Christopher Hitchens launched one of his patented “Sherman’s stagger to the sea” attacks on University of Michigan professor and sometime pundit Juan Cole Tuesday. In it, he accuses Cole of poor scholarship, inflated academic credentials and being an apologist for the Iranian regime and in particular, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
I should first say that “stagger to the sea” is a possibly unwarranted reference to Hitchens’ drinking problem. Andrew Sullivan says he was at Hitchens’ home when the latter filed the Slate piece, and that, contrary to Cole’s charge, Hitchens was “stone cold sober” at the time. I’m skeptical, since earlier in the day Sullivan said he had just returned from “a long lunch” with Hitchens; it’s perhaps unfair, but “long lunch” and “Hitchens” in conjunction suggest diluvian quantities of alcohol to me. It’s possible Sullivan is confusing “not falling-down drunk” with “stone cold sober;” it’s certain he knows “filed” isn’t synonymous with “wrote.”
He also says Hitchens was “on top form,” which may, pathetically, be true.
In response to Sullivan’s affidavit, Cole retracted his charge of drunkenness, offering that Hitchens is in this instance apparently only “an asinine thief.”
At issue, ostensibly, was Cole’s position that a phrase from a speech given by Ahmadinejad was mistranslated as calling for the annihilation of Israel. Someone sent Hitchens an email from a private discussion list in which Cole offered a different, less ominous and apparently more accurate translation. Hitchens used the email as the basis for his attack, which concluded that Cole is an Ahmadinejad apologist because he deliberately mistranslated the phrase in question in order to make Iran seem less a threat than it actually is. In the process, Hitchens, who doesn’t actually speak or read Farsi and who apparently didn’t contact anyone who does, offered up his usual litany of personal attacks on his subject.
The real issue, of course, is that Cole opposes an attack on Iran and Hitchens is in the process of gearing up to support one. It’s important for him to marginalize anyone of an opposing viewpoint who wanders into his possibly unblurred sights. Like many dogmatists who began their political lives on the very far left, Hitchens has come nearly full circle; his politics have changed, but he retains the bloodthirstiness, literal and metaphorical, that distinguishes both the radical left and the radical right; guns remain better than butter, and what was once a doctrinaire Trotskyist desire for the destruction of opposing views and those who hold them is now a doctrinaire McCarthyist one.
Aside from the attack on his moral qualities and professional credentials, Cole was distressed by what now appears to have been the leak of his email by a participant in the discussion list from which it originated, and by Hitchens’ use of it. Helena Cobban, an Arabic-speaking journalist who has reported on Middle Eastern Affairs for many years and also participates on the list in question, points out that among the members of it are some who rely on its privacy for considerably more than just a quiet space to discuss Middle Eastern issues.
Now, the whole point of having this private list is that its members– who include citizens of many different countries, of many political complexions, and with many different areas of Gulf-related expertise– can all explore ideas together in a safe space without the fear that what they write for it will get quoted in the public media. It might sound a little elitist (and probably is). But still, it is a remarkable place, where people who are citizens of many countries, including of course the numerous fairly repressive countries bordering the Gulf, can explore and exchange ideas.For many list members, the promise of discretion for what they write is a completely necessary element of their personal security against the intrusions (and worse) of authoritarian state bodies.
So, advertently or not, Hitchens’ publication of Cole’s email will have inevitably shaken the confidence of people whom, presumably, Hitchens would support in their efforts to participate in discussions their regimes would disapprove, in some cases to an extreme.
Good job, Hitch.
