Chomskyites In My Own Backyard

This article in the Jerusalem Post points out some of the Chomskyites operating at my own university. The piece exaggarates the extent of the problem, in my opinion; the professors here are almost universally left wing, but the vast majority are not anti-Zionist radicals. The individuals cited here are certainly the right suspects, though. I know Neve Gordon vaguely and had a class with Oren Yiftachel. Gordon is a fool, one of the most fantastically unintelligent people I've ever met in my life; his radicalism is merely a desperate defense against his own mediocrity. Yiftachel is a smart guy but utterly consumed by his ideology. He is certainly anti-Zionist and occasionally flirts with anti-semitic rhetoric, particularly in regard to his understanding of Jewish history, which is, to say the least, limited. I've had a few conversations with him (he seemed to want to convert me to his point of view) and while he's always unfailingly polite, he's a classically close-minded individual, he seems to go deaf when you say anything he disagrees with. Such is the price, I imagine, of Chomsyite surities.

I'm Fine

To anyone who's worried or interested. I was not anywhere near Tel Aviv the other night. Obviously, I'm hugely disappointed and discouraged, although I should have expected that something like this would happen. Perhaps I've allowed myself to become more optimistic than I realized. However, I'm not despairing yet; we'll have to see how things play out over the next few days. Here's hoping.

Requiem for Raul Duke

On my last flight back to Israel from the States, I picked up a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at Logan Airport and finished it an hour before we touched down in Tel Aviv. I think my fellow passengers were convinced I was insane, because I could not stop laughing out loud every few minutes for the entire flight. It is hands down one of the funniest and most fearlessly savage (to use a term adored by its author) books I have ever read. Although I obviously have little sympathy for Hunter S. Thompson's politics, and, as someone who can't smoke a joint without vomiting, I have difficulty relating to the lifestyle of someone who ingested unique chemical variations on the secretions of the peneal glands of the South African iguana on a semi-regular basis; I am nonetheless convinced that his suicide marks the passing of a unique American talent and one of the best and most original writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Rest in peace, you beautiful psychopath; too wierd to live, too rare to die.

Happiness Is

...sitting around on a Saturday listening to Beethoven's piano sonatas and witnessing a couple of Chomskyites getting a good shellacking. Check it out, one of the participants is a certain John Summers, with whom I had a brief email exchange on this very subject. He goes off the deep end at one point in really spectacular fashion. Enjoy.

Expectorating Churchill

There's a very interesting post over at The American Spectator on the Ward Churchill phenomenon. I don't agree with all of it, but it makes a very good point about how the term"academic freedom" is now used to conceal a multitude of sins; lying, stupidity, and intellectual tyranny not least among them. Check it out.

Chomsky Defends Treason, Again

I must say, I'm having a ball watching the public crucifixion of Ward Churchill. I've been waiting for awhile to see if the assundry frauds, petty tyrants, and would-be revolutionaries that have infested the American university system would ever get their comeuppance; and I'm gratified to see this blubbering excuse for an intellectual, who has no doubt committed many a public crucifixion of his own on students who dared to question his beliefs, being forced to sweat it out in the public eye.

As I expected, the good professor and erstwhile subject of this blog has weighed in on the subject, praising Churchill's scholarship as "excellent, penetrating and of high scholarly quality" an opinion which seems to be shared by Churchill himself and disputed by almost everybody else. Its not surprising to me that Chomsky is in Churchill's corner, since there doesn't seem to be much light between their respective ideologies. They both embrace the US as Nazi Germany trope (a position I consider tantamount to Holocaust denial) and advocate the violent overthrow of the US government, although Chomsky does seem to be a bit smarter about how he goes about saying so. They seem to share career paths as well, both of them being completely unqualified rhetorical arsonists who have achieved their position by saying disgusting things about subjects in which they hold no credentials and by bullying anyone who dares to contradict them, although I don't think Chomsky's ever been dumb enough to try to fake his own ancestry (although one could see his anti-semitism as an attempt to formulate a non-Jewish identity, but that's a subject for another time).

I think I should be clear on what I think about Churchill's possible dismissal; firstly, I absolutely support his right to spew all the venom he wants to (although I strongly doubt he would support mine to do the same), but I do not believe he has an inalienable right, constitutional or otherwise, to academic tenure and a university position. Now, I don't support universities summarily dismissing anyone who's views they don't care for, but Churchill goes well beyond that. What he is advocating is treason, and no university is required to give succor to such elementary forms of political evil, any more than they are required to retain a professor of neo-Nazi sympathies or one who thinks the world is flat (and yes, I consider Churchill morally and intellectually comparable to a Nazi or a flat earther; in fact, he seems to be a somewhat farcical synthesis of the two). Most ironically, it seems clear to me that Churchill was not hired in spite of his radicalism but because of it, and it would be a marvelous act of divine justice if that same radicalism results in removal from his clearly much undeserved position.

My Own Remembrance of Things Past

I don't know if I've ever mentioned it here, but I played semi-professional blues guitar for about five years in Boston (more semi- than professional). I've written a few things about that time, and I hope at some point to put them together into a memoir of sorts. I've posted a brief piece at the other blog, so if you're interested in some very non-Chomsky stuff of mine, enjoy.

Another Great Day for Freedom

I've been following the news a bit today regarding the Iraqi elections. I don't have much to say about it, except that I think its a marvelous moment for democracy in this region and a great blow for human freedom against totalitarianism West and East. I've lived too long in the Middle East to have anything other than cautious optimism about Iraq's future, but optimism is still optimism, and in a region like this, its something to be savored.

The WikiChomskyites Keep Digging the Hole

The old adage that one should never stand in the way of one's enemy when he's trying to hang himself would seem to hold true in the case of the Chomskyite minions at Wikipedia as well. They have just rewritten their post on the Faurisson affair, painting Faurisson as a courageous, if slightly misguided, martyr to the cause of free speech and Chomsky as a sage moralist who must "explain" such elementary principles to the ignorant fanatics who would condemn the innocent intellectual who is simply too "ignorant" to understand the falsity of his conclusions. A thoroughly dispicable display of the slippery slope inherent in the Chomskyite ideology, one begins as a shallow contrarian and ends as an apologist for anti-semitism. A master class, I should think, in the dangers of elementary intellectual and moral arrogance.

Rousting the WikiChomskyites

It has been recently pointed out to me that the folks over at the supposedly open-source encyclopedia called Wikipedia, have a page on Chomsky which is notable in its unrelenting Chomskyite blubbering. I will deal with their analysis (such as it is) of Chomsky's politics at a later date, but the section on criticism of Chomsky is; inadvertently, no doubt; far too hilarious in its relentless apologetics for all manner of the good professor's intellectual atrocities to ignore.

