Oh for

Submitted by Hugo (United Kingdom), May 22, 2012 at 07:18

If you were going to make the case that the late Hitch was a phony, you shouldn't have gone in for a move that proved him right.

"And one more charming aspect of Hitchens' character: Giulio Meotti establishes that he was an antisemite. Just one quote: "In his atheist best-selling jeremiad, God is Not Great, Hitchens describes Judaism and Israel as both 'genocidal'.""

This is an old ... piece of elision. A disgust for Judaism, especially but not limited to, as the father of the monotheistic obscurantism that has darkened so much of our history, is not anti-semitism. Indeed someone may well be a philo-semite, esteeming the achievements of the Jewish people in science and the world of the Enlightenment, while having utter disgust for the religion of Judaism

The piece you link to gets even dumber, relying on the nonsense equivalence between attacks on Israel and attacks on Jewry, and the moronism of imputing words to someone that they did not state. But sure. The man who gave the Daniel Pearl memorial lecture, the man who relentlessly wrote on the subject of antisemitism and opposed it, was secretly a Jew hater. ...

For the record, I am both a philo-semite and a Zionist, but it's this sort of thing that makes it a little difficult at times. And to clarify - the Israel I defend is the Israel of the largest numbers of published scientific papers per head in the world, and also the largest number of per capita nobel prize winners, the only secular democracy in the Middle East. It is absolutely not the Israel of superstitious backwardness and romantic drivel about an ancient and glorious past. The Middle East has plenty of those states already.

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