More evidence that the police should be investigating where Christopher Hitchens is. They can start by tracking down who’s been publishing articles in his name. This is absurd:
(1) The real Christopher Hitchens rarely makes bad arguments. We refer you to this morning’s chapter length exploration of bad arguments this Christopher Hitchens made.
(2) We know you’re not supposed to write posts this way, but we also know your time is valuable. So we’ll put our unbeatable proof of foul play right here. Quote unquote:
In almost every confrontation between Islam and the West, or Islam and Israel, the Vatican has either split the difference or helped to ventriloquize Muslim grievances.
Describing ‘solidarity with the Palestine’ as an attempt to “ventriloquize Muslim grievances”? No chance. We could win this case in court. Who are you, and what have you done with Hitch?
(3) This Christopher Hitchens makes the ‘the Crusades prove that Catholics are violent too’ argument to flatten distinctions between contemporary Islam and contemporary Christianity. We have never seen anyone with an IQ over 90 make that argument. The real Christopher Hitchens has an IQ well over 90. QED.
(4) This Christopher Hitchens cribs from Juan Cole – and they’re both wrong (see post below). The real Christopher Hitchens finds Juan Cole distaste, and he would need significant warrants for agreeing with him. At a minimum, Cole would have to be right in content and in tone before the real Hitchens would deign to associate himself with the caution-impaired professor.
(5) The real Christopher Hitchens has an abiding respect for great literature, and would never insult authors like CS Lewis by implying that experiencing the presence of the divine – even in a vision – is comparable to claiming that you went “into a trance and took dictation from an archangel”. Because there’s a difference that makes a significant difference on levels of judgment and theology (aesthetic vs. epistemic, etc) that the real Christopher Hitchens would find obvious.
(7) This Christopher Hitchens opens with an embarrassingly weird cheap shot:
There are many popes within Christianity – the Coptic Church has one, and the Eastern Orthodox Church also boasts a patriarch or holy father – but we have acquired the habit of using the term to describe only the bishop of Rome… and this… helps to give non-Christians the impression that the representative of Roman Catholicism represents rather more of the “West” than he actually does.
No man of letters would voluntarily chose to defend the absurd proposition that the Bishop of Rome has no claim to being a privileged representative of the West. From “Rome” we go to the “Holy Roman Empire” and from there to the spread of Catholicism and papal control over much of Europe. Eventually this structure yields monarchies that begin to form the contours of the West – all in the shadow, under the instruction, and with blessing of Rome. Also, the real Christopher Hitchens would never suggest that the existence of popes in the East would undermine the Bishop of Rome’s claim of leadership in the West. Because the real Christopher Hitchens can read a map.
(8) This Christopher Hitchens fails to comment in any way on how Muslims are being violent to protest being accused of being violent. The real Christopher Hitchens would never pass up the chance to just pour acid on that irony, coining some staggeringly sublime understatement that we could steal and reuse two weeks from now.
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