It begins with a plethora of vile apologetics for Chomsky's defense of the Khmer Rouge, which I will not reiterate here; a full exposition of Chomsky's attempt to deny mass oppression and slaughter is detailed here; I invite you to reach your own conclusions regarding Wikipedia's seeming inability to look upon Chomsky with the same unrelenting critical gaze they praise in their sensei, even when the slaughter of millions is involved.

The post on the Sudan is much easier to deal with, since (as with the Afghani "genocide" that never happened, which, by the way, the WikiChomskyites don't even bother to mention) it was pure fantasy on Chomsky's part, a fact of which Chomsky, if not his amen corner, is no doubt well aware. The ameners give us this fascinating piece of self-serving drivel to compensate for Chomsky's asinine and obvious lies:

On 16 January 2002, Suzy Hansen of Salon.com telephoned Chomsky and conducted an interview [5] in which he said "That one bombing, according to the estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands of deaths", thus accidentally implying that Human Rights Watch had put a number on it. This led to Carroll Bogert, communications director of Human Rights Watch, writing to Salon.com to deny they had made an estimate.

In subsequent clarifications made in an article on Salon.com [6] and elsewhere, Chomsky has asserted that any ambiguity in a "telephone interview [which] does not have quotes, details or footnotes" is easily cleared up by "turn[ing] to what is in print".

In fact, there is no ambiguity in this case at all, nor did Chomsky "imply" anything; he stated quite clearly that Human Rights Watch had made an estimate they did not make, and did so for the express purpose of lending illegitimate rhetorical weight to an obvious falsehood. I advise you to read Chomsky's response, which is linked herein; its a fascinating piece of intellectual evasion and dishonesty; Chomsky essentially throws a stack of references at the reader and hopes that no one will notice that he doesn't even deny the fact that he was wrong in citing Human Rights Watch for an estimate that never existed. This is fairly typical of Chomsky's method of argument: intone a bunch of impressive sounding balderdash and pray people will be so intimidated that no one notices you're talking nonsense. Its a fairly debased form of intellectual bullying and typical of the fundamental bad faith which Chomsky employs as his primary method of argument. His acolytes at Wikipedia seem to suffer from the same contempt for their readers' intelligence, since they quite openly provide the links to the evidence that disproves their craven apologia, apparently in the hopes that we wont be smart enough to figure it out for ourselves. Of course, its all in a good cause:

Noam Chomsky has quoted these three sources more than once when making comparisons between these attacks and the attacks on New York on 11th September 2001, arguing (in a reductio ad absurdum) that if the US had the right to bomb Afghanistan in retaliation for the latter attack, then "Sudan [would have] every right to carry out massive terror [against America] in retaliation" for the attack in Khartoum.

One thinks that, in a purportedly honest overview of anti-Chomsky criticism, the WikiChomskyites might have deigned to quote Paul Berman's extensive critique of Chomsky's reductio ad absurdum (and absurd is right) from Terror and Liberalism, in which he pointed out the absurd amorality of Chomsky's comparison, since the collateral damage from the 9/11 attacks was infinitely more massive than the Sudan attack, considering its impact on the American and world economy and its enormous political ramifications, and considering the blatantly obvious fact that the mass death Chomsky attributed to the attack never occurred. More than can be hoped for, apparently; we must be satisfied with the assurances of the wise men at Wikipedia that Berman's critique does not exist. Nor, apparently, does Christopher Hitchens' widely read criticism of Chomsky's equation of Sudan and Afghanistan.

The Chomskyites then turn to slandering David Horowitz, a favorite pastime on the Left, since there is nothing more dangerous to the totalitarian than people who dare to think beyond the proscribed limits of their ideological sureties. The authors manage to pack more lies and evasions than one would think possible into two short paragraphs:

Right wing author David Horowitz is one of Chomsky's more vocal critics. He has described Chomsky as the "Ayatollah of Anti-American Hate" and "the most treacherous intellect in America" claiming Chomsky has "one message alone: America is the Great Satan" [8]. However, while Horowitz claims "It would be easy to demonstrate how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has written the facts are twisted" he feels "there really is no need" and notably has not done so, leaving few claims to refute.

Chomsky has not responded in detail to Horowitz's allegations, stating in an interview that "I haven't read Horowitz. I didn't read him when he was a Stalinist and I don't read him today." [9] This response has in turn been disputed by Horowitz, who argues he was never in fact a Stalinist and that Chomsky has in fact read and analyzed his writings in the past [10]. However, in a Guardian article, a Ramparts Magazine writer describes Horowitz as an ex-Stalinist [11]. In a National Review article, Horowitz is mentioned as a former Stalinist [12].

Nearly every sentence in this ridiculous menage is either a distortion or an outright lie. The claim that Horowitz has not issued detailed critiques of Chomsky's writings is patent balderdash; he has published several articles (which can be found here) attacking specific writings of Chomsky's in detail and has edited a recent book, The Anti-Chomsky Reader, which contains similar criticisms by himself and a collection of other authors. This is typical of Chomsky's defenders: pretend his critics are shallow and ill-informed and cannot hope to pierce the carefully researched and objective findings of the great mind that is Chomsky; should detailed and in-depth criticism be found, they simply act as if it doesn't exist. This is intellectually shameful, and, while typical of Chomskyites, is something any self-respecting person capable of independent thought would find beneath contempt, whatever their ideology.

As for Horowitz being a Stalinist, this is also typical, and bespeaks the intellectual weightlessness the disciples seem to have inherited from the master. Put simply, anyone who knows anything about the history of the New Left would know that Horowitz was never a Stalinist and that both he and the entire movement he had a hand in founding were consciously anti-Stalinist from their beginnings (though by no means anti-totalitarian). The claim that Chomsky never read Horowitz is also obviously ridiculous, as can be gleaned by reading any of Chomsky's writings on the Cold War, which are little more than iterations of the historiography put forward by Horowitz in his revisionist history, The Free World Colossus. Considering the fact that Horowitz also published articles by Chomsky in Ramparts and that Horowitz was a hero of the New Left before Chomsky even got into the game would seem to indicate that the WikiChomskyites are asking us to believe that Chomsky (who, by their own assertion, is superhumanly well informed) never bothered to read the writings of a man who was one of the intellectual luminaries of the New Left, whose writings clearly influenced Chomsky's own work, and who edited Chomsky's writings for publication. If you buy that, of course, you're well on the way to the dream palace of the Chomskyites, at which these sycophants have clearly long since arrived.

The question of anti-semitism, of course, arises, as it must when discussing Chomsky's longtime hostility towards Jews and Judaism, but any hopes for elementary honesty and fairness are summarily dashed upon arrival:

Chomsky was also [sic] involved in a high-profile controversy over an essay he wrote in defense of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson's freedom of speech, which was then used as the introduction to a book by Faurisson. Chomsky's defense of Faurisson was rooted in his support for civil liberties, even for those he feels are guilty of "war crimes," and mirrors the position advocated by civil liberties organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union. On various occasions, usually resulting from the Faurisson affair and his criticism of Israeli politics, Chomsky has also been accused of supporting anti-Semitism, notably in Werner Cohn's book "Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers" (ISBN 0964589702) [13]. Chomsky has replied once to Werner Cohn's allegations, calling him "a pathological liar" [14].

Like most of Chomsky's defenders, and Chomsky himself, the WikiChomskyites refuse to confront the actual controversy in the Faurisson affair, which was never freedom of speech, but rather a petition that Chomsky signed in support of Faurisson which put the word "Holocaust" in scare quotes, and attempted to portray Faurisson as a legitimate, qualified historian and a political moderate (he was neither). When a great many critics (including many from the French Left, not a group noted for anti-Chomskyite attitudes) found this act morally appalling, which it most certainly was, Chomsky, in typical fashion, dashed off an essay on the subject of free speech, which had nothing to do with the issue at hand, which was Chomsky's own moral and intellectual bankruptcy and his refusal to recognize the reprehensible nature of his actions regarding Faurisson (it is worth noting that there were other petitions circulating which concentrated on the free speech issue while acknowledging the immorality of Holocaust denial, which Chomsky did not sign). As per usual, Chomsky salved his own ego and sated his acolytes by blubbering irrelevant nonsense combined with a few self-serving pieties and petty character assassination against better and smarter men than himself; such is sufficient, apparently, to satisfy Wikipedia's insatiable desire for the open-source truth.

As for Werner Cohn, I invite everyone to read his book, which is better documented than any of Chomsky's, and which is corroborated by Pierre Vidal-Naquet's excellent Assassins of Memory (Vidal-Naquet's devastating condemnation of Chomsky's actions in the Faurisson affair is easily linked to on line at http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet81b/, something the WikiChomskyites, in their infinite dedication to free speech and intellectual honesty, appear to have missed) and Alain Finkielkraut's The Future of a Negation, and make up your own minds. The Chomskyites have apparently found Chomsky's "pathological liar" slander (and he ought to know) to be the last word on the subject. Perfectly understandable, of course, since to conclude otherwise, or to allow access to the information which would allow others to conclude otherwise, is indeed a frightening prospect for people whose purpose is not to inform, but to manipulate and control.

Nor, I would note, do the writers bother to cite Chomsky's many anti-Jewish and anti-semitic statements, such as his claim that Judaism teaches genocide, or his recent statements to the effect that Jews are "the most privileged part of the population", who only raise the issue of anti-semitism because "privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control"; statements which would appear to any thinking person as familiar invocations of some of the most vulgar and debased myths of anti-semitic ideology.

All in all, this page has to rank as one of the shoddiest and fundamentally dishonest pieces of pseudo-scholarship I've ever seen in my young life. Fortunately, Wikipedia can be publicly edited, so I invite anyone interested to add their own thoughts to the piece; they will be summarily erased in short order, but at least it will give the censorious minions a no doubt much needed workout.

A Very Anti-Chomskyite New Year

Just wanted to wish you all a happy new year and to thank you for the support you've given me and this blog over the past months. My apologies for not posting recently, but I'm working on a short novel at the moment which unfortunately is consuming most of my writing energy. I will endeavor to pick up the pace. Best wishes to all.

On Cinema, Again

I've posted a few thoughts on Sergio Leone's gangster film Once Upon a Time in America over at the non-Chomsky blog. Not really a review, more of a short essay. If you're interested, enjoy.

To Everyone on the Mailing List

I've just experienced a small computer meltdown, which -- thank God -- did not wipe out my hardrive but did destroy my Outlook address book, for which, me being the lazy computer illiterate that I am, I had no backup. Anyone who was on the mailing list for blog updates -- or would like to be on it -- send your email address to me at benjaminkerstein@hotmail.com and I'll put you back on. Thanks.

Amritas Returns

In a most welcome development, anti-Chomskyite linguist Amritas has returned to the service of the cause. Go check out his site, he was in the counterrevolutionary business before any of us.

Another Chomskyite Shuffles Off the Stage

This surprisingly less than biased article in the NY Times informed me today of a happy occasion: the retirement of PBS pseudo-journalist/guru Bill Moyers. Although it does make the mistake of calling Moyers a progressive (he isn't, he's an anti-capitalist authoritarian reactionary), it does manage to give something resembling equal time to some of Moyers's detractors, which, for the NY Times, is no mean thing. Well worth reading.

As for my own thoughts regarding Moyers (and don't take my word for it, Laurence Jarvik's book PBS: Behind the Screen has an excellent, and somewhat frightening, chapter-length deconstruction of Moyers's long and disgraceful career) I should say that I speak as someone who grew up in Boston, a community where Moyers was considered to be a figure somewhere between Ghandi and JFK in the pantheon of beautiful souls; I have seen Moyers-worship up close, and it has only served to confirm my belief that Moyers was the American media's foremost Chomskyite, and we can only view both his growing irrelevance -- which has served more than anything else to drive him off the egomaniacal deep end -- and imminent retirement from the stage as a victory for the anti-Chomskyite cause.

Moyers, in his ideology and the conduct of his career was the very picture of the Chomskyite in action; he was enraptured with the picture of his own moral and intellectual righteousness; he demonized and slandered those of whom he disapproved in the most hysterically vicious terms while still maintaining a self-image of injured morality; he routinely lied, distorted, covered up and omitted in his desire to control the information available to his viewers in order to swing them to his ideological control; he was completely incapable of viewing his political opponents as anything other than agents of apocalyptic evil and corruption; he engaged in relentless apologetics for terrorism, tyranny and anti-semitism; he refused to recognize communism or radical Islam and America's battle against them as anything other than symptoms of the evil hardwired into the system of capitalism and the just desserts of the United States as capitalism's foremost practical manifestation; he claimed to be a populist spokeman for the downtrodden when in fact he was the scion of a tiny elite which despises ordinary Americans and has nothing but contempt for their beliefs and opinions.

