Christopher Hitchens loves his strawmen, and at long last we are treated to his paean to the current object of his affection, "Rage Boy".
This is typical Hitchens: define and isolate "the opposition" to a lone, marginal figure, rip them apart with some combination of logic, rhetoric, name-calling, misdirection and so forth, and declare victory.
Yes, it's easy to show that "Rage Boy" is irrational and a bit unhitched, err, unhinged. It should be unsurprising that in any society, at any end of any social or political spectrum there are irrational extremists. But most of us realize that this "lunatic fringe" is a poor representative of the larger majority, and that the antics and proclamations of such extremists is a poor caricature of the arguments, grievances, aspirations and tactics of the more rational and more populous denizens closer to the center of the spectrum.
Hitchens would like to pull the cameras back to expose "Rage Boy" and his cohort as the minuscule demographic it actually is, and I agree. We need to look past the extreme outliers, and focus more on the core. However, I get the distinct impression reading Hitchens that, once dismissing "Rage Boy" and declaring the folly and impossibility of pleasing him that there is nothing left to the larger issues of how the US, Europe and the West in general interacts with the Muslim world. While I agree that we shouldn't waste our efforts trying to placate "Rage Boy", it does NOT follow that we should not dismiss the larger grievances and problems with the larger Muslim world, even if those problems and grievances bear some relationship to those expressed by "Rage Boy".
As is usually the case, the true "nugget" in this Hitchens piece is the passing reference to the overthrow of Hussein and the Iraq war and occupation. Hitchens is correct that "Rage Boy"'s reaction to the Iraq affair is largely irrelevant, and that we shouldn't base our policies and actions around his reaction. However, it certainly does NOT follow that "Rage Boy" is the only Muslim who opposes our actions and policy in Iraq and the greater Middle East, or that his are the only complaints.
Nor does it follow that we shouldn't do roughly what "Rage Boy" wants us to do in some cases (e.g. redeploy out of Iraq). Just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, an extremist such as "Rage Boy" might irrationally express a desire that corresponds to a rationally considered desirable course of action.
My point, then, is to drop "Rage Boy" and all other fringe outliers, including Hitchens' typical strawman caricatures, from the discussion. By continuing to trot out grossly irrational strawmen, Hitchens seems to be endorsing a sort of reverse-infallibility; whatever "Rage Boy" says must be false and whatever "Rage Boy" wants, we should do the opposite. Its a weird form of argument by authority, and belief in a perfect anti-logic.
Unfortunately, Christopher Hitchens' intellectual sloth has proceeded to the point where he will not or can not argue against a larger center. I generally agree with Hitchens' position regarding Salmon Rushdie, and that the capitulation of booksellers to the threats against Rushdie and "The Satanic Verses" was unfortunate, unprincipled and unjustified. However, I believe that a thoughtful argument for or against should focus more on the dynamics of the larger Muslim and Western worlds. And unlike his defense of the Iraq fiasco, I believe Hitchens could make a reasonable, thoughtful and persuasive argument supporting Salmon Rushdie without leaning entirely on the idea of "Rage Boy"'s perfect fallibility.
The saddest thing, I suppose, is that Hitchens keeps returning to this kind of sloppy reasoning. Sad because it betrays a woeful denial or ignorance of the fact that he and his rhetorical tricks have been exposed, repeatedly, by astute (and even marginally astute) readers here and elsewhere. And sad because he obviously has such a low opinion of his readers that he continues increasingly amateurish rhetorical sleight-of-hand and expects them to be fooled.
LMoe
