I’ll need a bit more time to take a breath, set aside my bias against the SSNP’s more recent thuggish manifestations, and write you back on the merits…

Arak will flow come June!

Here’s a question, or perhaps rather an exercise in advocatus diaboli: I’ve heard it said by some that defacing the SSNP logo would have been one thing, but to have done it on the Khaled Alwan sign in particular was something else. To these people, Hitchens wasn’t making a point about swastikas but instead was desecrating a prized symbol of victory over the foreign aggressor and occupier. This of course prises open the classic resistance/terrorism debate, and I’m wondering where you stand on it. Are Israeli soldiers on Lebanese soil fair game, and if so, does it matter if you’re wearing civilian clothing or not?

With regard to the beating, again, he deserved it ‘on the details,’ my way of making the point that, at the primitive level, certain acts draw certain responses. There’s a fine line between courage and stupidity and, in this case, he straddled it. I accept the point you’ve made about how some assholes believe women were ‘asking for it,’ but I do believe the gang analogy is more appropriate. Even so, and this is important for me to get across, the problem was not his defacing the sign; the problem was that a ‘political party’ essentially treats Beirut’s main shopping district like its own back-alley.

You’re right on the issue of facts. ‘Sometimes wrong’ would have been better. I also think, now, I should have made distinctions between his literary essays and foreign commentary. I do wish to reiterate that his mistakes were those you’d see from someone who tackled so many issues at such a rapid pace… Not due to incompetence, but sheer volume and expedience.

Perhaps in June we can get that wine!

There’s no denying that he could get his facts wrong – I once wrote a piece myself on such an occasion (http://thedisgraceofgod.blogspot.com/2011/07/defaming-victims-hitchens-slanders.html). What I disputed was whether this was “often” the case. As I said before, I’m not aware of him having a reputation for factual error (though Lebanon is indeed an unarguable counterexample – and an odd one, too. Why did he not once visit the country between 1991 and 2009? That’s plain incuriosity to me).

This is a big subject, and one that in all propriety should be tackled over wine, if not whisky.

1. There’s a difference between writing what you feel, in a transparent manner, perhaps in an opinion piece, essay, or even within a news article that calls for some color, and allowing ideology and intellectual dispositions to shape what readers a world away think are the facts. While Hitchens was great at the former, I think you must admit he’s done plenty of the latter.

2. On the beatings, I’m only saying that, in terms of the small picture, he ‘deserved it.’ He was comically wrong about Jumblatt and he was just plain stupid in defacing a gang sign in gang territory. And he admits as much on both counts.

The larger point, however, is how his interlocutors handled the issues. You and I have disagreed on as much as we’ve agreed on, but it’s always been amicable. I hardly think you’d beat me and drag me into a car because of it… And, as you concede, that’s the larger point.

How do I reconcile the two? Imagine me throwing up a ‘Bloods’ sign in a ‘Crips’ neighborhood. Down in the weeds: I would have ‘deserved’ it in the sense that I ‘asked’ for it, considering how stupid I’d have been. At 30,000 ft.: Nobody would argue that I’d deserve an ACTUAL beating (or worse). That’s my point here, and one that Hitchens himself made.

3. On his style… I don’t say it’s a bad thing. I just point out what it was and how it was received by people. There’s no denying his approach, just as there’s no denying his talent and accumulated skill.

4. His stance on Iraq, among other places, is an example of him being too confident. Lebanon, too, was such a place. And both are examples of factual shortcomings.

Does that mean you or I disagree with him? Not necessarily. In fact, I agree with plenty of what he said on Beirut. But the same traits that made him such a great essayist – especially his clarity and tone – simply amplified when he was right and when he was wrong.

I will say, however, that I should not have used the word ‘glaring.’ I meant to say that ‘X and Y stand out.’ But the connotations of the word I use needlessly make it seem like I’m picking on him. My mistake.

