I'm sorry -- when somebody says that 70% of all birth defects in a city are caused by 11% of the population, I hear Adolf Hitler talking. This is the sort of thing Hitler had to say about the Jews and gypsies, and Hitchens musters little more evidence to justify his rant than Hitler did.
Oh, sorry. He found a Muslim writer (a GOOD one) who said it. Well, then it must be true. But Hitler, no doubt, could have probably found a Jew or two to agree with him, and his American counterparts would have found that an easy task. Many of America's early Jews -- the ones who came before, say, 1880 -- were deeply ashamed of those Jews who arrived from Eastern Europe in the new century. The early Jews were from western Europe and were modern in dress and thought. Those who came after 1900 (including my grandparents) were rural, backward, and slower to assimilate. It would not have been difficult to find a Jewish writer of 1905 to claim that inbreeding among these people (who, like my first cousin maternal grandparents, came from a small rural backwater where the pool of marriage partners was limited) was causing birth defects. Hitchens' soul brothers in the social sciences would argue, as late as the 1920s, that tests administered by the Army during WWI "proved" that upwards of 70% of Italians, Hungarians, and Jews were "feeble-minded." Like Hitler, these people were not afraid to use the word "sterilization." And they dominated immigration policy in the USA for decades.
I guess what bothers me more than anything else is that Hitchens is making wildly inflammatory statements about an entire population and giving no more than anecdotal evidence to back it up. Are honor killings really common in England today, or is this the magnification of an incident or two? After all, incest and honor killings -- not to mention racially motivated murders -- were commonplace in certain regions of the United States right up to the latter part of this century. I can still recall hearing Sunday sermons which justified these events completely. Eventually, the United States did something about these backwaters -- some of which were not so back -- without demonizing white Protestants as a class.
But to take it yet another level deeper, does Hitchens really want to argue that the racial slur "wog," in today's Brtiain, is only applied to fundamentalist Muslims? That no Hindu or Sikh need fear racist attacks, because racial violence, as we all know, is only committed by those who make careful distinctions about those who they are attacking? Or is he not, with this kind of argument, giving aid and comfort to those who simply don't like dark-skinned people, or immigrants? We've all heard, I'm sure, about attacks on people of color here in the United States whose only crime was that they looked something like the 9/11 criminals. Hitchens rant implicitly justifies this, and if he doesn't know it, he's like a child playing with an Uzi.
Yes, it is right to denounce the tribal mentality brought onto the world stage by some fundamentalist Muslims. But it is NOT right to generalize it into an attack that -- because it totally lacks serious documentation or any level of distinction between those who attempt to promote their ideas by force and those who do not -- invites the reader to simply cast out an entire population.
And when readers do this, Hitchens of all people should know that, once one accustoms the public to the denunciation of entire populations, it won't stop with Muslim fundamentalists who arguably deserve censure. Those open to this kind of advocacy will put themselves at the service of any reactionary group which wants to use racism to promote its agenda. It is no coincidence that neo-Nazi groups are ALWAYS hard-right conservative in their non-race-related politics. It is not at all far-fetched to call this article an enabler of fascism.
And, of course, we all know why Hitchens wrote it. He supported the war in Iraq for reasons that, however honorable they may have been at one time, have long since ceased to be so. Rather than admit that he, along with the American people, were led into a disasterous decision by dishonest and incompetent leadership, he continues to find justifications for a war that isn't being won and never will be, because those who started it have no interest in winning it, just in using it to justify their hold on power.
I had always thought Hitchens was simply deluded, but it seems to have gone beyond that by now. Now he has left his moorings completely, and joined forces with the very racists he denounces.
