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Against Hitchens I see in pseudo-intellectuals like Hitchens, an attempt to deal with history but actually hating it because it doesn't fit into their comfortable neo-liberal ideogram. They want things to have been otherwise. They are entitled to their opinions like everyone else but since they also want to claim a piece of intellectual territory, above all, they want their opinions to matter. They want to prescribe a particular reading of history based on their own presumptions: thoughts which seem to be based on a rather skeletal grasp of the subject in the first place. Essentially they are criticising humanity for being imperfect! Well? If your views go against what people have believed for 5000 years, then at least do some homework first. If one accepts that reality is what it has come to be, then one can't attack religion without first completing a thorough inquiry of the place of religion in that reality. History is meant to be an account with a factual basis but not necessarily a moral one. A person of reason who judiciously studies religious and cultural history will probably find oneself becoming more and more confused. That confusion will probably make one wiser, leading one to refrain from making banal statements of any kind at all. At base, Hitchens and others atheist writers like him such as Martin Amis, probably want to vent their wrath at Islam for disturbing their sense of security but somehow they seem to feel that in order to do this they must say that all religions are useless and is so their so called 'critiques' are veiled attacks on anyone who has ever prayed. I interpret this as a way of disguising their general ignorance about Islam and Muslims. Making religion seem like some large melting pot of delusion and superstitions is a convenient literary tactic for avoiding dealing with specificities that might reveal the irrationality behind their own assertions. In other words, their books are cheap-shots. People will buy them because they make for easy reading. A prejudiced, uninformed and unthinking public gets the literature it deserves.
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