5. As to all points, I’ve generally tried to hedge a bit… I don’t know what Hitchens expected at AUB. And yes the crowd was full of Laptop Leftists we’ve discussed before. But he could and should have prepared better for that question, considering the premise of his talk.

6. Finally, on him being ‘misunderstood,’ as Young writes, I agree. But framing people’s reaction to what he said – just as I have to frame your reaction to what I write – is necessary.

(I hope I got it all. I’m writing this on my phone)

- It would have been nice to have had an example of his “cloaking ideological presumptions in the garb of observational commentary”. If by this you simply mean he wrote what he felt, I see this not as a flaw but as a very welcome breeze of candour in an all-too-constipated, politically correct and ‘inoffensive’ intellectual environment.

- Was he really “often wrong about the facts”, a charge you repeat at the end? You cite the valid case of his poor understanding of Jumblatt, but that to me was a rare, and conspicuous, lapse as opposed to a common one. If he had a reputation for factual error, I was never aware of it (and that he spent his career making large claims about people – e.g. that Bill Clinton was a rapist in ‘No One Left to Lie To’, or that Henry Kissinger was a war criminal in ‘The Trial of Henry Kissinger’, or that Mother Teresa was a fraud in ‘The Missionary Position’ – without ever being sued for libel suggests that his facts were more often than not in very good order).

- I’m not sure if it’s at all true that he “expected a friendly reception” or “polite and deferential questions” at AUB. For his stances on god and, more pointedly, Iraqi Baathism, he was denounced on a more or less daily basis from both the right and the left, and I see no reason why he should have expected any different in Lebanon, of all countries. As for the questions, he famously delighted in confrontation and was never happier than when seizing on a fatuous or flaccid interrogator.

- On this same point, I’ve seen no evidence that he took any sort of “beating” at AUB. If I remember correctly, someone called him a fascist, which showed a questionable understanding of his politics to put it mildly, and the others made the usual zoo noises about being a stooge of Zionism and capitalism (as of course anyone who opposes Islamism and Syrian dictatorship must be). It was actually Michael Young, in my opinion, who dealt with this question best, in his obituary in The National (http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/an-enemy-of-totalitarianism-the-mideast-misunderstood?pageCount=0).

- It now starts to get downright sinister when you say that he “deserved every beating he took”. Excuse me? Can you really mean to have said that the use of a marker pen to express written dissent calls for physical violence in reprisal? I don’t see how you can put down these words and then go on to decry the “clique of cabals [that] fights thoughts with bullets, confronts words with bombs, and rewards dissent with death” as if you hadn’t just a moment ago defended precisely this culture. You may not have it both ways: either there is to be free expression or not; and either nonviolent dissent should be opposed with violence or not; and I’m afraid you come out of this crucial test looking ambivalent at best.

- Finally, on what you describe as his “alienating” style. This is all too often written off as mere pugilism or crankery, but he actually believed there were very good reasons to be oppositional and unforgiving. Accused once on air by some typically nervous TV anchor of bringing about “too much heat, and not enough light”, he instantly snapped back “light only comes from heat”. Put more formally, he believed that radical change (what we would now probably call ‘progress’) could not come from forever diluting and decaffeinating one’s arguments to suit the sensibilities of an audience that was all too easily ‘offended’. So long as one allowed people to avoid confronting the important questions, one acquiesced in the overall degrading of politics. The “dialectic”, as he called it (no doubt a relic from his Marxist/Trotskyist days), was the only path forward. I for one think there’s a lot of truth to that, and it saddens – no, irritates – me to see people say, in effect, ‘Couldn’t he have been a bit nicer?’ (He was invariably described, by the way, as being unimpeachably courteous and chivalrous in person. I don’t think many could watch this clip of his interaction with an 8-year-old audience member and see a cruel or cantankerous bully http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok7MqazQkCo)

So I’m afraid I don’t really grant you either of your two “glaring weaknesses”. But a nice piece nonetheless.

And on paper it´s got to make you laugh, even though the truth behind it is enough to make you choke just a little.