But more than this, he also was the very manifestation of that uniquely Chomskyite quality of eruptive, uncomprehending hypocrisy. He denounced corruption and cronyism in the relationship between business and government, yet he was the very epitome of it, making millions of dollars on the backs of American tax payers due to his extensive connections in the small clique of public television; he derided racism and yet refused to deal with the anti-semitic attitudes of interviewees like Joseph Campbell, Edward Said, and Chomsky himself; he claimed to support rational and intelligent discourse, yet aggrandized faith healing and routinely engaged in vicious namecalling rather than debate; he denounced secrecy in government and business and yet refuses to this day to disclose the details of his business dealings; even in his final moments onscreen, he ranted and raged against the conservative media as an imminent threat to democracy, with no seeming comprehension of the fact that he himself has been the most flagrantly ideological journalist of the last quarter century.

Moyers was to television what Chomsky is to the world of political writing: a debased and fanatical authoritarian paranoic with no capacity for self-examination, self-criticism, or even the basic humanity necessary required to admit that your opponents may not, in fact, be demonically, apocalyptically evil. He corrupted his profession, his medium, and his viewers, and in so doing flagrantly exploited the many hardworking Americans who were forced by their government to make him rich. He will no doubt, as Chomsky has been, be privy to much attention and accolade in these waning days of his career, but we may take comfort in the fact that as both of these monuments to intellectual venality fade away, they do so raving and seething at the world which is now swiftly, and thankfully, leaving them behind.

On the Front Page, Part IV

Thanks again to the uber anti-Chomskyites at FrontPageMag for publishing (slightly altered) my piece on Chomsky's take on the election.

A Small (anti-Chomskyite) Victory

Leftist anti-Chomskyite Paul Berman - who also happens to be one of my favorite writers - has written a wonderful short article celebrating the release of Raul Rivero, a dissident Cuban poet, from Castro's gulag. Berman believes it to be a very heartening and possibly portentious victory against one of the world's most brutal and oppressive dictatorships; and one, it should never be forgotten, for which Chomsky and his disciples have carried the torch for over forty years. Apparently, no less an expert in toppling totalitarianisms than Vaclav Havel - who Chomsky has rather unceremoniously assaulted in recent years, Chomsky's fearful contempt for genuine dissidents, whose very existence makes farce out of his own claims to the title, being well known - is optimistic on the possibility of Cuban freedom, lets hope he's right.

History's Landlord

Noam Chomsky, who can't seem to decide if he wants to praise or bury the Rais, has expended a fair amount of Al-Ahram’s presumably precious space in order to comment on the media/cultural conception of Yasser Arafat in the United States, with unsurprising results. It is always fascinating to hear a lifelong falsifier of history spending so much time and energy seeing the mote in his neighbor’s eye; but we must accept that the “ownership of history”, as he puts it in classic Stalinist terminology, is important to Chomsky, as it is to all totalitarians, and thus ought to read his eulogy and its attendant - and inevitable - digressions with a certain interest, since we are seeing as much a statement of intentions and principles are we are a lamentation for a palsied thug in a rented uniform.

We receive, before we even get to Arafat, a clear missive from on high as to exactly who is in charge here:

The fundamental principle is that "we are good" -- "we" being the state we serve -- and what "we" do is dedicated to the highest principles, though there may be errors in practice.

Chomsky then proceeds into a paragraph long, largely incoherent rant about the Vietnam War, which is completely out of context and totally unnecessary, except, of course, for a Chomskyite, and then it is completely understandable. For what it is, in fact, is an opening benediction, an acknowledgement that we will all now consent to the same mutual catechism. Chomsky the high priest is elucidating for us what is acceptable and what is not, what is history and what is not, what is true and what is not; and, as I have mentioned numerous times before, what is acceptable, historical and true is, quite resolutely, “owned” by Noam Chomsky. There is no mention, of course, of the nature of the Vietnamese government, or the million apparently unimportant human lives it extinguished – no doubt collaborators with US imperialism – or the fact that Vietnam was, in fact, a fully justified – and legal – war against the most oppressive and murderous form of government ever devised by man, a form of government for which Chomsky has been an unrelentingly bloodthirsty advocate and apologist for decades. Such facts, truths, “history”, one might even call them, are quite resolutely unincluded in Chomsky’s benediction, as well they might not be, since to acknowledge them would be to acknowledge the possibility of heresy, and no high priest can ever tolerate such offenses against the faith. It does not improve from here.

Chomsky’s historiography regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict is, per usual, as relentlessly ahistorical as humanly possible, and not at all difficult to analyze, since its themes are consistant throughout: the Arabs are always seeking peace, Israel is always rejecting it out of its relentless expansionism - and racism, of course, where would we be without racism? - and the United States is, naturally, the chief villain behind it all. Complexity is, of course, what makes history difficult, and history – or difficulty for that matter – is most decidedly what the good professor wishes here to avoid. I have dealt with the details of Chomsky’s relentless falsifications before and I will not enter into them again in detail. However, I feel I must once again point out a few of Chomsky’s most egregious lies:

Let's turn to the second example: Sadat's reaching out to Israelis and thereby gaining the Sinai in 1979, a lesson to the bad Arafat. Turning to unacceptable history, in February 1971 Sadat offered a full peace treaty to Israel, in accord with then- official US policy -- specifically, Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai -- with scarcely even a gesture to Palestinian rights.

In fact, Sadat did not offer anything, he demanded an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai as a pretext to any negotiations with no guarantee of a treaty or even recognition at the end of them (keep in mind that Egypt, at this point, did not even recognize Israel’s existence); in other words, it was a non-offer offer, and one which no country would have accepted under such circumstances.

Turning to unacceptable history, during the year prior to the Israeli invasion the PLO adhered to a US-brokered peace arrangement, while Israel conducted many murderous attacks in south Lebanon in an effort to elicit some Palestinian reaction that could be used as a pretext for the planned invasion. When none materialised, they invented a pretext and invaded, killing perhaps 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, thanks to US vetoes of Security Council resolutions calling for ceasefire and withdrawal. The Sabra-Chatilla massacre was a footnote at the end. The goal that was stated very clearly by the highest political and military echelons, and by Israeli scholarship and analysis, was to put an end to the increasingly irritating Arafat initiatives towards diplomatic settlement and to secure Israel's control over the occupied territories.

