Who blew Lebanese businessman cum politician Rafik Hariri away and why? Conspiracy theories abound, not the wackiest of which is Hitch's insinuation that Syrian President Bashar Assad was behind it. The explosion, estimated to have packed a blast equivalent to 300kg of dynamite, made a crater 10 metres wide and 1 metre deep. Now Der Spiegel is clearing Assad and trotting out a new villian.
Always oozing with confidence and often flushed with certainty, Christopher Hitchens is not a writer who could ever stand accused of understating his case. There is something reminiscent of the Olympic downhill skier about his polemic style that allows his prose to slide or glide over inconvenient facts that block the serpentine way towards his prearranged conclusions as if they were mere flagpoles marking out the course. And how the fanboys cheer him all the way to the finish line regardless of how many red ones he demolishes on the way down.
Among the many many finish lines he's crossed in this way to loud applause in some quarters are those that have found Bill Clinton to be a serial rapist and war criminal; Henry Kissinger a war criminal and an inciter and enabler of genocide; Saddam Hussein a hoarder of yellowcake and weapons of mass destruction; the present Iranian government an aspiring wiper of Israel off the map, Sidney Blumenthal a perjurer, Joe Wilson clueless, Wanda Sykes not funny, and Scooter Libby an innocent victim who rather than rotting in jail should be sent back into the arms of his poor white-haired old mother.
Some of these conclusions have been on firmer snow than others, of course, but none are quite as cut and dried as Hitchens would have us believe. And Hitchens's by now long established method of arguing like a lawyer or a conman rather than like a journalist has contributed greatly to his growing reputation, deserved or not, as a consummate liar, a bullshit artist supreme, and as someone whose word is generally not to be trusted.
Hence many observers, myself included, were reluctant to take Christopher at his word when he insisted on a number of occasions, despite an absence of proof, that the Syrian Government was obviously behind the assassination of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri. In December 2008, for instance, in reporting on the terror attacks in Bombay, Hitch elected to bring up his conspiracy theory about events in Lebanon in support of his conspiracy theory about events in Bombay:
This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the "bloody coordinated" assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer's excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—"[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?"—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it.
Here are the known facts: If you are a Lebanese politician or journalist or public figure, and you criticize the role played by the government of Syria in your country's internal affairs, your car will explode when you turn the ignition key, or you will be ambushed and shot or blown up by a bomb or land mine as you drive through the streets of Beirut or along the roads that lead to the mountains. The explosives and weapons used, and the skilled tactics employed, will often be reminiscent of the sort of resources available only to the secret police and army of a state machine. But I think in fairness I must stress that this is all that is known for sure. You criticize the Assad dictatorship, and either your vehicle detonates or your head is blown off. Over time, this has happened to a large and varied number of people, ranging from Sunni statesman Rafik Hariri to Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt to Communist spokesman George Hawi. One would not wish to be a "conspiracy theorist" and allege that there was any necessary connection between the criticisms in the first place and the deplorably terminal experiences in the second.
Hammer's article is good for a laugh in that it shows just how much trouble the international community will go to precisely in order not to implicate the Assad family in this string of unfortunate events. After all, does Damascus not hold the keys to peace in the region? Might not young Bashar Assad, who managed to become president after the peaceful death by natural causes of his father, become annoyed and petulant and even uncooperative if he were found to have been commissioning assassinations? Could the fabled "process" suffer if a finger of indictment were pointed at him? At the offices of the long-established and by now almost historic United Nations inquiry into the Hariri murder, feet are evidently being dragged because of considerations like these, and Hammer describes the resulting atmosphere very well.
As I'm sure many readers will have noticed, Hitch's "known facts" consist purely of assertions and innuendos, in keeping with his well-known modus operandi as a slime merchant. But until recently, the Syrians have had as little success in convincing the world that they didn't knock off Hariiri as the Libyans had in denying culpability for the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 or the killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside its London Embassy in St. James's Square in 1984, let alone for the attack on Marty, Doc and Einstein in Back to the Future. When you are the terrorist nation du jour in the Western mainstream media, it's only natural that you are guilty until proven innocent.
Now, however, we have a Western mainstream media source that clears the Syrians of involvement in Hariri's assassination, much to Hitch's chagrin no doubt. The source is Erich Follath in the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, which is doubly interesting because this was the very same journalist and the very same journal that came out with "new evidence" pointing to Syrian guilt in an exclusive published on October 24, 2005.
The latest Der Spiegel article, dated May 24, 2009, is entitled Breakthrough in Tribunal Investigation: New Evidence Points to Hezbollah in Hariri Murder. This is a scenario I'm sure Hitch can live with, and no doubt he'll be tweeking his Hariri files to point to the new bad guys before too long. Apparently, the problem is that, just as with the 2005 article, no real proof is presented and the sources of the information are not named. Franklin Lamb in Beirut has an in-depth article on this story.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
”
