Christopher Hitchens

The admonition not to rush to judgment or jump to conclusions might sound fair and prudent enough, perhaps even statesmanlike when uttered by the president, as long it's borne in mind that such advice is itself a judgment that is more than halfway to a conclusion...

Lenin once defined a revolutionary situation as one that occurred when the rulers could not go on in the traditional way and the ruled did not wish to continue in that old way. Engels was more metaphorical, saying that revolution was the midwife that delivered a new life out of an older body...

If the time ever does come when we look back on our intervention in Afghanistan as a humiliating debacle, this past weekend may well be identified as one of the moments when the calamity became irreversible.[more ...]

This week sees the opening on various cinema marquees of the film Collision: a buddy-and-road movie featuring last year's debates between Pastor Douglas Wilson, who is a senior fellow at New St. Andrew's College, and your humble servant...

A contradiction must be faced by those of us who don't especially like the propaganda name neoconservative but who wish that there was a useful term for someone who favors a robust American attitude toward totalitarian and aggressive states...

SYDNEY, Australia—This wondrous city awoke last month to find that it was experiencing any metaphor you like, from "darkness at dawn" to "red dawn." A gigantic cloud of dust had blown in from the interior, shrouding the capital of New South Wales in a sinister and choking mist of particles. ...

According to all recent reports, the ancient city of Cairo now presents to the world the image of a growing pile of festering trash. Nothing new, you say. The streets have never been exactly uncluttered, and the levels of noise and traffic and pollution are an object of wonderment...

According to his obituary in the New York Times, Irving Kristol once felt intimidated among New York intellectuals when he found himself seated with Mary McCarthy on one side, Hannah Arendt on the other, and Diana Trilling across from him...

"Living in the Islamic Republic," wrote Azar Nafisi in her book Reading Lolita in Tehran in 2003, "is like having sex with a man you loathe." This verdict has gathered extra force and pungency as the succeeding years have elapsed and as more women have been stoned, hanged, beaten, raped, and...

Right though I so very often am, it always makes me feel distinctly queasy to find myself in the majority. A few weeks ago, I reported Rory Stewart's increasing misgivings about the course being followed by NATO and the United States in Afghanistan...

By the time I came across the full-page ad in Sunday's New York Times, I had become so numb and habituated that the thing barely managed to register as grotesque...

President Obama has said that he wants "the Islamic Republic of Iran" to be welcomed back into the "community of nations." Unfortunately, it is precisely the fact that it is an Islamic republic that excludes it from such consideration...

The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn't even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism—particularly Muslim religious extremism—that is spreading across our culture. A ...