Cobban also notes that Cole’s original accusation that Hitchens must have been drunk is understandable, given that “anyone who’s known Chris for even one-fourth as long as I have would have to admit the guy has long had a very serious drinking problem. Was it ad-hominem for Juan to mention that? Yes, probably, although he was doing so in a quasi-exculpatory way– and Juan, like many of the rest of us, has had solid evidence of Chris’s performance of professional duties having been impaired by his evident drunkenness…”
McCarthyist tactics are a staple of the right. Although they’re generally and thankfully nowhere near as successful now as they were in McCarthy’s heyday, the intent is the same: to personally discredit opponents of an ideology, to chill discussion of whatever is at issue, in this case Iran, and to damage the careers of the targets. Those were certainly among Hitchens’ goals, and John Fund’s in his attack on Cole, which included labeling Cole an anti-Semite. Both are obviously efforts to damage both his academic career and his standing as a print and spoken word commentator in order to remove him from any discussion on Middle Eastern policy and events, and both Hitchens and Fund specifically said as much. They have the desire; they lack the capacity.
We’re fortunate that people aren’t imprisoned and careers aren’t ruined on a McCarthyesque scale now, but the far right’s effort to marginalize moderate and liberal points of view has met with considerable success in terms of tamping down the exposure and discussion, if not the existence, of opposition to reactionary policies and practices. The excecrable performance of the press after 911 is evidence of that, although, to borrow heavily from Cobban’s response to Cole’s somewhat elegiac description of Hitchens as a one-time “great man of letters,” current-day press critics exaggerate the lapsarian aspect of the deterioration in the quality of the press. (Cobban said that Cole “overdoes the lapsarian aspect of Chris’s career trajectory quite a bit there.” It’s a great turn of phrase, I like it and I’m stealing it.)
On to Slate.
I’m fond of Slate. I’ve been posting for years in the magazine’s reader forums; this site is a direct outgrowth of that, and several of the contributors here are people I met there. So I have a personal interest in the place, along with unreasonably high and almost invariably unrealized expectations of the writers and editors. Hitchens is probably the only writer who no longer regularly disappoints, for the obvious reason that he bottomed out some years ago; the only element of surprise now is what feature of the landscape down there he’s exploring on a particular day.
What remains disappointing about Hitchens is that Slate continues to publish him. Maybe he had the foresight to ink a lifetime contract. Whatever the reason, he’s still on the roster and Slate editor Jacob Weisberg is still responsible for providing the platform upon which Hitch performs. And that’s why I emailed Weisberg yesterday to request that he make his magazine available for Cole to respond to Hitchens.
It seems a reasonable request. Hitchens accused Cole of a lack of scholarship, or dishonesty, or both, and of supporting a regime for which Cole has repeatedly expressed a deep abhorrence. Weisberg gave Hitchens the opportunity to do that in a widely read magazine. Cole doesn’t have a weekly column in a widely read magazine. Weisberg should offer Cole a one-time opportunity equal to that Hitchens enjoys weekly.
My first request got no response. I followed up with another; Weisberg replied this morning that he didn’t need to issue an invitation because Cole was free to respond at any time, and added that he didn’t think Cole needed an intermediary.
Par for the course, I suppose, although in my admittedly limited experience it’s not unheard of for a publication to proactively offer someone they’re about to attack the opportunity to respond coincident with the attack; possibly that’s an antiquated practice. I told him I agreed he didn’t need to issue an invitation but I had hoped he would want to.
I wonder, though, how easy it is for someone to respond at any time, since Slate doesn’t appear to publish any contact information for its editors. Presumably one could take a shot at sending a note to the intern handling the corrections inbox, or email or call the magazine’s publicist. The only reason I had Weisberg’s email address was that I asked around for it some while back, and eventually found someone who knew it. Maybe Cole should get a publicist so his publicist can call Weisberg’s publicist and do lunch. Or however that’s done.
Sullivan described the contest between Hitchens and Cole as “an online fight.” That’s technically accurate, since Slate is an online magazine and Cole’s blog is indisputably online as well. But in terms of reach, Slate is a younger cousin to the guns of Navaronne — the magazine was recently purchased by the Washington Post, and several of Slate’s writers, Hitchens mercifully excluded, now appear in the newspaper— Informed Comment, although widely read and widely defended, isn’t.
