Noam Chomsky, champion of Israel?

Jerusalem Post ^ | 4-23-06 | ERIK SCHECHTER

[SJackson]

What do Noam Chomsky and the neocons have in common? They both stand accused of protecting the enormously powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington from legitimate criticism. That's right, hell has frozen over. Professor Chomsky - the far-left MIT linguist who has consistently (and often quite viciously) criticized Israel since the early 1970s - is apparently a big softie when it comes to Zion.

Or so say assorted left-wing critics.

The brouhaha began in late March when two American academics published in The London Review of Books a paper critical of the Israel lobby. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argued that neither idealism nor hard-nosed practicality justified American support of the Jewish state. Nevertheless, a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations" has been steering US policy in that direction for years.

Though hardly a novel idea, the essay caused a wave of controversy because the authors were not your run-of-the-mill, paranoid kooks. Mearsheimer sits on the international academic advisory board at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, at Bar-Ilan University, and both he and Walt are leading lights of the realist school of international relations. Their critique simply could not go unanswered.

Indeed, following the publication of the article, professors and pundits of all stripes took to their keyboards.

Now, I will not address the many errors of the M-W piece or explain how arguing that lobbies drive foreign policy upends the whole realist paradigm; that's been done elsewhere and by people far smarter than me. What's interesting is where Noam Chomsky stepped out on the controversy.

Writing in Z Magazine, the aging anarchist commended Mearsheimer and Walt for their "courageous stand" but then attacked their notion of an informal, far-flung lobby as an empty label. "M-W focus on AIPAC and the evangelicals," wrote Chomsky, "but they recognize that the Lobby includes most of the political-intellectual class - at which point the thesis loses much of its content."

Max Boot, a neoconservative fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted the very same thing when he quipped, "In Mearsheimer-Walt's telling, the Israel lobby seems to include just about every American politician, think tank and newspaper." Now who could have imagined Chomsky manning the same barricade as the neocons?

BUT NOT to worry, he won't be joining the GOP or Likud anytime soon. He still thinks Israel serves as the brutal attack dog of American imperialism - having first helped the oil companies back in 1967 when it smashed an uppity Nasser and, thus, discredited secular Arab nationalism. Likewise, Chomsky still bleeds for the Palestinians. It's just that he objects to the part about capitalists needing to be goaded into regional domination. And, the MIT linguist is not alone on this point; radical journalist Salim Muwakkil and Columbia professor Joseph Massad also dismiss the blame-the-lobby argument. In the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram, the latter wrote, "The record of the United States is one of being the implacable enemy of all Third World national liberation groups… Why then would the US support national liberation in the Arab world absent the pro-Israel lobby is something these studies never explain."

The problem is that, while Muwakkil is African-American and Massad is Palestinian, Chomsky is a Red Sea pedestrian - and that raises suspicions in some left-wing circles.

Veteran pro-Palestinian activist Jeffrey Blankfort, for example, has taken issue with Chomsky's early experiences in the Marxist-Zionist Hashomer Hatza'ir movement, saying that they somehow blinded him to the political machinations of his fellow American Jews.

Amazingly, Blankfort - himself Jewish - has lambasted Chomsky as "a boon for AIPAC" and, by extension, "Israel's position in the United States."

Like Blankfort (and post-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe), James Petras also disagrees with Chomsky on the M-W paper. In fact, the Marxist sociologist gets downright nasty in his critique, suggesting that Chomsky's analytic skills "are totally absent when it comes to discussing the formulation of US foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly the role of his own ethnic group, the Jewish pro-Israel lobby and their Zionist supporters in the government."

Once again, Chomsky is covering for the tribe.

One would think that the Jewish anarchist has already paid his dues. Chomsky has attacked Israel time and again; described French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson as "a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort"; commended the scholarship of the late Israel Shahak, author of the vile Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, and claimed that the charge of anti-Semitism is used to stifle criticism of Israel.

Yet the tragedy of Chomsky is that, for people like Blankfort and Petras, all this counts for nothing. The latter still accuses him of playing with the evidence in order to hide the role of the pro-Israel lobby and the "ZionCons" in hatching the current Iraq war.

Though Chomsky never answered the e-mail I sent him, I asked anti-Zionist firebrand and DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein what he thought of these unseemly attacks on his mentor. "I see no point in probing motives," he told me, "One should judge any argument on its merits."

All true, and still the fracas with Chomsky proves that, if you're Jewish, no matter what you say and do, you're always just one essay away from being labeled a pro-Israel lobbyist.

The writer is a former Jerusalem Post military reporter

[DoughtyOne]

Sorry, but you can't support what Chumsky does and support Israel at the same time. Everyone else he supports hates Israel.

[SJackson]

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[CarolinaGuitarman]

Chomsky supports Israel like Arafat supported peace.

[sageb1]

Chomsky is a fraud who, even when proved wrong by facts, continues on in his own little world. He's the god of the leftist utopia where truth doesn't matter.

I do find it fascinating, however, that he is on the Pentagon payroll.

[Psycho_Bunny]

I'd sooner start and maintain a flea farm than give a crap about anything Chomsky says or thinks.

[Thombo2]

Chomsky pro Israel?For everything you wanted to know about Noam but were afraid to ask,ck out "The Anti-Chomsky Reader",Collier/Horowitz.

[sauropod]

Chomsky is a liar. Always has been.

[SunkenCiv]

the authors were not your run-of-the-mill, paranoid kooks.

...they were a whole different kind of paranoid kook. ;')

[George - the Other]

"What do Noam Chomsky and the neocons have in common?"

Truely, I have a hard time imagining ANYTHING in common. He's a leftists' leftist.

I've only read one of Chomsky's essays, "Notes on Anarchism," and here's some of what I noticed.

For starters, Chomsky glorifies the French Revolution but as a typical pseudo- socialist, ignores all the "innocents" that were executed in the name of freedom. For anyone who uses mouthwash, you can now always remember that Lavoris is name after famous French chemist Antoine Lavoisier ( http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Lavoisier.html) who was beheaded during the revolution for the "crime" of being an aristocrat, betrayed by a jealous scientific wannabe turned “liberator.”

He also glorifies the Spanish War. George Orwell fought in this war and wrote about his experience in "Homage to Catolonia." What happened was that the rather then "unifying" under the banner of socialism, the anarchists, socialists and communists started fighting each other - a civil war within a civil war. This was the beginnings of what lead Orwell, a democratic socialist, to write a numbers of essays warning of the threat of leftist politics to liberty.

Also, another thing Orwell warns about is wordyness of leftist writings and how truth is propogandized and distorted for political gain by what on the surface to the unperceptive apprears to be "intellectually" inspired literature. It would be fascinating if Orwell were alive and what he would say of Chomsky, since Chomsky's verbosity is the very antithisis of Orwell's call for clarity in political writing.

[tanknetter]

He's just a run-of-the-mill whore who's figured out how the game the system to milk both sides.

Everything a person needs to know about him can be found in Do as I Say, Not as I Do.

[prophetic]

the fact that Chomsky is on the Pentagon's dole is proof perfect that the Government is really irresponsible in spending Taxpayers money.