Fw: Wolin vs. Hitchens

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

   Oy vey! More Counter-Iconography.Wolin, has many articles over the yrs.
in Telos. His anthology on Heidegger with an interview with Derrida
attracted the lawyers of Derrida. Second edition of the book from MIT Press
did not have the interview.
Michael Pugliese

----- Original Message -----
From: cwright
To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 8:15 PM
Subject: AUT: Wolin vs. Hitchens


This was forwarded to me by someone in News and Letters.  Alongside their
Statement, i think it reflects a certain position.  I hope to have a
critique of this on paper soon.

Cheers,
Chris


-----Original Message-----
From: Wolin, Richard [mailto:RWolin@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2001 1:42 PM
To: Postel, Danny
Subject: Hitchens' Journalistic Incompetence


September 15, 2001
Dear Danny,
            Please do not forward to me any more articles by Christopher
Hitchens. I basically stopped reading him after he began publishing articles
in defense of Holocaust-denier David Irving in "sophisticated" intellectual
organs such as Vanity Fair (Of course, Irving's status as a "dangerous
spokesman for Holocaust denial" was recently reaffirmed by a British court.)
Will the guy do anything for a paycheck? As a professional historian, I feel
I have some competence in such matters that Hitchens clearly lacks. Still,
since the Vanity Fair article, I have been wondering what could have
motivated him to whitewash Irving's blatantly anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi agenda.
Upon reading the piece you forwarded concerning Tuesday's World Trade Center
bombing (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4255763,00.html)
(I live in a commuter community in New Jersey where many persons have been
directly and adversely affect by these tragic events), I feel that I now
have some additional insight.
            There is something especially sinister about the article you
forwarded to me. By focusing on the purportedly profound question of "why"
Tuesday's events came to pass instead of the question of "how" (as if this
"why" is a mystery to all but the "enlightened" Christopher Hitchens),
Hitchens suggests, via insinuation and innuendo, that in essence the United
States brought this attack upon itself. This is the clear thrust of Hitchens
's essay. But, in cowardly fashion, he refuses to state his thesis directly,
for fear, no doubt, of having to take responsibility for its implications.
            In the recent Guardian article and elsewhere, Hitchens
insinuates that this "why" is a relatively simple matter: the US is
supporting a "racist" Israeli government that has brought untold and
undeserved woe upon the innocently suffering peoples of the Middle East -
the Palestinians in particular. But in making such claims, Hitchens makes
things too easy for himself. Here, too, I'm afraid Hitchens needs another
history lesson - a field that's obviously not his strong point.
            That in the Middle East conditions exist in which anti-Semitism,
religious fundamentalism, and the ethos of Jihad have melded into a
self-defeating and all-encompassing "worldview," has more to do with the
reactionary character of the governments themselves than it does with either
Israel or America's support for the latter. Yet, this is a problem that
Hitchens, for self-serving and extremely suspect ideological reasons, won't
touch with a ten-foot pole. That the nations of the Middle East subsist in
poverty and hopeless political impotence is directly attributable to
authoritarian political regimes that find it easier to blame their woes on
Israel than face up to the complexities and demands of contemporary
politics. Inculpating Israel is a sure-fire and effective tool to deflect
responsibility from their own nepotism, corruption, and, if one looks at
recent Middle Eastern history, egregious political miscalculations. By
whipping up anti-Israeli sentiment, which nowadays blares from the minarets
of almost every mosque, they are employing a classic technique of modern
political authoritarianism: identifying an "other" qua political scapegoat
in order to unify the "Volk" for bellicose, racist ends. Insuring that a
people is maintained in a state of political immaturity, moreover, is one of
the classic techniques employed by authoritarian political regimes to
perpetuate their rule. It seems to me that if Hitchens were really concerned
with the welfare of Arab peoples, he would address some of these concerns
rather than trying to score cheap and sensationalist journalistic points.
            In another characteristically slimy maneuver, Hitchens's article
implies that terrorism is the only political recourse left to the
anti-Israeli Arab coalition given America's support for the Jewish state.
(Although he doesn't say this in so many words, the fact that the article
offers not even the faintest criticisms or condemnations of Tuesday's
terrorist acts leads one inexorably to this conclusion.) At the end of his
article, he also has the temerity to suggest that these attacks, which
brought about the deaths of some 5,000 innocent and unarmed civilians, were
not "cowardly," since they were perpetrated in "broad daylight" - as if
somehow, one would preclude the other! (That the Guardian would see fit to
print such idiocies is another matter entirely.) Such actions, which
Hitchens seeks sympathetically to "understand" and thus potentially to
exonerate, stand as a fundamental breach in the code of civilized human
behavior. They reek fundamentalism, political hatred, and intolerance. They
suggest that the proper way for Islam to deal with its "enemies" is by
annihilating them; that those who in any way oppose their standpoint deserve
purely and simply to perish. Could this indeed be the "why" that Hitchens
finds so elusive?
No one is asking "why" the Arab states promoting Osama bin Laden have been
driven to such extremes, contends Hitchens, exuding false naïveté. America
has been unequivocally and maliciously wronged, and Hitchens disingenuously
seeks out a scapegoat: it must be America's own  - or, better still, Israel'
s - fault! In truth he need look no further than the ideology of hatred and
intolerance that contemporary Islam has become. Hitchens has failed to learn
a basic political lesson: for persons committed to international standards
of justice and human rights, mass murder is not an acceptable political
weapon under any circumstances. Period. By irresponsibly seeking to
rationalize terror, Hitchens voluntarily removes himself and those he
supports from basic considerations of rule of law and political morality. He
thereby practices a hypocritical double standard: according to his thinking,
only the Henry Kissingers of the world must be held to norms of civilized
international conduct. For the "oppressed" of the Arab world (but, once
again, one must ask: who here is doing the oppressing?), anything goes.

Sincerely,

Richard Wolin
Professor of History and Comparative Literature
CUNY Graduate Center
New York