Very well, I invite those who believe that to repudiate the opprobrium Hitchens heaped on Edward Said and the others. If it is crass to dole out the same treatment to Hitchens as he routinely does to others then why the fuss over a crass vulgarian?
Excerpts from Christopher Hitchens’
Valediction for Edward Said:
The loss of Professor Edward Said, after an arduous battle with demoralizing illness that he bore very bravely, will be unbearable for his family, insupportable to his immense circle of friends, upsetting to a vast periphery of admirers and readers who one might almost term his diaspora, and depressing to all those who continue hoping for a decent agreement in his birthplace of Jerusalem.
To see and hear him play the piano was to be filled with envy as well as joy: One was witnessing a rather angst-prone person who had developed the perfect recreation to an extraordinary pitch. To ask him for a tutorial and a reading list, as I more than once did, was to be humbled by the sheer reach of his erudition. I can still hear the doors that opened in my mind as he explicated George Eliot's rather recondite Daniel Deronda.
On one occasion in New York, after giving us a tremendous tour of the Metropolitan Museum during its show on the art of Andalusia (and filling out the most exquisite details on the syntheses and paradoxes of Islamic, Moorish, and Jewish Spain), he took my own wife on a tour of the shops to advise her expertly on the best replacement for a mislaid purse. I never met a woman who did not admire him, and I never knew him to be anything but gallant. As I look back, I am inclined to be overcome at the number of such occasions, where his bearing and address were so exemplary and his companionship such a privilege.
I was astonished, when reading his memoirs, to learn that such a polished and poised fellow had never lost the sense that he was awkward and clumsy. And yet this man of enviable manners could be both those things when he chose.
Perhaps then I can do a last service, and also dip a flag in salute to a fine man,
Topic: Atheist Censorship