In February 2009, Christopher Hitchens gave a talk at the American University of Beirut titled Who are the real revolutionaries in the Middle East? As he later wrote in his last book, Arguably, a collection of essays: "I did my best to blow on the few sparks that then seemed dimly perceptible." He praised individuals best embodying democratic change in the region, from the Egyptian academic Saad Eddin Ibrahim, to the Kurdish foes of Saddam Hussein, to the Lebanese who had overthrown Syrian hegemony in 2005.
Yet the AUB talk was a bad-tempered affair. Many in Hitchens' audience had come to castigate a man who supported the war in Iraq and whom they blamed for siding with American neoconservatives. Others accused him of ignoring Palestine. Hitchens reminded them that he had written a book with the late Edward Said on the Palestinians, and pointedly asked: "Could there have been any greater degradation for Iraq than being under the control of a psychopathic family?"
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