Ms Glick: Thank you for calling this to our attention. I was never a great Hitchens devotee, and I have never before heard about this part of his belief system. I am disappointed that -- if it is indeed the case that Hitchens held an antipathy for Israel -- so many have been willing to gloss over his anti-Semitism. While this certainly does not -- for me, as a Christian -- give me a pass to hate him, neither should we gloss over things that need to be said. If he was anti-Semitic, that is not to his credit. I salute you for your honesty. Oh, and I will also dispense with the saccharine niceties about "May he find peace with God." Unless Hitchens experienced a death-bed conversion to Jesus Christ (something which one certainly hopes to have been the case), I, for one, am less than sanguine about the felicity of his current place of abode. Yes, as Paul writes in Romans (6:23), "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." And, yes, while that offer is good to all this side of the grave, as far as I can tell from reading the Scriptures, there is no place in heaven for the UNREPENTANT sinner. Whoops! As Pamela Geller says, "Truth is the new hate speech," and I think I may have just committed "truth."

Thanks for this one Caroline. I did enjoy Hitchens ability to skew people and his use of language. With the way pro-Israel conservatives were lionizing him I had thought that he had turned a corner in his hatred of Judaism but apparently not. I read a review of his latest book and lo and behold there he was hating on Judaism and blaming evrything wrong with the world on the Jewish people. I was going to drink a bit of scotch in his honor, but quite frankly he no more deserves an honored send off than did Ezra Pound.

That's a long article, I didn't read the whole thing, but I read enough to decide it was a credible accusation. I havn't read much of Hitchens either, but from what I did hear, there was not much to excite me and I am also an atheist.

My impression is that what was missing in Hitchens polemics is science, which should be the most fundamental intellectual foundations of any good atheist, even where the atheism is strictly regarding deism as in Buddhism or the other Eastern beliefs where there is no God.

It isn't as though science cannot be embraced by those who are not atheist, but science does not need them or their beliefs. There is plenty of room in science for many beliefs that cannot be supported by science. Science itself requires belief in many things that are not easily observed even while they can be observed given the need to do so.

History is science and the history of the Jews shows that the Jews are an innocent people and the beliefs of Judaism are universally benign and life affirming and pose no threat or aggression against any other beliefs or people. Jewish scripture cites the history of conflicts between Jewish believers and others where Jewish belief makes claims of dominion over others. But these are very specific cases and we have no history other than these scriptures in trying to decide what was going on. BUt it is significant that the God of the Jews that the Jews claim rules the universe and whose universe is that God's creation has never promised the Jews anything beyond a small scrap of land.

For an atheist, this is truly amazing. If the Jews invented God and the beliefs of Judaism to serve the Jews, then why would the Jews limit the grants of this God to the Jews to such a small scrap of land when there was clearly the world that was available? Why not Egypt, from whence they were once delivered? What would be the harm or who could deny such a claim? Why has God never said, "I am the creator of the world, the universe and all of humanity. You are my chosen people, I give you the world, all its creatures and all of humanity as subjects."? Certainly such claims have never embarrased the beliefs of Judaism's imitators in Islam and Christianity.

But Hitchens was no scientist. He was a writer, a "polemicist". He was an artist. One of the hazards of being an artist is never having to challange the veracity of ones beliefs. As long as one has patrons, your beliefs have all the validity you need. Integrity becomes a strictly personal affair, integrity for an artist is just another part of the market and for Hitchens, the market was very good as it was. But integrity is fundamental to science. Without reproduceable results that work the same way for everyone, there is no science.

http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=5791

I beg to differ.

Caroline - I didn't agree with everything Hitchen's said, but I can't agree that he was anti-semitic.

Several years ago Hitchens delivered the Daniel Pearl Memorial lecture. You can find it still on YouTube. It would be a strange man who could deliver such a speech and yet hate Jews.

The definitive essay by Benjamin Kerstein together with your unease leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I have never been a Hitchens fan for reasons even I wasn't sure of. The fact that he was so obviously antisemitic yet loved by conservative pro-Israel Jews makes me wonder what delusionary world they are living in and are they as pro-Israel as they claim to be.

Hello Caroline,

Please let me begin by saying that I highly enjoy reading your articles.

However, I feel quite disturbed with regards to your statement after reading Kerstein interpretation of C. Hitchen's Jewish Problem.

I believe that what we have here is a good example of how easy it is for someone's personal agenda to distort objective reality.

