Last week Christopher Hitchens and I were attacked in Beirut. Less than 24 hours after we landed at the international airport, a half dozen members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party jumped us on Hamra Street when he defaced one of their signs.

He and I were traveling together because Lebanon's New Opinion Group invited us to meet Prime Minister Fouad Seniora, Future Movement party leader Saad Hariri, Druze chief Walid Jumblatt, and other leaders of the pro-independence "March 14" coalition.

We had just attended a massive rally downtown commemorating the fourth anniversary of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Christopher needed a new pair of shoes. Our colleague Jonathan Foreman from Standpoint Magazine needed a shirt. I needed a coffee. So I led the way as the three of us strolled over to Hamra Street where we could buy just about anything. And I told my two companions a story about the neighborhood's past on the way.

"When Hezbollah violently seized West Beirut last May," I said, "the Syrian Social Nationalist Party followed them in. They put up their spinning swastika flags all over the neighborhood, and no one dared touch them until the prime minister ordered them taken down several months later."

It was a warning of sorts – or at least it would have been heeded as such by most people. I don't go looking for trouble, Jonathan is as mild-mannered a writer as any I know, but Christopher is brave and combative, and he would have none of it.

"My attitude to posters with swastikas on them," he later told Alice Fordham at NOW Lebanon, "has always been the same. They should be ripped down."

When we rounded the corner onto Hamra Street, a Syrian Social National Party sign was the first thing we saw.

"Well there's that swastika now," Christopher said.



Read the rest at MichaelTotten.com