Arab Orthodox fascists vs. Hitch

Gamboling around Beirut with Michael Totten and my friend Jonathan Foreman, Christopher Hitchens saw a stylized swastika on a poster for a Syrian neo-fascist party (chiefly Orthodox Christians, I regret to say), and defaced it. Thus commenced a scary street scene ending with all three getting beat up by thuggish party members. From Totten's report:

Christopher has seen Beirut at its worst. He visited Lebanon during the war and immediately after. In 1991, he told me, the city looked like Rotterdam after World War II had gone to work on it.

"Anyway," he said, "call me old fashioned if you will, but my line is that swastika posters are to be defaced or torn down. I mean, what other choice do you have? I'd like to think I'd have done that if I had known it was being guarded by people who are swastika fanciers. I have done that in my time. I have had fights with people who think that way. But I was surprised first by how violent and immediate their response was, and second by how passive and supine was the response of the police."

Question to the room: was Hitchens' anti-fascist gesture admirably brave, or reckless and foolish? I say the latter. If he wants to get himself killed by making a romantic gesture like that, fine (and it would still be foolish, but admirably brave). But he put the lives of his two friends at risk.