Hitchens v. Galloway: Postmortems

Hitch won on points, says Andrew Anthony, who notes that after the Grapple in the Big Apple, the line for copies of Hitchens' book was twice as long as the Galloway line.

Hitchens, for his part, says he's not done with Galloway yet.

The experience of spending some hours on a public platform with George Galloway is disappointingly similar to the experience of watching him on al Jazeera, or on Syrian state television. One learns exactly nothing that one did not already know.

When addressing audiences in the Middle East, his metaphors of martyrdom and rape, and his celebration of the "resistance" forces are a little more florid, perhaps, but I shall have to concede that even in New York he has the nerve to tell an audience that the atrocities of September 2001 were essentially the fault of the United States itself. That was not his finest moment - and nor was it by any means his lowest one - but I began to see again his essential appeal, which is an utter indifference to embarrassment.