Problematic Dissent

Every time I delve into the world of the Chomskyites, I thank God for Dissent Magazine, if only because it reminds me that an intelligent, non-Chomskyite Left does exist, albeit on the margins of the ideological map. Had I remained a Leftist, I would likely be in their camp. However, reading this article by Michael Walzer on the Bush victory and how to deal with it reminds me of why I did not and could not do so.

I've always had an ambivalent opinion of Mr. Walzer. Personally, I much prefer Paul Berman, who is a better writer and a more courageous thinker, in my opinion. Walzer's position on Vietnam was, to my mind, utterly immoral and indefensible; and his writings on just war theory strike me as, at best, the naivete of a sheltered intellectual. I think he is an intelligent man who remains, unfortunately, mired in an inchoate nostalgia for the iconography of the Old Left, and for the aesthetic pleasures of revolution and revolt for its own sake. His musings on the state of the left today serve only to confirm that opinion. The piece is long, so I will confine myself to a few essential quotes:

The experts have apparently agreed that it wasn't values that lost us the last election. It was passion, and above all, it was the passion of fear. But maybe frightened people look for strong leaders, whose strength is revealed in their firm commitment to a set of values. Fear politics and value politics may turn out to be closely related.

Now, I understand why this is a popular theory for people who simply can't understand how anyone could vote for George Bush, but it nonetheless remains a fairly obvious rationalization. Yes, people are afraid of terrorism, and they should be, but in my view Bush represented more than fear to the people who voted for him, myself among them; he represented defiance, resoluteness, anger, and the belief that America is worth fighting for because it is fundamentally better than an ideology of theocratic totalitarianism and mass murder. At its most basic level, this represented a certain elementary courage; one which is, I believe, rooted in the very human desire to stand up and defend oneself when attacked. One can debate all of these things, but the manner in which Walzer reduces them down to "fear politics and value politics" trivializes something profound and important to a great many, perhaps a majority, of Americans; which is both shallow and never a smart thing to do if one is seeking a viable political platform.

Questions about just and unjust, right and wrong, goodness and evil...for the right today, the market takes care of such matters, or God takes care of them; the common good arises out of the competition for private goods-in obedience, amazingly, to God's word. On the left, however, we have to take care of moral matters by ourselves, without the help of history, the invisible hand, or divine revelation.

Maybe the struggle against Islamic radicalism and religious zeal is a world-historical struggle, as the struggle against communist totalitarianism was. I doubt that Islamic radicalism has the expansionist potential that communism had, but . . . maybe.

The first statement being made here, that the left is less moralistically extreme than the right, is simply categorically untrue. If anything, the left has become even more moralistic, even more fanatical, and even more extreme since 9/11 and the war in Iraq. They may not evoke God as much as the right, but the fervor with which they regularly compare Bush to Hitler was certainly religious in nature, and Hitler is, after all, merely a secular word for Satan. Moreover, even the mainstream organs of the left have proven willing to defer to these pathologies to a disturbing extent, even to the point of embracing political unpopularity (witness the rise of third-place loser Howard Dean to DNC chair). The problem is not that the left is uncertain of itself, but that its certainty has coalesced around an illusory and frankly psychotic worldview which perceives its own country and president as a manifestation of cosmic evil and refuses to acknowledge the reality of such other possible evils as, say, Islamic radicalism and its attendant terrorist acts. Walzer, in denying this phenomenon, is, like most well-meaning leftists, both in denial and setting himself up to reach all the wrong conclusions about the left's current impasse.

The essence of that impasse lies in two statements which say a great deal more than Walzer likely intended them to; his concept of "the common good", and his assessment of the threat posed by radical Islam. As to the latter, it is obvious to me and to many others that a theocratic totalitarianism which has political momentum, widespread popularity, access to sophisticated weaponry, and a demonstrated willingness to use said weaponry to cause wanton death and destruction is, to put it mildly, a major threat, and in the age of nuclear proliferation, perhaps even an apocalyptic one. At any rate, the question of whether radical Islam is the equal to communism in its danger is an irrelevancy; Islamic terror has proven that it can massively damage, upset, derange, and traumatize the United States, not to mention cause massive loss of innocent life. Its declared intention is to continue doing so until it is victorious or stopped by armed force. Walzer dismisses all this with a "but...maybe" which pretty much tells the whole story.

