New Atheists have lots of enemies, and all of them try to discredit us with ad hominem attacks and character assasination — I do think, however, than the worst offenders are not the religious folks, but rather secular totalitarians, terrorism apologists and West haters such as Glenn Greenwald, PZ Myers, CJ Werleman and Noam Chomsky (and all those on the so-called the regressive left).
We already know they’re in the business of ideology and not in that of intellectual honesty. These people will lie about us, strawman us and put words in our mouths that we never pronounced — all in the name of the greater good.
Case in point, a quote attributed to Christopher Hitchens about Iran (“As for that benighted country, I wouldn’t shed a tear if it was wiped off the face of this earth”):
Tariq Ali hears this from a nameless ‘source’ at a venue Hitchens spoke at previously. A venue, which was at the time, absent of one Christopher Hitchens. Not only was this reported a year after Hitchens’s death, it comes third hand, anonymously.
In summary, this quote came from a guy who told a guy he heard some people say Hitchens said something once. Needless to say, no footage of Hitchens saying these words has surfaced (to my knowledge).
Well, Hitchens’ razor to the rescue of Hitchens himself — so poetic: What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
There’s no evidence whatsoever that Hitchens said anything remotely similar about wiping Iran off the face of the Earth, so to claim he did is a lie — what’s worse, it defames a man who is dead and can’t defend himself or his honor.
After seeing how these people bash Richard Dawkins almost just for being alive, and how they sistematically smear Sam Harris, no wonder they waited for Hitchens to die — with such fragile egos, they wouldn’t have survived a Hitchslap in response.
By the way, kudos to Stephen Knight who unearthed this whole farce.
