The New Atheist Threat: The Dangerous Rise of Secular Extremists by CJ Werleman

Author:CJ Werleman [Werleman, CJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: atheism
Publisher: Dangerous Little Books
Published: 2015-09-06T22:00:00+00:00

Norman Finkelstein says Hitchens had been waiting for an opportunity, like 9/11, to “repackage himself as an apostate” of the Left. “For maximum pyrotechnical effect, he knew that the “awakening” had to be as abrupt as it was extreme: if yesterday he counted himself a Trotskyist and Chomsky a comrade, better now to announce that he supports Bush and counts Paul Wolfowitz a comrade. Their fates crossed when Wolfowitz and Hitchens both immediately glimpsed in September 11 the long-awaited opportunity: for Wolfowitz, to get into Iraq, for Hitchens, to get out of the left”:

Hitchens has riotous fun heaping contempt on several of the volunteer “human shields” who left Iraq before the bombing began. They “obviously didn’t have the guts,” he jeers, hunkered down in his Washington foxhole. Bearing witness to his own bravery, Hitchens reports in March 2003 that, although even the wife of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman is having doubts about going to war, “I am fighting to keep my nerve” – truly a profile in courage, as he exiles himself in the political wilderness, alongside the Bush administration, Congress, a majority of U.S. public opinion, and his employers in the major media. Outraged at the taunt that he who preaches war should perhaps consider fighting it, Hitchens impatiently recalls that, since September 11, “civilians at home are no safer than soldiers abroad,” and that, in fact, he’s not just a but the main target: “The whole point of the present phase of conflict is that we are faced with tactics that are directed primarily at civilians…It is amazing that this essential element of the crisis should have taken so long to sink into certain skulls” (emphasis in original). No doubt modesty and tact forbid Hitchens from drawing the obvious comparison: while cowardly American soldiers frantically covered themselves in protective gear and held their weapons at the ready, he patrolled his combat zone in Washington, D.C. unencumbered.

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