I've been busy helping three Ontario New Democrats get elected to municipal office and worked in Alberta last month.   So I haven't done much lately to build support for the Euston Manifesto.  Hopefully, the following will re-inspire me:

The man who has most influenced my opinions over the last eigtht years will be visiting Toronto this week.   I'm sure he will have much to say about Afghanistan.   I hope to meet him.

From:  http://hhdebate.sa.utoronto.ca/formaldebate.html

Debate on Freedom of Speech

"Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate" -- November 15, 2006, 7:30 pm

Speaker - Christopher Hitchens

The controversy arising from the Danish Mohammed cartoons has been only one instance of a recent rise in concern over freedom of speech and hate speech in the western world. Our debaters and guest speaker will discuss whether or not speech can be banned on the grounds of hate.

Christopher Hitchens was born in April 1949 in Portsmouth, England and was educated at the Leys School, Cambridge and Balliol College, Oxford. He holds an Honours Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. From 1971-1981, Hitchens worked as a book reviewer in London for The Times and was social science editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement. He was assistant editor and staff writer at The New Statesman; researcher/reporter for London Weekend Television and chief foreign correspondent for Daily Express. Hitchens emigrated to the United States in 1981 where he worked as a weekly book reviewer for New York Newsday and continued on as a writer, commentator, critic and social intellectual for many publications since.

Hitchens is among one of the best known controversial writers and critics in the media. He was a columnist for Vanity Fair, The Nation, and Slate. He is also a frequent or regular contributor to the New York Review of Book, the London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the Atlantic Monthly, among many other publications.

As foreign correspondent and travel writer, Hitchens has written from more than sixty countries on all five continents, from Afghanistan, Albania and Angola through Dublin, India, Iran, Iraq and Japan, to Vietnam, Western Sahara, Xylophagou and Zimbabwe. He is the only writer to have written, since 2000, from Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Hitchens’ essays and articles have been collected or anthologized in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Essays, Best American Essays of 2001, Best American Travel Writing of 2002, Best American Political Writing of 2004, and the “best of” collections published by The London Review of Books, The Spectator, The Nation, The New Statesman, The Weekly Standard and Best 50 Atlantic Monthly Book Reviews.

He is the author of many books including Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies, Karl Marx and the Paris Commune, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favourite Fetish, International Territory: The UN After Fifty Years, The Palestine Question, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq.