Thank you, Randy, for having me again.

I have the impression that people like yourselves come to meetings like this not just to listen, but to talk. Since we only have 45 minutes together, I’ll be as brief as I can on my topic and invite your responses. I think I must need to be brief because for someone who’s an atheist and a skeptic and who works professionally in the media, the target rich environment would otherwise be too broad for me to deal with fully. I suppose every one of you knows the sort of problem I’m talking about.

Hitchens’ skepticism of media attention

For example, it’s probably best defined as something that’s innate, something in the media that is essentially credulous, something in the communications industry that seems to need to take things at their own face value. It’s irritating actually in all fields. I would instance something permanently pisses me off. The attention paid to ex-cathedral remarks made by the man I think of as the Bishop of Rome, which is what he’s called in the 39 articles of the Church of England, but is always invariably referred to in our media as if not only he was the Pope, but as if this country was a Catholic country.

The attention given to him, the deference given to a man whose title to be the vicar of Christ on earth is surely, as well as untestable, extremely immodest and lacking in humility. The Coptic Christians of Egypt have a Pope. The Byzantine Orthodox Christians of the East have a number of Popes. There was in living memory a rival Pope to this Pope in Avignon and elsewhere. It seems very odd to me all the time that this man is always called the Pope as if there was only one and as if we owed him attention.

That’s just an obvious example. Then there is the obvious journalistic, sensational, crowd-pleasing, thoughtless way in which everyday events are covered. There were two of these last year I think, both of them showing the incredible exhaustion of imagination that exists among, for example, headline writers. You may recall the terrible tragedy of the dozen coal miners who were trapped under the rock after a cave-in in the coal field in, I believe it was, West Virginia, where after hope of them had been given up, it was then announced they had been found, identified, communicated with, and were still alive.

So their families who’d had something you may not want to imagine for yourselves. The thought of a male member of that family, a father or a brother or a husband trapped near asphyxiation under the rock and anthracite dust had the sudden deliverance of being told no, there’s an air pocket, they’re all right, they’re alive. And that made it much worse, I would imagine, to be told a few hours later that that news was false, that that had never been true, that was a false alarm and they could go back to, after all, thinking of their relatives asphyxiated by anthracite dust alone under the rock.

But in the meantime, on the false first news, every news bulletin in every newspaper had already rushed to comment and rushed to print the headline. And is there anyone here who can’t guess what the headline was? Miracle, of course it was a miracle. As if to rub it in even more, as if to add to the pain and misery and loss and isolation of their relatives.

The same if you remember when the Air France jet broke a wheel landing at Montreal Airport and the heroic stewardesses of Air France, very highly trained for their job, managed to get everybody out onto the tarmac as the plane had slewed around and gone off the runway and nearly led to a catastrophe. And there was every headline that said, “Miracle.”

The miracle, as we all know, is that you can get human beings by the laws of physics into a metallurgical tube and fly them generally safely and on time almost anywhere you want, something that is effortlessly accomplished every single day but never seems to acquire the wonder of the moment when an accident is not, as it was in the case of West Virginia, actually lethal. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, comrades, brothers, sisters, friends.

Just trying to see if I can do that most difficult of things, make you think about something you already know in a way that would make you angry. So from this vast field of fatuity and asininity in which I toil as an occasional scribbler and on-air commentator, I’m going to select just one example, which is also well enough known to you I dare say, but I want to emphasize a few points about it.

That occurred just after I left this podium last, having talked to you about Thomas Jefferson, and ended with what I thought was the ringing invocation for the separation of church and state, “Mr. Jefferson, build up that wall.” I left. I was feeling good. Some of you kindly remember it. I went about my business. Within a couple of weeks, one of the gravest breaches in that wall that I have yet seen was inflicted upon us.

The Danish cartoons sparked violent backlash

I’m referring to the publication of and the reaction to the publication of some mildly disrespectful cartoons in an evening paper in Copenhagen, Denmark. I actually know the name of the paper. It’s the Juland’s Post and Juland is Jutland, a famous promontory of the Danish Peninsula. It’s not necessary to know that. No one had ever heard of this newspaper before, but everyone suddenly got to know about it not long after I left this podium. Here’s what happened.

