DERSHOWITZ-CHOMSKY CAGE MATCH!

I first debated Chomsky in 1973, several weeks after the Yom Kippur War. Chomsky’s proposal at that time was consistent with the PLO party line. He wanted to abolish the state of Israel, and to substitute a “secular, binational state,” based on the model of binational “brotherhood” that then prevailed in Lebanon. Chomsky repeatedly pointed to Lebanon, where Christians and Muslims “lived side by side,” sharing power in peace and harmony. This was just a few years before Lebanon imploded in fratricidal disaster.

I don’t like Dersh all that much, but he sure is right here.

In a subsequent debate at the Harvard Medical School, Chomsky initially denied having advocated a Lebanon-style binational state for Israel, only to have to back down upon being confronted with the evidence. He also tried to dispute the fact that he had authorized an essay he had written in defense of Robert Faurisson to be used as the forward to Faurisson’s book about Holocaust denial, but again had to back down. Chomsky took the position that he had no interest in “revisionist” literature before Faurisson had written the book. When confronted by Robert Nozick, a distinguished philosophy professor who recalled discussing revisionist literature with him well before the Faurisson book, Chomsky first berated Nozick for disclosing a private conversation and then he shoved him contemptuously in front of numerous witnesses.

This then is the man who is leading the campaign for divesture against Israel. He is joined in this ignoble effort by some who would take the money now invested in the Mideast’s only democracy and have it sent to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba, the Palestinian Authority, and others who support and finance terrorism. He is also joined by a motley assortment of knee-jerk anti-Zionists, rabid Anti-Americans, radical leftists (the Spartacist League), people with little knowledge of the history of the Arab-Israeli dispute, and even some of Chomsky’s former students who now teach in Israel.

There is no intellectually or morally defensible case for singling out Israel for divestiture, and I challenge Chomsky to debate me on the morality of this selective attack against an American ally that is defending itself — and the world — against terrorism that targets civilians. Universities invest in a wide array of companies that have operations in countries that systematically violate the human rights of millions of people. Nor are these countries defending themselves against those who would destroy them and target their civilians. Yet this petition focused only on the Jewish State, to the exclusion of all others, including those which, by any reasonable standard, are among the worst violators of human rights. This is bigotry pure and simple, and those who signed the petition should be ashamed of themselves and shamed by others.

Chomsky is an America-hating anti-Semite whose sole organizing intellectual principle seems to be siding with genocidal cretins.

UPDATE: Reader Watt Boone writes:

Regarding “Chomsky is an America-hating anti-Semite whose sole organizing intellectual principle seems to be siding with genocidal cretins.”

This all may be true. Yet he can’t be anti-semitic unless he hates himself, which certainly is a possibility. He’s Jewish (at least by birth) and is the son of a Hebrew scholar in NYC.

Yes, I know. But if I were Chomsky, I’d hate myself.