How Hitchens Uses Anti-Semitism to Make His Case against Religion

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Manhattan, New York, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) August 28, 2010 -- (For full article check out my blog: http://scholarlywritingreviewed.com/)

Christopher Hitchens forces us to perceive anti-Semitism in a new light with his recent Atlantic article. We can always predict his ultimate aim when he writes about religion—to discredit it as dangerous and irrational— but, agree with him or not, it pays to analyze his argumentative strategy, which is, to borrow his own term, “a model of polemic.”

Hitchens starts by calling our attention to the irrationality and hypocrisy that typically underlie anti-Semitism. He first points to the contemporary example of how Hamas utilizes the “evil” and “discredited” Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a propaganda tool. The author then goes on to pronounce that “anti-Semitism is not a mere prejudice like any other,” since it has prevailed under every conceivable condition: from society to society, Jews have historically been perceived as villainous—before the appearance of capitalism, communism, and the establishment of Israel, and even in states where Jews have never resided, such as Malaysia, they have consistently served as the scapegoat. Furthermore, in Nazi Germany anti-Semitism played a “godfather role… as the organizing principle of other bigotries.” By asserting all this at the beginning of his essay, Hitchens carefully prepares us for the contentious claims that follow, since he establishes his sympathies with the Jewish people and contempt for racism.

He then shifts to a more subtle paradigm in dealing with today’s tendency among some Jews to brand “any piece of anti-Jewish graffiti” as Protocols-style anti-Semitism, which ultimately raises some suggestive contradictions. Whether it be Robert Wistrich’s slanderous claim that after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Italian labor movement staged a two hundred thousand person protest in which all participants “passed before the Holocaust memorial of a Rome synagogue uttering the cries of ‘Death to the Jews’ and ‘Jews to the ovens;’” or Ariel Sharon’s habit of characterizing criticism as blood libels; or Menachem Begin’s comparing the PLO to the Nazi Party; or Benjamin Netanyahu supporters’ casting David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel as self-hating Jews, there clearly exists a pattern of gross exaggeration.

But the hyperbole takes an ironic turn when we consider that some Jews, such as Yeshayahu Leibowitz, refer to Israeli settlers as Judeo-Nazis.

Given its dangers, Hitch argues, we must draw a distinction between real anti-Semitism and inaccurate, knee-jerk accusations. The middle of Hitchens’ piece functions as an implicit demonstration of this discrepancy. British literature, as Anthony Julius details in his book about the matter, features an abundance of anti-Semitism, from the works of T.S. Eliot to Chaucer to Shakespeare. But then there are the sympathetic and unprejudiced works of Dickens and George Eliot. We must not, therefore, claim that British literature is completely anti-Semitic.

Likewise, British politicians have been both gracious and vicious to the Jews. On one hand, Oliver Cromwell permitted them to return to England after expulsions by prior monarchies, and at the same rate Arthur James Balfour headed a Conservative Party that implemented the anti-Jewish Alien Acts of 1905.

Yet the reactionary attitude towards anti-Semitism betrays its hypocrisy when writers like Wistrich and Julius excuse Balfour’s behavior because he authored a document that put Zionism on the path to statehood. This pattern is further compounded by Wistrich’s calling Sir Edwin Montagu’s opposition to the Alien Acts ironic, because Montagu, a Jew, opposed the Balfour Declaration. To quote Hitchens, “it is as if one was forbidden ‘even’ to think that an anti-Semite could favor a separate state for Jews… or that a British Jew could have a non-‘ironic’ reason for resenting being told that he belonged in Palestine.”

Hitch opens the concluding paragraph by stressing the contradictory nature of Judaism and Zionism through a series of questions: “is there such a thing as ‘chosenness’”? “Does the state of Israel have the right to speak for all Diaspora Jews”? And, perhaps in reference to the recent rabbinical controversy, “who is a Jew, anyway”?

Having illustrated how anti-Semitism and the religion at which it is directed, together with the superlatives that Jewish reactionaries conveniently hurl at dissenters correspond in their contradictions, Hitchens moves in for the kill. The real problem, as he sees it, is... (to read the rest of this piece check out my blog: http://scholarlywritingreviewed.com/)

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