Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in … - Christopher Hitchens

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Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.

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About Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an-English-American journalist and writer. He contributed to the New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and Vanity Fair. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on a range of subjects, including politics, literature, and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure and public intellectual.

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Also Known As

Birth Name: Christopher Eric Hitchens
Also Known As: Hitch
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Additional quotes by Christopher Hitchens

The prince's official job description as king will be 'defender of the faith,' which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to be anointed as defender of all faiths — another indication of the amazing conceit he has developed in six decades of performing the only job allowed him by the hereditary principle: that of waiting for his mother to expire.

As for the woman styling herself Mother Teresa, I can attest that until I wrote my little pamphlet, she had been the recipient, the beneficiary, of a twenty-five year Niagra of one-hundred percent favorable publicity in every secular, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic, or non-religious outlet of any kind at all in the media. Only by the grace of my intervention [laughter] could it not be said, when she died, that no one had ever said a single word against her; and that no one had ever pointed out that she had fawned on the Duvalier family in Haiti and said that they were the Lord's anointed and beloved of the poor.

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When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship — though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…

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