Hitching To Beirut

To the very end, Christopher Hitchens lauded the Russian Revolution for its effect on his reviled Orthodox Church.

Although the Syrian Social National Party that beat him up in Beirut for vandalising a war memorial is not itself a Christian organisation and in fact subscribes to the separation of Church and State as well as to various weird racial theories, nevertheless its base is among the Antiochian Orthodox, so it is no wonder that it was not too keen on the antics of the less important Hitchens brother.

He was in Lebanon, not as a guest of the alliance backed by Syria (Christian-majority provinces, Christian festivals as public holidays), but as a guest of the rival alliance, which is backed by Saudi Arabia. And by Israel, to the resistance to whose occupation had been erected the memorial that he defaced.