Christopher Hitchens has gotten a lot of airtime on conservative talk shows because he's a rare man of the left who uses his prodigious intellectual power to support the war on terror.  Unlike, say, John Edwards, whose leftism springs not because of any particular intellectual hunger, but precisely because it suits his needs at the moment and because most of the people to whom he panders are also on the left.  [See Mr. Edwards's recent address to the Council on Foreign Relations, asserting that George Bush and Karl Rove "framed" the response to 9/11 as a war on terror simply to justify their desire to torture innocent people at Gitmo.]

Some say leftists and liberals act on feelings rather than thought.  That is to say, their position on any issue is the one that makes them feel best.  Another way of putting it is that they take whatever position is easiest to take, which is usually the first position that occurs to them with the least amount of thought.  Apparently this is not so with Mr. Hitchens, whose positions on issues might seem to some to be a strange amalgam of inconsistencies, as though he reinvents the wheel for every position he takes.  But this is not necessarily so.  Mr. Hitchens is a man of the left who comes by it honestly.  He does not take the positions he takes just to pander to the thoughtless.  Whereas it might be easy to mistake a British accent for erudition, Hitchens is a genuine intellectual who blazes his own trail.  Sometimes he blazes them in the wrong direction, at least from my perspective, and seems to have been, as Faulkner once said of Joyce, electrocuted by his own divine spark of inspiration.

The fact of the matter is that Mr. Hitchens realizes that violent fundamentalist Islamic jihad is a threat to all the West's liberal principles.  Unlike other liberals who believe that it is our fault for the jihad and that if we simply ignore the problem or surrender to it, then it will go away.  Hitchens knows his throat will be the first to feel the scimitar when the jihadists prevail.  One would think that the liberals in Europe and America would realize this, but their visceral mindless dislike for George Bush makes them incapable of acknowledging that Bush might be right about something.

Unlike Jews who reject evangelical Christian support for Israel because they believe the support is for the wrong reasons (selfishly theological, rather than moral or practical affinity for Jews, as if that were relevant), conservatives accept Mr. Hitchens opposition to radical jihad, even though he has just as much animosity toward anything else that is motivated by a belief in a deity.  Jihad to him is reprehensible not just because it is violent, but because it is religiously inspired.

This was made clear in his comments on the passing of Jerry Falwell, a man who would never prescribe a violent end to another human being simply because of a theological disagreement.  For some reason, Mr. Hitchens was invited to appear on the Hannity and Colmes show to voice his thoughts on the late Dr. Falwell and he unleashed quite a stream of vitriol about the man, who Hitchens believed was just as much a hustler and charlatan as any other televangelist, even those whose reputations had been marred by scandal.  Hitchens's words about Falwell were as harsh as anything he had ever said about bin Laden.  To Hitchens's credit, when he was attacked by both Hannity and Colmes for his opinion, he defended himself by reminding his hosts that he was asked to come on and express his opinion, not to have his opinion attacked for the purposes of good television.  His opinion is what it is and those who ask for it can either accept it or not, but he was not going to change it to give others a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.  Religious people are reprehensible to Hitchens because they "tell lies to children."  In this, Mr. Hitchens is wrong.  When religious believers tell others what they believe, they are not telling lies and more than President Bush was lying when he believed with the rest of the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  Based on everything observable, it was much more reasonable to believe that Saddam HAD such weapons rather than to believe that he did NOT have them.  

["Telling lies to children" is a complaint that inspired much of today's so-called liberalism.  Many Baby Boomers distrusted their parents and anyone else over 30 and assumed that the accumulated wisdom of the ages was a lie.  Rather than honest critical thinking, which would reveal why things work the way they do, the hippie generation simply denied history in a narcissistic, counterproductive attempt to appear intellectual without doing any real thinking.  Ignoring Santayana's warning, repeating history's mistakes, reinventing the wheel every day, today's liberals believe surrendering the war on terror and other suicidal policies are the right thing to do.  At least Mr. Hitchens's has been honest in his cogitations about the war.]

In fact, Mr. Hitchens's atheism does not have any bearing on the existence of God.  When one takes a look around, no matter how closely or scientifically, which of the following assumptions is more reasonable?  That nature came from something or that it came about by chance from nothing?  The existence of God will be proved only when He reveals himself to us, whether we are looking for Him or not.  To prove that He does not exist at all is probably impossible.  For this reason, atheism is no less a matter of belief than theism itself.

It is patently absurd to say that all religious fundamentalists pose equal danger to civilization.  Still, the ironically named "Christ-bearer" Hitchens's eloquence on the threats to western civilization are welcome additions to the need to realize what we are facing.

Hitched Couplets (A Drinking Song)

Christopher Hitchens is an honest liberal,
Whose skepticism doesn't buy the Muslim's great fib or all
That rubbish claiming Islam's the religion of peace.
(If you believe that lie, then this sweet young thing's my niece!)

When Hitchens gets to bitchin' 'bout religion and the soul,
With bombast 'bout Islamists and its bombists and their goal,
Unlike his fellow libs, ol' Chris stands up to face the worst:
He knows that when Sharia comes, his head will come off first.