Hitchens on single standards

Peter K. peterk at enteract.com
Fri May 3 11:17:40 PDT 2002


http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020513&s=hitchens

"One weeps to think of what might still have been accomplished then if the United States had been willing to act on a two-state solution. Yet Washington took the same line on Palestinian statehood that St. Augustine took on chastity: It was something to be desired eventually, but not quite yet. It still does, dumbly and unbelievably, take that same line, as if the West Bank was the one place in the world where a superpower's writ does not run."

and

"Facile equivalences are to be avoided. One in particular is the stupid equation by peaceniks between Sharon in Jenin and the international coalition in Kabul, which easily made distinctions between killers and noncombatants and which still does. But if the American conservatives choose to make the same mistake by identifying in reverse order, then they replicate the reciprocity between Sharonism, which is an insult to the Jews, and jihadism, which is a disgrace to the Arabs. (Perhaps a pious Christian supervision of this ghastly "process" of symbiosis is all that we needed.)...."



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