In this case, Kerstein seems quite blinded by his objective of proving that C. Hitchen is a Jew hater. The end justify the means,...especially for those who truly believe that their motive is "righteous". This has always been the case, throughout history. And as always, no matter the race or gender or colour, their motive blinds them.

I honestly thought that you would have detected the widespread overinterpretations, for it leads the reader like the pied piper.

Isn't this where totalitarian tendencies always takes their roots?

Please ask yourself, if only for a few moments, if such type of character assassination could be produce against any other free thinker (even one such as yourself) or any political dissident?

Don't take it from me, take it from our good friend B. Obama: YES, WE CAN.

Note the overwhelming use of re-formulation and disengenuous distortion tactics in Kerstein article (the implication is, in other word, etc).

When does harsh critisism suddenly become hate speech? And according to whom's overinterpretation?

This is how it always begins. Sadly, it's only when this violent gaze is upon us, distorting our own writen or spoken words, that our prevous cheers... suddenly stop.

Excerpt:

Kerstein wrote:

"Concerning, for example, the 2003 terrorist bombing of the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul, he wrote with ostensible sympathy that "The worshippers were not killed for building a settlement in the West Bank: they were members of a very old and honorable community who were murdered for being Jews." The implication that, had the Jews of Neve Shalom been building a settlement in the West Bank, murdering them would have been perfectly acceptable, points to where Hitchens's dialectics can lead."

"Indeed, Hitchens's concept of anti-Semitism is itself a largely self-serving fantasy. "Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war," he has said, "it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilization and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason." In other words, Hitchens appears to be opposed to anti- Semitism only to the extent that it has nothing to do with the Jews but serves as a proxy for other evils."

Thank you,
Sobieski

Thanks, Caroline, for the heads-up on
Christopher's anti-Jewishness and anti-Zionism.
I hadn't known that.

His nihilistic atheism might be aimed at
Judaism, though he is more vocal in his
opposition to Islam. The first possibility
might be expected from someone who has a Jewish
background, but has rejected that background.

Much as many American atheists come from a
Christian background, and direct most of their
anti-religious rhetoric against Christians,
instead of, say, Islam (which they may even
sympathize with, because it opposes the theism
with which they are most familiar).

Though to what extent that is true in
Christopher's case, I cannot say.

Other atheists who come from a Jewish
background, such as Ayn Rand, are more|
even-handed in their critique of religion;
and in fact, Rand and other "secular Jews"
typically are supportive of Israel and don't
say anything against religious Jews.

There is much to admire in Hellenistic culture.
Without Hellenism, eastern forces emanating
from Persia would have dominated more of Europe.
In such an alternate universe, Rome conquering
Athens would not have resulted in the creation
of Greco-Roman (western) civilization, but
rather, a synthesis of Rome and Babylon.

Surely that would have been much worse than our
timeline. Yet no person, movement, or
government perfectly embodies any particular
ideology. We should not say that the Greeks who
ruled Israel were paragons of Hellenism, or
that Hellenism is a consistently correct
philosophy/way of life.

Neither should we say that Hellenism had
nothing to offer, or that the Jewish rebels
were paragons of Jewishness or consistently
correct. To judge people from the past, by
standards that were discovered long after those
people had perished, would be anachronistic
even if correct.

The flourishing of humanism within cultural
Judaism, might be considered a by-product of
the destruction of the temple in 70AD and the
restrictions placed upon Jews in medieval
Europe. This maybe said, while still rejecting
the predations of Gentiles against the Jewish
people and culture.

The proper antidote to Islam, is not a softer
version of mysticism. Analogously, we may say
that Republicans have not successfully opposed
socialism, because they offer a softer version
of it. Judaism is better than other religions,
because it is more in accord with human nature
and reality generally. Even the monotheism is
reasonable as an approximation, since there is
only one reality and one singularity.

A human-oriented, reality-oriented person is
more in accord with natural law, even if mildly
religious, than an anti-humanstic person even if secular.

Hitchens did more to make rebellion against God chic and in vogue than any Satanist with an open expense account and the best advertising firm on the planet.
I had to do a little digging to find what made him tick (in his own words) and what I found were the two main ingredients that drive all of Lucifer's disciples and why we are now living in such perilous times.

"Noting that Christian evangelists say they are motivated by a desire to please God, I asked Hitchens – pointing to his "zeal" for his message – what motivates him.
"Well, intellectual scorn, really. Frankly," he said. "A sense of superiority, arrogance."