In fact, as any reader can find out from a piece of "acceptable history" – as in researched, competent, and not created for the purposes of salving the egomania of fanatical pseudo-prophets – called Israel’s Lebanon War, by Zev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, the Lebanon War was the product of the Lebanese Civil War and its effect on the longtime alliance between Israel and Lebanon’s Maronite Christians, who had been subjected to a brutal campaign of occupation and ethnic cleansing at the hands of the PLO and their Muslim neighbors, particularly Syria, which has always had imperial designs on Lebanon and does not recognize its sovereignty. The “pretext”, as Chomsky calls it, for the invasion, was not "invented"; it was the very real assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador to England, which left the man permanently disabled, by Palestinian terrorists. The larger pretext for the war was the growing PLO mini-state in South Lebanon which was metamorphizing under Soviet tutalage and funding into a conventional armed force which any country would find unacceptable sitting on its borders. It was clear that the "peace arrangement", as Chomsky calls it, which was in reality an informal ceasefire, could not hold and was not intended to hold, but rather was being exploited by Arafat to buy time to consolidate his new army and eventually resume the war. This was, at any rate, the Israeli analysis, and a hardly unreasonable one considering the brutal campaign of mass murder undertaken by Arafat in Lebanon to consolidate his power and the long campaign of PLO terror attacks on Israel's Northern border, which had caused strategic destabilization, mass flight from population centers and substantial economic damage. Unlike tenured charlatans, military and political leaders have to make decisions in which the lives of their citizens are at stake and Israel’s leaders felt that a PLO army on its Northern border was an unacceptable risk and acted accordingly. As for the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, Israel did not commit it, nor allow it to be committed, nor desire for it to be committed; the killings - committed by the Maronite Phalange militia - were of a piece with a long and bloody mosaic of tit for tat massacres between Christians, Muslims, and Palestinians that had marked the Lebanon Civil War as one of the most brutal in modern history. To make mention of the massacre – as so many do – without this context is to engage in ghoulish exploitation for the sake of scoring political points; nothing unusual, of course, for Noam Chomsky, although we can happily note that, in this case at least, he acknowledges that this particular mass murder actually happened. As for “Israeli scholarship and analysis”, the Lebanon War is still highly controversial, and no such consensus as Chomsky describes regarding the origins, intentions, and outcomes of that war exists. Chomsky has a nasty habit of making definitive claims on subjects about which he knows nothing, such as politics, history, and anything to do with the Israel-Arab conflict. He should stick to linguistics.

Meanwhile the NYT refused -- the word is accurate -- to publish the fact that through the 1980s, Arafat was calling for negotiations which Israel rejected. The Israeli mainstream press would run headlines about Arafat's call for direct negotiations with Israel, rejected by Shimon Peres on the basis of his doctrine that Arafat's PLO "cannot be a partner to negotiations".

Chomsky here is involved in the fairly standard practice of Palestinian apologists, i.e. pretending that Palestinian nationalist ideology does not exist. Until the Oslo Process, the PLO did not and would not acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, nor amend its stipulaton that Zionism was a form of imperialism, that the Jewish state was racist and had to be destroyed, or that, after this destruction, all post-1948 Jewish immigrants would be expelled - i.e. ethnically cleansed - from the country. Nor would the PLO renounce terrorism or cease its attempts to use terrorism (witness the Achille Lauro atrocity). Thus, Israel concluded that peace gestures from Arafat were merely a tactic, in keeping with his own “Plan of Phases”, a post-Yom Kippur War plan which involved using negotiations as a prerequisite to resuming the armed struggle; a plan which, it now appears, Arafat was in fact following throughout the ‘90s. This impasse between the two sides ended, or appeared to end, during the Oslo process, when the PLO at least verbally acknowledged Israel's right to exist; which is why Israel, under pressure to end the riots and general mayhem of the first intifada, agreed to negotiate with the PLO at that point, a risk which now seems to have proved a massive blunder. Perhaps Israel should never have allowed international pressure and internal manipulation from its own extreme Left to foist Arafat upon us, although at the time it seemed worth taking the chance. There is more than enough blame to go around for this, but it was a miscalculation, not a sinister attempt at manipulation, as Chomsky would have us believe.

Miller carries the story on in the same vein, leading to the standard denouement: at Camp David, Arafat "walked away" from the magnanimous Clinton-Barak offer of peace, and even afterwards refused to join Barak in accepting Clinton's December 2000 "parameters", thus proving conclusively that he insists on violence, a depressing truth with which the peace-loving states, the US and Israel, must somehow come to terms.

Turning to actual history, the Camp David proposals divided the West Bank into virtually separated cantons, and could not possibly be accepted by any Palestinian leader. That is evident from a look at the maps that were easily available, but not in the NYT, or apparently anywhere in the US mainstream, perhaps for that reason. After the collapse of these negotiations, Clinton recognised that Arafat's reservations made sense, as demonstrated by the famous "parameters", which, though vague, went much further towards a possible settlement -- thus undermining the official story, but that's only logic, therefore as unacceptable as history. Clinton gave his own version of the reaction to his "parameters" in a talk to the Israeli Policy Forum on 7 January 2001: "Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations..."

This is quite simply a pack of outright lies. Although negotiations broke down before borders were finalized, the offer on the table at Camp David included a continguous Palestinian state, with shared soveriegnty over Jerusalem, that would be connected to Gaza by means of an elevated highway. Chomsky’s claims in this regard are merely echoes of the standard Palestinian propaganda line – as is typical, during the Cold War he routinely cited pro-communist propaganda as though it was objective reportage – and have no basis in the realities of the negotiations whatsoever. Of course, this is to be expected, since to acknowledge the reality of what was offered would be to acknowledge the reality of what was turned down, and would not only destroy the sacred cow of eternal Palestinian innocence, but would also collapse Chomsky’s fervid and desperate indictment of Israel and his own country, with dire consequences indeed for a man so dedicated to his own capacity for rhetorical violence and moral obfuscation.

The statement is interesting from several points of view. The linkage reveals, once again, the obligatory visceral hatred of Castro. There have been shifting pretexts as circumstances changed, but no information to question the conclusions of US intelligence in the early days of Washington's terrorist attacks and economic warfare against Cuba: the basic problem is his "successful defiance" of US policies going back to the Monroe Doctrine. But there is an element of truth in the portrayal of Arafat in the Globe think-piece, as there would have been in a front-page report during the imperial ceremonies for the semi-divine Reagan, describing him as one of the iconic group of mass murderers -- from Hitler to Idi Amin to Peres -- who slaughtered with abandon and with strong support from media and intellectuals. Those who do not comprehend the analogy have some history to learn.

I suppose there is no point in citing the real reason for Washington’s opposition to Castro – his communist ideology and former status as a Soviet military pawn and imperial underling, as well as his distinction of being one of the most murderous and oppressive dictators in the world – nor the unintentional hilarity of jumping from Castro to Arafat to Reagan without saying anything meaningful about any of them, nor the moral and intellectual bankruptcy inherent in placing Reagan and Peres in the same arena as Hitler, since such calculated dissonance - perhaps stupidity is a more accurate term - is typical of Chomsky, who has always been far more fixated on his own childish resentments than upon genuine analysis. But I digress, since, having learned some history, I can safely say that, on the subject of mass murder at least, Chomsky does have some expertise, if only as an accessory after the fact.

