Hitchens the Warmongering Hacker

By Juan Cole, AlterNet. Posted May 5, 2006.

(Editor's note: This story first appeared in a slightly different form at Informed Comment. Caution: Some of the images below are quite graphic and may be disturbing to readers.)

Christopher Hitchens owes me a big apology.

I belong to a private email discussion group called Gulf2000. It has academics, journalists and policymakers on it. It has a strict rule that messages appearing there will not be forwarded off the list. It is run, edited and moderated by a former National Security Council staffer for Carter and Reagan, Gary Sick, now a political scientist at Columbia University. The "no-forwarding" rule is his and is intended to allow the participants to converse about controversial matters without worrying about getting in trouble. Also, in an informal email discussion, ideas evolve, you make mistakes, and they get corrected, etc. It is a rough, rough draft.

Hitchens somehow hacked into the site, or joined and lurked, or had a crony pass him things. And he has now made my private email messages the subject of an attack on me in Slate. (I am not linking to the article because it is highly unethical, and Slate does not deserve any direct traffic from my site for it.) Moreover, he did not even have the decency to quote the final outcome of the discussions.

I'd like to take this opportunity to complain about the profoundly dishonest character of "attack journalism." Journalists are supposed to interview the subjects about which they write. Mr. Hitchens never contacted me about this piece. He never sought clarification of anything. He never asked permission to quote my private mail. Major journalists have a privileged position. Not just anyone can be published in Slate. Most academics could not get a gig there (I've never been asked to write for it). Hitchens is paid to publish there because he is a prominent journalist. But then he should behave like a journalist, not like a hired gun for the far Right, smearing hapless targets of his ire. That isn't journalism. For some reason it drives the right absolutely crazy that I keep this little web log, and so they keep trotting out these clowns in amateurish sniping attacks. It is rather sad that one person standing up to them puts them into such piranha-like frenzy.

The precise reason for Hitchens' theft and publication of my private mail is that I object to the characterization of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having "threatened to wipe Israel off the map." I object to this translation of what he said on two grounds.

First, it gives the impression that Ahmadinejad wants to play Hitler to Israel's Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people. But the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action or killing anyone at all.

The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks.

Since Mr. Hitchens wants to splash my private mail all over the internet against my will, as though he were himself an agent of the Bush administration's electronic spying on the private conversations of Americans, I'm glad to share the message that encapsulates the results of our deliberations at Gulf2000.

Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 15:34:18 -0400 From: "Cole, Juan"

The speech in Persian is here:

Sorry that I misremembered the exact phrase Ahmadinejad had used. He made an analogy to Khomeini's determination and success in getting rid of the Shah's government, which Khomeini had said "must go" (az bain bayad berad). Then Ahmadinejad defined Zionism not as an Arabi-Israeli national struggle but as a Western plot to divide the world of Islam with Israel as the pivot of this plan.

The phrase he then used, as I read it, is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope -- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.

Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and maintains the blog Informed Comment.

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