Where’s Hitchens on Carter?
Christopher Hitchens has, notoriously, come to a kind of tepid “defense” of the work of David Irving, who is in turn notoriously charged as a Holocaust denier, or at least revisionist. (See “The Strange Case of David Irving,” in Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War.) Hitchens’ willingness to even have his name appear in a sentence containing Irving’s stems, I think, from Hitch’s long-standing advocacy for the Palestinians and thus his willingness to thus toy with something very few American intellectuals will touch: a critique of Israel.
So I find myself waiting for Hitchens to say something about “the Carter affair”–the controversy generated by Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. (The NY Times reports today on a number of advisors to the Carter Center resigning over the book.) Granted, Carter is not one of Hitchens’ favorites, but neither is he any kind of admirer of Irving. I think Hitchens owes us an intervention on the issues here.
