A Clash of Fundamentalisms

There is a widely read new essay at the neocon Jewish Ideas Daily denouncing Christopher Hitchens as an anti-Semite. How sweet comeuppance can be, especially for these two parties that definitely deserve each other. There is much worth noting, however, about how they got there.

It was inevitable, to be sure, that the largely modern Orthodox neoconservative core would clash with an erstwhile ally who expressed his agreement with Voltaire “that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil.” Yet what our author fails to grasp is that what he insists on calling anti-Semitism – a talismanic phrase that he may or may not have noticed gets diminishing returns – is merely Hitchens’ dogged consistency. Hitchens joined the crusade against Islamofascism (how quickly we forget he coined that noxious term) because he was committed to armed progressivism while his leftist comrades had to oppose it because it was being articulated in a Texas drawl. And to his credit, Hitchens is rare in his consistency among the atheist mandarins for being as unsparing to Judaism as to Christianity and Islam.

But of course all this is lost on one who writes shamelessly of “the existence of a Jewish nation in the land of Israel for centuries, its sovereignty ended only by genocide at the hands of Roman legions . . . . and various other significant and notably secular historical facts.” The heart of the matter lies in the somewhat obscure figure of Israel Shahak, whom Hitchens reveres as a “great and serious man” and his antagonist insists was a “barking mad” Jewish anti-Semite.