Like others here I have mixed feelings about Hitchens. When he was good, he was very good (see his demolition of Chomsky re the latter’s odious commentary on 9-11), when he was bad, he was and is terrible.
He isn’t a scholar, and his grasp of political realities appeared more often than not mere typical superficial journalese, his output has on occasion descended into odious and dubious hack work. Hitchens doesn’t do in-depth. He disgracefully came to Chomsky’s defence over the latter’s associations with French fascists and Holocaust Deniers like Robert Faurisson, misrepresenting grossly what that was all about (see Hitchens’s essay ‘Cassandra and the Chorus’ published in the Nation in ’77). It was a career low point for him, but he got away with it.
Whilst I am not an atheist, I didn’t have a problem at all with his role evengalising for the new atheism, but often the way he went about it, that’s another story.. He admitted to being a great admirer of Israel Shahak, his trusted source on the Jewish religion. Shahak was a notorious self-loather whose absurd and sinister fabrications re the Jewish faith (and his disgusting justifications for the most terrible pogroms in Eastern Europe)have seen Shahak’s poisonous output praised by neo-Nazis and Muslim extremists as proof of Jewish evil. When it comes to Israel (and thus let’s face it the Jews) Hitchens was a cookie-cutter know-nothing Leftist.
I do hope that he recovers though.
