# Quote — Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22

> This sort of stuff was at least partly to be expected. Rushdie was a bit of a Leftie; he had contrived to disturb the status quo: he could and should expect conservative disapproval.
>
> More worrying to me were those on the Left who took almost exactly the same tone. Germaine Greer, always reliably terrible about such matters, again came to the fore, noisily defending the rights of book burners. “The Rushdie affair,” wrote the Marxist critic John Berger within a few days of the fatwah, has already cost several human lives and threatens to cost many, many more.” And “the Rushdie affair,” wrote Professor Michael Dummett of All Souls, has done untold damage. It has intensified the alienation of Muslims here…Racist hostility towards them has been inflamed.” Here we saw the introduction – and by a former promoter of “Michael X,” do not forget – of a willful, crass confusion between religious faith, which is voluntary, and ethnicity, which is not. All the deaths and injuries – all of them – from the mob scenes in Pakistan to the activities of the Iranian assassination squads, were directly caused by Rushdie’s enemies. None of the deaths or injuries – none of them – were caused by him, or by his friends or defenders. Yet you will notice the displacement tactic used by Berger and Dummett and the multi-culti Left, which blamed the mayhem on an abstract construct –“the Rushdie affair.” I dimly understood at the time that this kind of postmodern Left, somehow in league with political Islam, was something new, if not exactly new Left. That this trahison would take a partly “multicultural” form was also something that was slowly ceasing to surprise me.

- Author: [Christopher Hitchens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens.md)
- Book: [Hitch 22](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/hitch-22.md)
- Page: 269
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hitch-22#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/hitch-22/this-sort-of-stuff

## More from this book

> Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked.

p. 381 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/hitch-22/jerusalem-that-pest-house.md)

> I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.
>
> If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.

p. 379 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/hitch-22/i-think-i-have.md)

> I suspect that the hardest thing for the idealist to surrender is the teleological, or the sense that there is some feasible, lovelier future that can be brought nearer by exertions in the present, and for which “sacrifices” are justified. With some part of my self, I still “feel,” but no longer really think, that humanity would be the poorer without this fantastically potent illusion. “A map of the world that did not show Utopia,” said Oscar Wilde, “would not be worth consulting.” I used to adore that phrase, but now reflect more upon the shipwrecks and prison islands to which the quest has led.

p. 420 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/hitch-22/i-suspect-that.md)