| I was pointing out that he doesn't seem to have considered it within the text you mentioned. Perhaps it appears elsewhere, though it doesn't appear to be tending that direction. The problem, as I see it, isn't even about incitement to violence. There's plenty of Holocaust denial that isn't an incitement to violence, unless by stretching that term far past its breaking point. It's not even really hate speech, in a strict reading of that term -- it only becomes defined as "hate speech" because we know that it originates from people who have had more explicit hate speech restricted. But that doesn't mean it's without harm. These "questions" are really assertions that rather than being killed en masse, Jews have in fact inflicted great deception on the world. That creates mistrust -- sometimes violent, but more often merely prejudicial. Those prejudices can take effect in myriad ways, impossible to trace to the questioner, but nonetheless real. Would a smart person like Hitchens be fooled by this? Surely not. But then again, he doesn't even seem to consider that it's a possibility. As you say, he seems to think that violence is the only way harm could be inflicted, and nothing else seems to be involved. That's a blind spot. That blind spot is important here, because his entire argument is based on "Let people make their arguments and surely we'll come to the right conclusion". I don't believe he himself is capable of coming to the right conclusion because he's missing something right in front of him -- something somebody must surely have pointed out at some point, but which he doesn't even consider to be a problem worth mentioning. |