posted May 02, 2008 02:43 PM            

Biography of Avram Noam CHOMSKY

Avram Noam Chomsky (Hebrew :àáøí ðåòí çåîñ÷é Yiddish: àáøí ðåòí ëàîñ÷é) (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century. He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in which he challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of behavior and language dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has also affected the philosophy of language and mind (see Harman and Fodor). He is also credited with the establishment of the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–1992 time period, and was the eighth most cited scholar in any time period.

Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky has become more widely known — especially internationally — for his media criticism and politics. He is generally considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of United States politics. Chomsky is widely known for his political activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments.

Chomsky was born in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar and IWW member William Chomsky (1896-1977), who was from a town in Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (born Simonofsky), came from what is now Belarus, but unlike her husband she grew up in the United States and spoke "ordinary New York English". Their first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky says it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish ghetto", split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side", with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature". Chomsky also describes tensions he personally experienced with Irish Catholics and anti-semitism in the mid-1930s, stating, "I don't like to say it but I grew up with a kind of visceral fear of Catholics. I knew it was irrational and got over it but it was just the street experience."

Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at the age of ten about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. From the age of twelve or thirteen, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.

A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia (the 184th graduating class), in 1945 Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, learning from philosophers C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky subsequently reinterpreted these as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from Post production systems). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky.

In 1949, Chomsky married linguist Carol Schatz. They have two daughters, Aviva (b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b. 1967).

Chomsky received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, his best-known work in linguistics.

Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2007, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 52 years.

In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", in The New York Review of Books. This was followed by his 1969 book, American Power and the New Mandarins, a collection of essays which established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of US foreign policy and the legitimacy of US power have made him a controversial figure: largely shunned by the mainstream media in the United States, he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets worldwide.

Chomsky has in the past received death threats because of his criticisms of U.S foreign policy. In addition, he was on a list of planned targets created by Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber; during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives. Chomsky states that he frequently receives undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus, although he does not agree with the police protection.

Chomsky resides in the United States and travels frequently, giving lectures on politics.

Opinion on cultural criticism of science
Chomsky strongly disagrees with post-structuralist and postmodern criticisms of science:

posted May 02, 2008 02:45 PM            

I think studying science is a good way to get into fields like history. The reason is, you learn what an argument means, you learn what evidence is, you learn what makes sense to postulate and when, what's going to be convincing. You internalize the modes of rational inquiry, which happen to be much more advanced in the sciences than anywhere else. On the other hand, applying relativity theory to history isn't going to get you anywhere. So it's a mode of thinking.

Chomsky has also commented on critiques of "white male science", stating that they are much like the antisemitic and politically motivated attacks against "Jewish physics" used by the Nazis to denigrate research done by Jewish scientists during the Deutsche Physik movement:

In fact, the entire idea of "white male science" reminds me, I'm afraid, of "Jewish physics". Perhaps it is another inadequacy of mine, but when I read a scientific paper, I can't tell whether the author is white or is male. The same is true of discussion of work in class, the office, or somewhere else. I rather doubt that the non-white, non-male students, friends, and colleagues with whom I work would be much impressed with the doctrine that their thinking and understanding differ from "white male science" because of their "culture or gender and race." I suspect that "surprise" would not be quite the proper word for their reaction.

Chomsky's influence in other fields
Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results.

The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various features of protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".

Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.

Famous computer scientist Donald Knuth admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. "...I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961.....Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!".

Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media (especially in the United States), its structures and constraints, and its perceived role in supporting big business and government interests.

Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media with numerous detailed case studies demonstrating it. According to this propaganda model, more democratic societies like the U.S. use subtle, non-violent means of control, unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population. In an often-quoted remark, Chomsky states that "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." (Media Control)

The model attempts to explain this perceived systemic bias of the mass media in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people. It argues the bias derives from five "filters" that all published news must "pass through" which combine to systematically distort news coverage.

