[Peace-discuss] More on Chomsky and the Zioncom Lobby

[Morton K. Brussel]

The argument continues…


Noam Chomsky and the Pro-Israel Lobby: Fourteen Erroneous Theses
James Petras
shamireaders at yahoogroups.com

"…Reflexes that ordinarily spring automatically to the defense of  
open debate and free enquiry shut down – at least among much of  
America’s political elite – once the subject turns to Israel, and  
above all the pro-Israel lobby’s role in shaping US foreign policy… 
Moral blackmail – the fear that  any criticism of Israeli policy and  
US support for it will lead to charges of anti-Semitism – is a  
powerful disincentive to publish dissenting views.  It is also  
leading to the silencing of policy debate on American university  
campuses, partly as the result of targeted campaigns against the  
dissenters…Nothing, moreover, is more damaging to US interests than  
the inability to have a proper debate about the Israeli-Palestinian  
conflict…Bullying Americans into consensus on Israeli policy is bad  
for Israel and makes it impossible for America to articulate its own  
national interests…." Financial Times, Editorial, Saturday, April 01,  
2006.

Introduction

             Noam Chomsky has been called the US leading intellectual  
by pundits and even some sectors of the mass media.  He has a large  
audience throughout the world especially in academic circles, in  
large part because of his vocal criticism of US foreign policy and  
many of the injustices resulting from those policies.  Chomsky has  
nonetheless been reviled by all of the major Jewish and pro-Israel  
organizations and media for his criticism of Israeli policy toward  
the Palestinians even as he has defended the existence of the Zionist  
state of Israel.  Despite his respected reputation for documenting,  
dissecting and exposing the hypocrisy of the US and European regimes  
and acutely analyzing the intellectual deceptions of imperial  
apologists, these analytical virtues are totally absent when it comes  
to discussing the formulation of US foreign policy in the Middle  
East, particularly the role of his own ethnic group, the Jewish Pro- 
Israel lobby and their Zionist supporters in the government.  This  
political blindness is not unknown or uncommon.  History is replete  
of intellectual critics of all imperialisms except their own, the  
abuses of power by others, but not of one’s own kin and kind.   
Chomsky’s long history denying the power and role of the pro-Israel  
lobby in decisively shaping US Middle East policy culminated in his  
recent conjoining with the US Zionist propaganda machine attacking a  
study critical of the Israeli lobby.  I am referring to the essay  
published by the London Review of Books entitled "The Israel Lobby  
and US Foreign Policy" by Professor John Mearsheimer of the  
University of Chicago and Professor Stephan Walt, the purged Academic  
Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. (A  
complete version of the study was published by the Kennedy School of  
Government in March 2006.)

For the rest, see:
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m22210&hd=0&size=1&l=e
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