God's favorite atheist? http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=378513#ixzz1gx3OuNTE

A lovable guy with a gift for words and the heart of Beelzebub,בעל זבוב‎, Baal Zəbûb.
The pride of Lucifer always wars against God when it rules the heart of man.

God always humbles the proud.

I generally enjoyed reading Hitchens because he could write. But - to your point: Hitchens was an irretrievable lefty. Ever since the "Palestinians" wised up and hijacked the whole black civil rights thing even talented lefties like Hitchens felt constrained to note, in an item about the latest rocket attack on Israel, that one rocket had damaged a set of figurines that no good Palestinian could afford.

Don't know much about Hitchens except that he was a staunch atheist who apparently was able to commendably/artfully articulate, both verbally and in writing, his contempt for religion and God.

Race/ethnicity and religion are not necessarily synonymous - defending a race of people does mean one accepts or is defending the religion/God that a particular race has historically been associated with - the opposite is also true.

“History is science and the history of the Jews shows that the Jews are an innocent people and the beliefs of Judaism are universally benign and life affirming and pose no threat or aggression against any other beliefs or people.”

This writer has put his finger on it. Rather than being an atheist or a materialist I would categorise many of these kinds of people as being “anti-clerical” which is a different concept entirely.

In that regard people like Richard Dawkins also fall into the similar trap of attacking all religion and religions as if they were the same. But they are NOT the same that is the point and any proper investigation should show this. Science demands an objective analysis of all the facts of phenomena, and is opposed to setting out armed with dogma. That these writers who follow in the path of Dawkins have not done. They have approached life armed with their own prejudices.

So writers like Spencer and Bostom are much closer to the scientific method even though they themselves are religious people.

I stress the method not the man. It must be added to the points made by Caroline and others that it was not just his hatred for Israel, Hitchens also was a very big assistance to the NATO/Jihad alliance against the Serbs in the break up and destruction of Yugoslavia, which had a very big impact on the development of the Arab Spring, rather Arab nightmare for the Jews and us all.

I concur with Caroline... never trust a Jew Hater.

Ms. Glick ... I enjoy your writing very much but must disagree with your assertion that Hitchens was anti-Semitic. That he had little respect for those who embrace religion--any religion--is obvious. So I suppose he is "anti-Semitic" if you insist on defining all Jews as religious Jews. But of course that is not the case. There are many atheistic and agnostic cultural Jews about whom Hitchens would had nothing pejorative to say. It should be enough that Hitch was a staunch, effective ally in the fight against jihad and Islamic supremacism. To kick him like this before the body is cold betrays a reductionism, and a stridency, that is unworthy of the great work you do.

I think the artcile you've referenced over-reaches and misinterprets. If Hitchens was an anti-Semite, as you say, how then could such a man give this kind of a talk at Daniel Pearl's memorial?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a7T0Zs4tkY

Hello Caroline,

Thank you for posting the link to Kerstein's essay.
The Bible says something very significant about people like Hitchens. It says that such people will be remembered no more. If one looks at the life of this man, what he has done, what his legacy is. What will remain that is useful? Does it give life, or is it dead?
The only advantage I see is that the people who applaud his antisemitic polemic come out of the background and show their true color.
With people like Hitchens everything is reversed.
It's like rock 'n roll. There's little or no substance. But that is not a problem since it's all about the attitude, and in Hitchens' case, bad attitudes.
I don't think he ever fully understood what he was writing about, because so many things he stated are unsubstantiated. But I think he very well understood where he was writing from. A deep, desperate hatred. And because he loved himself more than he loved others, this hatred needed to be directed against the mainstream targets of persecution : the jew (and the christian).

I've enjoyed Hitchens writings,though have not read a great many of his articles and was not aware of his anti-Semitism.

Ms. Glick describes Hitchens as a "hero" to some conservatives,and she may well be correct,but he certainly was never a hero to me,just a writer whose opinion I found interesting.

Every person is flawed,and to admire a body of work which may be in itself brilliant, is not to project perfection in all things on to that person.There's a difference between admiration of a particular piece of work and adulation of the person who created that work,the difference between the thoughtful adult and the fawning teenager.

Hitchens screed on Mother Theresa is an example of seeing only the faults,and being blind to the virtues. Hitchens is no different than any other opinionated person,though he was an extraordinary wordsmith,he still had his biases,some quite disgusting,as per Ms.Glick's article.

