Chomsky, bin Laden and the struggle for a shining future
Translation by Małgorzata Koraszewska and Sarah Lawson
On Friday, May 6, a towering figure of the left, Noam Chomsky, published his comments on the tragic death of Osama bin Laden in the magazine Guernica. There the learned linguist expresses great doubt whether bin Laden’s statement about his own responsibility for the attack on the World Trade Center can be taken seriously. According to Chomsky, Obama was lying when he said, after the operation in which an unarmed man was killed, that the United States quickly learned that the attacks on the WTC were carried out by al Qaeda; after all, even “the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it ‘believed’ that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany.”
In the same paragraph Chomsky reminds us that the Taliban offered to “extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have.” And does not have until today, whereas “bin Laden’s ‘confession,’ … is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon”.
The rest of Chomsky’s arguments are easy to guess: travesty of justice, murder, “how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic,” etc.
On Tuesday, May 9, in Slate, Christopher Hitchens responded. Hitchens, who as a foreign correspondent knows the Middle East and has its number. It is no wonder that Chomsky’s deliberations reminded him of all those hundreds of times when he had heard that Americans or Jews themselves organized attacks on the WTC in order to get their hands on oil and satisfy their lust for harming Muslims. Certainly even in the West there is no shortage of similarly deranged people, and in a special place among them is a former British intelligence, agent David Shayler, who claims that no attacks took place at all, and to add to the wackiness announced his own divinity.
Hitchens reminds us that 10 years ago Chomsky did believe that Al-Qaeda organized the attack on the WTC but then he limited himself to minimizing the attack by claiming that the crimes of the West were much, much greater so there was nothing special about it.
Chomsky – Christopher Hitchens writes –still enjoys a good reputation among intellectuals. He claims incessantly that he is “turning to the facts.” However he does not show an elementary knowledge of facts presented in official investigations; it appears that he never read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker”, or followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen, or John Burns.
With the paranoid anti-war “left,” you never quite know where the emphasis is going to fall next. […] And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn’t even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade – concludes Hitchens.
It is astonishing sometimes to what a degree Chomsky and his ilk echo fanatical Muslim clerics. The same Friday when Chomsky published his article, in Al-Nour Mosque in Cairo people were praying for the death to America, for Paradise for bin Laden, and for death to Obama. Of course, just to round things up, they also chanted “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return”. (A clip with those prayers can be watched here.)
In Al-Aqsa Mosque the preacher extolling Osama bin Laden announced that Bush and Obama soon will be hanging on the gallows.
Today, the dogs of the West are rejoicing at the killing of one of the lions of Islam. Today, the West rejoices at the killing of one of the lions of Islam. We say to them, from the Al-Aqsa Mosque, from the heart of the Caliphate, which, Allah willing, is soon to come: Dogs should not rejoice at the killing of lions. A country of dogs will always remain a country of dogs, while a lion remains a lion even after it is killed.
This concurrence of opinion was still more visible in an address by Dr. Salah Al-Din Sultan, a member of International Union of Muslim Scholars, headed by Sheik Yousef Al-Qaradhawi. In an article posted on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood website, he explained that while the U.S. committed terror in the service of hegemony, oppression and tyranny, bin Laden raised the banner of jihad for the sake of Allah and he served a lofty goal, even if he did it in a misguided way.
Bin Laden’s terrorism raised the banner of jihad for the sake of Allah after the Islamic countries had renounced it as part of their resistance to Zionism in Palestine, to communism in Afghanistan, and to Hinduism in Kashmir. [True], bin Laden may have rushed in to things without first consulting the clerics and preachers of the ummah. He exercised independent discretion in matters of religious law and erred in some of his deeds. But the terrorism of the U.S. [is much worse because it] is essentially hegemony over money and power aimed at humiliating the regimes and peoples, at stealing the good of their [lands], plundering their resources, and producing tyrants in our Arab and Islamic world.