But it is the former which is really the heart of the matter, since it goes to explain the long term decline of the left, and not merely that which followed 9/11; since it makes it abundantly clear that Walzer simply doesn't understand modern conservatism in any way shape or form. And that, moreover, this lack of understanding is based in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of human freedom. Like most leftists, Walzer is obsessed with the economic-political realm, or rather, he believes that the economic-political realm encompasses all of human society. As a result, he cannot grasp the fact that conservatism does not desire "the market" to "take care of such matters"; but rather for people, autonomous human beings, to regulate themselves without the interference of the state. For the conservative, there is no "common good" per se, because society is too complex for there to be a single good to be held in common by all; there is only the interaction of free individuals self-regulated by culture, morality, and, yes, religion, all of which exist independent and autonomous of politics. In truth, beyond all questions of war, peace, morality and values, this is the quintessential failure of the left today: its inability and conscious refusal to recognize the limits of politics and the very existence of the free individual. In the leftist mind, we are all merely pawns in the "common good". This is why they can see the War on Terror as a product of politics (i.e. the wicked Bush administration and/or the past machinations of the wicked United States) and also see the solution to the War on Terror as political (i.e. the election of a benign Kerry administration and/or overthrow of the existing political order by riot and street theater). The idea that religious, cultural, or moral forces at work in the world - such as radical Islam and its incompatibility with modern secular democracy - may create immovable realities is simply inconceivable to the left; and thus the possibility that politics means nothing in this struggle and that secular democracy, with all its flaws, may have to be fought for with blood and treasure, no matter who occupies the White House, becomes a fundamental threat to the entirety of their worldview, and must be denied out of existence. Michael Walzer is one of the smartest and most sober leftists writing today; and the fact that even he cannot begin to look beyond the impasse that is his and his movement's is, for me at least, as someone who hopes for an intelligent and engaged opposition, very disheartening indeed.

Definately Not in Kansas Anymore

Ok, this is very off topic, but I can't help it. The other day I woke up and heard this bizarre noise, like a cat hacking up phlegm in a very low register. I go outside with the morning coffee and cigarette, and I see my neighbors across the street feeding this big furry thing on their porch (my street is really an alley, so they're only about five feet away). And I ask them if they got a new dog. They beckon me over, and there's this goddam sheep, the size of a freakin' Great Dane tied up on their porch. They told me they just bought it at the local market and were going to slaughter it for the Passover seder. Apparently, they do it every year. I think I now know the true meaning of the phrase "culture gap". Only in Israel...

The Monsters of Virtue

Its rare that one gets to witness such displays of left wing anti-semitism as this extraordinary recent atrocity at UC Berkeley (to say where else? is too tempting a cliche) involving none other than erstwhile faux-indian and professional slanderer of mass murder victims Ward Churchill. There's really nothing new here except for the fact that white-guy-desperate-for-an-oppressed-past Churchill gives his opinion regarding my own people and our oppressed past. Perhaps Churchill's idiocy is motivated by envy (although I could tell him personally that living with the blood of history isn't all its cracked up to be; and suffering real racism isn't nearly as edifying as he imagines it), but judging from this, its based more on total ignorance and a toweringly fanatical belief in his own virtue.

This leads us to the situation in a certain sense of settler colonialism and the cruel order of a particular type in the area of Palestine, which results not from something Jewish but from something particularly anti-Jewish, which is Zionism. [Audience applause.] Zionists return that [with the significance] of Judaism they have not even the sanction of their own rabbinical councils at the time they undertook the project of conquest and colonization in the area they now call Israel. Never did and ultimately they never will.