I apologize to any of you to whom I’ve told this story before, but I’ll be pitiless in repeating it, even at that cost. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great English lexicographer, as you know, produced the first real serious dictionary, literary dictionary of the English language. When he performed this huge accomplishment, he was visited by many delegations of people in London, including a delegation of respectable ladies who waited upon him in his house in Fleet Street and said, “Dr. Johnson, we congratulate you very much on your refusal to include any obscene or indecent words in your dictionary.”

He said, “Well, ladies, I congratulate you in turn for your assiduity in looking these words up.” If you understand that joke, which clearly you do, it’s not a joke. It’s a true story. You know essentially what the censorious nature is. You know all you need to know about the instinct to censor. You know all you need to know about those who find certain things offensive. In other words, you know that there’s no possibility of not offending people who are determined to be offended and who will look for occasions to announce that they have been.

Well, Dr. Johnson came back to me when I read that a group of imams in Denmark had, in response to a set of cartoons published in the Juland’s Post, and decided to become not as defended but very highly organized about it. It’s the first point I want to make about my profession. They knew more about media spin than Karl Rove does.

They knew that a few harmless cartoons had been published that were themselves a satire of the fact that no one in Denmark would agree to illustrate even a children’s book on the life of the Prophet Muhammad for fear of making a mistake or offending the faithful. In other words, the original publication of the cartoons was a mild expression of worry about the extreme toxicity of this question and the extreme combustibility of those who were determined to be offended by it. So they already had a tufa.

They could take the response to it and say it was an aggression. And they worked their butts off to do this. They took these cartoons to every Muslim capital, at least in the Arab world. They added, for additional spin purposes, some cartoons that had not appeared in the original Copenhagen paper, including a particularly offensive picture of a human mammal wearing a pig snout that it turns out they had photoshopped from an event I must say I did not attend might have been interested to attend a pig squealing competition in southern Provence.

Okay, there’s something for everybody. Thus adding the incredible insult of the porcine that most despised of God’s creation to the already grave offense given by the discussion even of the Prophet Muhammad in an afternoon newspaper in Copenhagen, Denmark. And they worked on it until they were ready to get a response. And at that point, they had the media as their megaphone. They had everyone in my profession working for them. Their protest was going to be reported in its own terms at its own face value. Is Denmark really multicultural?

Have these people really been upset? Was it wise to print these? Cartoons, wall-to-wall coverage. They must have believed all their birthdays had come at once. But then the campaign succeeded just a little perhaps too well. People who sold Danish pastries or Danish bacon or Danish biscuits or Danish beer or Danish cheese all across the Muslim world had their stores broken into and burned. Their livelihoods destroyed. Individual Danish and random other Scandinavian civilians were set upon sometimes killed.

After a while, any one of the Christian faith in Nigeria of all places was attacked by association, if you like, with Scandinavian Christianity. I don’t remember Nigeria being part of any Scandinavian empire. Danish embassies and consulates and diplomatic missions and media offices were put to the torch by large and very violent mobs acting under police protection in the capital cities of countries that normally allow no demonstrations at all. If a demonstration is allowed by the government of Syria or the government of Libya, for example, it will only be usually because of the leader’s birthday.

No one can have a spontaneous demonstration in such a place. When demonstrations of this kind become that violent and that large and no one is arrested and diplomatic immunity can be violated without action by the police or the armed forces, one knows that a certain kind of collusion between totalitarianism and populism has broken out and taken a very vicious and violent and cruel form. Well, now comes my point. How is my profession in the United States going to report and deal with all this?

Who among you has not heard or felt or thought or said in the last several decades now that if anything, any one thing is wrong with our media, there’s any one thing about it that makes you moan with shame as a consumer, let alone for me as a contributor or producer, it is the domination of everything by images, the domination of everything by the pictorial, the driving of words off the front page of magazines and now increasingly of many newspapers by pictures alone, the absolute resort to the visual stimulus.