I don’t know whether Cole will take advantage of Weisberg’s openness, if that’s what it is, to a response. At this point I’m not even sure I’d want him to, since it would give Hitchens the opportunity to phone in another smear.
Regardless, I’m sure Weisberg will continue to publish Hitchens without sparing a thought for the character of his writing. And, stupidly, I find that thought depressing.
One final note: Hitchens refers to Cole as a member of the “academic Muslim apologist community.” Presumably this means Hitchens thinks Muslims of any and all stripes owe him, or the world, an apology. Here’s hoping he holds his breath ’til he gets one.
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UPDATE: Welcome back Atrios readers. While you’re here, I want to recommend the preceding post on immigration and the recent protests, from Demosthenes, one of our regular contributors (not regular enough, but he’s a busy man).
UPDATE 2: I was wrong about Hitchens’ position on Iran; as of March, at any rate, he was strongly opposed to any US military action against the country and supportive of reaching out to the Iranian government. More on that, and on his accusation that Cole is an Ahmadinejad apologist, here.
Huh? Don’t you have better use for your time and intelligence than to get into the middle of this sort of high school back and forth. I don’t know these guys and, if I did, would still have little, if any, interest in their various feuds.
P.S. I have found that the best way to avoid any embarrassment from the disclosure of my private emails is to avoid making any embarrassing statements in my private emails. It is a natural corollary of one of my favorite maxims: The only way to keep a secret is not to share it.
Best regards,
PubliusToo
People keep saying that, but this is exactly what happened during the runup to the invasion of Iraq&mdahs; demonizing the prospective target, demonizing anyone who doesn’t sing the same tune and attempting to squelch discussion of it. I think it’s important to hit back whenever something like this arises; if we don’t, it’ll work again. Hitchens may not have much impact, but add up all the Hitchenses and Funds and it’ll take a toll.
As for the email issue, not saying anything you don’t want published means, for at least some of the people on the list, not saying anything at all. If they’re unable to travel and unable to speak out publicly in their own countries, they have no other recourse than discussion forums like the one at issue here. That’s a big deal.
You say that Hitch “didn’t contact anyone who does (read Farsi)”
Errr, did you actually read Hitch’s article? Cos if you did it’s quite clear who was contacted and what was translated by whom.
PubliusToo, don’t you have better use for your time and intelligence than to post patently ignorant and useless comments on weblogs?
Great Hitchins post. When I was in the Marines w/ 2nd Force Recon co. we had a Brit on loan to us from the Special Boats Squadron who seemed really quite tough on first blush but turned out to be a complete fraud (that may be why he was on loan)and once we found out we would entertain ourselves during our off time by beating the shit out of him. Hitch reminds me of that guy a great deal. Hitch, like our Royal Marine, both talk a big game but when it comes down to it they’ve seen no action other than what they’ve found at a bar and would piss themselves if ever anyone called them on their line of shit.
Jez B, Yes, it is clear. Hitchens has two sources for his Farsi translations. He took the translation in a New York Times story and compared it to Cole’s, and then he offered a translation from a Khomeini speech, which he got from “a volume published by the Institute for Imam Khomeini.” Unless you equate “reading something by” with “contacting,” he didn’t contact anyone.
Publius Too,
err do you understand what Hitchens did? He hijacked a piece of thread from a private acadamic forum and misrepresented it in his Slate piece. It was a classic Hatchet Job.
And to what end? To make sure people who might get in the way of an attack on Iran keep quiet and are “discredited” in the public sphere. It’s Scott Ritter and Joe Wilson all over again.
Ignoring it is a receipe for waking up one morning and discovering that your country just invaded another.
