Christopher Hitchens' critiques of specific individuals

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Main article: Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens (born April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth, England) is an British-American author, journalist and literary critic. Over the last thirty years, he has become famous for his scathing criticism of public figures on both the left and right. Three figures, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa were the targets of three separate full length texts, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens has also written biographical essays about Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America), George Orwell (Why Orwell Matters) and Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography), all three of whom the author greatly admires. However, the vast majority of Hitchens' critiques take the form of short opinion pieces, some of the more notable including the following individuals:

Contents 1 Jerry Falwell 2 George Galloway 3 Mel Gibson 4 Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama 5 Michael Moore 6 Daniel Pipes 7 Ronald Reagan 8 Mother Teresa 9 Cindy Sheehan 10 References

[edit] Jerry Falwell

When the controversial evangelical Southern Baptist televangelist Rev. Jerry Falwell died on May 15, 2007 Hitchens was interviewed on Anderson Cooper 360°. He argued that "the empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you just get yourself called reverend."^[1] To bring his point home, Hitchens asked:

How dare he say, for example, that the Antichrist is already present amongst us, and is an adult male Jew, while all of the time fawning on the worst elements of Israel with his other hand pumping anti-semitic innuendos into American politics, along with his friend Robertson and Graham... And encouraging, encouraging, encouraging the most extreme theocratic fanatics and maniacs on the West Bank and in Gaza not to give an inch of what he thought of was holy land to a people that already lived there, undercutting and ruining every democrat and secularist in the Jewish state in the name of God. He has done an enormous disservice.

– ^[2]

On the following day, May 16, 2007, Hitchens appeared on Hannity and Colmes with Ralph Reed in which Hitchens called Falwell "a vulgar fraud and crook," and argued that "we have been rid of an extremely dangerous demagogue who lived by hatred and prejudice, and who committed treason by saying that the United States deserved the attack upon it and its civil society on September 11, 2001 by other religious nut cases like himself." At the very end of the interview, Hitchens concluded that "if you give Falwell an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox."^[3]

[edit] George Galloway

In May 2005, George Galloway MP entered into an argument with Hitchens before giving evidence to the US Senate.^[4] Galloway called Hitchens a "drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay," "[s]ome of which," Hitchens contended in a column, "was unfair."^[5] A few days later, Hitchens wrote an article that attacked Galloway's political record, criticized his Senate testimony and made a case for Galloway's complicity in the Oil-for-Food scandal^[6]. In this essay, Hitchens states that,

To this day, George Galloway defiantly insists, as he did before the senators, that he has "never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf." As a Clintonian defense this has its admirable points: I myself have never seen a kilowatt, but I know that a barrel is also a unit and not an entity. For the rest, his defense would be more impressive if it answered any charge that has actually been made. Galloway is not supposed by anyone to have been an oil trader. He is asked, simply, to say what he knows about his chief fundraiser, nominee, and crony. And when asked this, he flatly declines to answer. We are therefore invited by him to assume that, having earlier acquired a justified reputation for loose bookkeeping in respect of "charities," he switched sides in Iraq, attached himself to a regime known for giving and receiving bribes, appointed a notorious middleman as his envoy, kept company with the corrupt inner circle of the Baath party, helped organize a vigorous campaign to retain that party in power, and was not a penny piece the better off for it. I think I believe this as readily as any other reasonable and objective person would. If you wish to pursue the matter with Galloway himself, you will have to find the unlisted number for his villa in Portugal.

– ^[6]

On September 14, 2005 Hitchens engaged in a formal debate with Galloway in New York at Baruch College. This debate was continued on Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO, USA) on September 23, 2005.

[edit] Mel Gibson

During an arrest for driving under the influence, Mel Gibson asked the arresting officer if he was Jewish and said that "f*ing Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."^[7] Hitchens criticised Gibson, stating,

Many conservative Jews, from David Horowitz to Rabbi Daniel Lapin, stuck up for Gibson as a man who defended family values against secular nihilism. I was just in the middle of writing a long and tedious essay, about how to tell a real anti-Semite from a person who too-loudly rejects the charge of anti-Semitism, when a near-perfect real-life example came to hand. That bad actor and worse director Mel Gibson, pulled over for the alleged offense of speeding and the further alleged offense of speeding under the influence, decided that he needed to demand of the arresting officer whether he was or was not Jewish and that he furthermore needed to impart the information that all the world's wars are begun by those of Semitic extraction. Call me thin-skinned if you must, but I think that this qualifies.

