” Certainly I want to hear. What he outlines is a checklist for being right—as a leftist—over all the big international issues since 1989: “First, everyone should have welcomed the fall of the Berlin wall and the overthrow of Ceausescu… As they should have been pro-Tiananmen crowd earlier that year. That’s the baseline.” Next, he continues, everyone on the left should have defended Salman Rushdie, “unequivocally, against the ayatollah.” The left should then have perceived that the “semi-utopian, Fukuyama, end-of-history stuff” was an illusion, and that the age of the totalitarian state hadn’t stopped. And when Milosevic invaded Bosnia, and Saddam invaded Kuwait, they should have been “not just for stopping that, but for overthrowing the people responsible… One has to be opposed to totalitarianism and its racist and theocratic version in particular. And the inescapable thing that lies behind all this is that it’s bound to make 1960s people reconsider their view of the US… anyone who hasn’t reconsidered it at all… I have no respect for.”

This taking of positions and deriving a “line” from a set of immutable principles belongs to a kind of Talmudic Trotskyism. “It teaches you forms of argument and method that you never lose, and that I wouldn’t be without.” Is that all that is left? The only regard in which Hitchens professes a modicum of empathy with religious believers is over the matter of losing one’s belief. “I say this as one whose own secular faith has been shaken and discarded,” he writes in God is not Great. “When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of historical materialism was not an absolute and it did not have a supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive, and it most certainly had mutually excommunicating rival papacies.”

His own loss of faith came in slow degrees. “If someone had asked me my political alignment, well into the 1990s, I would have said that I was a socialist and a Marxist.” Then he found himself writing to students of his and this process developed into the 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian. As he surveyed the 30 years since the catalysing effect of 1968, he says he was forced to admit that there was no longer a socialist international movement, nor even a socialist critique that might help to revive one.

“So what are you doing calling yourself a socialist?” he asks. “All you’re doing is making sure that people don’t confuse you with a liberal—which I’d always considered a position of lily-livered weakness. But that makes it an affectation. So I felt it fall away. I didn’t repudiate it, I didn’t get poisoned by it, I didn’t hate it and I didn’t have a Damascene moment about it. But I did notice that those who do think they’ve got a critique of capitalism turn out to be reactionaries. They prefer feudalism or agrarianism; they’re pre-capitalists. Marxism at least has a theory of development and innovation. And global capitalism now seems to be the only thing that is revolutionary. That’s my Marxist way of looking at it.”

Many of Hitchens’s critics conclude that this is his way of saying he’s a neoconservative. His reply is that he doesn’t consider himself to be “any kind of conservative.” He would rather just be called a human rights hawk. “There should be a word for people who believe US power can and should be used to oppose totalitarianism,” he says. With no faith left in the French and Russian revolutions, or the proletariat, all that now remains is his idea of America as “the last revolution in town”—its spirit of liberty revived by the struggle to transform the middle east.

As a night with Hitchens threatens to break into morning, theories of how the neoconservative strain emerged from schisms within New York’s anti-Stalinist left, become increasingly labyrinthine. “Does this mean anything to you?” he asks at one point. “It must sound like the dribblings of someone reminiscing about being governor-general of the Punjab.”
***

As he usually does if he has no plane to catch or obligation to meet, Hitchens rises late—looking faintly predatory. He and his “girls” (as he refers to Carol, his second wife, and their daughter Antonia) have invited me to stay for three days, and he has cleared his diary for our conversations. The appearance he gives of living improvisationally must obscure a ferocious interior organisation. Articles get written at any time of day or night, with extraordinary speed and fluency—however much he has drunk. He turns out a couple of pieces in the intervals while I’m taking a breather from merely talking.

Amazingly, after 40 years of celebrating the military-tinted pleasures of his favoured Rothman’s brand, he has stopped smoking. He appears to have done so in the same spirit with which he sloughed off the socialist creed: not in an act of repudiation, so he claims, but simply out of a realisation that he wanted to live longer. Even his drinking, though still heavy, has been rationalised. If he is an alcoholic, he is a controlled, high-functioning one. He makes a display of comparing the prettiness of his youth with “the mammal you now see before you.” Yet, contrary to the imputation often fired his way—that a degeneration of his opinions has followed a path of bibulous decline—he doesn’t look bad for 59; healthy even. Still, there is something alarming in the nicotine-withdrawn appearance of Hitchens in the morning, and I beat a retreat until lunch, in a Greek restaurant in the Dupont Circle area of Washington.

The proprietor is a friend and familiar who plays up to Hitchens’s Rabelaisian presence, automatically presenting him with a full tumbler of Johnnie Walker as they banter about the finer distinctions between halloumi and kasseri—the Cypriot cheese or the Greek. He talks about Athens not only as the site of western origins, but as the city where his mother died and childhood ended. An old friend of his, David Rieff, has warned me against psychological enquiry. (”He won’t go there.”) But publishers in both Britain and America have recently been urging Hitchens to write a memoir, and he is using our interviews to exercise an autobiographical muscle.

