'An attack on civilisation.' Photo / Reuters

'An attack on civilisation.' Photo / Reuters

With the late afternoon sunlight making a last gasp into his Washington DC apartment, Christopher Hitchens, one of America's most prominent journalists and provocative authors, tries to ignore the minor commotion of President George W. Bush's motorcade passing the streets below.

Without pausing, Hitchens, a British-born American citizen, proceeds to finish his story about that devastating early September morning in New York more than six years earlier.

"It irritated me that the President, standing not far from the rubble of the Twin Towers, said that you're either with America or with the terrorists," Hitchens recalls as he describes walking through the badly shaken streets of lower Manhattan, his first American home, scanning the countless missing persons posters.

"The President described it as an attack on America. I would prefer to say that it was an attack on civilisation."

For Hitchens, 59, the events that day were part of what he calls a series of "test moments" - periods when one's ethical beliefs are placed on trial by external challenges or crises.

Channelling one of his influences, George Orwell, Hitchens viewed the terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington DC as a moment to respond - which he did, by becoming an advocate for the invasion of Iraq, a move leftist critics saw as opportunistic and imperialist.

Hitchens wrote a series of columns for Vanity Fair and the Nation after the attacks that revolved around his disgust for the perpetrators while saluting the stoicism of New York City that he claimed harkened back to the "British phlegm during the Blitz".

Since 9/11, Hitchens has employed an aggressive rhetoric over what he has called "Islamofascism" or "fascism with an Islamic face".

"There was a time when you could publish a book that said 'Muhammad sucks' as long as you were not and never had been a Muslim," Hitchens said. "Now you can't. The aggression [of fundamental Islam] is mounting all the time.

"And I'm very, very determined that this does not go unchallenged."

In late 2002, Hitchens resigned from his position at the Nation after writing that the publication had become "the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft [former US Attorney-General] is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden".

Moving even further away from the liberal left, Hitchens began his unwavering support for US military intervention.

"Shall I take out the papers of citizenship?" Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair in December 2001. "Wrong question. In every essential way, I already have."