The now-infamous confrontation between Hitchens and Father Rutler at Manhattan’s Union League Club on May 1 reveals a deadly weakness in the conservative movement. It shows how carelessly and reflexively we have fallen into the habit of treating our enemies as friends, and our friends as enemies. Many of us, it appears, have lost the ability to tell the difference. This is no trival flaw. Unless corrected, it spells doom for our movement, and perhaps for our Republic.

Hitchens rejects the Soviet or “€œStalinist”€ model (as do virtually all leftists today), and proposes instead that we fashion our enlightened “€œsecular”€ state after the example of… Moorish Spain. Hitchens praises the Muslim warlords who conquered Spain in AD 711 and ruled it for centuries. Hitchens suggests that life under the firm yet benevolent rule of enlightened Muslim emirs may be the closest thing to a perfect society that we benighted humans can expect to achieve.

Writer Christopher Hitchens has hit the jackpot. His new book, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, has proved a runaway bestseller. Why, then, is Mr. Hitchens so angry? Eyewitnesses report that Hitchens erupted into a drunken rage at a recent promotional event for his book. After denouncing circumcision as a “filthy Jewish practice,” Hitchens reportedly descended from the stage, visibly inebriated, approached a Roman Catholic priest in the audience, and began shouting at him, only inches from his face. Hitchens called the priest (a hero of Sept. 11) a “child molester.”