Like his admirer Chomsky, Churchill has an unfortunate tendency to pontificate on subjects about which he knows nothing. If Churchill knew something about Judaism or Zionism, he would know that the desire to return to the Land of Israel and reestablish the Jewish state is not only less than anti-Jewish but one of the essential tenants of the Jewish faith. He should read 12th century poet and philosopher Judah Halevi, whose work cannot be described as anything other than proto-Zionism. Nor, apparently, is he aware of the involvement of many religious Jews in the Zionist movement, including several Zionists such as Kalishcher who predate even Theodore Herzl and the Zionist Congress, and such eminent religious Zionists as Rabbi Avraham Kook, who believed Zionism essential to Judaism in the modern world. I will not try to decipher Churchill's mangling of the past and present tense, but his claim that Zionism did not have or does not have sanction from "rabbinical councils" is transparently ludicrous. Judaism is not Catholicism, we have no Pope and no central authority. Yes, there are "rabbinical councils" who reject Zionism (though as early as the 1930s they were already a minority), and there are those who embrace it; the notion, however, that this proves anything in regards to the relationship between Zionism and the Jewish religion, which is a complex and long one, if it is even possible to completely separate the two; is simply the ranting of a man who has directed his inchoate resentments upon things he neither understands nor wants to understand, since to do so would render his murderous fanaticism impossible.

But there is something even more important at work here. It is simply this: Zionism is the Jewish national liberation movement; as such, Churchill, were he consistent with his expressed principles, would be forced to acknowledge its essential legitimacy. The fact that this man and his fellow travelers, who base their entire sense of their own overweening virtue on their support of the right of oppressed peoples to rise up against their oppression, can see nothing in Zionism but "settler colonialism", a process of "conquest and colonization", a "cruel order" which is "particularly anti-Jewish", speaks of nothing more than a double standard with is fundamentally and self-evidently racist. What we are looking at here is nothing less than a pure and unvarnished expression of left wing anti-semitism. And this is from the man who invokes Eichmann with alacrity and vomits the words Nazi and racist upon any and everyone who dares to threaten his hermetic Manicheanism.

There can be no mistaking what we are dealing with here, and it is no less horrifying than this: Churchill and those who stand with him are the little Eichmanns of our time; it is they who espouse a totalitarian ideology of hate and slaughter, it is they who believe the devil bears the face of the Jew, it is they who desire to spill oceans of blood in the name of justice, it is they who have made virtue into an ideology of murder. In looking at them, I can only think of Nietzsche's words on the virtuous:

Alas, how ill the word "virtue" sounds in their mouths! And when they say: "I am just", it sounds always like "I am revenged!"

They want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies with their virtue; and they raise themselves only in order to lower others.

If this be virtue, I want no part of it.

Comments Provisionally Discontinued

I've always considered it a point of pride that I have never censored my comments, but I've had a lot of recent complaints that they have more or less become a message board for Chomskyites and anti-Chomskyites to hurl insults at each other; which, needless to say, was not what I had in mind when I started this blog. So, for the moment, I am discontinuing the comments section. If any of you have passionate opinions on this or any other matter relating to this blog, feel free to email me at benjaminkerstein@hotmail.com.

Hands on the Whip at Last

I recently received an email which expressed the not uncommon opinion that the erstwhile subject of this blog is simply insane. While I understand the sentiment, and I agree that it is difficult to explore Chomsky's worldview without concluding that it contains at least some measure of psychological paranoia, I nonetheless cannot agree; and its worth it to explain why, especially in the context of the previous post.

In my opinion, Chomsky is completely sane. Obviously, I don't know the man, nor am I a qualified psychiatrist, but his bizarre denials of reality and frequent distortions of history do not strike me as the products of a diseased mind, but rather as willful lies and exaggerations of which Chomsky is well aware. I don't think he really believes that the Cambodian genocide was invented by the American media, that the US tried to commit a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan, that Israel is reminiscent of Nazi Germany, or that the Bush administration will bring about the end of life on this planet. Nor, in my opinion, is he convinced that communist Cuba, Sandanista Nicaragua, or North Vietnam were anything other than immensely oppressive totalitarian dictatorships. Why Chomsky and his fellow travelers hold otherwise is not, in my view, a particularly difficult question, and the way to the answer is pointed out by George Orwell with his usual incisive prescience, when he remarked that the pro-communist intellectuals of his day desired not justice and equality as they claimed but rather a new hierarchical society in which "the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip".