The first filter, ownership, notes that most major media outlets are owned by large corporations. The second, funding, notes that the outlets derive the majority of their funding from advertising, not readers. Thus, since they are profit-oriented businesses selling a product — readers and audiences — to other businesses (advertisers), the model would expect them to publish news which would reflect the desires and values of those businesses. In addition, the news media are dependent on government institutions and major businesses with strong biases as sources (the third filter) for much of their information. Flak, the fourth filter, refers to the various pressure groups which go after the media for supposed bias and so on when they go out of line. Norms, the fifth filter, refer to the common conceptions shared by those in the profession of journalism. (Note: in the original text, published in 1988, the fifth filter was "anticommunism". However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been broadened to allow for shifts in public opinion.) The model describes how the media form a decentralized and non-conspiratorial but nonetheless very powerful propaganda system, that is able to mobilize an élite consensus, frame public debate within élite perspectives and at the same time give the appearance of democratic consent.

Chomsky and Herman test their model empirically by picking "paired examples" — pairs of events that were objectively similar except for the alignment of domestic elite interests. They use a number of such examples to attempt to show that in cases where an "official enemy" does something (like murder of a religious official), the press investigates thoroughly and devotes a great amount of coverage to the matter, thus victims of "enemy" states are considered "worthy". But when the domestic government or an ally does the same thing (or worse), the press downplays the story, thus victims of US or US client states are considered "unworthy."

They also test their model against the case that is often held up as the best example of a free and aggressively independent press, the media coverage of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. Even in this case, they argue that the press was behaving subserviently to élite interests.

Critics of Chomsky and Herman's mass media analysis, including author and historian Victor Davis Hanson of the conservative Hoover Institution severely disagree with Chomsky and Herman's theories. They see the idea of "Manufacturing Consent" as nothing more than a recycling of the Marxist idea of "false consciousness" in where the masses have been so manipulated that they have neither the perspective or intellect to see beyond the propaganda and require superior intellects like Chomsky's to point out to them the real truth. Arch Puddington of the Hoover Institution also claims he sees virtually no empirical evidence in media coverage, specifically regarding the mass media's treatment of Cambodia and East Timor, to back the claims made in Manufacturing Consent.

Stephen J. Morris, a critic of Chomsky's position on Cambodia, evaluates Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model by reviewing their analysis of media coverage during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Chomsky and Herman argue that the "flood of rage and anger directed against the Khmer Rouge" peaking in early 1977, was a concrete example of their "propaganda model" in action. They argued that the media was singling out Cambodia, an enemy of the United States, while under-reporting human rights abuses by American allies such as South Korea and Chile. A study performed by Jamie Metzl (Responses to Human Rights Abuses in Cambodia, 1975–80) analyses major media reporting on Cambodia and concludes that media coverage on Cambodia was more intense when there were events with an international angle, but had largely disappeared by 1977. Metzl also contradicts Chomsky and Herman by claiming that of all the articles published regarding Cambodia, less than one in twenty dealt with the political violence being perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.

Chomsky has stated that "My personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in The Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised libertarian socialism. He is a sympathizer of anarcho-syndicalism and a member of the IWW union.

Noam Chomsky has been engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed opinions on politics and world events which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Chomsky has in turn argued that his views are those which the powerful do not want to hear, and for this reason he is considered an American political dissident. Some highlights of his political views:

