Noam Alone

Pejman Yousefzadeh wrote a piece lambasting (who else?) Noam Chomsky for Tech Central Station last week and I felt the need to weigh in with a response. Not sure why, but my "feedback" was never posted and, actually, one of the pieces of feedback I reference isn't up anymore, either. Hmm...

Anyway, since I went to the trouble of writing, I thought I'd post it here...

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It’s nice to see Mike Cosby in the above post, “Read the Book,” pointing readers to the text of an actual Chomsky speech on the “silent genocide” issue. Also, as an FYI, there is another readily-available Chomsky lecture from December which is thoroughly documented and provides more context for discussing his interpretation of the post 9/11 world. Tellingly, Yousefzadeh had linked to an article by David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh of Frontpage Magazine for details on what Chomsky was trying to say.

There have been enough character smears against Chomsky to fill a book since 9/11. And, like this one, the vast majority of them lack any semblance of originality. The only thing missing from this TCS article was a reference to Werner Cohn and a discussion of Chomsky’s alleged Holocaust denial.

As for the Cambodia issue, I urge readers to do some investigation on their own. Sophal Ear’s undergrad thesis is a good start for one side of the issue, but it’d be prudent to check out what Chomsky says in The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism and After The Cataclysm (parts 1 & 2 of The Political Economy of Human Rights, respectively).

I’d also recommend looking at this defense of Chomsky written by Christopher Hitchens in 1985, as well as this 8-part discussion on “Chomsky and Cambodia”.

Still, I’m surprised that Yousefzadeh felt the need to pen this tripe, as he obviously reads FrontPage Magazine and has to know that they post a frothing anti-Chomsky diatribe at the rate of what seems to be once a month. Truth be told, this article is tired and redundant. I mean, the author even links to two articles which basically say the exact same thing he is trying to spit out. This begs the question: is there nothing better in this world to write about?