If one looks at the various movements Chomsky has supported, they are all more or less movements composed of radical ideologues, not much different from himself, who have simply taken the extra step of merging their intellectual stance with the gun. That is to say, with the power to enact their plans through cruelty and violence. The attractiveness of this to the average radical intellectual, especially in democratic societies, which always tend towards the mean, cannot be underestimated. It allows him to live out his fantasies of revolution vicariously while making sure that he never has to actually pull the trigger himself. It allows him to be, shall we say, a mandarin of sorts; someone who can taste the thrills of absolute power without having to pay the inevitable price of political crime. Thus, the intellectual can, through the act of mere support, or rhetorical succor, remain sanguine on such subjects as oppression and mass murder while still imagining himself morally pure and unsullied. Once this is coupled with the naked reality of one's self interest, this becomes a particularly intoxicating combination. Since a man of Chomsky's beliefs can never hope to achieve any real power except through imposing his ideas by violence upon the rest of us, the sight of men like Fidel Castro or Daniel Ortega actually doing so cannot possibly appear to be a brutal act of tyranny but rather a heroic and admirable assault on those who keep self-anointed prophets like Chomsky trapped in the purgatory of relative obscurity and powerlessness.

It strikes me, therefore, that Chomsky and is ilk are not motivated by madness, but rather by lust for power and a reasoned acceptance of what it would take to achieve it. This, coupled with an almost theological admiration for the capacities of political violence and the men who use it; on whom are easily projected impossible fantasies of domination and rule, the intoxicating capacity to simply say "Exterminate all the brutes!"; creates a mindset in which all facts or truths which stand in the way of seizing the heights must be done away with, by fair means or foul. Seen this way, the average Chomskyite's relentless confabulations appear not merely sane, but also sensible; as sensible, at least, as one can be when driven by such forces. It for us, therefore, not to simply dismiss such things as the ravings of madmen, but to do what we can to ensure that the whip does not fall easily into their hands.

On Kurtz and Chomsky

A new post over at the rhetorically overwrought but nonetheless informative Moonbat Central has a fantastic display of Chomskyite ideology at its worst, witness:

“Unlike many leftists of his generation,” says [Robert] Barsky, “Chomsky never flirted with movements or organisations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, anti-revolutionary, and elitist … He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century.”

This is, to put it very mildly, willful blindness bordering on insanity. The movements and organizations Chomsky has supported which were not merely later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, etc; but were openly so from their inception; amounts to a laundry list of the worst ideological pathologies of the twentieth century. A recitation that includes the PLO, the FLN, the NLF, North Vietnam, Castro's Cuba, the Khmer Rouge, Maoism, Nasserism, Baathism, the Sandanistas, et al; would be significant only in its inadequacy to convey the breadth of Chomsky's affection for authoritarianism. Indeed, an objective look at Chomsky's record reveals that there has hardly been a totalitarian, oppresseive, exclusionary, anti-revolutionary, or elitist movement which Chomsky has not supported. The fact that much of the mainstream left has managed, either out of inchoate resentment or a secret admiration for the unfettered capacities of absolute power, to convince itself otherwise is, of course, the essence of the Chomskyite phenomenon. It reminds me of nothing less than the passage in Conrad's Heart of Darkness in which Marlow reads through Kurtz's lengthy paper on the Suppression of Savage Customs, and after pages of well meaning and intelligent discourse on the issue, finds a single, scrawled line at the end: "Exterminate all the brutes!" Once one sifts through the various exhortations of "accurate analysis" and high minded moralisms of the Chomskyites, this will to absolute power, and thus destruction, is, ultimately, all one is left with.

On Cinema

I've posted a brief and very personal comment on Martin Scorsese's The Aviator over at the non-Chomsky blog.

Published!

My review of a new Israeli film called Walk on Water has just been published by the english language website of Yediot Acharanot, Israel's biggest newspaper. They cut the original by about two thirds, but I think the point gets across. Enjoy.

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.