Irony

The Chomskyite world has never lacked for it. Back in my former and much unhappier life I was a resident of the gray-cold hell city of death known as Boston, Massachusetts. Yes, the capital of liberal America, where everyone loves Chomsky and everyone loathes the Jews. I still remember being told by a cracker Irish kid from Southie about how he'd "Jewed" somebody and then going the next day to a political science class at Boston University to be told by the professor that Israel was the cause of 9/11. At least the various ethno-class divisions in the gray-cold hell city of death can find solidarity around something.

At any rate, the gray-cold hell city of death's newspaper of record, The Boston Globe, which could well be a charter member of Chomsky's fan club, reports that Chomsky is now the prime signatory of a petition on behalf of an academic who claims he was denied a post at MIT because of racism.

What makes this amusing, of course, is that Chomsky is something of flaming racist himself. While he confines himself to such politically correct forms of bigotry as claiming that the Jews are "priveleged people" who want "total control" over American society and invoking Rousseau's image of "half-naked savages" to describe the Third World, it is nonetheless incumbant upon us to call the thing what it is. The Boston Globe, if it weren't too busy congratulating itself over its latest condemnation of whatever Israel has done this week to defend its right to exist, might have noted this slight contradiction. Perhaps I should be sanguine on the matter, and simply confine myself to being grateful for one more reason to be happy that I now live in Israel.