The issue of what the President of Iran said and how much actual decision-making power he has is important. What the neocons are saying he said is important. And whether they said the same thing is important. The administration is gearing up to attack Iran (or at least to get the propaganda value of blood lust from such a plan) based on their statement of Iran’s wish to have nuclear power and a stated wish to attack and eliminate Israel. Therefore, it is important whether or not it is truthful to say the stated intent or policy of Iran to physically demolish modern Israel.
This is more than a internet cat fight. The substance of correct translation and its propaganda value could be the difference between noone dying and many many thousands dying. I dont have any illusion that the Iranians will passively accept bombing without a massive response in Iraq and on the international oil market.
Hitchens is such a drunken turd. Why does anyone listen to a person who completely disgraces himself in public on a regular basis? Reminds me of me.
Still Swinging,
Frank Sinatra
I’ve seen the ravages of alcoholism uplcose in my family, and I recognize in Christopher Hitchens the late stages of that disease. He has become so enraged and self-loathing that his only contact with feeling is the bitter attack on whomever’s at hand.
Further, he has even stopped trying to keep up appearances. I’ve seen him on TV or heard him on radio several times in the last month when he was obviously so inebriated that he could barely go on. The sad part, as seen in his appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s show a few weeks ago. After a few minutes of incoherent poison, Hugh rang off, making the excuse that Hitchens was having “a bad time with allergies” due to the blooming of cherry blossoms in D.C., no less, and remarked how many of us can identify with “what allergy medicines can do to you”. Now I’m not a big fan of Hitchens warmongering, or bile-fueled ramblings, but it made me sad to realize that this guy was getting close to the end.
If Mr. Weisberg cared a fig for his employee, he’d organize an immediate intervention for Hitchens, and insist that he get some help. It’s a shame that now that right-wing creeps like Hewitt are happy to take advantage of Hitchens’ decline, and gleefully enable Chris’ psychotic Clinton-hatred and willingness to say anything for the price of a bottle, we are treated to the sad spectacle of someone who once had something important to say being used as a dancing bear for third-tier radio talk shows.
I get no pleasure from seeing Hitchens suffer. As much as I sympathize with Mr. Cole’s outrage, at least he won’t wake up with the shakes tomorrow morning. Hitchens on the other hand, is in a Hell of his hown making. As much as I disagree with him, I don’t want to read that he’s been found dead from alchohol poisoning, and evidence points to that being a distinct possibility.
You write:
One final note: Hitchens refers to Cole as a member of the “academic Muslim apologist community.” Presumably this means Hitchens thinks Muslims of any and all stripes owe him, or the world, an apology. Here’s hoping he holds his breath ’til he gets one.
The irony of this is that Juan Cole, is to my knowledge, not a Muslim. He was, for a very long time, an enrolled member of the Baha’i Faith. However, Cole insisted on doing history and translations involving Baha’i events and Baha’i documents and not submitting them to the central authorities of the Baha’i Faith for overview (read: censorship). He ended up resigning his membership one step head of getting the “left foot of fellowship.”
I would suspect that Cole’s interest in Persian (Farsi) and Arabic *might* have something to do with his religious beliefs, and that is borne out by checking Cole’s academic website as well as googling his name.
So that’s another one of Slate’s sins: attributing a religious belief to Juan Cole that Cole probably does not hold. Don’t they have factcheckers anymore?
Fluffy, I think Hitchens meant “apologist for Muslims,” but either way it’s dense.
Pope Ratzo: I’m sorry for your family’s troubles. My guess is that Hitchens has been the subject of interventions already. I doubt Weisberg is a close enough friend to manage it, although Sullivan seems to be.
the last thing these assholes want is an exchange of ideas. they whore their ideas, remember? if others exchange theirs freely, it puts a crink in the notion of an elitist punditocracy, which hichcup seems to value above all things.
So Hitchens was “on top…”, etc. Hardly a good-faith response to the matter at hand.
I’m too drunk to talk. As a rule though I know everything because I walk by night.
I gotta say it.
It takes real nerve to rip someone off, and then to complain about what you stole.
