By Benjamin Merhav <benmerhav@yahoo.com.au> Australia
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/noamchomskyandzionism29apr06.shtml
April 29, 2006

More on the Treachery of Noam Chomsky, Article 21 by Benjamin Merhav (April 29, 2006)

Posted at www.treacheryof.blogspot.com/

Those on the Left who have opposed Noam Chomsky's loyalty to zionism, but still trusted him as an "anti-imperialist intellectual", would have to find for him a new excuse if they would still insist on trusting this zionist bourgeois intellectual. The following journalists' reports expose Noam Chomsky for what he is in reality : a zionist and a supporter of USA imperialism, and they both come from the enemy's own mouth, namely, from an Israeli daily paper run by fanatical zionists, and from a New York paper reporting from West Point Military Academy.

Let us start with the zionist report, and follow up with the report from West Point. Under the title, "Noam Chomsky, Champion of Israel?", a former military reporter for The Jerusalem Post opens his report on Chomsky in the 22nd April issue of the same zionist paper as follows :

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1143498893816&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%

"Noam Chomsky, champion of Israel?
By ERIK SCHECHTER

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?"

The second report is from the West Point correspondent of The Journal News, a New York newspaper, as follows:
http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060421/NEWS03/604210331/
1024/NEWS08&template=printart

Foreign-policy critic speaks at West Point

By ALICE GOMSTYN
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original Publication: April 21, 2006)

WEST POINT — The U.S. Military Academy at West Point was host last night to one of the world's foremost critics of American foreign policy.

Noam Chomsky, the Institute Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke at the academy as part of its Distinguished Lecture Series.

More than 500 people attended the lecture, most of them cadets who could someday serve in the Iraq war.

Last night, they heard the gray-haired scholar explain that, in his view, that the war in Iraq is unjust.

Chomsky, who spoke on the issue in response to a question from a cadet, said that while the war could be called preventive, it was still an act of aggression by the United States that most people in the world didn't support.

He added that Iran might legitimately have grounds for its own preventive war.

"If preventative war is legitimate under these circumstances, it's legitimate for everybody," he said.

Ian McDougall of Boxborough, Mass., a cadet who attended the lecture, wouldn't say whether he agreed with Chomsky. But he did enjoy the lecture, he said.

"Agree or disagree with the points, he's certainly very well-read," said McDougall, 20.

The bulk of Chomsky's remarks revolved around "Just War Theory" — a theory, he said, that modern scholarship hasn't sufficiently explained. Scholars who discuss the theory, he said, name wars they believe are "just" without providing arguments to support the label.

Chomsky, who spoke for roughly a half-hour before taking questions from the audience, also questioned which historic military acts could be considered pre-emptive in nature. For instance, he said, before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor — which prompted the United States' entry into
World War II — U.S. journals were publishing reports on America preparing fighter planes that could burn Japan's wooden cities to the ground. Should Japan's attack, he asked, then be considered pre-emptive?

Still, he added: "Does that justify Pearl Harbor? Not in 10 million years."

Chomsky also discussed Israel's military conflict with Lebanon, the war in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein's violations of human rights, and the United States' onetime support for the former Iraqi dictator.

At the end of his presentation, the military academy's class of 2008 presented Chomsky with a framed picture of a part of the campus.

Lt. Col. Casey Neff, a staff member for the academy's commandant's office, said he too enjoyed Chomsky's lecture.

Neff said Chomsky was at West Point to state a position and provoke debate.

The free speech of Chomsky and others, he said, "is one of the things we're here to defend." (All emphasis added).