The late Christopher Hitchens had such a great reputation for integrity, someone must explain to me why he put these ideas, of 2001, on Charlie Rose, on the back burner. As usual, I suspect corruption: I wonder if he got jobs that made it inconvenient for him to say these things. Or also if he was wetbrained: if he was just bellicose and luxe in his last decade. Notice the implicit Israel lobby analysis at the end. Makes me wonder if his contempt for Walt and Mearsheimer is that they beat him to it?
Some highlights: Zionism: it was a mistake to set up a Jewish farmer society on Arab land…. My mother wanted to move there. I tried to talk her out of it…. guaranteed to create a quarrel with the Arabs… 4th generation of Palestinians brought up in exile or living under humiliation… original sin… If Jews born in Brooklyn have a right to a state in Palestine then Palestinians born in Jerusalem have a right to a state in Palestine. Why do we have one and not the other? After all, it’s America that pays for all this.
He died still feeling this way. I feel that the emergence of his post 9/11 discourse on Islamism of him holds no contradiction with the video.
I have seen people here saying that he was a zionist, or an Israeli lover. Not by a mile.
Glenn Greenwald on Hitchens.
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/christohper_hitchens_and_the_protocol_for_public_figure_deaths/singleton/
Sums up my feelings precisely.
This incessant praising of a warmonger who advocated Endless War as an ideal for ‘civilization’ in his dying days is distasteful. And you should know better. You are not stupid. Don’t be blinded by your liking of his anti-Zionism.
i didn’t know hitchens existed til the iraq war. i was diametrically opposed to his ptv and found his persona often times disgusting and frequently pompous. he was already a drunk by them.
Interesting column at Anti-War.com about Hitchens hypocrisy in regards to Zionism:
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2011/12/16/christopher-hitchens-fundamentalist-exemption-for-zionism/
Hitchens, at 0:12: My mother wanted to go, be a zionist, I tried to talk her out of it. It’s been a thing in my family.
Then why “discover” only in 1987, long after her death, that his mother was Jewish (as he described in Hitch-22)?