Hitchens is now dead,and his admirers can lament that fact while his detractors can debate where he will spend his eternity,and like all public characters, as time passes his memory will be distilled by fading memories to saint or satan,when he was neither.

I'll miss Hitchens writings on subjects of my interest,but no more so than other accomplished journalist who's passed on.

Caroline, I must differ in your assumption on the late Hitchens's alleged anti-semitism on the basis of Dennis Prager's comment on the occasion of his death, praising the man's original thinking, eccentricity, and courage, something which he would definitely not have done if he would have thought him to have been an anti-semite. Mr.Prager is a very knowledgeable, well and deeply informed on a complete prism of subjects conservative intellectual very positively Jewish and Zionist and a meticulously honest thinker who already for the last 29 years has a three hour daily radio show on an Christian American radio station. He knew Hitchens personally and had a lengthy interview with him in 2007 which can be found on youtube.

Further to my recommendation that those believing Hitchens was antisemitic should watch the Daniel Pearl Memorial lecture, I thought I'd transcribe this statement made at its close:

"Because antisemitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and facism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason - most especially in its most current, most virulent form of Islamic jihad........many pogroms against Jewish people have been reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure that our own defences are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing...this plague...this pest by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it is probably ineradicable"

At the start of the lecture Hitchens points out that anyone who wants to defame the Jewish people will also be defaming his mother-in-law, his wife, his daughter and his own mother (I believe I'm right in saying that Hitchens had no idea of his own Jewish heritage until he was in his 40's)

The lecture continues with a short video clip of Mel Gibson which Hitchen's later deconstructs, describing anti-semitism as 'pathological' madness.

As mentioned yesterday, I did not agree with all Hitchen's said or wrote, but it is clearly wrong and unfair to label him a Jew hater.

"And we can't give anti-Semites a pass" - We can't give any bigot and racist a pass. Can a liberal Jew give a a KKK member a pass? An Arab or a Chinese hater? Of course not. The only people easily forgiven by progressive world Jewry are anti-Semites. Bigotry shows a general moral perversity, a spiritual ugliness, a sick mind and soul. Praising such people for other qualities means voluntarily connecting to their rot. One would expect progressive Jews to condemn racism in all its manifestations, even if it's "only" against themselves.

Thanks for the article, Caroline. I was rather baffled by what seemed an excess of speaking no ill of the dead regarding Christopher Hitchens, particularly on the part of some conservatives. Apparently he could hold his liquor, had physical courage, and could turn a pretty phrase. It was his virulent hatred for and repudiation of Christianity and Judeo-Christian values and morals that turned me off. He seemed to assume, like many leftists and atheists, that there are virtues embedded in humanity independent of any kind of transcendent deity. History alone should have long ago put paid to that myth! There exists no natural law without reference to the transcendent. Any attempt to make it so is based on sand, washed away at the first onslaught of an amoral totalitarian. Antiochus Epiphanes was a perfect example of my point. Yes, I've read Josephus and Maccabees.

So no, Hitchens does not deserve a pass much less lionization. To know that he was anti-Semitic just adds support to my thought.

Thanks so much for this very interesting assessment of Hitchens' attitude towards the Jewish people. Unlike Mr. Kerstein I am disinclined to attribute Hitchens' stern criticisms of Jewish Orthodoxy and the state of Israel to anti-semitism. He was, of course, a devout and self-described anti-theist and saw all religions as a form of numbing mind-control and even as a form of ingratiation in the ways it sold salvation. He was noted for saying that he considered the notion of a god and an afterlife as a gruesome fairy tale blaming such beliefs for most of mankind's misfortunes. If the question is did he harbor any deliberate and calculated ill will towards Jews or Israel of the sort that would result in their extinction I would have to say that the answer is absolutely not and his statement that, "organized religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive towards children" may be taken as proof that he was opposed to organized religion but should not be interpreted as being anti-Semitic.

There is no doubt that Hitchens was an iconoclast, a polemicist, the enemy of cant and a champion of freedom. Orthodoxy whether it was in the form of Judaism or any other religion was anathema to him. He was an equal opportunity sceptic whose reason forced him to rely on verifiable evidence rather than appeals to "faith" or texts that were old, unreliable, often contradictory and an amalgam of fact, fantasy and allegory. He found circumcision to be a barbaric practice and the undue emphasis placed on female sexuality by all of the so-called Abrahamic faiths to be of a highly repressive nature. He once wrote that our most precious possession is the mind and that it was not well trained, or well served, by assuming that which it must prove. In this regard Hitchens was his own most faithful disciple.