The email was private. The discsussion group was private. The lifted material represented translations that Professor Cole was working on. It was not a finished, published or public piece of work. To hack in, or the receive and use such a leaked email is simply unethical.
I think however, that Juan’s sharing his knowledge about the Johnny Walker monkey on Hitchen’s back only clouds the issue. Alcohol is a great “disinhibitor” but never, ever made anyone do a bad thing all on its own. Hitchens impulse to behave in this way is..all…about…Hitchens.
I honestly don’t understand why anyone enjoys Slate anymore, and thought this piece by Hitchens illustrated the problem. Slate failed very basic journalistic tests in publishing Hitchens, even allowing for the fact that this is OpEd, not straight reporting.
The worst part of it is that Hitchens actually conceded that Cole was correct. Hitchens: “Quite possibly, ‘wiped off the map’ is slightly too free a translation of what he originally said…” He then went on to attack Cole for saying just that.
If Slate had minimal editorial standards, Hitchens would have been forced to at least make the case that Cole has been soft on Ahmadinejad. Since Cole has in fact always been sharply critical of Ahmadinejad, Hitchens’s brief would have collapsed and no story could have been written.
But there’s more. Slate failed to:
1. Contact the source to get reaction.
2. Recognize that Hitchens has been caught embellishing his resume on Middle East matters and require closer fact checking on his accusations.
3. Remove gratuitous ad hominem like “Muslim apologist,” or substitute something less religiously bigoted, e.g., “apologist for Muslim extremists.”
If Cole were purely a non-public person, I would imagine that he could successfully sue Slate for defamation. As a quasi public person, he has a higher standard. However, publishing private e-mails could constitute invasion of privacy. While such lawsuits are rare for reasons of cost, Slate should reflect that in another case of editorial nonfeasance, it could end up paying a large judgment.
In sum: while Hitchens forfeited his journalistic credentials by submitting a wild and seemingly baseless attack over a tempest that would be hopelessly lost inside a space as small as a teapot, the failure is that of the editors at Slate.
As for Juan Cole, he’d be a better advocate for his side if he would reply with greater cool. He’s still one of the most important voices on the Middle East and doesn’t deserve to be slimed.
As for Juan Cole, he’d be a better advocate for his side if he would reply with greater cool.
Yeah, maybe. We can’t all be Colbert. This team pushing for war with Iran is proven evil and proven stupid; they really deserve no respect at all, Hitchens included.
you should make sure that you give juan cole jacob weisberg’s email address so that cole can contact him directly.
I don’t doubt that Hitchens likes to drink, but that’s nothing at all new. I wonder where all the tsk-tsking teetotalers of the Left were when he was pouring his drunken contempt on Israel (back in the 1990s)? I thought so.
Moreover, I listened to the Hewitt radio show–it’s painfully clear that Hitchens DID have allergies. Anyone who confuses that with drunkeness, has never seen a drunk or an allergic.
Theresa, I can’t speak for the rest of the lefty teetotalers, assuming there are any of those present, but I didn’t have a blog in the 1990s. As for Hewitt, I haven’t any statistics to hand, but I’d guess the odds are fairly slim that anyone here has never seen a drunk or someone suffering from allergies. And as for Hitchens, the decline in his appearance and coherence over the past decade has been steep.
Toddy, I forwarded Weisberg’s response to Cole, so he has the email address. We’ll see how it goes.
I quit reading Hitchens when I got tired of the ad hominems.
Nobody who wants to be taken seriously engages in that sort of commment, and I’m really tired of reading ‘pundits’ who can’t seem to rise above sophistry and abuse (Coulter comes to mind) to make their feeble arguments.
“What remains disappointing about Hitchens is that Slate continues to publish him. Maybe he had the foresight to ink a lifetime contract.”
