Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) defended the Iraq War, opposed Islamism and anti-Semitism

Christopher Hitchens, author and public intellectual, died Friday, 15 December of pneumonia resulting from esophageal cancer in Houston, Texas.

Mr. Hitchens lived one day beyond the ceremony to end the Iraq war. He supported the liberating the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples from Saddam Hussein.

From Wikipedia:

Christopher Hitchens argued the case for the Iraq War in a 2003 collection of essays entitled A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, and he has held numerous public debates on the topic with George Galloway and Scott Ritter. Though he admits to the numerous failures of the war, and its high civilian casualties, he sticks to the position that deposing Saddam Hussein was a long-overdue responsibility of the United States, after decades of poor policy, and that holding free elections in Iraq has been a success not to be scoffed at. He argues that a continued fight in Iraq against insurgents, whether they be former Saddam loyalists or Islamic extremists, is a fight worth having, and that those insurgents, not American forces, should be the ones taking the brunt of the blame for a slow reconstruction and high civilian casualties.

An updated summary of his views on Iraq and the war on terror can be found in his memoirs Hitch 22. . . .

British politician George Galloway, founder of the socialist Respect Party, on his way to testify in front of a United States Senate sub-committee investigating the scandals in the U.N. Oil-for-Food programme, called Hitchens a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay", to which Hitchens quickly replied, "only some of which is true." Later, in a column for Slate promoting his debate with Galloway which was to take place on 14 September 2005, he elaborated on his prior response: "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a 'popinjay' (true enough, since the word's original Webster's definition is a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)."

Journalist Eli Lake eulogizes Mr. Hitchens in the Daily Beast:

Mr. Hitchens never stopped saying and writing that the (Iraq) war was just and that American arms were needed to end the regime of Saddam Hussein. But Christopher did not arrive at this position simply because his old colleagues at the Nation Magazine did not. He came to support the Iraq war after befriending many Iraqis, and particularly Kurds, who told him about the horrors of that dictatorship. For Christopher, supporting the war was an expression of his anti-totalitarianism. He would later say that the war pitted the anti-totalitarian left against the anti-imperialist left.

"Why are we so bad at detecting the guilty and so good at collective punishment of the innocent?" asks Christopher Hitchens

The West's failure to recognize the Islamist, theocratic ideology inciting Islamic rejection of the Jewish State revisits the West through aviation. If we recognize that Jihadists are Muslim 'holy warriors' where we fight them in uniform, when will we acknowledge who they are domestically? Christopher Hitchens writes in Slate, 28 Dec 2009

"What nobody in authority thinks us grown-up enough to be told is this: We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims. Our civil aviation is only the most psychologically frightening symbol of a plethora of potential targets."

Prof. Victor Davis Hanson explains the Islamist's war against the West in this DemoCast exclusive video:


"The future murderers will generally not be from refugee camps or slums (though they are being indoctrinated every day in our prisons); they will frequently be from educated backgrounds, and they will often not be from overseas at all. They are already in our suburbs and even in our military. We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it. Those who don't get the point prefer to whine about "endless war," accidentally speaking the truth about something of which the attempted Christmas bombing over Michigan was only a foretaste. While we fumble with bureaucracy and euphemism, they are flying high."

Obsessive anti-Israelism IS racism (and why it's incumbent upon the Media which fomented it to now stem-the-tide to save their societies from it).

British Parliamentarian, Denis MacShane writes in the Washington Post, The New Anti-Semitism:

"Hatred of Jews has reached new heights in Europe and many points south and east of the old continent. Last year I chaired a blue-ribbon committee of British parliamentarians, including former ministers and a party leader, that examined the problem of anti-Semitism in Britain. None of us are Jewish or active in the unending debates on the Israeli-Palestinian question.

Our report showed a pattern of fear among a small number of British citizens -- there are around 300,000 Jews in Britain, of whom about a third are observant -- that is not acceptable in a modern democracy. Synagogues attacked. Jewish schoolboys jostled on public transportation. Rabbis punched and knifed. British Jews feeling compelled to raise millions to provide private security for their weddings and community events. On campuses, militant anti-Jewish students fueled by Islamist or far-left hate seeking to prevent Jewish students from expressing their opinions.

