Hitchens and Israel
The print issue of National Review has a very revealing review of Christopher Hitchens' autobiography by Ronald Radosh. It comes as no surprise that Radosh praises the book and its author as a "voice to treasure"; Hitchens has been enjoying neocon praise since he emerged as a very vocal supporter of the neocon project of using American blood and treasure to impose democracy on the Mideast. What is surprising, given NR's history, is where Radosh chooses to criticize Hitchens. Hitchens is not criticized for his jihad against religion, which is arguably at the heart of Hitchens' worldview. Instead, Radosh charges that Hitchens is insufficiently supportive of Israel, which Radosh sees as part of Hitchens' being "strangely unable to empathize with 'the tribe,'" a peculiar term Radosh employs because Hitchens has Jewish ancestry on his mother's side. The same priorities are reflected at NRO, where piece after piece extolls Israel and no dissent on American policy toward Israel is allowed.
If anyone had predicted 50 years ago that the magazine founded by the author of God and Man at Yale would someday view hostility to Christianity as no big deal and would instead have as its litmus test support for Israel, he would have been laughed at. Nonetheless, he would have been right.
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Unfortunately, National Review lost almost all remaining value in the early 90s when they purged poor Joe Sobran. It seems clear that WF Buckley was chagrined at how his Frankenstein creature had evolved through the years.
I would guess that Michael Novak has competition in the hero-worshipping socialist atheist trade.
I was a subsciber to National Review for over 40 years. I also was a financial supporter when I was quite a bit flusher. I even went to the 25th birthday party in 1980. I also had dinner with Mr. Buckley at a political dinner, where he was speaker. For some reason he went off the rails in about 1990 and starting attacking good people like Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan. The magazine, by the early part of this century, stated to read like Commentary. I just could not take it anymore and dropped my subscription. Whatever the neocons touch they seem to ruin. Hitchens has a checkered history on Israel. He hates Islam and all religion. He also was a frequent critic of Israel and it's racist policies. I think he moderated those as he became more friendly with the neocons.
An amusing article that illustrates the depths to which NR has fallen. Like Mr. Marino, NR's dumping of and upon Buchanan and Sobran was my invitation to dump them. (An urge to reconsider was quickly dashed once David Frum's infamous drivel labeled anyone straying off the imperialist reservation as "non-patriotic.")
Hitchens' much larger presence in the various media outlets in the past decade or so seem to coincide with his cozying up to the neo-cons. While his not-yet lockstep loyalty to the Likud Party leaves him in need of further re-education in neo-con eyes, his backing off of his earlier criticisms of Israel has rewarded him handsomely and shone the light on the proper path to continued and even greater success and visibility.
Ronald Radosh used to be able to think and do research. How are the mighty fallen.
Unfortunately, Tom, I think if you review Buckley's 1991 "antisemitism" article in which he smeared Buchanan and other (which, as I recall, Rothbard called Buckley's "Christmas screed"), you'll that NR's disproportionate and unbalanced emphasis toward Israel came from WFB. At least in that article, Buckley conceded that one could only impute antisemitism to Buchanan if one accepted, as he did, that Jews were entitled to special treatment apart from other groups, and the same point that is legitimate to make toward one group would be antisemitic if directed toward Jews.
Remarkably, of course, neither WFB nor his minions seem to grasp the obvious intellectual bankruptcy of that definition of "antisemitism."
Purging "poor Joe Sobran" was even more justified than purging Pat Buchanan. There is an "ant-semitic" engram that underlies some (but surely not all) of the Anti-Zionism that one finds in Chronicles and elsewhere.
In no writer is that more discernible than in Sobran. Further, by their friends shall ye know them---and the fact that Sobran has appeared, on a number of occassions, as the opening act for David Irving's road show does speak condemning volumes.