Power is always illegitimate unless it proves itself to be legitimate. The burden of proof is on the authority. If it can't be proven, it should be dismantled. Authority that puts some above others is illegitimate by assumption similarly to the use of violence by a nation.
That there isn't much difference between slavery, and renting yourself to an owner, or "wage slavery." He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that destroys and undermines our freedoms. He holds that those that work in the mills should run them.
Very strong criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States. Specifically, he denounces what he feels are the double standards of the US government, which result in massive human rights violations. Chomsky argues that while the U.S. may preach democracy and freedom for all, the U.S. has a history of promoting, supporting and allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states.
He has argued that the mass media in the United States largely serve as a propaganda arm and "bought priesthood" of the U.S. government and U.S. corporations, with the three parties all largely intertwined through common interests. In a famous reference to Walter Lippmann, Edward S. Herman and Chomsky have said that the American media manufactures consent among the public.
He has opposed the U.S. global war on drugs, claiming its language to be misleading, and referring to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors education and prevention in the issue, as opposed to military and police action. In an interview in 1999, Chomsky argued that, whereas crops such as tobacco receive no mention in governmental exposition, other non-profitable crops, such as marijuana, are specifically targeted due to the consequences incurred in persecuting the poor.
"US domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control."
Critical of the American capitalist system and big business, he describes himself as a libertarian socialist who sympathizes with anarcho-syndicalism and is highly critical of Leninist branches of socialism. He also believes that libertarian socialist values exemplify the rational and morally consistent extension of original unreconstructed classical liberal and radical humanist ideas to an industrial context. Specifically he believes in a highly organized society based on democratic control of communities and work places. He believes that the radical humanist ideas of his two major influences, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, were "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and retain their revolutionary character."
Chomsky has stated that he believes the United States remains the "greatest country in the world," a comment that he later clarified by saying, "Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired."
According to Chomsky: "I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way…. I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is…. People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important." "We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on."
He holds views that can be summarized as anti-war but not strictly pacifist. He prominently opposed the Vietnam War and most other wars in his lifetime. However, he maintains that U.S. involvement in World War II was probably justified, with the caveat that a preferable outcome would have been to end or prevent the war through earlier diplomacy. In particular, he believes that the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "among the most unspeakable crimes in history."
He has a view of broad free-speech rights, especially in the mass media; he opposes censorship and refuses to take legal action against those who may have libeled him.
Chomsky has frequently stated that there is no connection between his work in linguistics and his political views, and is generally critical of the idea that competent discussion of political topics requires expert knowledge in academic fields. In a 1969 interview, he said regarding the connection between his politics and his work in linguistics:

I still feel myself that there is a kind of tenuous connection. I would not want to overstate it but I think it means something to me at least. I think that anyone's political ideas or their ideas of social organization must be rooted ultimately in some concept of human nature and human needs. (New Left Review, 57, Sept.-Oct. 1969, p. 21)
On September 20, 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez recommended Chomsky's book, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, during his speech at the U.N. General Assembly. Chávez stated that it was a good book to read because it demonstrates why the greatest danger to world peace currently is the United States.

Academic achievements, awards and honors
In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at University of Cambridge; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden; in 1988 the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto titled "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies". In 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in Cape Town, among many others.

Noam Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from the most prestigious universities around the world, including the following: University of London, University of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, Swarthmore College, Delhi University, Bard College, University of Massachusetts, University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Amherst College, Cambridge University, University of Buenos Aires, McGill University, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Columbia University, Villanova University, University of Connecticut, University of Maine, Scuola Normale Superiore, University of Western Ontario, University of Toronto, Harvard University, Universidad de Chile, University of Calcutta, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Santo Domingo Institute of Technology and the University of Bologna. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others. He is twice winner of The Orwell Award, granted by The National Council of Teachers of English for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language"

He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Social Sciences.

In 2007, Chomsky will receive The Uppsala University (Sweden) Honorary Doctor's degree in commemoration of Carolus Linnaeus.

Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine Prospect. He reacted, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls" . In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time".

Source: Wikipedia

posted May 02, 2008 08:05 PM            

And before you make the ad hominem attack that I'm puppet brainwashed by right wing propaganda for daring to call his "wisdom" into question, I feel the same way about many right wing pundits and speakers.

posted May 02, 2008 08:17 PM            

Chomsky is regarded by many free-thinkers as a man of rare integrity,
and a true crusader for the rights of the underdog.

I havent heard anything about it, and until I see some evidence, I'll remain blissfully ignorant.

posted May 05, 2008 04:08 PM            

He's an apologist for all the excesses of communists, meaning the killing of about 200,000,000 of their own citizens and only faults Stalin because Stalin gave communism a bad name.

He's also a total construct. In other words, Chomsky is a tin plated fraud. The so called governmental system..communism is itself a total fraud as is the communist command economic system.

