Christopher Hitchens’ new book, "Love Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays," is an extraordinary collection.
There are few writers who write with as much clarity and force as he, as evidenced by this excerpt from "Jewish Power, Jewish Peril," one of the essays included in this volume (and the essay that got Hitchens listed in the Forward Fifty in 2002):
Maimonides wrote that, while the Messiah will one day come, "he may tarry." . . .
[T]he tragic element [in that statement] is so raw and so recent that there isn’t any need to go over it. . . . [N]o other ethnicity has ever had to witness the physical destruction of perhaps one-third of its entire membership, carried out by a highly civilized European country that had been the model for assimilation, and involving the deliberate state murder of children.
* * *
The survival of the Jewish people has for centuries been a means of taking the moral temperature of a society. Those who take that temperature are quite rightly conditioned to notice even a slight elevation.
In "Of Sin, the Left, & Islamic Fascism," published less than a month after September 11 in The Nation, Hitchens forcefully argued against the allegation that the war against America was caused by support for Israel:
The teachings and published proclamations of this [Al Qaeda] cult have initiated us to the idea that the tolerant, the open-minded, the apostate or the followers of different branches of The [Islamic] Faith are fit only for slaughter and contempt.
And that’s before Christians and Jews, let alone atheists and secularists, have even been factored in. . . .
The grievance and animosity predate even the Balfour Declaration, let alone the occupation of the West Bank. They predate the creation of Iraq as a state. The gates of Vienna would have had to fall to the Ottoman jihad before any balm could begin to be applied to these psychic wounds.
And this is precisely, now, our problem. The Taliban and its surrogates are not content to immiserate their own societies in beggary and serfdom. . . . [T]hey deludedly believe that they are commanded to spread the contagion and to visit hell upon the unrighteous.
The very first step that we must take, therefore, is the acquisition of enough self-respect and self-confidence to say that we have met an enemy and that he is not us, but someone else.
Hitchens is not religious (he hasn’t the "smallest belief in any supreme executive power, let alone a wise one"). In fact, he is against religion ("that most toxic of foes"). Nor is he a Zionist (quite the contrary). So people who like the above quotes may not like ones in other parts of this book (or even other parts of the same essays from which they came).
But Hitchens writes so well, with such intelligence and passion, that even when one disagrees with him it is instructive, because it requires one to re-think and defend one’s own first principles. So this is a book worth owning and perusing.