Nice to see you and I are on the same side on this one, Yehudit.

Unfortunately, "Hitch" doesn't get it, as Martin Kramer points out:

http://www.writely.com/View.aspx?docid=ah6sxjndq9qq_13gt87xp

I thought he'd say this!!

Diane, the link didn't go to Kramer, just to the Hitch op-ed.

Hitch employs a different set of rules for Israel than for everyone else (so what else is new?), and his fans get exasperated but are reluctant to toss the baby out with the bathwater, but in this case he is so incoherent I can't figure out what he's trying to say at all.

My bad: I got the link from Martin Kramer's site. Wasn't clear about that.

And yes, Hitch is indeed incoherent here, which is something else I privately predicted. He can't exactly say anything pro-HA. But he can never bring himself to say anything pro-Israel. Hence incoherence. However, the general import of what he says, at least to my mind (and to Kramer's) is that he's against this.

Now, in this particular war, IMO, if you are not with Israel, you are against it.

You either think that HA should point Zelzal missiles towards Israel, or you don't. A Zelzal is a death machine. God forbid it should be launched & strike a target in Israel.

I'm not sure if the Zelzals that HA has are this particular model but this gives you an idea of how destructive it could be:

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iran/missile/shahab-3.htm

I'll do some more research.

My snark was directed towards certain bloggers who seem to have adopted Hitch as a comrade in arms. I knew that when push came to shove, he'd bury the hatchet in Israel's back.

That's the way Hitch is - full of contradictions. He's great on the war on terror, terrible on Israel.

He may, one day, be able to get over his antipathy towards Israel. As he once got over his antipathy to neoconservatives. Or not.

His major point seems to be that the US, not Israel, the US's proxy, should be fighting this war.

Based on everything I have read of his, plus seeing him debate twice: he knows who the bad guys are. He is very clear that Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas and taliban and AQ are bad guys, even the same bad guys.

He has grudgingly accepted the justice of Jewish self-sovereignty, although I think he'd prefer the "one binational secular state" model, but he also knows it shouldn't happen as long as Hamas is in charge. He wants Palestine to have a secular liberal state too, not a jihadi one.

Beyond that I think he takes too many of his talking points from Edward Said, who was his friend, and there are ultra-far-leftist Israelis whose views he accepts uncritically.

He gets incoherent when he has to fit "Israel as good guy" into his equation. Somehow Israel has to have instigated this or made it worse, even though he would not maintain that assumption for Iraqis or Kurds fighting terrorism, even though he sees through that bias when it is assumed America must be the root of the problem.

sometime I am going to ask him how he justifies a different standard for the Kurds and the Israelis....