An Evening with Christopher HitchensBy FrontPage MagazineFrontPageMagazine.com | June 1, 2007The Freedom Center presents “An Evening with Christopher Hitchens.” Union League Club, New York, May 1, 2007David Horowitz: Welcome to what’s bound to be a stimulating and unpredictable event.Actually, this is two events. It is, first of all, an evening with the redoubtable Christopher Hitchens. But in case no one has told you, it’s also a fund raiser for the Center -- the Freedom Center , which is unique among conservative think tanks, in that it has no fellows, it does no policy-wonking, and it has nothing interesting or new to say about the American founding. It is in fact not a think tank, but a battle tank.To understand the discussion that we’re going to have this evening, and to understand the mission of the Center, you have to understand that the Left is in fact a secular religion. It is two Catholic heresies -- the Pelagian and the Manichean. Pelagius believed that human beings could do the work of God; that they could create God’s kingdom on earth. The Left called this Kingdom of Heaven socialism, or now they call itsocial justice. What it means is the end of poverty, suffering, war, and all the ills that have beset mankind since the fateful apple was eaten.The Manicheans believe that the world is divided into light and darkness, good and evil; and again that mere mortals can redeem it. The Left calls the evil principle that rules the world private property or profit, which is the root cause of all planetary suffering. The Left’s utopia is the world’s redemption.But in 200 years, the Left hasn’t got a practical clue how to get there. Yet the hunger for redemption persists and will not be denied. And redemption begins with a waragainst evil.As Marx put it, everything that exists deserves to perish. The Left is nihilism. Its goal is the destruction of the system on which all our liberties and our prosperity is based.For more than 200 years, the political Left has been at war with the democracies of the West. In the Twentieth Century, it was and aligned itself with totalitarian communism, the most oppressive empire in human history. Now it has joined with Islamic reactionaries in a global jihad against the Great Satan.The Center’s mission is to defend the free societies that are under attack against this onslaught. And I won’t mention a lot of things we do. But one of the things that we’ve done this year, which was a little bit drowned out by the tragedy at Virginia Tech involves a film called “Obsession.” Some of you may have seen it on Fox News Channel, where I think they showed it four times. It just shows Hassan Nasrallah leadinga crowd of hundreds of thousands, chanting, “Death to America.” And it has interviews with people like Nonie Darwish about Islamofascism.A student, a Michael Abdurakhmanov, at Pace University, who is from a family ofJewish refugees from Tajikistan, tried to show this at Pace. And the administration shut the film down after Muslim Students Association, which is a pro-Hamas Saudi-funded operation, complained that it was insensitive to their religion.And when I heard that, I said we’re going to show “Obsession” on a hundred college campuses on April 19th. And we’re going to call it Islamofascism AwarenessDay. And if you had asked me 10 years ago if this could be done with conservative students, I would have said absolutely not. But we actually did it.And in the fall is we’re going to have 200 showings. Then we’re going to have Islamofascism Awareness Weeks on campuses across the country. That’s basically what we do.The two gentlemen -- you will notice immediately that there are a couple of funnypeople on this platform, and witty ones, and it’s not me -- who will run tonight’s entertainment, I’ve known for more than 40 years. Peter Collier has been my coauthor and closest friend for most of these years. He is now the Program Director of the Center.Christopher is also a dear friend of mine, although our relationship has been somewhat checkered by political events. I met Christopher in England when we were both leftists of a Trotskyist persuasion. On the bright side, this meant that we were both anti-Stalinists. On the other hand –Christopher Hitchens: It’s a start.David Horowitz: -- a start. On the other hand, it meant we both had the illusion that the Left could change its spots, and that a better world was still waiting in the wings. I fear that Christopher still retains a bit of this dream.In 1984, Peter and I did the unthinkable, and we voted for Ronald Reagan and became second-thoughters. Three years later, we held a conference in Washington of second-thoughters. And the criteria we set for inviting people to be on the panels was you had to be anti-Communist. And in particular, you had to be anti-Sandinista. In other words, you had to oppose the totalitarian Left on its battlefront and not just the Stalinist past.As a Trotskyist, Christopher was willing to fight the Communists. But he was notabout to fight the Left. He came to the conference to fight us. He came with Sidney Blumenthal, then –Christopher Hitchens: Oh, Jesus.David Horowitz: -- an attack dog for the Washington Post and later for Bill Clinton. And he came with a pack from The Nation; they attacked us, and we attacked them back.Peter and I then wrote a book called, “Destructive Generation,” about the Left we had left. In the eyes of Christopher and his flock, we had committed many sins in that book. The one that ended our literary careers, by setting the entire cultural universe -- which is centered in New York -- against us, was a little quip we made at the end of the book about Susan Sontag.Susan Sontag had gained an undeserved reputation for integrity and courage by making one famous jab at the hypocrisy of the Left, calling Communism “fascism with a human face.” At a Miami book fair, Peter and I asked her why, then, had she continued her own political hypocrisy by allowing an atrocious propaganda book she had written about the Vietnamese Communists to remain in print?I was rewarded for this episode when I appeared on a television book show hostedby Louis Lapham, who had invited Christopher to comment on the book. Christopher brought along to the studio the writer David Rieff, who was Susan Sontag’s son. Rieff,who was over six feet tall, spit at me. But he couldn’t manage