In a recent article for Guernica, professor Noam Chomsky referred to Osama bin Laden as an "unarmed victim" and asks how Americans would have reacted if "Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic." Chomsky decries the former president, arguing his crimes "vastly exceed" those of bin Laden's.

In a scathing rebuttal in Slate earlier this week, Christopher Hitchens ripped Chomsky's piece to shreds. Here's an excerpt:

Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism. This cognitive dissonance—to give it a polite designation—does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida's martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the "operation." As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all....

Read Hitchens' rebuttal here.