Christopher Hitchens is calling on Jon Stewart and others in the media to join him in urging CNN to reinstate Rick Sanchez.
In a Slate column Monday, Hitchens defended Sanchez's controversial comments that the media is run by Jewish people.
"I ask myself if the world in which I have worked for so many decades--the intersecting and overlapping world of the news media, publishing, the academy, and the think-tank industry--is even imaginable without the presence of liberal American Jews. The answer is plainly no," Hitchens writes. "Moreover, I can't think of any other 'minority' of which this is remotely true, unless it were to be the other minority from which I can claim descent: people of British or Anglophile provenance."
Hitchens wrote that Sanchez "didn't descend into saying that there was Jewish control of the media, but he did imply that liberalism was linked to a single ethnicity" and added that "there is nothing criminal about this."
He connected Sanchez's abrupt firing to those of Octavia Nasr from CNN (after her kind words toward a late Hezbollah leader) and Dr. Laura Schlessinger (following her N-word rant) and said that, together, these incidents "suggest a network system that cares only about playing safe and avoiding 'offense.'"
Over the weekend, Stewart (who Sanchez called a "bigot" before discussing Jewish people at large) joked that "All [Sanchez] has to do is apologize to us [Jews], and we'll hire him back."
Hitchens called on Stewart to make good on that comedic claim, and join him in urging CNN to reinstate Sanchez:
The best way to demonstrate the hidden influence of the chosen people would be for Jon Stewart and others to join me in calling for Rick Sanchez's reinstatement. If it then didn't happen, it would help us understand who really pulls the strings around here
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