Sunday, January 01, 2012

Finkelstein seems to want to avoid gloating over the death of Hitchens, but can't quite manage it

For one thing, he takes a video of North Koreans weeping over the death of Kim Jong Il, replaces the otherwise unaltered footage with an image of Hitchens for a few moments, and labels the result "American intellectuals weep uncontrollably over passing of 'great leader and guide' Christopher Hitchens." He also has a "Brief Comment on the Passing of Christopher Hitchens," which I'll let you read in its place if you are interested. It involves not very subtle but "ironic" speculation that the death of that very public atheist could be seen as Divine retribution. I will note that it includes the incredible sentence "I get no satisfaction from Hitchens’s passing." And then after an interval of two more sentences, he writes
And if you’ve made a career of pissing on other people’s mostly innocuous beliefs, should it surprise that outside the tiny tent called Vanity Fair, your memory stinks of urine?

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