More worrisome was what we described as anti-Jewish discourse, a mood and tone whenever Jews are discussed, whether in the media, at universities, among the liberal media elite or at dinner parties of modish London. To express any support for Israel or any feeling for the right of a Jewish state to exist produces denunciation, even contempt.

Europe is reawakening its old demons, but today there is a difference. The old anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have morphed into something more dangerous. Anti-Semitism today is officially sanctioned state ideology and is being turned into a mobilizing and organizing force to recruit thousands in a new crusade -- the word is chosen deliberately -- to eradicate Jewishness from the region whence it came and to weaken and undermine all the humanist values of rule of law, tolerance and respect for core rights such as free expression that Jews have fought for over time.

Today there is still denial about the universal ideology of the new anti-Semitism. It has power and reach, and it enters into the soft underbelly of the Western mind-set that does not like Jews or what Israel does to defend its right to exist.

We are at the beginning of a long intellectual and ideological struggle. It is not about Jews or Israel. It is about everything democrats have long fought for: the truth without fear, no matter one's religion or political beliefs. The new anti-Semitism threatens all of humanity. The Jew-haters must not pass.

The Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, published journalist Anshel Pfeffer's exploration into the reasoning of Mr. Robin Shepherd, a senior research-fellow at the Chatham House think-tank in London in "The Objective Anti-Semites."

"Mr. Shepherd has no significant connection to the Jewish people, and his visit to Israel last week was only his second. But he still believes his decision to spend a year researching the new European anti-Semitism is perfectly relevant for any serious observer of international affairs. When asked about his interest in the subject, he first answers on a philosophical level by quoting the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, who has said that "only a moral cretin thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews."

He then offers an academic explanation: "The Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the key issues in international relations, and there are very few people in this field without a position on it." His last work was on the wave of anti-Americanism sweeping Europe, and this led him to believe that a new form of anti-Semitism was also at the root of the increasingly critical attitude toward Israel there. (...)

"A much bigger problem is the objective anti-Semitism, the hatred of the State of Israel," he says. "Since Israel is a Jewish state, and if you use false analogies between Israel and Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany, you are comparing them with Jews and you are therefore engaged in anti-Semitism."

That doesn't mean that everyone who uses the comparison is an actual anti-Semite, says Shepherd. "That depends on how central [this comparison] is for you. When it becomes an obsession and this is one of the things you find increasingly in Europe - then at this point it becomes a new form of anti-Semitism."

This is Shepherd's answer to the standard response by Israel's detractors in the West, that "not every criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism."

"Of course one can criticize Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when the critics begin using constant key references to South Africa and the Nazis, using terms such as 'bantustans.' None of these people, of course, will admit to being racist, but this kind of anti-Semitisim is a much more sophisticated form of racism, and the kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire people, since Israel is an essentially Jewish project."

To explain this distinction, he cites Zimbabwe as an example. "A lot of people will defend themselves by saying that their motivation is the cause of the Palestinians. Well, if you wanted to express your disapproval of Robert Mugabe's regime by highlighting his violation of human rights and the way he's destroying the country, then you could say your motivation is human rights, but if you expressed your objection with a cartoon of Mugabe as a gorilla jumping up and down on blood-soaked bananas, that kind of imagery of black people is pure racist. But it's the kind of imagery being used against Israel."

Mr. Pfeffer also relates Mr. Shepherd's explanations for anti-Israelism/anti-Semitism among the media and the far-left, even among Jews themselves. Referring to Noam Chomsky, Shepherd explains, "He is not a self-hating Jew, but his political standing in the left is more important for him than his Jewish identity. That's why the extreme Jewish critics of Israel almost always come from the far left - for them, politics is the most important part of their identity. It might be personally painful for them, but the ideological left is a secular religion, more than any other political group, and for them this religion comes before being Jewish,"

A must-read.