You know all of you what I’m talking about. But in this case, the argument was entirely about the cluster of images and the question was well, why won’t we show them then? How are we expected to cover this subject? How can we talk intelligently to our audience, television or print, and we’re not showing them the photographs, excuse me, we’re not showing them a picture of, a photograph of, a reproduction of the cartoons in question.

We don’t, it seems, trust the audience to make up its own mind as to whether or not these were in fact offensive images or could have licensed this tremendous pogrom against a small northern European country and I’ll make a digression here on the word offensive. I think some of us find it more offensive to see the citizens and the embassies and the newspapers of a small peaceful civilized democracy being lynched and put to the torch.

We find that much more offensive than the publication of a gentle satire about a desert theocrat whose supposed words can only ever be written or recited in Arabic. Some of us think that the first offense is much more genuinely offensive than the second but to hold a position like that in Washington DC last February was to be convicted of holding the most extreme and bizarre and marginal position possible. Clearly the real problem was the offensiveness of images that could not be shown.

I’ll give you a couple of anecdotes from my own experience of trying to debate this mentality and this policy. What could the two excuses really be for after all? For declining to reproduce the photographs of the actual event that was being the source of the controversy which had admittedly by then become the wall to wall coverage of the media. There could only be two.

One would be that reproducing them would itself be offensive and the second would be that those who had the editorial decision about whether or not to reprint them were frightened, were afraid, had become themselves intimidated. I’m going to leave it to you to decide which of these two would be the most disturbing of the conclusions but I can give you two examples that materialize both instances.

I went on CNN to debate a spokesman from an Islamist organization in Washington and CNN in its pre-discussion sequence showed the page of the Danish newspaper with the cartoons pixelated out. They had done their due diligence if you like. There was a picture of the newspaper but you couldn’t see the cartoons. They had been blurred, pixelated out. No viewer could still see why this was. In the discussion I said to the lady chair, I said your viewers will have noticed that you don’t trust them to see what we’re talking about.

I accuse you of making this capitulation purely because you are afraid as a network of showing this that you’ve surrendered to threats of violence if you do show them. And actually rather to my surprise and in some ways to my pleasant surprise she said that’s true. We have bureaus all around the world. We have reporters all over the place. We have a big property in Washington. We’re not taking the risk of covering the story. We’re only going to allow people like you to come on and do that for us.

So I thought well at least they don’t say — they’re not hypocritical about it. But there’s still a little twinge of conscience I think sometimes in my profession and they felt it’s a bit odd not to be able to show the picture that is the story. And I was fascinated to hear the correspondent of PBS say how they had resolved the problem.

PBS had been invited by the Mullahs in the case, the originators not just of the protest and the inventors of the offense and the multipliers of the offense by the publication of bogus cartoons and the insiders to the violence of which the rest of the media were by then already you’ll have noticed afraid and the insiders to the assault on Danish diplomatic immunity and the attempt to sabotage the Danish economy. Nonetheless, they invited PBS to come and say well you can come and see us handing copies of the cartoons out.

We’re allowed to show them to anybody. Pause to notice it. The Mullahs can show it to anybody but they can kill anyone or threaten with death anyone else who tries to show them to anybody. And so PBS said so we showed the Mullahs handing the cartoons around to people. You couldn’t quite see the cartoons maybe once or twice over the shoulder of a Danish Imam you could glimpse one but we could say we had in a way shown them because we showed them distributing them to everybody else.

And so now we can say our job is done. I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard anything as craven as that in the whole of my life as a writer and commentator and reporter. And I might not have minded so much and I won’t want to sound too much emitting a wail and squeal of self-pity but when I organized the demonstration of solidarity outside the Danish embassy in Washington D.C. thinking well it might be nice just for a few minutes to have cameras pointing at a Danish embassy that is not on fire and that is surrounded by people saying we stand by Danish democracy against theocracy and we like tubal beer and other heartening such slogans.

I thought well it gives them a chance to cover something else. Nobody covered it. Not interested. Not interesting at all. I sometimes thought perhaps if I’d said if I’d go and shoot them no no no no no never mind don’t even think about it. So that I leave it to you to decide whether it was the fear of being offensive, the fear of violating some pseudo multicultural taboo that meant that every reader and viewer in the United States had to be treated like a child.