In his personal life Chomsky doesn't practice what he says he believes. He's a typical leftist hypocrite. He says he's all for abolishing copyright and patent protections for intellectual property. In his real life as a leftist hypocrite, his writings are copyrighted and he has warnings on his website.

Chomsky says he wants the estate tax to continue...a communist wet dream straight out of the ass of Karl Marx. In his real life, Chomsky set up a trust to protect his assets from estate taxes and transfer his assets to his daughter(s).

Now, for someone who says..someone like you HSC, that they abhor killing...Chomsky is a strange person for you to put on a pedestal. Chomsky is leftist, reliable as a hater of Israel and is in favor of the jihad against Israel. Since that jihad is all about killing Israeli civilians how does that make you FEEL HSC.

Well, birds of a feather do seem to flock together.

posted May 05, 2008 04:16 PM            

Noam Chomsky has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955. In 1961 he was appointed full Professor in MIT's Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics. In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Professor Chomsky is "the most cited living author" and ranks just below Plato and Sigmund Freud among the most cited authors of all time. While acknowledging that he is reviled in some quarters for his ferocious anti-Americanism, a recent New Yorker profile calls Chomsky "one of the greatest minds of the 20th century."

Chomsky is without question the most politically influential living academic among other academics and their students. He is promoted by rock groups such as Rage Against the Machine and Pearl Jam at their concerts the way the Beatles once promoted the Guru Maharaji, with the performers solemnly reading excerpts from his work in between sets and urging their followers to read him too. The devotion of Chomsky's followers is summarized by radio producer David Barsamian, who describes the master's effulgence in openly religious terms: "He is for many of us our rabbi, our preacher, our rinpoche, our sensei."

Manufacturing Consent, a documentary adapted from one of Chomsky's books with the same title, has achieved the status of an underground classic in university film festivals. And at the climactic moment in the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting, the genius-janitor, played by Matt Damon, vanquishes the incorrect thinking of a group of sophomoric college students with a fiery speech quoting Professor Chomsky on the illicit nature of American power.

Any analysis of Chomsky must address linguistics, the field he remade so thoroughly by his scholarly work of the late 1950s that he was often compared to Einstein and other paradigm shifters. Those who admire this achievement but not his politics are at pains to explain what they take to be a disjunction between his work in linguistics and his sociopolitical ideas. They see the former as so brilliant and compelling as to be unarguable -- in all a massive scientific achievement -- and the latter as so venomous and counter-factual as to be emotionally disturbing.

Paul Postal and Robert Levine, linguists who have known and worked with Chomsky, take the view that the two aspects of his life's work in fact manifest the same key properties: "a deep disregard of, and contempt for, the truth; a monumental disdain for standards of inquiry; a relentless strain of self-promotion; notable descents into incoherence; and a penchant for verbally abusing those who disagree with him."

Chomsky's work in linguistics allowed him to make a transition from the university to the public arena in the mid-1960s and to be taken seriously as a critic of the war in Vietnam. In a series of influential articles that appeared in the New York Review of Books and other publications, he distinguished himself by the cold intellectual ferocity of his attacks on American policy. Although a generation older than most members of the New Left, he shared the latter's eagerness to romanticize the Third World.

Chomsky was one of the chief deniers of the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, which took place in the wake of the Communist victory and American withdrawal from Indochina. He directed vitriolic attacks towards the reporters and witnesses who testified to the human catastrophe that was taking place there. Initially, Chomsky tried to minimize the deaths (a "few thousand") and compared those killed by Pol Pot and his followers to the collaborators who had been executed by resistance movements in Europe at the end of World War II. By 1980, however, it was no longer possible to deny that some 2 million of Cambodia's 7.8 million people had perished at the hands of the Communists. But Professor Chomsky continued to deny the genocide, proposing that the underlying problem may have been a failure of the rice crop. As late as 1988, Chomsky returned to the subject and insisted that whatever had happened in Cambodia, the U.S. was to blame.

