Chomsky on what we can do for Palestine
Noam Chomsky — July 29, 2010 2 Comments
The media and commentators — unanimously, to my knowledge — evaded the central fact about the war: the issue was not whether Israel had a right to defend itself from rockets, but whether it had the right to do so by force. It surely did not, because the US-Israel knew that peaceful means were available but refused to pursue them: accepting Hamas’s offer to renew the cease-fire, which Hamas had observed even though Israel did so only partially
Editor's Pick, Politics
The Observer’s Chomsky fetish
Matt Kennard — July 5, 2010 79 Comments
Chomsky is big enough to put up with this kind of rubbish, but can the Guardian or Observer, the most influential left-wing journal in the English-speaking world, really not find one journalist who doesn’t have a visceral dislike of Noam Chomsky? Sadly, but maybe predictably, for a newspaper made up of liberals pickled in the self-righteous playfields of Oxbridge liberalism, I guess they don’t
Editor's Pick, Politics
Johann Hari on Chomsky, Hitchens, Iraq, and anarchism
Matt Kennard — June 15, 2010 9 Comments
But I think Hitchens arguments are so well put and one should engage with them and take them at face value. He says Saddam was intermeshed increasingly with Islam. Zarquawi, for example, was already in Iraq before the war. I don’t agree with his argument on that. Ba’athism and Islamism are different things, and should be opposed for different reasons
Editor's Pick, Politics
Noam Chomsky on the US Empire and hopes and prospects
Matt Kennard — June 10, 2010 0 Comments
They hope that China will organize a coalition of peace loving states to stop the militarism and aggressiveness headed by the US and its British ally. Well it’s interesting that they have such contempt for American democracy and British democracy: they don’t even dream of it coming from within. I don’t agree with it – I don’t think we have to wait for China to save us from all doom – I think we can do it ourselves
Politics
Nick Cohen on Iraq, the Left and the anti-globalisation movement
Matt Kennard — May 25, 2010 5 Comments
In this society you don’t have to make commitments anymore. You didn’t have to say, “If Saddam’s Iraq was a terrible place when America when was his ally, it was still a terrible place when America was his enemy.”
Politics
Containing the “virus” of decency in the Obama era
Noam Chomsky — October 28, 2009 2 Comments
In thinking about international affairs, it is useful to keep in mind several principles of considerable generality and import. The first is the maxim of Thucydides: the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must. It has an important corollary: every powerful state relies on specialists in apologetics, whose task is to show that what the strong do is noble and just, and if the weak suffer it is their fault. In the contemporary West, these specialists are called “intellectuals,” and with only marginal exceptions, they fulfill their assigned task with skill and self-righteousness, however outlandish the claims, a practice that traces back to the origins of recorded history
Politics
Chomsky Battles Ian Williams
Max Ajl — September 22, 2009 9 Comments
It looks like Chomsky and Ian Williams have been having a tiff. At the words “Chomsky” and “tiff,” the first question is, what’s the body count? The expected has occurred, but Williams has opted for a peculiar sort of posterity. Call it the walking dead. Like most zombies, Williams’s mental capabilities aren’t so keen
Editor's Pick, Politics
The Toronto declaration is not a violation of artistic freedom
Faraaz Rahman — September 18, 2009 7 Comments
The protest is not against the individual Israeli filmmakers included in City to City, nor does it in any way suggest that Israeli films should be unwelcome at TIFF. However, especially in the wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza, protest is against the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of what the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann have all characterized as an apartheid regime.
Culture, Editor's Pick, Politics
Interview: Noam Chomsky on US-Iran relations
Kourosh Ziabari — May 4, 2009 6 Comments
Kourosh Ziabari talks to Professor Noam Chomsky about the fraught relationship between his country, Iran, and the United States
Editor's Pick, Politics
Noam Chomsky on the Cuban embargo and “democracy promotion”
Noam Chomsky — February 23, 2009 17 Comments
Chomsky takes on the myths surrounding the US embargo on Cuba.
What They Really Mean
Noam Chomsky is misguided on the Israel-Palestine dispute
Omri Preiss — January 14, 2009 40 Comments
Omri Preiss takes a look at what Noam Chomsky has been saying about the Israel-Palestine dispute.