Christopher Hitchens Wasn’t Great

“Tis the season to remember Christopher Hitchens.” So my fellow Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti wrote in December in a Washington Free Beacon essay marking the 10th anniversary of the controversial writer’s untimely death. Continetti’s tribute to Hitchens is one of many over the years by authors I admire, and that is why I feel compelled—if ’tis truly the season—to explain why I consider Hitchens’s legacy to be so unworthy of celebration. In his writings about faith, and especially in his critiques of Judaism and the State of Israel, Hitchens reflected, with disconcerting constancy, the very vices that he purported to criticize throughout his career: bigotry, dishonesty, and ignorance.

The bestselling book of Hitchens’s career, and the one for which he is most known, is God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything. It is easy to document historical horrors committed in the name of religion. What sets this book apart—as Benjamin Kerstein documented in Jewish Ideas Daily—is the casual statements about Judaism that are obviously untrue, as well as its obsession with Judaism. Hitchens not only criticizes biblical commandments that stand in tension with the zeitgeist; he attacks what he calls the “pitiless teachings of the God of Moses, who never mentions human solidarity and compassion at all.” This is a strange thing to say about a Pentateuch that begins by banning murder because all humanity is created in the image of God, and concludes in Deuteronomy with the exhortation to “love the stranger” and to not abhor the Edomite, “for he is your brother.”

Similarly, Hitchens mourns the events marked by Hanukkah, because if Antiochus Epiphanes’s assaults on Judaism had succeeded, Judaism would have been eradicated. Antiochus, he insisted, “weaned many people away from the sacrifices, the circumcisions, the belief in a special relationship with God, and the other reactionary manifestations of an ancient and cruel faith.” Leaving aside the manifold murders of Antiochus’s regime documented in classical texts, it is strange to say that the pagan Antiochus weaned his subjects off sacrifices; one need only visit, or Google, ancient Athens to find the “Temple of Olympian Zeus” commissioned by Antiochus. Its existence illustrated just how important the act of sacrifice was to the Seleucid emperor. “What can be asserted without evidence,” Hitchens famously asserted, “can also be dismissed without evidence.” But what are we to make about statements that are contrary to all obvious evidence—evidence that even rudimentary research would reveal? Are Hitchens’s assertions against obvious evidence not evidence itself that his assaults are expressions of deliberate dishonesty?