I find Christopher Hitchens to be an insufferable, pretentious blow-hard, and his latest article in Slate only confirms this perception.
Ironically, Hitchens, who thinks the Zionist enterprise is dubious to begin with, argues that "Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist" because she (very likely) has said that the war in Iraq is being fought on behalf of Israel. He further points to her paranoia by claiming that her allegation that an e-mail attributed to her was "easily and convincingly refuted."
But after having made this ad hominem attack Hitchens's real point is that Sheehan's activism is futile and kind of ridiculous, because the basis for her case is unlikely to find support on the left, right, middle, or anywhere. He asks rhetorically, what if we actually did what she demanded?
I don't know if Christopher Hitchens read my latest rant against him, but you might think he did, because I make the same point: if he's so much against Israel that he employs every rhetorical fallacy in the book against the Jewish state, is he willing to take responsibility for the consequences of his view, i.e., about 5 million Jewish refugees?
For all I know Cindy Sheehan has become unhinged after having lost her son, or maybe she was a little nutty to begin with and things only got worse. I doubt she and I would have a lot of common ground on most issues, especially if she believes a Jewish cabal killed her son. Who knows, I might hate her guts.
Maybe Hitchens missed the talk on polemics at whatever educational institution he attended (Orwell, whom Hitchens vainly tries to emulate, attended Eton as a King's Scholar and almost certainly didn't). But surely he can't be blind to the fact that in this world, people take extreme positions quite often, and few of them actually believe they will convince the world with them. I'm sure one could refute or at least argue against many of Sheehan's positions on their lack of merit, but not simply because they are unlikely to find popular support.
It's time Slate sent this dude to The Nation or some other similarly stupid rag that gets the slim readership he deserves. He's wasting our time elsewhere.
Comments