Hitchens, reviewing the brilliant book by Oriana Fallaci on Islam written when she was stricken with cancer, famously called it in his Atlantic review (look just past the large, drop case "H"), "a sort of primer in how not to write about Islam," just before he began writing a book that one could describe similarly--but about Christianity.
The arrogance and inconsistency, Mr. Hitchens! It's all right for you to spit at Christianity, but when a fellow atheist--a journalist who was even braver than you, and you are indeed brave (though my military training indicates I'd have lasted longer being waterboarded than you)--does the same to Islam in a manner you find disconcerting. Well, what of it?
I like Michael Medved's review of Hitchens's book better than the well-known Michael Kinsley one in the NYT. Medved, a man of probity and wisdom, asks a devastating rhetorical question:
He summarizes the book, which I have read, as follows:1. Some 24 years ago Hitchens abandoned his British homeland and chose to make his life in the United States. This April, he proudly took the oath as a naturalized American citizen at the Jefferson Memorial. He has written movingly and persuasively of his love for his adopted country--despite the fact that throughout its history the people of the United States have proven notably more committed to their predominantly Christian faith than their Western European counterparts. A previous visiting journalist named Alexis de Tocqueville described America as "a nation with the soul of a church" and Hitchens conceded that to this day more Americans engage in regular prayer and Bible study than do the citizens of any other advanced Western nation. If religion indeed "poisons everything" then why has it so pointedly failed to poison the United States - producing, instead, a nation that Hitchens himself openly prefers to any other? [emphasis min]
For any sophisticated religious believer, this powerfully popular work represents a maddening combination of stimulation and sloppiness, erudition and ignorance, provocation and puerility.
The sly distortions and grotesque errors that appear in every chapter of his work demonstrate the author's carelessness and arrogance. In one especially appalling example (on page 100), Hitchens writes of "the pitiless teachings of the god of Moses, who never mentions human solidarity and compassion at all." He thereby ignores the most celebrated commandment in the Five Books of Moses, "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18), identified by Jewish sages (and in Matthew's Gospel by Jesus himself) as the very essence of the Hebrew Scriptures. Hitchens also fails to acknowledge the innumerable Old Testament injunctions to show loving-kindness and mercy in dealing with widows, orphans, strangers, and the poor. Whether one imputes these teachings to God or to Moses, they hardly qualify as "pitiless" and most certainly emphasize "human solidarity and compassion."
Beyond its factual errors and obvious misstatements, "god is not Great" (Hitchens makes a point of never spelling the word "God" with a capital "G") provides a frequently primitive and juvenile characterization of religious belief.
Leave a comment