Peter Hitchens Quotes
Terrorists are overjoyed when we shut down our freedoms and turn ourselves into a police state and when we retaliate, swatting the Middle East with useless bombs or rounding up the wrong suspects and locking them up without charge.
Hitchens, Peter. "We're in terror of... a man with a wooden sword." The Mail on Sunday, 22 Nov. 2015.
One myth is that Islamic violence is caused by the dispute over Israel in the Middle East and American and Christian encroachments into Islam. Violence by Muslims against fellow Muslims is responsible for many more deaths than Muslims perpetrate against the West. In this example it shows that Muslim on Muslim violence in Egypt alone is far grater than the violence against the Israelis. In the Iraq war, Muslim insurgents killed many more fellow Muslims than they killed Americans. Many Muslims will kill and intimidate anyone of any religion who simply disagrees with them. Governments fighting the terrorists often, out of desperation, resort to Emergency Laws, suspensing rights or other extra judicial means. Democratic Israel, which has had to cope with terrorism for its entire existence still has a constitutional democracy and has not resorted to undemocratic extra judicial means of counter terrorism.
Agree had resigned from the CIA in protest to its political positions. This prediction was right after the 9-11 attack. He not only predicted the attempts to restrain American civil liberties, but also the length of the war. See {632811}.
He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are repugnant to us because they have no respect for Civil and Human Rights and would deny us what we value so highly and for which so many Americans have sacrificed. We are little better off if we surrender our civil rights in order to cope with the problem of losing our civil rights to the likes of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The neoconservatives at the time, not only urged the invasion of Iraq, but no sooner did it take place than Ledeen and other neoconservatives were calling for the invasion of other countries in the Middle East that were controlled by dictators.
The Prime Minister was stating a widely held, but erroneous view of the West, history and geopolitics. The Crusades were traumatic for Muslims as the Europeans were not only military threats to the Muslim holy places, but the Christians were particularly brutal even to Richard the Lionhearted butchering unarmed prisoners of war who had surrendered. This aggression by some countries in Europe under the Christian “banner” is associated, to this day with Christianity and any primarily Christian nation is therefore just poised to attack and expel Islam from the Middle East. Mahathir therefore saw the American attack on Afghanistan and later Iraq as just an extension of the Crusader zeal whose object is to destroy Islam. Malaysia has a large population of Muslims—much larger than any of the Middle Eastern Islamic states. Yet, religiously oriented Islamic political leaders make common cause with other Muslim nations which have almost no other interest in common other than their religion.
In the aftermath of 9-11, there was a call for giving the law enforcement agencies more authority and the Patriot Act was passed in haste and fear. Some law enforcement personnel then went about picking up Arab Americans and in many cases holding them incommunicado without any charges. No terrorists were discovered by this process and yet good American citizens were abused, traumatized and insulted. In our zeal to protect American freedom, we actually began to resemble some of the capricious and abusive practices of our undemocratic enemies. There were other abuses allowed under the Patriot Act, but at the time of this writing the extent had not yet been revealed, but the refusal of the authorities to make public the national security benefits suggests that there was not much national security benefit and much abuse.
He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The intelligence and law enforcement advocates of reducing privacy rights so that law enforcement can prevent acts of terrorism frame the question as a tradeoff between civil right and safety. However, as Leahy and many others point out, we would not be much safer if we gave up all our ivil rights. Further, hundreds of thousands of American have given their lives so that we would have those civil rights. Without them what are we protecting.
He was Defense Minister at the time. This theme was picked up later by both Israel and the United States and after September 11, President George W. Bush made it official U. S. policy.
In the face of terror bombings, Britain passed some anti-terror laws which also somewhat infringed on civil rights, liberty and privacy.
There can be a heavy cost in terms of giving up rights, costs of prevention the internal conflict in the society about how to deal with the terrorists.
Peter Jonathan Hitchens is an English journalist and author. Hitchens writes for The Mail on Sunday and is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington. He has contributed to The Spectator, The American Conservative, The Guardian, First Things, Prospect, and the New Statesman. He is currently a columnist for the The Mail on Sunday. Hitchens has published numerous books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, The War We Never Fought and The Phoney Victory.
