Hitchens did not leave his position writing for '' The Nation '' until after the September 11 attacks , stating that he felt the magazine had arrived at a position " that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden " . The 11 September attacks " exhilarated " him , bringing into focus " a battle between everything I love and everything I hate " and strengthening his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy that challenged " fascism with an Islamic face . " His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative , although Hitchens insisted he was not " a conservative of any kind " , and his friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left . Hitchens recalls in his memoir having been " invited by Bernard-Henri Levy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine '' La Regle du Jeu '' . I gave it the partly ironic title : ' Can One Be a Neoconservative ? ' Impatient with this , some copy editor put it on the cover as ' How I Became a Neoconservative . ' Perhaps this was an instance of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one : It was decided that I evidently was what I apparently only thought . " Indeed , in a 2010 BBC interview , he stated that he " still thought like a Marxist " and considered himself " a leftist . " In 2007 Hitchens published one of his most controversial articles entitled " Why Women Are n't Funny " in '' Vanity Fair '' . Relying mainly on anecdotal evidence , he argued that there is less societal pressure for women to practice humour and that " women who do it play by men 's rules " . Over the following year , '' Vanity Fair '' published several letters that it received , objecting to the tone or premise of the article , as well as a rebuttal by Alessandra Stanley . Amid further criticism , Hitchens reiterated his position in a video and written response
September 11 attacks
September 11 attacks
Christopher Hitchens