– ^[8]

In his book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens describes Gibson as an "..Australian fascist and ham actor.."

[edit] Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

Main article: Tenzin_Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama#Criticism

In 1998, Hitchens lambasted Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama for a number of reasons, including: the Dalai Lama's acceptance of "45 million rupees, or about 170 million yen" from Shoko Asahara the leader of the Supreme Truth cult which released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo Subway system; the Dalai Lama's proclamation that Steven Seagal is "a reincarnated lama and a sacred vessel or 'tulku' of Tibetan Buddhism"; the persecution of "supporters of the Dorge Shugden deity -- a 'Dharma protector' and an ancient object of worship and propitiation in Tibet -- [who] have been threatened with violence and ostracism and even death following the Dalai Lama's abrupt prohibition of this once-venerated godhead"; the Dalai Lama's specified sexual norms, which ban oral and anal sex, masturbation and explain the proper way to pay for prostitution; and, most importantly, the Dalai Lama's "support of the thermonuclear tests recently conducted by the Indian state."^[9] Although, in contrast, the World Tibet Network News service later claimed that the Dalai Lama was "saddened to hear about the series of nuclear tests conducted by India," and was "fundamentally against the existence and stockpiling of any wapons [sic] of mass destruction."^[10]

[edit] Michael Moore

In June 2004, Hitchens severely criticized Michael Moore in a review of Moore's film Fahrenheit 911, concluding that

if Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

– ^[11].

This drew several counter-criticisms,^[12] including an eFilmCritic article and a Columbus Free Press editorial.^[13][14]

[edit] Daniel Pipes

Hitchens severely criticized Daniel Pipes, upon Pipes' nomination to the U.S. government-sponsored U.S. Institute of Peace. Hitchens expressed "bafflement" at this appointment in a Slate essay entitled "Daniel Pipes is not a man of peace".^[15] Hitchens claimed that Pipes "employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him," and that this contradicts the USIP's position as "a somewhat mild organization [...] devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict." Hitchens concluded his opposition to Pipes' nomination by claiming that Pipes "confuses scholarship with propaganda" and pursues "petty vendettas with scant regard for objectivity."

[edit] Ronald Reagan

Two days after Ronald Reagan's death, Hitchens stated that "this was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time."^[16] However, Hitchens argued that

There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)

– ^[16]

[edit] Mother Teresa

In 1992, Hitchens wrote an article^[17] for The Nation in which he called Mother Teresa "The Ghoul of Calcutta". He later narrated and co-wrote Hell's Angel, a documentary broadcast November 8, 1994 on Channel 4 in Britain, and expanded his criticism in a 1995 book, The Missionary Position. He accused her of failing to treat people, particularly children, placed in her care; her strong religious views on contraception and abortion, the latter of which she described as "the greatest destroyer of peace today"^[18]; and her "acceptance" of poverty, which took the form of encouraging the poor to embrace their poverty.

Hitchens asserts that Mother Teresa behaved like a political opportunist who adopted the guise of a saint in order to raise money to spread an extreme and aggressive version of Catholicism. He also condemns her for using contributions to open convents in 150 countries rather than establishing a teaching hospital, the latter being what he implies donors expected her to do with their gifts.

He also criticized her pursuit and acceptance of donations from third world dictators; large donations accepted from Charles Keating, who was later convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy; and the allocation of these donations away from treatment and towards furthering what Hitchens called "fundamentalist" views. Hitchens's writings have earned him the ire of Roman Catholics; Brent Bozell, board member of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, for example, called Hitchens and Aroup Chatterjee "notoriously vicious anti-Catholics".^[19]

During Mother Teresa's beatification process, Hitchens was called by the Vatican to argue the case against her. He testified in Washington, the role previously known as the "Devil's Advocate", ^[20] although Pope John Paul II had previously abolished that position. Hitchens has satirically referred to his work in the case as the person chosen "to represent the devil pro bono".^[20]

[edit] Cindy Sheehan

Main article: Support and criticism of Cindy Sheehan#Criticism

In a column, Hitchens argued that Cindy Sheehan "has obviously taken a short course in the Michael Moore/Ramsey Clark school of Iraq analysis and has not succeeded in making it one atom more elegant or persuasive."^[21] Hitchens commented upon a Sheehan email featured on Nightline that said her son "was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel." Sheehan said that the email had been altered and that it did not represent her views regarding Israel. However, Hitchens used the statement to denounce Sheehan for what he called positing a "Jewish cabal" and for attracting the support of David Duke.

[edit] References