The NYT published one major op-ed on the Arafat death, by Israeli historian Benny Morris. The essay deserves close analysis, but I'll put that aside here, and keep to just his first comment, which captures the tone: Arafat is a deceiver, Morris says, who speaks about peace and ending the occupation but really wants to "redeem Palestine". This demonstrates Arafat's irremediable savage nature.

Here Morris is revealing his contempt not only for Arabs (which is profound) but also for the readers of the NYT. He apparently assumes that they will not notice that he is borrowing the terrible phrase from Zionist ideology. Its core principle for over a century has been to "redeem The Land", a principle that lies behind what Morris recognises to be a central concept of the Zionist movement: "transfer" of the indigenous population, that is, expulsion, to "redeem The Land" for its true owners. There seems to be no need to spell out the conclusions.

Typically, threatened by the opinions and conclusions of real historians – as in, people who do actual research on primary documents and can footnote a book with references to someone other than themselves – Chomsky resorts to slander rather than real evidence. As a former student of Professor Morris, I can testify that the only thing for which he has “profound contempt” is the Palestinian nationalist movement, on which he has done extensive study, and which he considers congenitally irredentionist, violent, uncompromising, totalitarian, and dangerously prone to blaming all its missteps on outside machinations rather than engage in self criticism; a perfectly reasonable and, in my opinion, accurate, assessment. It is my belief that Chomsky’s lies regarding Morris are gleaned from Ilan Pappe, a Chomskyite Israeli historian who, upon receiving a devastating review by Morris of one of his recent books, promptly, in classic Chomskyite fashion, chose to call Morris a racist rather than defend his work, since, in equally classic Chomskyite fashion, his work was indefensible. Of course, Morris’s personal opinions are irrelevant, since I doubt Chomsky has ever met Morris, and such claims can only be based on hearsay in any case; so the issue is whether contempt for Arabs exists in any of Morris's texts. Having read all but one of Morris’s books, I can testify to this as well: it does not. In fact, in Morris’s earlier work – during his post-Zionist heyday as the darling of the "New Historians", leftist Israelis who rewrote Israeli history to fit their ideology – there is a great deal more contempt for Israel itself, and especially the 1950s and '60s Labor Party elite, than for anybody else. One also wonders at Chomsky’s capacity for projection, since contempt, and outright racism for that matter, towards Jews – as well as his patronizing, Eurocentric, Rousseauvian fetishization of the Third Worlders he claims to support, which is undoubtedly a form of contempt – is one of the outstanding constants of his work and has been for decades.

Morris is identified as an Israeli academic, author of the recent book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. That is correct. He has also done the most extensive work on the Israeli archives, demonstrating in considerable detail the savagery of the 1948- 9 Israeli operations that led to "transfer" of the large majority of the population from what became Israel, including the part of the UN- designated Palestine state that Israel took over, dividing it about 50- 50 with its Jordanian partner. Morris is critical of the atrocities and "ethnic cleansing" (in more precise translation, "ethnic purification"): namely, it did not go far enough. Ben-Gurion's great error, Morris feels, perhaps a "fatal mistake", was not to have "cleaned the whole country -- the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River".

To Israel's credit, his stand on this matter has been bitterly condemned. In Israel. In the US he is the appropriate choice for the major commentary on his reviled enemy.

In fact, Morris has not been “bitterly condemned”, as opposed to the dream castle of the Chomskyites, Israel is a free society where opinions are debated and not condemned. Moreover, Chomsky’s claim that Morris’s opinions regarding transfer are born out of his fealty to the “terrible” ideology of redemption of the Land is simply a total fabrication (unless Chomsky is, in fact, largely ignorant of Morris’s work, which is certainly a strong possibility). In fact, Morris’s position is the opposite of what Chomsky claims it is. Morris believes that the events of ’48 became inevitable because of the refusal of the Arabs to accept the principle of partition as the Zionist Movement did. In other words, the war was caused not by Zionist lust for the redemption of the land, but by Arab unwillingness to give up at least a part of their territorial maximalism, and, on top of that, choosing a war of annihilation against the Jewish residents of then-Palestine as the alternative, thus leaving the Jews with no moral or practical alternative then to answer with all the means at their disposal, including expulsion. Thus, Morris believes that the events of ’48 occurred not because of Zionist territorial ambitions, but in spite of the willingness of the Zionist movement to compromise on those very ambitions and the refusal of the Arab side to reciprocate. Nor does Morris’s lament the fact that Ben-Gurion did not “finish the job”; he merely states that, if one assesses the Arab rejection of Jewish nationhood as an inevitable and likely indefinitely ongoing phenomenon, one is confronted with the question of what is more moral: to relent from a total expulsion and thus leave the problem unresolved with perhaps fatal consequences or commit a complete expulsion and perhaps thus ensure stability and peace for all concerned through greater suffering in the short term. A brutal equation, no doubt, but an honest one, and one born, it must be remembered, out of a distinctly bloody and cruel historical situation. In my opinion, whatever one thinks of his theories, Morris deserves credit for his desire to confront difficult, if not impossible, moral questions in all their complexity, and not to engage in shallow slander and vicious negation in the hopes of reaching simple and demagogic conclusions where none are possible; something which has always been beyond the capabilities of Noam Chomsky.

Of course, regarding Chomsky's central theme, his assault on the American media, it is superfluous to point out the fact that the media coverage of Arafat's death was, for the most part, scrupulously deferential to the rais, going so far as to refrain from even a mention of his numerous victims, paticularly when said victims happened to be Jews. As for Arafat's political failures and the nastier details of his ideology, these are matters of fact, and to ignore them in favor of yet another frenzied indictment of Israel and the US would have been difficult even for the most liberal of journalists - although some certainly gave the task their level best. If there is a general consensus among the mainstream media elite, it seems to be that Arafat was a successful terrorist and a failed stateman; something which no doubt vexes Chomsky, since, as a Palestinian nationalist whose ideology seems to lie somewhere to the right of Hamas, he no doubt disapproves of Arafat's failure to push the Jews into the sea, but this hardly warrents a sputtering and largely confused lecture on history as real estate.

