 Since his treacherous abandonment of the true Left, apostate Chris "Judas" 'Itchens has committed many sins and crimes against the Holy Left, ones which of course have been thoroughly cataloged and chastised by us Watchers and Hitchhunters the world round. But none of his transgressions have been greater nor more heinous than the ultimate offense that he has so unapologetically committed. Namely, his flagrant flouting of the most sacred and holiest of all commandments on the Left: Thou shall not smite thy Chomsky. Yes, attacking Noam Chomsky is the supreme international crime on the Left, encompassing all the evil that follows. One can be sure that as you read these words, somewhere somebody is on the internet scathingly denouncing someone else for denouncing Chomsky.
So naturally, as a card-carrying Leftie, my hackles were up and I bristled at this fatuous, crude, and dishonest drivel published in Slate posing as a vulgar attempt at a hit-piece against Chomsky for his reaction to Bin Laden's death.
The article is off the rails the moment it leaves the station. First there's the revelation that Hitchens doesn't seem to understand what cognitive dissonance is (it's not a contradiction for someone to believe simultaneously that Bin Laden wasn't behind 9/11 yet the attack was justified). Next, more insidiously, he obliquely implies that Chomsky is not just paranoid, wrong and--aghast!--"stupid and ignorant", but that he can be conflated with conspiracy theorists and may even in fact be one of the Truther variety himself at heart. Of course this is not even risible to anyone who knows anything about the Troofers. They tend to hate Chomsky more than Cheney. And the hypocrisy is rather rank for Hitch to stick his nose up at this sort of thing when he's done his own share of batty conspiracy theorizing himself (unlike Chomsky). Such as alleging that the Lusitania sinking was a vast, vast conspiracy conducted by none-other than Winston Churchill in order to draw the US into the war, or that the Russian apartment bombings in September 1999 may have actually been a false flag and the handiwork of Vladimir Putin and the FSB.
To parse some of what CH writes:
As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of ahologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open.
Chomsky has left the "central" question of whether 9/11 actually happened open? That's news to me, or any honest person who has actually read the Guernica article, where Chomsky obviously does nothing of the sort. Such a ludicrous accusation is about as delusional and serious as the Truthers' allegations, appropriate though, as Hitchens is becoming about as marginal and credible as them.
We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.
No, it's just a simple fact that claims made by Bin Laden about 9/11 are not necessarily true and indisputable. Hitchens knows this, and clearly agrees with this truism given how he discounted Bin Laden's multiple "confessions" in the years after 9/11 that he was not responsible for it.
So the main new element is the one of intriguing mystery. The Twin Towers came down, but it's still anyone's guess who did it. Since "April 2002, [when] the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it 'believed' that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan," no evidence has been adduced. "Nothing serious," as Chomsky puts it, "has been provided since."
Of course CH knows that Chomsky is not agnostic about who was behind 9/11, he's disingenuously refusing to address the point NC raises, i.e. that the evidence that OBL was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks is actually more thin than conventional wisdom suggests, to the degree that it might have factored into Obama's reluctance to capture and try Bin Laden rather than assassinate him. Hitchens goes on to sneer at Michael Moore for daring to reiterate an elementary principle of a society governed by the rule of law: that criminal suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. And on top of Hitchens' snide contempt for the very values of the society he claims he is trying to protect from Islamofascism (talk about facile moral equivalence, Bin Laden is no Hitler, 9/11 was not remotely as bad as the Holocaust!), he then strangely suggests that it's somehow a contradiction to plausibly suspect Bin Laden was a culprit behind 9/11 whom should be apprehended and his guilt ascertained by the courts (and that we should rightly be aware of the US role in the creation of jihadi movement). Innocent until proven guilty doesn't mean that the police aren't allowed to have suspects in a case. This is pretty basic.
Unlike some, I don't really have a beef with folks attacking Chomsky, but a pathetic, fatuous and desperate attempt like this is pretty reprehensible and low, even for someone as shameless and dishonest as our Hitch. Another clear demonstration of how Hitchens seems to have genuninely lost it, morally and intellectually. |
