Hitchens slams Falwell’s life

From CNN via Crooks and Liars:

HITCHENS: The whole consideration of this — of this horrible little person is offensive to very, very many of us who have some regard for truth and for morality, and who think that ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men, that we're — we're not told that people who believe like Falwell will be snatched up into heaven, where I'm glad to see he skipped the rapture, was found on the floor of his office, while the rest of us go to hell.

How dare they talk to children like this? How dare they raise money from credulous people on their huckster-like "Elmer Gantry" radio stations, and fly around in private jets, as he did, giggling and sniggering all the time at what he was getting away with?

Do you get an idea now of what I mean to say?

COOPER: Yes, no, I think — I think you're making yourself very clear.

I mean, I…

(CROSSTALK)

HITCHENS: How dare he say, for example, that the Antichrist is already present amongst us and is an adult male Jew, while all the time, fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping anti-Semitic innuendoes into American politics, along with his friends Robertson and Graham?

COOPER: And, yet, there are…

(CROSSTALK)

HITCHENS: … encouraging — encouraging — encouraging the most extreme theocratic fanatics and maniacs on the West Bank and in Gaza not to give an inch of what he thought of as holy land to the people who already live there, undercutting and ruining every Democrat and secularist in the Jewish state in the name of God?

Click here for the video.

Hitchens, a Trotskyite writer, went nuts after 9/11 and abandoned the left in order to support the neocon wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. That made him not a very popular guy in liberal online circles. Of course, what pushed him in this baffling direction was his utter hatred of religion--apparently, he was extraordinarily rattled by the fatwa declared by Iranian clerics against his pal author Salman Rushdie back in 1989. Once the WTC was hit in 2001, I'm sure he was totally freaked out. So now he's a hawk without any real ideological allies.

But man, he's still stellar when bashing religion. Actually, his anti-religious zeal is probably what drives him more than anything these days. And man, he really lets Falwell have it. This video is well worth checking out, if only for its bile and venom.

He's also got a really kickass English accent. Go check it out.

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