But in the end, what we are dealing with here is not a debate over the ownership of history, but a violent, and fairly juvenile, tantrum from a man who is, first and foremost, incensed at the world's failure to acknowledge his own genius. Who are you? he is asking. Who are you not to acknowledge my ownership of history? Who are you not to acknowledge my obvious intellectual and moral supremacy? We are privileged to witness a form of intellectual narcissicism so profound that it renders its victim unable to understand how anyone would dare to rise up against his divine truths, and how anyone finds the courage not to defer to the blinding light of his revelation. We are witnessing what happens when the smartest kid in his kindergarten class never grows up; nothing more or less, in fact, than a classic example of the authoritarian personality as it manifests itself in the intellectual, and one must stop and wonder at the potentialities inherent in a man who believes that he, and he alone, is the true owner of history.

Thanks to the good folks at Blue Octavo Notebooks for the link.

Some Elementary Asininities on the Recent Election From the Pen of the Good Professor

While sitting here listening to the extraordinary soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's equally extraordinary film Barry Lyndon (if any of you haven't seen it, do; then see everything else by Kubrick you can get your hands on) I checked out this link to Chomsky's new blog, sent to me by an erstwhile fellow anti-Chomskyite. While its still unclear to me that Chomsky actually writes it - at least, its no more clear to me than if Chomsky actually writes his own books - I think its worth wading into a few of the good professor's ruminations on the recent election.

The Chomsky-approved bio refers to him as a "critic of US foreign policy, anti-capitalist, and long time advocate of liberation and justice"; while I wouldn't use a dignified term such as "criticism" to describe what Chomsky is engaged in, we can at least thank him for acknowledging with some clarity that he is resolutely opposed to economic liberty. As for being a "long time advocate of liberation and justice" we can rest assured that such sentiments apply only to tenured linguistics professors and not, say, to Vietnamese or Cuban citizens, or, for that matter, to anyone else living under an authoritarian socialist government. Frankly, I don't understand why the ZNet people didn't refer to him as a "long time advocate of kissing baby seals and being nice to your mother", at least that would have removed the unseemly pretense of objectivity. One would think that such self-styled free thinkers would have the wherewithal to mind Orwell's maxim that all saints ought to be judged guilty until proved innocent; but perhaps such sentiments are purely anti-Chomskyite in nature.

(Incidentally, being from Massachusetts, I can safely testify that Lexington is a very wealthy upper middle-class suburb of Boston where no genuine anarchist would deign to hang his hat. But, of course, Chomsky has always been the most resolutely bourgeoise of radicals.)

Chomsky's take on the election is more or less a restatement of various talking points he's employed for years, but these recurrent themes have a significance of their own, if only because their constant repetition indicates their intrinsic value to the Chomskyite worldview. Needless to say, our erstwhile critic is not happy with the election outcome:

The outcome was a disappointment, but there have been disappointments before. Take 1984, when essentially the same gang of thugs—a little less tilted to the extreme reactionary statist side—won by a 2-1 margin, with about the same percentage of the electoral vote as today. And they were engaged in horrendous atrocities abroad and very harsh and destructive programs for most of the population at home. The world didn’t come to an end. In fact, activism proved quite effective.

Chomsky's obsession with Ronald Reagan is an odd one, though only in its extreme rhetorical violence, since it is understandable that the man who brought about the final historical discrediting and collapse of authoritarian socialism should arouse the ire of one of its foremost advocates. Nor is the objective failure of Chomskyite ideology to obtain the loyalty of anything resembling a majority of the electorate - or, in this election, even a fringe element; I think Nader polled under 1%, indicating that he has indeed, in every way, become Pat Buchanan's heir - via democratic means any easier to fathom for a man so resolutely convinced of his own powers of prophetic rectitude. As for the "horrendous atrocities" and "harsh and destructive programs" we can only assume - since Chomsky, per usual, refuses to give specifics to his slanders - that he means the efforts of the Reagan administration to resist authoritarian socialism abroad and the hugely successful campaign to revitalize American capitalism and economic liberty at home. Since these efforts were overwhelmingly approved by the American electorate in the most massive electoral victory in history (not, as Chomsky claims, by the same percentage as this years more narrow, but still decisive, Republican victory) and proved immensely successful at regenerating the vital forces of American society, and, indeed, led directly to the preeminent economic, political, and military position of the United States in the world today; it is hardly surprising that such a perfect storm of rejection by the great unwashed and by the tide of history itself should turn Chomsky to spasms of apoplectic rage. Rage, however, is not truth; a lesson Chomsky ought to have learned a long time ago.

I don’t think that the Kerry campaign even tried to include the opinions of most of the population, including those who voted for Kerry. People will vote their class interests when they see some credible political force that might represent those interests. That’s not Kerry or the DLC. There are urban-rural differences, but even greater differences internal to each. We can reach out to people, urban or rural, by taking them and their concerns seriously, trying to understand them, and working to find ways to realize legitimate concerns, without compromising our own principles. The same way we work in, say, liberal academic communities, where there is also vast diversity.

The lack of understanding and knowledge of the American political system on display here is rather stunning, and deserves a sustained commentary. Of course, vulgar Marxism aside, most Americans do not vote along class lines. Unlike Europe, American elections are generally decided by regional and ethnic loyalties rather than by class or ideological interests; a fact born out by the famous "red state vs. blue state" map, which clearly shows the country divided by regional blocs. The Democratic and Republican parties represent these competing geographical-ethnic blocs quite well and with fairly uncanny accuracy. The urban-rural divide is clearly a piece of this puzzle, but only a piece. In the previous election, it is clear that differences about social values, morality, religion, and, especially, security and foreign policy had the most decisive impact on voting patterns and the difference between the two parties was eminently clear on these issues, despite John Kerry's seemingly uncanny talents for equivocation. The motivations of the American electorate are more complex than simple class interests and I do not believe this is a vice, there is more to human beings than their material desires, something Chomsky and his ilk seem congenitally incapable of understanding.

Incidentally, Kerry and the DLC were not connected (Chomsky's reference is vague, but he seems to be implying one) in fact, they were largely ideologically opposed and the DLC is, rightly, seen as "Clintonista" held territory. Some have theorized that the Clinton faction was more interested in a Kerry defeat than a victory, in order to clear the way for Hillary's inevitable 2008 bid for the presidency; I am not a Clinton hater, but I think this theory has some weight to it.

As for the "vast diversity" of liberal academic communities, I can only say, to quote Ghandi on Western civilization, that it sounds like an excellent idea. I have long felt that most academic leftists desire to turn the entire country into a reflection of their totalitarian fiefdoms; its nice to have one's suspicions confirmed.

