Noam Chomsky, who spoke at Boston University’s Jacob Sleeper Auditorium on March 2 as part of the noxious Israel Apartheid Week and a guest of Students for Justice in Palestine, clearly lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies, and intellectually imbecilic distortions of history and fact. As a result, the MIT professor emeritus of linguistics has become a widely known, eagerly followed superstar of the Israel-hating, America-hating Left.
The explosive power of Chomsky’s animus for the imperialist West – Israel and the U.S. in particular – is only matched by his slavish affection and apologetics for the murderous despots of the Soviet Union, Khmer Rouge, and Viet Cong, whose barbarous excesses were in his mind predicated by the oppression and exploitation of the tyranny of Western democratic states.
If Chomsky’s animosity toward America has been a defining theme in his intellectual jihad, an obsessive, apoplectic hatred for Israel has more completely dominated his screeds and spurious scholarship. Like other anti-Zionists in the West and in the Arab world, Chomsky does not even recognize the legitimacy of Israel, believing that its very existence was, and is, a moral transgression against an indigenous people, and that the creation of Israel was “wrong and disastrous . There is not now and never will be democracy in Israel.”
Jewish power is a repellant notion for Chomsky, just as the hegemonic might he ascribes to the terror states of Israel and America is the scourge of peace – not, of course, the destabilizing barbarism of Islamism. The existence of Israel not only subjugates the long-suffering Arabs but is driving the entire globe toward annihilation, Chomsky suggested, using the image of Israel having succumbed into a kind of moral madness. Its very psychosis had become a source of power, and the exercise of that power would bring about global genocide.
“Israel’s ‘secret weapon,’ ” Chomsky wrote, evoking an apocalyptic vision, “is that it may behave in the manner of what have sometimes been called ‘crazy states’ in the international affairs literature eventuating in a final solution from which few will escape.”
Chomsky denounces Israel’s identity as a Jewish state as being essentially racist on its face, and decries the very notion of its Jewishness as necessarily violating the concept of social equity by being exclusionary and elite.
While he is happy to, and regularly does, ignore the murder of Jews by Palestinians, Chomsky never hesitates to point to what he sees as the perfidy of Israel and its barbarous assaults on its Arab neighbors who, in his socialist fantasies, wish for nothing more than to live in peace. He draws the perverse parallel between Israelis and Nazis so frequently in his writings that, to paraphrase the wry Professor Edward Alexander, he would be rendered nearly speechless if he were unable to use the epithet of Nazi against Israel in every sentence he utters.
If imperialism itself can be classified as a type of state-sponsored “terror,” as it regularly is in the morally-incoherent universe where Chomsky and other anti-Western thinkers reside, then it is quite simple to suggest, as Chomsky regularly does, an equivalence between the murderous acts of Hamas and Hizbullah who attempt to address perceived grievances and the legitimate self-defense of democracies whose citizens are under attack by murderous, non-state actors. Once someone has equated the rogue terror of one party with the legitimate acts of self-defense by sovereign nations, it is possible, and indeed inevitable, that he or she will start investing both actors with the same moral, and legal, standing.
Chomsky’s optimism concerning the political aspirations of Hizbullah is equally as ludicrous. In 2006, when he traveled to Beirut to Hizbullah’s headquarters to meet with its secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Chomsky was naturally impressed with the terrorist’s “reasoned argument and persuasive argument that [arms] should be in the hands of Hizbullah as a deterrent to potential aggression….”
As for Chomsky’s friend Nasrallah, his lovely opinions concerning Israel and the Jews are widely known, including his view that Jews “are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment,” but “if they all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
And in keeping with Chomsky’s own pathological obsession, Nasrallah has suggested that, since the Zionist regime is nothing but a blot on mankind, “there is no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel.” That would seemingly make for a perfect world in Professor Chomsky’s view, but what would he then write about so fervently and with so much venomous enthusiasm?