Like myself, Hitchens was half Jewish but not in the way he was raised. In his case he was brought up as a Methodist. In my case it was as a Roman Catholic. Both of us attended British boarding schools for our numerous sins. Many people would argue that there is no such category as half Jewish in much the same way as they would argue that one cannot be half pregnant. Nevertheless, in this case it really depends upon the laws to which one subscribes. According to Judaic Law I would not be considered Jewish since it was my mother who was Catholic but according to the Nuremburg Laws this nice distinction, had I been alive at the time, would not have saved me from the gas chambers. Hitchens' mother was Jewish so his appointment at the gas chambers would have been just slightly ahead of my own.

I must confess to a great admiration of Hitchens' keen and unusally high intelligence which gave him such perceptive and illuminating insights. These gifts coupled with his breadth and depth of knowledge and his mastery of the English language produced an unsurpassed lucidity not given to lesser mortals. The first time I read his work I felt like someone who had somewhow wandered into the MET, not knowing anything about opera, just as Pavarotti started to sing the first stanza of Nessun Dorma. One would realize at once that one was in the presence of a sparkling and an inimitable brilliance. The first time I heard his sonorous voice I was enchanted. The first time I saw him in a debate I quivered for his opponent and understood how Mister Toad felt when he first saw a motor car.

Hitchens never shied away from a fight particularly one that he had started. He possessed a fiercly independent mind unrestricted by any hide-bound ideology. Like Alexander Pope he was of no sect and sworn to no master. This often made him the one discordant note in an otherwise harmonious chorus.

When the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a writer of fiction, it was an outraged Hitchens who sprang to Rushdie's defense while so many of his colleagues either criticised Rushdie or stood on the sidelines leaning against each other striking attitudes. The fatwa was a subornation of murder for payment for the high crime of writing a novel based on the life of Mohammed!

Another instance of Hitchens' intellectual independence and ability to challenge his own assumptions was when immediately after 9/11 he began to reassess his opinions coming to support the war in Iraq thereby incurring the undying wrath of many of his left-wing friends, but he had detected a whiff of sulfur which he knew had not only deranged all of our calculations but which had also exposed the relentless march of Islamic totalitarianism hitherto unacknowledged in the corridors of power or by the mass media of which he was a part and which then unleashed their hostility towards him.

With Hitchens' death we have lost a towering intellect and one of the most brilliant exponents of rationalism and humanism in our time. Let that be his legacy rather than accusations of anti-semitism based on his atheism and anti-theism which thundered against the pious purveyors of the supernatural, the harmful credulity of superstition and the frauds who indulge in the ritualistic buffooneries of organized religion.

Jonathan Swift once noted, "When a true genius appears in this world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him." Like Swift, Christopher Hitchens is now in a place "where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart" but I, for one, feel greatly deprived and will miss his company on the ramparts.

Sincerely,

Paul Schnee
West Hollywood,
California,
U.S.A.

Hitchens took a diagonal line across the poitical spectrum so in some sense every group had a reason to hate him and admire him at the same time. As far as Jews are concerned he was himself Jewish by blood and came to embrace this part of his heritage in a cultural sense (even marrying his second wife in a synagouge) however he never accepted the Zionist charge that Jews had a divine madate to occupying land in Gaza (or to do anything for that matter). In fact he absoltely abhorred this idea.

Now to frame this position in the accusatory and inflamitory manner that you are trying to in this article "He was a Jew hater" is both inaccurate and irresponsible. Hitchens was no such thing. What Hitchens hated and fought against was theocrasy and the tolerance of people claiming divine right to justfy otherwie unacceptable deeds. He was consistent in this opinion and for what it's worth was as critical as anyone (in the West at least) on Islam and its similar charge. In fact his criticisms of Islam were FAR more scathing and rightly so. To brand Hitchens an anti-semite does nothing more than to expose the ugly culture of branding every partially critical voice anti-semitic. This inability to accept informed and even handed criticism will win you few friends.

The irony is that Hitchens found out late in life that his mother was Jewish, at least at her origin.
Another famous journalist is ROGER COHEN who cries over his roots in a little town in antisemitic Lithuania but officialy pronounced himself that the creation of Israel was a mistake!!!!