In the course of an interview for Frontpage magazine (published on 10 December 2003), Christopher Hitchens made a stunning admission:
"Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn’t fully grasp until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose.'
This belated confession added fuel to the already raging fire sparked by Hitchens' full-throated support for the American-led military intervention in Iraq earlier that same year. Even more baffling to his erstwhile comrades on the left is Hitchens’ on-going advocacy of this gruesome war, despite the complete unravelling of the stated grounds for the occupation and in the face of mounting public pressure to withdraw. It is only with the publication of his new book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, that the basis for Hitchens’ unwavering commitment to this cause becomes clear: the struggle in Iraq is but a symptom of the real war now being waged, and that is against religion itself.
This war, to which Hitchens silently pledged himself that day, must be fought wherever the enemy is encountered, whether in the guises of global jihadism and vulgar American fundamentalism, at one extreme, or in the West’s more urbane agnosticism — which amounts to little more than a self-congratulatory 'Dunno', a position lacking both intellectual stamina and moral courage, all the while priding itself on being open-minded — at the other. As he demonstrated in The Missionary Position, a devastating exposé of Mother Theresa (and effectively the prequel to his latest book), neither the most saintly instances of religious belief nor the most seemingly innocuous should be left unopposed because "all religions are versions of the same untruth", and, as such, are "positively harmful."
This same sentiment — one of sheer, unmitigated aggression, the "exhilaration" to which Hitchens referred earlier — drives Richard Dawkins’ contribution to the contemporary assault on religion. The God Delusion emerged from a deep sense of the intolerability of a situation that had been allowed to fester for too long. As he wrote just days after the event in September 2001:
"It is time