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

[Robert Naiman]

I don't know. I kind of still have some affection for the word
"argument." I hate to see it associated with this nonsense. Chomsky as
a running dog of Zionist imperialism? I used to think of Petras as
mostly sane. Is he getting senile, or was he always like this and I
just wasn't paying attention?

On 4/9/06, Morton K. Brussel <brussel4 at insightbb.com> wrote:
>
> 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&amp;hd=0&amp;size=1&amp;l=e
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>
>


--
RN