Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:59:53 -0800 From: Jeff Blankfort
NOAM CHOMSKY: Before saying a word, I’d like to express some severe personal discomfort, because anything I say will be abstract and dry and restrained. The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it’s likely to harm them.
We have to face the reality that our actions have consequences, and they have to be adapted to real-world circumstances, difficult as it may be to stay calm in the face of shameful crimes in which we are directly and crucially implicated.
Here is Jeff's take on Chomsky's intellectual and heartfelt understanding of reality:
This is an extraordinary statement but unfortunately not a surprising one from Chomsky who has not only opposed any action taken by the progressive movement in the United States to penalize Israel for its years of dispossession and occupation of Palestinian land and its chronic invasions and attacks on Lebanon, but has even tried to torpedo them and stature and his contributions in other areas can no longer be allowed to shield him for the public criticism that his actions in protecting Israel and the Zionist power structure merits.
NOAM CHOMSKY: .[A]nother familiar fairytale that you could read about a couple of days earlier in the New York Times, where the respected policy analyst and former high government official, Leslie Gelb, wrote that every US administration since 1967 has privately favored returning almost all of the territory to the Palestinians for the purposes of creating a separate Palestinian state. Note the word "privately."
Crucial. We know what the administrations have said publicly. Publicly they have rejected adamantly anything remotely of the sort ever since 1967 -- ’76.
Chomsky is no less a teller of fairytales than is Mr.Gelb. The facts of the matter are that every administration beginning with Richard Nixon has attempted to get the Israelis to withdraw from the lands it occupied in 1967, not for the benefit of the Palestinians, but for something that Chomsky does not seem to understand, US national interest.
Is this the reason for Blankfort's turn to the dark side of moral judgement? He feels that sacrificing the lives of a few million Jews is in the best interests of the US? Read on, there is more.
Every one of those attempts except that of Jimmy Carter at Camp David has been shot
down by a combination of the Israeli government and its 5th Column in the US and the evidence for this Chomsky has conveniently hidden from sight while repeating the canard that it is the US that is mainly responsible for Israel maintaining its hold on the occupied territories and preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state which would, if it came into being, would not only be a feather in the cap of the
president, but would add another vassal state to the US Middle East stable, something the Israelis wish to avoid at all costs. Chomsky, in fact, rejected the Palestinian aspirations for a single democratic secular state until the PLO accepted Israel's existence in 1978 and he still rejects that idea because, like other Zionists across the political spectrum, he fears what would happen to the country's Jewish population should the Arabs become the majority. As for his "path to Mideast peace," he has already done a good job of undercutting that.
And, of course, Jeff has to plug his own brand of antisemitic material.
For a more detailed analysis of Chomsky's position see my paper: "Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict" which was originally published in Left Curve and can be found on the web at: http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html. It was also published on Dissident Voice and Voltaire.Net among others.
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