LONDON: As a professional provocateur and vocal supporter of the war in Iraq, Christopher Hitchens has been engaged in countless verbal punch-ups with his ideological opponents, most of them conducted from the safety of a television studio.

But when the author, broadcaster and journalist defaced a political poster in Beirut, he found himself at the wrong end of a bruising encounter that left him with a limp and nursing cuts and bruises.

Hitchens had been drinking in Beirut's main boulevard, Hamra Street, last Saturday afternoon with two other Western journalists after attending a rally to commemorate the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. They spotted a poster for the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a far-right group whose logo bears a resemblance to the Nazi swastika, and Hitchens decided to act. "I couldn't tear it down but I got my marker out and wrote on it, effectively telling them to 'f--- off'," he said after arriving in Britain.

Hitchens's political statement was witnessed by a group of SSNP activists, who have a strong presence in Beirut.

He described how he was knocked to the ground, ending up with his shirt covered with blood after he cut his arm in the fall and "skinned" two fingers on one hand. A crowd later confronted the assailants, saving him from further injury.

Hitchens said he walked with a limp for several days afterwards, but insists that while bloodied, he was unbowed. "It was a scrape. It wasn't honours even but it wasn't a rout."

Guardian News & Media