Lebanese media reports that the man who hit the late Christopher Hitchens in an altercation in Beirut in 2009 has been killed in Syria, fighting alongside forces allied with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Adonis Nasr, an information officer with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), often boasted of slapping Hitchens, after the British-American author defaced a placard commemorating an SSNP “hero” who killed two Israeli soldiers in a Wimpy’s restaurant in 1982.

Hitchens wasn’t a big fan of Israel, and his gesture certainly wasn’t intended to defend Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon. He just despised fascists and rightly interpreted the SSNP’s ideology and symbols as fascist, so when he saw the SSNP’s version of a swastika in the Hamra section of Beirut, he was moved to act. As Hitchens later wrote for Vanity Fair: