WALTER SHAPIRO delivers a blogger-like Fisking to Noam Chomsky’s book. Sample:
At a moment of intense patriotism, it is worth trying to decipher the roots of Chomsky’s against-the-grain appeal.
The secret certainly does not lie in Chomsky’s riveting prose style. The book was cobbled together in mid-October from Chomsky’s voluminous e-mail exchanges, primarily with foreign journalists. The repetitive format, consisting of naïve questions followed by self-serving answers, allows Chomsky to elude any rigorous explanation of what America should do in the face of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The MIT linguist may be a prophet without honor in his own country, but Chomsky is far from an adroit soothsayer in any language. Radiating the armchair pseudo-certainty that is his trademark, Chomsky predicts, “An attack against Afghanistan will probably kill a great many innocent civilians, possibly enormous numbers in a country where millions are already on the verge of death from starvation.”
Just in case any gullible reader missed his point, Chomsky helpfully adds, “Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.”
OK, even great thinkers occasionally make mistakes. But Chomsky cannot even decide whether Osama bin Laden should be reviled or coddled with a tolerant understanding of the causes of his murderous fury.
Hmm. Maybe this is because Chomsky’s, you know, an idiot? Shapiro continues:
Chomsky is a master of false equivalence. High on his roster of American war crimes is the 1998 destruction of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in an abortive cruise missile attack against al-Qaeda. Chomsky claims that tens of thousands of Sudanese died because of the resulting lack of life-saving drugs. He dismisses with a flurry of rhetorical excess the American explanation that the misplaced attack was due to faulty intelligence.
In classic style, Chomsky wonders whether the 1958-61 Chinese famine should also be dismissed because “Mao did not ‘intend’ to kill millions of people.” In a few short sentences, Chomsky has implicitly likened an errant cruise missile to the worst horrors unleashed by the Chinese Communist government.
Why is anyone reading this tripe?
Maybe because, you know, they’re idiots too? Shapiro’s explanation is kinder and more reasoned than mine — but not necessarily inconsistent.