Monday, December 22, 2003
Roger L. Simon points to this Christopher Hitchens Slate piece on the Qaddafi deal.
Simon:
"Then it would be nice if Gen. Ariel Sharon was asked to declare his own stocks of nuclear weapons and was questioned rather closely about what contribution they make to regional security. For a start, where was Israel thinking of using such devices and under what circumstances? In the war against jihad, Israeli nuclear weapons are even more useless than our own. Precision-guided munitions, which take out the tyrant and spare the population, are the wave of the future."[...]
Read the whole Simon piece for a take-down on this almost non-sequiter of an Israel reference.
This is another reminder of the origins and ultimate mortality of Hitchens. He has had it right on Iraq and much of the War on Terror, but he shows his leftist roots in a piece like this, where knee-jerk Israel condemnations are a demonstration of bona-fides.
The difference, of course, at its simplest (other than what should be the horribly obvious number and viciousness of Israel's enemies), between nukes in the hands of countries like Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan, or the same in the hands of Israel is that in the case of the latter, there's damn little chance that Israel has any intention of possessing the weapons but for their own use, while the former nations are far more likely to be proliferators - that is, aquire them to pass on either the weapons or the technology to others. In fact, as Roger points out, they are likely to be even more responsible than either the Russians or the French. In the case of the French, it was they who helped build Israel's nuclear reactor, and need I remind the reader of their intentions with regard to Iraq?
On a separate issue, as I said in Roger's comments, Hitchens' constant refrain of referring to Sharon as "General" Sharon is fairly annoying as well. The clear rhetorical intent is to delegitimize him and put him into the camp of illegitimate military strong-men. I don't hear very many democratically elected leaders referred to by their former military titles while in office. It's a bit of cuteness on Hitchens' part I think he'd be well advised to drop if he wants to be taken more seriously than his old leftist friends out tearing down Bush effigies.
But obsession with Israel is characteristic of that particular wing of the political spectrum these days - to the point of bringing Israel into almost every issue no matter how tangential. It's helping to hold the Arab world down, and it's not helping the political left any, either. One would hope that Hitchens, in a more lucid moment, would recognize, and I'm quite sure has recognized this - that such unhealthy monomania is really a symptom of something deep and twisted...and very dark indeed...
I'm a big fan of C Hitchens but I agree with your comments re Israel. Do you think there's a chance he might somehow get to read said comments? I don't see how he could possibly disagree with them, if he does then isn't it strange how the leftwing virus can lie dormant for a while only to pop up almost unbidden to take over the host in spite of huge intelligence as protection against it?
Would that it were so simple that a fwe paragraphs from me could get a guy like Hitchens to re-think his positions. Sadly, I'm sure he's heard it before and has many a ready-made rationalization. As an indicator of where he's coming from, remember he was a good friend of Edward Said after all.
Is there hope? There is always hope. Having a skilled polemicist like Hitchens on Israel's side, rather than against her, would certainly be a good thing.
Hitchens does not believe that any state founded upon ethnic or religious lines is valid - a normal position for a real Trotskyite. According to this viewpoint, the way to security for Jews is to establish real socialism anywhere, which would protect them as it would protect all other members of the human family - or at least, so goes the catechism. This was actually a debate within the Jewish community during the late 1800s/early 1900s, and Hitchens sides with the Jewish-born Marxists.
This is a somewhat abridged summary, but he has written as much in other articles. Wish I had an URL.
The bottom line is that Hitchens denies Israel's prima facie right to exist, and supports the "secular, bi-national state" solution. Which is where his thus-far untarnished ideological consistency hits a rock, because if everything else he writes about the War on Terror is true, this solution is impossible in an atmosphere where half of that state has been carefully trained since birth to wish to murder the other half.
Thanks, Joe. To add: My knowledge of Trosky v. Lennin v. Stalin v. Marx is pretty general, but I've dealt with and read enough from them to "get the program."
The trouble is that, if we take the world as it is, not as one might *wish* for it to be, no one in their right mind should be willing to allow themselves to be murdered while we wait for someone's utopian fantasy future to materialize.
Solomon,
Yes, that's exactly the problem here.
If I had to try to reach Hitchens, I'd start by asking where else he thinks Jews could live today in safety, then go on from that small list and ask what could change that safety, and what alternative the Jews would have.
Indeed, that strikes me as a very solid debating strategy generally.