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Reader comment on item: Christopher Hitchens Rants Again

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.

Submitting....

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Reader comments (9) on this item

Title Commenter Date Thread
Hitchens vs Rickles: Offensive vs Funny [178 words]DaveAug 20, 2022 17:39285372
Anti-Religious Vitriole Knows No Limits - Was Accorded as Free Speech in America for Freedom for All [219 words]M ToveyJan 31, 2022 11:37278627
Life Lived in Invective Views of Hatred for a World That Did Not Conform to Self-imposed Expectations [145 words]M ToveyAug 22, 2022 16:46278627
4Oh for [288 words]HugoMay 22, 2012 07:18195787
1Note to Hugo: philo semites CAN dislike Judaism but they usually dont [378 words]ShishirApr 17, 2013 09:18195787
An excess of alchohol... [98 words]Mirko BodulDec 30, 2011 00:14192142
On the article on Hitchens [121 words]Gabrielle CroftsDec 29, 2011 08:30192128
4Christopher Hitchens [67 words]NickDec 20, 2011 15:07191894
A comment on Hitchens [39 words]Dr. Mark McAndrewDec 19, 2011 09:27191845

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