Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens died of hospital-acquired pneumonia on 15 December 2011 in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, aged 62. In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research. "Mortality", a collection of seven of Hitchen's "Vanity Fair" essays about his illness, was published posthumously in September 2012.
Political views of Christopher Hitchens
In the months following the 9/11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and the proper response to it in a highly charged exchange of letters in "The Nation", including discussion of whether any comparison could be legitimately made between the 9/11 attacks and the 1998 Al Shifa bombing by the US. Approximately a year after the 9/11 attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left "The Nation", claiming that its editors, readers and contributors considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden, and were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his former colleagues. Hitchens was also severely criticized by Norman Finkelstein, an American political scientist and Hitchens's former friend. Citing Hitchens's support for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, as well as Hitchens's critique of Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ", Finkelstein called Hitchens a "model apostate," a "dirt bag," and a "showboat run amuck" who is "dying for the camera."