Kate wrote: > i respond because this is an international list...i take offense at the > notion that any one of us can presume to speak for the majority, most or the > average american... there is no 'average' american
I don't think you should take offense. I think I have a general enough idea of how most Americans would react to Chomsky's view to make the leap of assumption. Perhaps many here and in other rarefied circles would agree with him completely, but I stick with my opinion that outside such circles, there would not be agreement with him. Here are just a few of his viewpoints and you can tell me if he represents views that many, not only a lot of Americans, would not consider offensive: Dismissal and denial of the millions killed in Cambodian holocaust: "The Khmer Rouge? Back in 1977, Chomsky dismissed accounts of the Cambodian genocide as "tales of Communist atrocities" based on "unreliable" accounts. At most, the executions "numbered in the thousands" and were "aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from American distraction and killing." In fact, some 2 million perished on the killing fields of Cambodia because of genocidal war against the urban bourgeoisie and the educated, in which wearing a pair of glasses could mean a death sentence." Dismissal and denial of the Jewish holocaust: "The Chomskian rage hasn't confined itself to his native land. He has long nourished a special contempt for Israel, lone outpost of Western ideals in the Middle East. The hatred has been so intense that Zionists have called him a self-hating Jew. This is an unfair label. Clearly, Chomsky has no deficit in the self-love department, and his ability to stir up antagonism makes him even more pleased with himself. No doubt that was why he wrote the introduction to a book by French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson. Memoire en Defense maintains that Hitler's death camps and gas chambers, even Anne Frank's diary, are fictions, created to serve the cause of American Zionists. That was too much for Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who challenged fellow leftist Chomsky to a debate. In the debate, Dershowitz keyed in on the fact that Chomsky had described Faurisson's conclusions as "findings," and claimed that they grew out of "extensive historical research." But as numerous scholars had shown, Faurisson was not a serious scholar at all, but rather a sophist who simply ignored the mountain of documents, speeches, testimony, and other historical evidence that conflicted with his "argument." Dershowitz noted that Chomsky also wrote the following: "I see no anti-Semitic implication in the denial of the existence of gas chambers or even in the denial of the Holocaust." Some of his comments on 9/11: "That brings us to 9/11, an egregious insult to decency in general and to the citizens of New York in particular. True to form, in one of the interviews, Chomsky calls the United States "a leading terrorist state" and equates President Clinton's 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan with the horrors of September 11. In every way, Chomsky's comparison is obscene. The bombing was in response to attacks on two U.S. embassies that had resulted in the deaths and injuries of thousands. The U.S. made sure it took place at night, when the target was empty of civilians. U.S. intelligence, mistaken though it may have been, indicated that the pharmaceutical factory was producing weapons of mass destruction. The unprovoked attack on the World Trade Center, needless to say to anyone except Chomsky and his disciples, occurred in broad daylight, with the intention of inflicting maximum damage and death on innocents. Chomsky concedes that the WTC attack was unfortunate-not so much because of the deaths of Americans, but because "the atrocities of September 11 were a devastating blow to the Palestinians, as they instantly recognized." (Some other group, disguised as Palestinians, must have been dancing in the streets that day.) Israel, he adds, "is openly exulting in the 'window of opportunity' it now has to crush Palestinians with impunity."
