A fatal triangle—Chomsky, the U.S., and Israel

Last Thursday, Dec. 3, Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT, gave the Fifth Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Chomsky is universally renowned for his contributions to his academic field of expertise, and both praised and criticized for his self-described libertarian-socialist, anarchist views.

In his lecture last Thursday, Chomsky focused on criticizing America’s “unipolar” hegemony, which he argued has been growing monolithically since the end of the Cold War. Despite the purported main focus of the speech being a criticism of American imperialism, Chomsky—in a move unsurprising to those familiar with his history of commentary on the Arab-Israeli conflict—did not hesitate in seizing the opportunity to attack Israel as well.

In fact, he included many crowd-pleasing attacks on Israel from the very beginning. His opening reference to last month’s celebration of 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall was used as a troubling analogy to describe the barrier between Israel and the West Bank. According to Chomsky’s logic, the significance of the Berlin Wall’s dismantling is somehow analogous to a need to “dismantle the massive wall ... now snaking through Palestinian territory in violation of international law.” This characterization of the wall as illegal and wholly cutting through “Palestinian territory” is false, as is his unsupported claim that the “true” purpose of the wall is acquisition of land—what Chomsky grandiosely refers to as “settler colonialism”—rather than its true purpose as a defense against the constant threat of terrorism.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz points out similar spurious claims about the path and purpose of the barrier, made by former president Jimmy Carter, who said, “United Nations maps and numbers confirm that the barrier adheres to the ‘green line’—the armistice line marking the boundaries of the West Bank—along about 140 km (45 percent) of the green line’s path.” Other areas in which the wall does fall within Palestinian territory are often known sources of terrorist activity—a fact that contradicts Chomsky’s downplaying of the real security-based purpose of the wall, which he trivializes in favor of the conspiratorial motive of “expansionism.”

Finally, the success of the barrier in preventing attacks, which is corroborated by the dramatic decline in their incidence, further lends support to the reality of the true need for the wall to help ensure security. Chomsky’s claim of the wall’s illegality with respect to international law is, in fact, a moot point. An internationally accepted border between Israel and the West Bank does not officially exist since this border has yet to be wholly finalized (a fact confirmed by the repeated deferral of a finalization of an eastern Israeli border until further peace efforts are made). In fact, Israel’s only internationally recognized borders are with Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan.

Another point Chomsky discussed was the U.S.’s repeated hypocrisy regarding the spreading of democracy. Chomsky charges the U.S. with “genocide denial,” referring to the pattern of American ignorance of bloody revolutions in the name of democratization (such as the coup in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973, which he claimed was worse than “our 9/11” by any measurable standard). It is more than somewhat ironic that Chomsky plays the moral authority on “genocide denial” in light of his repeated trivialization of contemporary terrorist threats and attacks on the U.S. and Israel and his history of defending the work of Robert Faurisson, who denies the occurrence of the Holocaust.
Chomsky also belittled Iran’s nuclear threat, simultaneously portraying Israel as the true rogue nuclear state, claiming “outside the West, few take U.S. claims about Iran’s threat seriously” and arguing that Iran would not use nuclear weapons due to the “threat” of Israel. Chomsky ignores the Iranian leadership’s fervor to enact genocide against Jews.

What is perhaps most troubling about Chomsky’s misleading attacks on Israel is his audience’s nearly uniform, unquestioning praise for his distortions. Then again, neither the attacks themselves nor the reaction from the audience is surprising, given Chomsky‘s clear ideological agenda of decrying the U.S. and Israel as the worst terrors, while downplaying terrorism enacted by radical anti-American and anti-Semitic terrorist groups. It is thus only natural that Chomsky attracts, panders to, and encourages extremist “intellectuals” at his speeches. Chomsky abuses true scholarship by stating as fact distortions of the truth that align with his ideological agenda. Blame also lies with an academic community that unquestioningly accepts his “facts” at face value and praises him for being a voice of truth, as was obvious during the question-answer period. Unfortunately, Chomsky continues to use his academic credentials as a platform for baseless attacks against Israel, and as long as universities lend him more of a platform, he will continue to subversively abuse the truth.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.

Tags: Opinion, Hunter Rees, Shelly Xu, Chomsky, Israeli-Palestinian conflict