But this simply isn't true. Hentoff did not go deaf, dumb and blind with regard to Communist oppression.
Google Hentoff Cuba and you'll see he waged a vigorous multi-year campaign to expose Castro's jailing of dissident librarians and to pressure the castroite ass-kissers at the American Library Association to support freedom of speech and other basic human rights in Communist countries.
Google Hentoff Chinese prisons and you'll see him excoriating the Chinese Communists over their treatment of the Falun Gong as well as their suppression of the Catholic Church in China.
As a lover of freedom, Hentoff also broke with the Left over the need for the U.S. to oppose Jihadi Terror.
In February 2003, he signed a letter advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq on human rights grounds, citing reports detailing Hussein's disregard for fundamental liberties. In summer 2003, Hentoff wrote criticizing the Democratic Party for casting doubt on President Bush's pre-war assertions about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction in an election year, and deriding the idea that an international consensus was required before forceful action could be taken.
As he put it in the Village Voice, "...if you had been in a Hussein torture chamber, would you, even in a state of delirium, hope for rescue from the UN Security Council?”
Hentoff also attacked head-on the complicity of Middle Eastern leaders in the “cartoon jihad,” as a means of “criminalizing insults of Islam and its prophets.” He wrote, " The Organization of Islamic Conference’s goal is to inhibit criticism of Islamic jihadism by threats of violence."
He exposed the fact that the UN's Kofi Annan, working together with the Islamic Conference, was opening to door to "enforce censorship by U.N. members and NGOs (nongovernmental organizations there) against purported defamation of Muslims in print and other forms of speech."
He did a great deal MORE to oppose Communist and Islamist oppression than the great majority of us Keyboard Kommandos at Free Republic.
And why I'm I writing in the past tense? This is no obit. Hentoff is still writing, still speaking, and still defending freedom on a more consistent basis than almost anyone you can name in the journalistic profession.
Thank you for your civil response.
I find it hard to believe that a man who spent 50 years at the Village Voice and was a close friend of I.F. Stone did not share the views of both the paper and the reprehensible shill for the Communists, I.F. Stone.
But I am willing to admit that he was a good music critic, and will also entertain the possibility that as he grew older, his outlook on issues changed.
Even if he did continue to draw his pay from the Village Voice, which DID and DOES overlook the actions of dictators and tyrants around the world in order to portray our President, government and way of life as just as evil in a perverse morally equivalent world they inhabit.