On Facebook, I posted a picture from the Holocaust and a link to a story about British fears regarding anti-Semitism, and my FB friend Paul Meehan replied: “Imagine the fear felt by both Jews and Gentiles alike who speak out against utterly rotten Israeli policies?”
I answered: “Fear of what? Of being killed? Killed by who?”
Are there people out there who fear for their lives because they criticize Israeli policies? I can see how a person could lose friends, social status and even a job for being anti-Israel (or pro-Israel), but I can’t see anyone fearing for their life over these views.
Steve Sailer writes:
The late Christopher Hitchens and the late Alexander Cockburn were highly similar far left opinion journalists from the British Isles who settled in America, where they dazzled the colonists with their Oxford-honed facility with the Queen’s English.
Despite their Marxism, both were snobs and believers in good-bone-good-blood, although Cockburn had better cause for genealogical boasting: British history is littered with famous Cockburns. It no doubt chafed Hitchens that Cockburn, not he, was Evelyn Waugh’s first cousin once-removed.
But the careers of the two very similar men went in very different directions after they came to New York. Hitchens permanently ascended to the stratosphere of intellectual celebrity for his brilliant strategic ideas like invading Iraq; while Cockburn, after a good run in the 1980s in which even the Wall Street Journal featured his column regularly on its op-ed page (probably to remind readers why they hated leftists so much) was increasingly exiled to the fringes of the intellectual world.