Many years ago, when a champion boxer had completely lost it, he could still make a few bucks (for his manager) travelling small towns, getting beaten by the local tough guys. The town would have a moment of glory and the local guy would feel like a big man for a while.
I think the allure of Hitchens is much the same. Slate publishes his drivel, and in ‘The Fray’ (the reader comments section), a few hundred junior Clarence Darrows shred his feeble arguments. It is by far the most popular feature at Slate. The commenters get to feel good about themselves, and Hitchens has solid evidence of the traffic that he personally generates for the site. He is undoubtedly the biggest draw they have.
Oddly enough I didn’t think much of the old sot when he was young & sober I am still surprised that people claim he was brilliant (or approching it). He stuck me as mean-sprited and liberal only in terms that it benefited him – a condition I saw way too often in the anti-war movment of the 60′s: “I’m against this war” = I got a low draft number.
Slate sank to unworthy some time ago simply because it appears to have no standard of jounalism much less decency. They became an embarassment to liberal thought because of their amorality & the Post has proven they are of the same cloth. A pox on both their houses.
Obviously, I am minority of one regarding the importance of these personal “he said-she said” dramas. I will admit that you have made valid (perhaps important) points both about fighting fire with fire (so to speak). Still, I can easily get bored with the arguments ad hominem. (I’m trying to be polite here.) I will also readily admit that my reply to weldon’s posting was glib. In that regard, I especially appreciated the response from “nobody” at no. 4 above; that was rather amusing and probably well deserved. In response, I will state (somewhat sadly) that apparently I did not have anything better to do that day (though the golf course was open and the weather was beautiful). In my defense, however, my reply did not exactly take much time or effort, so I don’t feel like I wasted too much time by so replying. Not that anybody really cares, anyway.
Finally, weldon, I knew what you would say about the email issue before I posted my message. Still, I think it’s best to expect that even your most private conversations are likely to be revealed. That’s a great way to help you to temper your remarks or, better yet, to be more circumspect. I think that if I lived in a country that did not respect individual freedom to speak and write, I would be much more cautious about what I say even in private because sooner or later someone who hears what you say or reads what you write will blurt it out. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m still sticking to it.
As to whether Hitchens contacted anyone who speaks Farsi, he was apparently was using the translation of the NYT bureau Nazila Fathi for whom Farsi is a first language. He also analyzed the context of the statement and notes that Ahmedinejad has NOT complained a bit regarding the conventional WORLD-WIDE translation that he would “wipe Israel off the map.”
Finally, I direct you to this analysis by another native Farsi speaker who calls Cole’s exegesis of Ahmedinejad’s speech “insane and ignorant”.
As for the rest of it, rather than a point by point rebuttal, I direct you here.
I, too, wanted to ask Slate what impression they expected to make by hosting this sort of character assassination, and why in the world they were keeping Hitchens around, and that’s when I also discovered that there was no way to contact the editors. The best I could figure out was to send my email via the Feedback link, which leads to what appears to be a complaint form designed for problems with the site tech. That was not what I really wanted, of course, but not being able to do what I wanted to do — send a good old-fashioned Letter to the Editor — I sent my “feedback” email anyway. I got back a form reply within a couple of hours promising that my note would be forwarded to the “appropriate” staff member for investigation and response. I don’t expect any further response, however.
On your winds of change link, did you try reading it?
“I am not a translatior, but I can tell you that here is a clear note in that sentence that Israel must be made to wanish from the face of time.
Maybe this is not a theat, as it was not directed to Israel, but to his followers, but it clearly is an decleration of intent. The intent is to make Israel cease to exist.
The word map is not litterarly in there”
So Cole was right it seems.
Sonic,
I did read it, did you? The Iranian commenting on the Cole’s translation called it a distortion of the meaning just as did Hitchens (“He distorts, you decide”).
I suppose if Cole translated the English term “I’m in a real pickle” to mean “I am currently wearing a dilled cucumber for a suit” you would call that an “accurate” translation as well.