For all that the personality is exorbitantly on display, he has scarcely written about himself before. The only near-intimate account he has laid down in print was a piece published in 1988 by the New York magazine Grand Street—called “On Not Knowing the Half of It.” In this he tells the story of how his brother discovered, many years after her death, that their mother had been Jewish. Much of the article is exercised by the question of whether his inheritance played a part in the shaping of his views. Largely, he concludes with satisfaction, it did not. He describes his annoyance at an editor telling him that it would make things easier because Jews are allowed to criticise Israel. The legacy of the ‘68 generation he most deplores is that of identity politics or any argument that begins “speaking as a…”—gay man, Scot, single mother, Muslim and so on. Nevertheless, while he revolts against the Kiplingesque notion of “thinking with the blood,” he relishes the surprise of his ethnicity and at least a remote connection to a great tradition of critics and intellectual outsiders.

It seems it was an atmosphere of genteel antisemitism in Britain generally, and of conservative opinion in her husband’s family more particularly, that persuaded Yvonne Hitchens to keep her Jewishness secret. One of the more “narcissistic recollections” in the Grand Street article suggests how she transferred her ambitions on to her first son. Hitchens recalls overhearing an argument between his parents during which his father declared that they couldn’t afford private school fees. His mother disagreed, concluding with the retort: “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, Christopher is going to be in it.” By insisting that the necessary sacrifices be made, she was doing more, Hitchens suspects, than merely ensuring his social elevation. “Now I wish I could ask my mother,” he wrote, “was all this effort expended, not just to make me a gentleman, but to make me an Englishman?”
***

Born in 1949, Hitchens’s first memory is of crossing the grand harbour of Valletta with his mother while his father, a naval officer, was stationed in Malta. This, he reckons, was around the time his brother Peter was born in 1951. It’s notable that when he describes events that involved his mother, they are presented in stark stripes of emotional colour that are otherwise absent from descriptions of his upbringing. “I remember the very deep blue of the sea and sky, the white and green of Valletta, and the olives coming down to this magnificent natural harbour,” he says. “I’m always happy in the Mediterranean. I don’t know why I don’t live there.”

His mother was a Wren during the war, which is how she met his father, who found in her a woman whose social savoir faire compensated for his limitations. The only note of sentimentality Hitchens strikes is when he alludes to her beauty, and the memory of being picked up by her from school. His father would have been there too, he adds, “but I don’t remember a thing about him. It was all her, for me. And I could tell that she was very keen on me. She was keen on my younger brother Peter too, of course, but I always felt that I was the light of her life, which they say is all you need as an older son.”

By contrast, he tells the story of his relationship to his father with almost ruthless detachment. The son of a school teacher, Commander Hitchens had worked his way up through naval ranks, fought a hard war, and was then decommissioned in the 1950s. A change in policy saw new recruits being put on higher pensions than veterans, and he and some fellow officers formed an association to petition against this—with no success. Hitchens recalls his father as a good and dutiful man, but also “very right-wing, and full of class resentment.” His was the kind of resentment that looks both up and down. “He had a hatred of trade unions, of welfare bums and so on. But it was also a resentment of others who never had to do a day’s work in their life; what he called ‘affluent society.’ He hated the obvious unfairness of those who had borne the heat of battle getting the old pension. He felt he’d been scrapped.”

The biggest day of Commander Hitchens’s career occurred at the Battle of North Cape, where on December 26th 1943, his ship, the HMS Jamaica, sunk the Scharnhorst. The nearest his son comes to conceding to filial pride is in describing this as “a better day’s work than I have done in my life.” Every Boxing day the family would toast the event, and though his father was one of those who preferred not to talk about the war, he once confided in Christopher: “I don’t like people who can’t talk about anything else, but, unfortunately for me, it was the last time in my life that I was sure about what I was doing.” He became a heavy drinker.

Christopher’s domestic existence was peripatetic, moving between ports as his father’s career played out—until he settled down as bursar of an Oxford prep school. The young Hitchens was a precocious talker and reader, but the England he belonged to was the little one of imperial disillusion, which handed down a spirit of contempt to a 1960s generation of leftists. He offers an account of himself as a small, pretty, clever child, who hit puberty late and learned to argue his way out of his vulnerabilities. He has few memories of younger brother Peter—now a well-known conservative columnist—except as an inconvenience. Their paths diverge politically—although Peter was also briefly a Trotskyist—yet there is a striking physical and temperamental likeness. Antipathy has given way to a frosty friendship, and their occasional public debates are crowd-pullers (most recently in Michigan before 1,200 people).

From the age of 13, the public school his father scrimped to afford made things more interesting. He recalls the Leys school in Cambridge as full of the sons of Methodist Yorkshire businessmen who “thought it was their perfect right to be there.” His nascent socialism was triggered by boys who considered the working classes to be oiks. “It came at me,” he says, “not