Informed Speculation

It’s been a while since a throw-down involving the Hitch has gotten this much reaction (well, since Hitchens/Galloway, at any rate). At the RCP Blog, Tom Bevan has coined the delightful phrase “Hitch-slapped” to describe the beating administered so ruthlessly to one Juan Cole, Professor. Hitchens was interviewed today on the Hugh Hewitt show:

…[S]ome of your listeners may know of Professor Cole of the University of Michigan. He is acclaimed, at least by himself, expert on matters Shiia, particularly, and he also says he’s fluent in Arabic, Persian and Urdu. And for all I know, he is. But he’s 10th rate, and he’s a sordid apologist for Islamist terrorism, and for Islamist terrorist regimes. And I’ve been on his case for a while. But he recently wrote in a blog conversation group he takes part in, that Ahmadinejead had never said that about wiping Israel off the face of the Earth, and neither had his role model, Ayatollah Khomeini. They’d never said it. It was a sort of slander. So I thought well, this isn’t going to take me very long. And I have a lot of Iranian friends who, alas for them, can’t live in their own country anymore, because of the hideous tyranny there, and who hate people who make excuses for their regime, as they should. And with their help, I was able to show very easily what I had long known, that Khomeini’s statement that Israel must be completely destroyed has been a canonical statement in Iran for a long time. Ahmadinejead was only repeating it. He probably was a bit surprised at how much attention it got, given how commonplace the thought is to him. But that it is nothing but a lie to say that this is not a statement from the Iranian theocrats, and it also suggests very strongly, which is the fun bit, that Professor Juan Cole does not know what he is talking about, in any language.

HH: (laughing)

CH: His English is, by the way, very poor. I can’t believe his Persian is excellent, because his English is lousy.

HH: Now you wrote about this…

CH: He knows no history, he has no policies. He is a complete dim bulb, and well, I must say, I took pleasure in pointing this out.

Hitchens also responded to the ‘unethical’ allegations by Cole (rather more weakly, to be sure), before going on the counterattack regarding Cole’s ‘alcoholic’ insinuations:

HH: Do you care to reply to anything else Juan Cole wrote about your personal life?

CH: I haven’t seen what he said about my personal life.

HH: Well then, I’ll read it to you.

CH: He doesn’t know anything about my personal life.

HH: Well, let me…this might be tough, Mr. Hitchens, but I’ll read it anyway.

CH: Well, no, I have a thick skin and a broad back.

HH: “Back to Hitchens. How to explain the peculiar behavior on the part of someone who was at one time one of our great men of letters? While I don’t think it is any secret that Hitchens has had for some time a very serious and debilitating drinking problem, he once showed up drunk to a talk I gave, and heckled me. I can only imagine that he was deep in his cups when he wrote, or had some far right-wing think tank write,” alleging plagiarism there. “his current piece of yellow journalism. I’m sorry to witness the ruin of a once fine journalistic mind.” By the way, Andrew Sullivan, writing on the web today, denounces this, and says he was with you when you wrote your piece about Juan Cole, and that you were stone cold sober.

CH: Well, good for Andrew. How nice of him. Yes, he was here yesterday at lunch, to have lunch, and I said can you hang us just a second while I finish this piece? Because I…and I added that I think you’ll like it, because it finally shows what an idiot Juan Cole is. And well, I mean, I don’t know about stone cold sober. I’m sure with Andrew, I must have had a drink to celebrate the piece. So he may be exaggerating that. And I can take a drink if I have to, but for some reason, my opponents think it’s incredibly important to represent me as a falling down alcoholic. And I mean, look, I don’t have to reply to a slander like that. They can ask themselves how it is that I manage to turn in copy that everyone wants to print, on demand, regularly, every week and every month. And I show up regularly to give lectures and television appearances also. And it would, I think, show if I was a hopeless case.

…[Cole] writes as if he’s drunk, because you have to, the sentences are made up of syntactical train wrecks. But I don’t think it’s alcohol in his case. I think it’s illiteracy, simply.

Hitch then goes into a lengthy discussion of secrecy as it relates to the Bush Administration, PlameGate, and the New York Times, before concluding with a movie thought:

HH: Quick 20 seconds. Have you seen United 93, Christopher Hitchens?

CH: I feel as if I have, if you know what I mean. I saw a wonderful documentary film called the Flight That Fought Back, that was enough for me. But I’m going to go see this, just to reward the people who made it.

HH: Well put. Christopher Hitchens, always a pleasure. Talk to you again soon.

Yes, indeed, well put, as always…