This conclusion is the principal theme of what may be loosely termed Chomsky's intellectual oeuvre: Whatever evil exists in the world, the United States is to blame. His intellectual obsession is America and its "grand strategy of world domination." In 1967 Professor Chomsky wrote that America "needed a kind of denazification." The Third Reich has provided him with his central metaphor for his own country ever since.

The long conflict with the Soviets and the fact that it was fought out primarily in the Third World allowed Chomsky to elaborate on his analogy with the Nazis and to spin his narrative on the evils of American power. The Soviet dictatorship was not only "morally equivalent" to democratic America, in Chomsky's view, but actually better because it was less powerful. The chief sin of Stalinism in his eyes was not the murder of millions, but the fact that he had given socialism a bad name.

Professor Chomsky has denounced every U.S. President from Woodrow Wilson and FDR to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as the front men in "four-year dictatorships" by a ruling class. In his view, the U.S., led by a series of lesser Hitlers, picked up where the Nazis left off after they were defeated in 1945. According to Chomsky, a case could be made for impeaching every President since World War II because "they've all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes."

Chomsky also detests the state of Israel, a country he regards as playing the role of Little Satan to the American Great Satan and functioning strategically as an "offshore military and technology base for the United States."

Of a pattern with this animus is Chomsky's involvement with neo-Nazis and Holocaust revisionism. This saga began in 1980 with Chomsky's support of Robert Faurisson, a French anti-Semite who was fired by the University of Lyon for his hate-filled screeds. ("The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie," Faurisson wrote.) Chomsky penned a preface to a book by Faurisson, explaining that the latter was an "apolitical liberal" whose work was based on "extensive historical research" and contained "no hint of anti-Semitic implications."

In the post-9/11 political ferment, Professor Chomsky's reputation, which had suffered because of his support of Pol Pot and his dalliance with figures like Faurisson, was revived by the anti-war Left. His following has grown, particularly in Europe and Asia, where his views have helped inform an inchoate anti-Americanism, and on the university campus, where divesting from Israel (a cause he has championed) and attacks against the War on Terror are de rigueur.

Professor Chomsky's most recent book, Hegemony or Survival (2003), casts America as a threat to global survival. The New York Times and Washington Post both treated Hegemony and Survival as a significant work, with Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power writing in the Times that Chomsky's book was "sobering and instructive.

Chomsky dismisses the atrocity of 9/11 as one that was dwarfed in magnitude by Bill Clinton's 1998 missile attack on a factory in the Sudan following the bombings of two U.S. embassies by al Qaeda, in which no one was injured.

Telling an MIT audience of 2,000 that the U.S. military response against the terrorists in Afghanistan was a calculated "genocide" that would cause the deaths of 3 to 4 million Afghanis, Chomsky denounced America as "the world's greatest terrorist state." He also traveled to the Muslim world to repeat the charges of U.S. genocide and terror to millions in Islamabad and New Delhi. (None of Chomsky's predictions of "genocide" and "famine" came to pass in Afghanistan, thanks to $350 million in food shipments supplied by the United States. Chomsky himself was aware of these shipments even as he made his accusations.)

Chomsky sees the 9/11 attacks as a turning point in history when the guns that were historically trained on the Third World by imperialist powers like America, were turned around. He sees this as a positive development, because in Professor Chomsky's eyes unless American "hegemony" is destroyed, the world faces a grim future.

In September 2007, Chomsky was praised by Osama bin Laden as "one of the most capable" citizens of the United States.

posted May 05, 2008 04:23 PM            

One could approach Massachusetts Institute of Technology Profesor Noam Chomsky's show of support this week for Hizbullah as a passing curiosity, or as yet one more piece of psychiatric evidence of this old Jew's dimming mind that has contributed so much to linguistic research has been swept away by his outrageous political opinions.

But it is also possible to see the praises Prof. Chomsky lavished on Iran's Lebanese proxy as an expression – as one expression – of a worrying and dangerous push gaining a foothold amongst Western intellectuals: An acceptance of radical Islam, and the view of such groups as legitimate liberation movements.

Liberation from what, you ask? The answer is clear: From the onus of colonialism, and American-Israeli oppression.........