The election had about the significance of tossing a coin to pick a king. If the coin was slightly biased, that’s unfair, but not the main issue. The much more important point is that the opinions of the majority of the population were excluded from the political arena on major issues. People voted for the imagery concocted by the PR industry. Exit polls reveal that clearly. But to discover whether the imagery is accurate, we have to compare people’s attitudes and beliefs with the actual programs. There’s plenty of interesting and credible evidence on this, and when we investigate it, we discover that people were hopelessly misled. Voters for both candidates assumed, overwhelmingly, that the candidates held their views, which is demonstrably false. In fact, voters recognized that they could not vote on agenda/policies/programs/ideas—about 10% gave that as their reasons—but only on imagery. And in a society based crucially on deceit (what is advertising?), it is quite natural that the political managers and the PR industry will run elections the same way. To repeat, there is overwhelming evidence that the opinions of the majority of the population on major issues were simply off the agenda, either within the political parties or in mainstream discussion, with rare exceptions. That democratic deficit seems to me far more important than the possibility that the coin that was tossed was biased.

As I have noted before, while Chomsky may not adopt the lifestyle of the anarchist tradition, he has nonetheless wholeheartedly adopted its studied contempt for representative democracy. One could put this down to a nasty case of overarticulated sour grapes, but I am more inclined to think that it indicates a deep-seated contempt for the institution itself, which, after all, grants to the average gas station attendant or certified public accountant the same weight in decision as self-regarded great minds like Noam Chomsky. The unmitigatedly galling experience of being transformed by the ballot box from a fervently worshipped guru to the desperately dissafected into just one of a hundred million slips of paper must be an intolerable experience for such a well-practiced narcissist as the good professor. Thus comes the desperate belief that the failure of the masses to heed the call of truth and liberation must be the result of conspiratorial "PR" manipulations and the blundering of the hopelessly misled. I don't know what exit polls Chomsky is referring to (perhaps the same ones which showed Kerry winning in a landslide), but facts are clearly not the issue here, what is the issue is that to accept the idea that the majority of the American people in fact voted in a convinced and reasonably well-informed manner would require at least some measure of acceptance and legitimation for one's ideological opposition, a thought akin to existential extermination for a confirmed fanatic whose life's work has been to construct a worldview into which no moderating force or opinion can possibly penetrate. This is no deficit of democracy, it is a deficit of character and ideology, and not merely Chomsky's, but one which has become the watchword of the entire radical Left under Chomskyite influence, and one which, through its contempt, if not its violence, is as much an enemy of democracy and the free society as any foreign tyrant or death-worshipping religious fascist.

Bush won slightly more than 30% of the electorate, Kerry slightly under 30%. I doubt that fraud had much to do with it. That’s about what I personally predicted, if that matters; am collecting some symbolic bets from friends, and even wrote about it a bit, on Znet. It is meaningless. It tells us virtually nothing about the country, just as it would tell us nothing if there had been a slight shift in votes and Kerry had won with a meaningless slight plurality...The progressive left is very substantial in scale, and could be far larger, including the large majority of the population, judging by highly credible public opinion studies that the press scarcely mentions, presumably because they understand that it is much too dangerous to allow people to understand that they are not alone in their views.

Presumably, Chomsky is trying to claim that the "electorate" also includes those who did not vote, since, of those who did vote, Bush won north of 51%. Not a landslide, but nonetheless a respectable win, especially in today's polarized political moment, and one which, combined with historically groundbreaking Republican wins in the Congress, cannot be regarding as anything other than an outright and indisputable victory. What we are really dealing with here is the myth of the silent Leftist majority. This trope has been a popular one among Chomskyites for years, but there is no evidence whatsoever that it exists. Most studies on the subject find that those who don't vote would likely vote along the same lines as those who do (though this is, admittedly, a difficult subject to quantify accurately) and considering the rather decisive regional and ethnic divisions in the country, this seems to be likely. Furthermore, the significance of the non-voter phenomenon itself is greatly exaggerated. In purely statistical terms, the percentage of voters is routinely diminished by the overwhelming number of young voters who do not turn out (I think in this election, despite the best efforts of the entertainment industry, whose influence I have always felt to be vastly overstated, only 10% of under-25s actually went to the polls). Once one breaks the threshold of the age of 30, the number of voters climbs precipitously until one reaches senior citizens, whose turnout is routinely massive. Thus, the issue of non-voting is not one of PR manipulation, or political non-representation, or the lack of viable alternatives, but simply one of age and maturity. Unfortunately for Chomsky, it appears that the further people are from the average age of his audience, the more they vote; unfortunate, perhaps, for him, and the source of much frustration, no doubt, but not entirely tragic for the future of the Republic.

What we are really seeing here, of course, is not so much a commentary on the recent election but yet another asinine display of Chomsky's hopelessly narcississtic contempt for democracy and the intellectual and moral capacities of his fellow citizens. He is unwilling to accept the possibility of a real and meaningful election or a real and meaningful democracy should it fail to enshrine his pseudo-prophetic blubberings into official policy. Thus the system which fails to enshrine becomes a farce and the people who fail to heed become easily manipulated dupes incapable of forming or expressing their own opinions and values through a representative system. I have noted before the ominous origins and even more ominous potentialities of such an ideology, and the fact that it is swiftly gaining ground in the war of ideas among our intellectual elite. It may be, as Alain Finkielkraut was once quieried, that the anti-totalitarian era is over as quickly as it began. If so, it does not bode well for the future of the free society, or, for that matter, for criticism, liberation, or justice.

To Bury the Rais and Not to Praise Him

I find myself in the odd situation of not knowing what to say about the somewhat anticlimactic death of Yasser Arafat. I think its ghoulish to celebrate the death of anyone, except perhaps the worst of monsters, and Arafat was, ultimately, little more than a thug and an assassin; certainly he was no Hitler or Stalin. He caused a plethora of pain and death in his life, although, ultimately, he probably brought more destruction and misery on his own people than he ever did on us. I am tempted to indulge in the sentiments of a film I once saw by a Russian-Jewish refugee in which a prisoner in one of Stalin's prison camps, upon hearing of the supreme leader's death, proclaims under his breath, "Haman is dead." But Arafat was no Haman, he was just another minstrel of violence,both physical and rhetorical, who was grandly horrendous or grandly tragic only in his inability to get beyond his negation of Jewish nationhood and make the leap into some kind of co-existence; but he certainly wasn't alone in that, and perhaps he hurt us most severely only to the extent that he disappointed our hopes that the war of negation that Arab society has waged against us for half a century might, at last, be over. The only thing I cautiously celebrate is the small possibility that the death of the minstrel may also mean the death of his only tragedy, and there may be, at last, some still, small light at the end of the tunnel.