Some people can say the most awful things. Readers might be aware of Media Lens, a web site edited by David Cromwell and David Edwards, self declared admirers of the work of Noam Chomsky. The web site urges its readers to send missives to the editors and journalists of newspapers to complain about articles that they do not like. These are typically articles that do not fit in with their Chomskyan world view. Media Lens also has a message board where registered users can discuss the wonderfulness of Chomsky and the disgracefulness of journalists who oppose him.
It should be no surprise to readers of this site as to who the targets of Media Lens include. One of them is Christopher Hitchens, a brilliant polemicist who is currently battling with cancer.
This afternoon the following message has appeared on the Media Lens message board:
“I wish Hitchens a speedy recovery … “
Posted by rippon
on August 26, 2010, 5:30 pm
In a thread below, lenin links to a review of Hicthens’ ‘Hitch-22’, by D.D. Guttenplan. Guttenplan ends, “I wish Hitchens a speedy recovery, a long life and as much celebrity as he wants. But it’s the Christopher with a feeling for justice I mourn. I miss him very much.”
Given what Hitchens has become (perhaps, beneath his former left-wing surface, always was), I don’t understand this sentiment, even if Guttenplan is a former comrade.
More rational, surely, is to wish him a slow painful death, the infliction of which upon millions of others he has energetically supported. And a celebration of the possible explanation that throat cancer comes to those who spend years using that organ to spew poisonous bile in support of mass-murder – divine justice, perhaps, which would suggest that, apart from neoconservatism, Hitchens’ other hobby-horse philosophy, evangelical atheism, is also flawed – perhaps there is a god who metes out just deserts.
I do not know who “rippon” is and nor do I care to know. What I do know is that he or she is a disgusting and vile human being. What kind of mind does it take for someone to say such a thing? “rippon” should be thoroughly ashamed of what he or she has said. I suspect that “rippon” has no shame.
Hat Tip
Oliver Kamm’s “Free” Tweet. (I wonder when Rupert Murdoch will work out a way of charging people to access the Tweets of his journalists.)
