Baseless Words - or: A Little Coaching for Christopher Hitchens

February 17, 2011

By Thomas Ruttig

"A reply to Chistopher Hitchens’ under-researched rant against what he calls the human rights ‘activists’ community that ‘finally notices the Taliban's war crimes’. AAN’s senior analyst Thomas Ruttig points to some reports that show how far this is from truth."

Read More http://www.aan-afghanistan.org/index.asp?id=1502

6 comments:

Robert Iddiols said...

Ruttig seems to miss the point entirely. Weird.

Anonymous said...

Tom, why are you giving such prominence on your website to this obscure person? I work in the field of international affairs, including Afghanistan, and have never heard of this person, and he has no particualr standing or authority in the field. You are flattering him enormously, by what I think is a rare editorial misjudgement on your part. But keep up the good work otherwise.

Ben

Tom said...

Ben, to say I'm flattering someone enormously is, well, I should thank you I suppose but this is not an official Hitchens website, or NYT or CNN, just a blog. But I appreciate your comment, you say what you think of the guy. After all it's just another Hitchens related post, the reader can make up his/her own mind on the quality of the article..and comment on it.

TheSuna said...

If you ignore the spelling and grammatical mistakes, the article is alright - if there was factual error, then that's a fair point to raise.

Actually, as much as I love his writing, one of the things that irks me about it is how difficult it is to know where Hitch is getting his information. Now, I'm not one to have another do my homework for me, and most of the times the info Hitchens gives is eerily accurate, but pointing the reader towards the relevant literature doesn't hurt.

(Oh, and I misread the title of this as "Coaching from CH", and got all excited that this was going to be a sort of field-guide or tutorial on argumentation and rhetoric from the man himself.)

Anonymous said...

Aww. Butthurt.

Jack said...

It would be really awesome if Hitch wrote a reply to this article as I do think Ruttig has missed the point.

 
 
 

Christopher reads from Hitch-22: A Memoir