Israel Matzav

Who is Noam Chomsky?

Benjamin Kerstein reports that most of the people who are arguing over whether Noam Chomsky should be allowed into Israel have no idea who he is or what he stands for.

The truth, however, is far uglier. Chomsky has been, throughout his long career, a consistent and dedicated supporter and/or apologist for tyranny, terrorism, political violence of all kinds, and sometimes horrifying acts of mass murder.

Chomsky first gained fame in the late 1960s as a critic of the American war in Vietnam. As one of the intellectual gurus of the antiwar movement, he openly advocated a North Vietnamese victory and, to this day, minimizes or denies outright the brutal oppression and killing that followed the fall of Saigon. He acted in a similar, albeit more notorious fashion, in regard to the Cambodian genocide, committed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. While the Khmer Rouge atrocities were so horrendous that they helped turn much of the left against them, including some particularly courageous French leftist intellectuals, Chomsky was the most outspoken partisan of the Cambodian regime, and expressed this by simply denying that the genocide was occurring at all.

Because of his rarified position on the left at the time, political opposition to the Khmer genocide was badly damaged, and while the true body count will likely never be known for certain, estimates of the dead run as high as three million. To this day, Chomsky denies his denial, and refuses to take moral responsibility for his statements and actions, even though this contradicts his own professed beliefs about moral responsibility, according to which we are responsible not only for what we say and do, but also for the potential consequences of what we say and do.

Chomsky’s habit of denying or minimizing genocide is not confined to Southeast Asia. In the 1980s, he signed a petition on behalf of French holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. When critics pointed out that the petition was clearly in support of holocaust denial, referring to Faurisson as a legitimate researcher and his claims that the holocaust never happened as “findings” and that Chomsky’s signature leant this monstrous claim intellectual and moral legitimacy, he simply attacked them all as enemies of free speech and freedom in general. He repeated the performance in the 1990s and 2000s, engaging in lengthy apologetics for the Milosevic regime in Serbia and denouncing the NATO air campaign against it.

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Perhaps most disturbing of all, however, Chomsky has recently begun to embrace a worldview which is unambiguously anti-Semitic. During a 2002 speech to a pro-Palestinian organization, he stated that “Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population,” and that “Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control.” Such fantasies of Jewish power are instantly recognizable for what they are, and besides being ugly and violent, would likely be in violation of Israel’s (and most Western democracies’) laws against racist defamation.

When Chomsky was denied entry into Israel, he called its government Stalinist (Hat Tip: Instapundit). Stalin murdered approximately ten million Russians during his time in power. But that hasn't stopped the Israeli government from falling all over itself to apologize for the 'clerical error' that resulted in Chomsky being denied admission to Israel and begging him to return. You have to wonder what kind of idiots we have in charge.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:41 AM