The fear of being offensive

Whether that is worse than the open admission that I had from so many other editors and publishers that it was done simply out of fear and the willingness to capitulate in advance to even the possibility that those of us who make our living by the First Amendment should actually be prepared to pay back every now and then and take some risks for it.

You can decide for yourselves which of these two is the most worrying but I’m just here to tell you that on an early challenge and it won’t be the last one as it wasn’t the first to the values of that amendment and all that it represents both in terms of free expression and in terms of church state separation you might want to know that the profession that regards itself as the first line of defense and that routinely turns a large profit out of the rights that it gets under that amendment buckled, surrendered, capitulated, ran away, collaborated and without a fight.

I’ll leave you with that thought. Invite your comments. Thanks for coming. We have time for a couple of questions. And right here. If you’ll join me in the aisle. To your left, sir. Hi. I was wondering if you were aware of a guy named Ezra Levant, columnist for the Calgary Sun. Levant, no. Oh. He did publish those pictures. Well, actually I should have added perhaps for the role of honor. The Western Standard in Canada, I don’t know if that’s Calgary, did and so did the weekly standard, a neo-conservative Murdoch in Washington.

And so did I in Slate because I told people how to link to the cartoons when they read my column calling for solidarity at the Danish Embassy but I couldn’t get Slate to put the cartoons on its cartoon page. So yes, there were ways around it but it was as if you lived in a sammized out society instead of an open one and you were having to make the most obvious points about your own profession to the people who actually run it. But yes, you’re quite right.

I should have mentioned the two very tiny exceptions in North America to that. Question from Jim Underdown, director of Center for Inquiry West. I practiced. That was my problem. We should add the Free Inquiry magazine published all of the cartoons and Borders Records and Books promptly decided not to stock that issue in all of their stories. And I should have mentioned that too and I’m publishing a book in May called God is Not Great which I hope you’ll all buy. Or if you’re in Borders, Steel.

Book stolen is a book sold I’ve always been told by my agent but I’ve told my publishers I don’t want to read at Borders. I’m not going to do any public events there whether they ask me to or not. It’s little enough but people who do that kind of thing must pay something for it and I really don’t think anyone should shop there ever again. There’s always an alternative bookstore. Not that much further away. Don’t go to Borders anymore. Yes, I have a question regarding how the media has really changed in the past few decades.

There was a time when things were simplistic, almost overly simplistic to the point of black and white. We were omni benevolent. We could fire bomb Dresden and there was nothing wrong with it but these evil, evil soldiers who were driven entirely by world domination could do no right and the Japanese we had some offensive terms for them. Is it possible that things could or have swung into the opposite direction too far to the degree where the contrast is so reduced that it becomes difficult to tell which shade of gray is darker?

Well I think if I guess your question correctly I think what you may be asking me to comment on is or large on is what I mentioned earlier about pseudo or bogus multiculturalism. In other words you could get the impression from a number of commentators and from a sort of mentality that’s becoming regnant in the mass media that to be a Muslim is to be a member of an ethnic minority, shall we say.

Religious violence and the erosion of community trust

That your proclamations of jihad are something to do with a civil rights struggle for a neglected or despised group of people who have no alternative but to be what they are. If I’ve got you wrong on that I apologize but that’s what I took from your question. I certainly think this has become an extraordinary problem. It’s not true by the way just about Islamism either. The people are afraid of attacking any expression of faith because it’s an attack on a community and communities have to be respected and communities mustn’t have their feelings set.

I had it when I published my book on Mother Teresa. Many many people refused to have me on because it was an attack not on the papacy or on Catholic dogma or on her very very extreme and fundamentalist interpretation of it. No it was an attack on the Catholic community, much of it made up of poor and vulnerable people and so on. I had many editors and chat show people explain that’s why they weren’t going to allow me to come on the television about it.

So yes all of this is I think going to have to be confronted by those of us who began by thinking that a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society was a good idea and are now being put in the position where its values so to speak are being negated, mutated and turned against us so that all religions have to be treated with equal respect not just with equal consideration but they all deserve a kind of protection.

The media’s shift from neutrality to moral judgment

The exact opposite of what’s meant by a proper multicultural society where everything can be discussed and anyone can take part in the conversation. I actually am going to switch my question a bit because I liked his so much and I think you skirted on the issue that he really wanted to address was well that we’re educated like with propaganda courses and that about the history of how the enemy has always been demonized and that to rally the people but now so now reporters seek out ways of humanizing the enemy and have we gone too far now can we actually are we too forgiving of our enemies and are we taught that well I think that’s the question like are we now incapable of perceiving evil?

Yeah good I mean all right then I’ll enlarge. Mosques are blown up every day now in Baghdad by Muslims something that not everyone was ready to see or to understand. Places of worship in fact practically never in the innumerable civil wars and strifes that I’ve covered. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case where a place of worship has been attacked by a non-believer by a humanist or a skeptic or an atheist. It’s always places of worship desecrated and blasphemed by other believers.

I think the last time that wouldn’t have been true would have been in the Spanish Civil War when the anarchists in Catalonia did burn the Catholic churches down. I remember George Orwell saying it was a mistake that they didn’t get rid of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona while they had the chance perhaps a slightly heartless observation. But now if it’s in Bosnia the synagogue or a mosque destroyed it’s by Christian Catholic or Orthodox fascists.

If it’s in Iraq it’s if it’s a Shia mosque it’s been destroyed by the Al Qaeda forces and if it’s a Sunni one by the forces of the Mahdi army but we don’t call them the parties of God we call them insurgents. We don’t even call them terrorists. So I think that is a huge capitulation. The fact is the parties of God have Iraq in their jaws and they’re tearing the society to death and they’re desecrating religious monuments and places of worship and pilgrimages every day and killing children in religious schools.

And we worry that a small paper in Denmark publishing a satire about the Prophet Muhammad might be offensive to Muslims. Aren’t Muslims upset at the mass murder of worshippers in mosques? What kind of sense of proportion have we lost? Quite aside from any sense of what’s obscene, what’s hateful, what’s murderous and what’s truly offensive. Yes a thousand times yes we have to say that. The press used the excuse that they didn’t want to be offensive they wanted free speech but we have to respect and not be offensive.

And you’ve kind of already touched on this that the Muslim community. I think the press did not bring up the idea that these people were being manipulated by the clerics that you speak of. I would have liked to see the press show those pictures of the clerics passing those out and of the fact that this cartoon came out three months earlier and these people built it up to this thing. I’m just wondering how. Yeah well to know that they were being spun is why I started that way.

Press’ attempt to avoid offense

It doesn’t begin as a panic response to oh dear you know will we be offensive if we cover the story properly. It begins as an abject willingness to be manipulated in the first place without protest or complaint by a religious mafia who can get you to jump through hoops and to whom no one will say no for fear of giving offense. So it’s a self-ceiling, self-reinforcing process.

And in this case you can’t even say it’s image and picture driven because the one thing the media was was the one thing it refused to be on this occasion. So it was utterly false to itself as an institution, as a profession, and as a communicator or medium of information. Which means it’s really quite a very, it’s quite a serious cultural defeat on quite a big issue, on quite a grand scale. And what is even more appalling to me is that it passed more or less without comment.

I’m quite, I don’t know if I’ve exhausted or I’m trespassing on anyone else’s time but if I haven’t I’m quite willing to be asked any other questions on any other topic. But I think they’ve come to take me away. I’m not sure. I have sort of have that feeling. The hook is intruding onto it. Regretfully and with great respect. We’re done?

Well it’s been real. And I think I’d find bookstores everywhere. There are some shards of my stuff. From now on I’d only be nice to people who’ve got a receipt. Thank you. This is America. On behalf of Mr. I waited until your hands were full, sir. On behalf of Mr. Andy it really isn’t a tam without Mr. Hitchens here. And we’re grateful for your time. We’re grateful for your insights. Oh please. I’m going to come back many more times. You bet. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you sir. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.