It is not known who is pilfering from whom: Noam Chomsky from Islamic scholars or Islamic scholars from Noam Chomsky? Of course, Chomsky cannot use the Koran in a similarly beautiful way, and his Marxism reaches only the most sophisticated. Dr Sultan wrote:
Bin Laden’s terrorism started out under the slogan, ‘Strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah and your enemies [Koran 8:60],’ while the terrorism of the U.S. was and still is [waged] under the slogan, ‘I am your Lord, the Highest [Koran 79:24],’ and, ‘I will cut off your hands and feet on opposite sides, and I will have you crucified on trunks of palm-trees: so shall ye know for certain, which of us can give the more severe and the more lasting punishment [Koran 20:71].’ [i]
Allegedly, CNN conducted a 20-minute interview with a former British lawyer currently living on social benefits, the unemployed Muslim Sheik Anjem Choudary and his followers. (The mysterious “allegedly” comes from the fact that the interview can be seen only on Choudary’s website, not on CNN’s.)
This well-known British unemployed lawyer believes that bin Laden is the first of a whole new generation that will be remembered for centuries. Al-Qaeda, created by him, spread jihad all over the Muslim world.
I do believe that Sheikh Osama bin Laden is the revivalist of this century. Allah tells us that every 100 years he will send someone to revive the religion of Islam, so I think he revived the concept of worshiping Allah alone; the concept of there are two camps in the world – the camp of believers and the camp of disbelievers – and the idea, the concept of jihad – to liberate Muslim land, to defend life, honor, and property, and to spread Islam all over the world. That is something which I think was in our divine text, but he brought it to the fore, and people talk about it now in normal conversations. So he is a very significant figure. I don’t think that any Muslim can say that, truthfully, he did not have an impact in their lives.
The proletariat is no more to raise the banner of the revolution and to overthrow capitalism in the name of a shining future, so now this can be done by the differently-excluded. The function of the proletariat can be taken over by unemployed lawyers from London, because if not they, then who?
One of the disciples of the unemployed lawyer from London, asked how he got to hear about bin Laden, answered:
I was introduced to the name Osama bin Laden shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Before that I didn’t really know who he was. But when 9/11 did occur it forced me to inquire about who this person was, what his message was about, and I realized this man – he was someone who stands up for the truth.
Noam Chomsky does not answer directly to questions of who Osama bin Laden was and still is for him. Only indirectly we can guess that for him bin Laden was a hero of the struggle against American capitalism, exploitation and imperialism—all that a true Marxist should struggle against.
He was also a herald of a better world, with sharia, four wives, subjugation of women, and a prospect of Paradise.
Such is Chomsky and he will probably remain the same. But it will be interesting to see if the number of people impressed by this Shining Light of the intellectual left will now decline or increase. There are periods in history when the demand for sick opinions grows regardless of income and the level of education.
[i] Ikwanonline.com, May 3, 2011., quote from MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 3823
This article is utter garbage. It shamefully misrepresents Chomsky’s position, then conflates him with a bunch of violent Islamists, and finally puts a load of posturing crap in his mouth that he never said or even implied. What an embarrassment. Yuk.
I enjoyed that article and agreed with most of it, but let me make one factual correction: Chomsky isn’t a Marxist.
I have to agree with Arthur. The article is a boatload of insinuations and hyperboles. Whether one is left or not, there are very serious questions about the behavior of the US and other western forces towards the rest of the world for a very long time. Asking to consider this, and to understand the anger many (not just the muslim world) have against US and its allies is not denying the gravity or cruelty of the terrorist attacks.
While I respect Hitchens and consider his contribution to the atheist/rationalist movement with awe, he does have a blind spot when it comes to 9/11 and its aftermath. This author, however, goes beyond what even Hitchens is saying. He sounds like a blind, irrational critic of anything left. Much like the frothing blabberings of an infuriated evangelical apologist.
I really do find this topic, or rather this particular clash of minds interesting/troubling/informative in equal degrees. I’ve read and liked a lot of Chomsky and Hitchens over the years and in different fields they loom very large. But the main thing I find interesting at the moment, is this idea of Left and Right. Surely the whole concept is a little outmoded? Surely it’s just a convenient catch all dichotomy that lumps a bunch of ideas in one pile and another set in another? Surely (and I haven’t checked, there’s a whole raft of discussion on this very subject out there in academia?
I dunno, I really do find it interesting and perplexing. And I think it is interesting to note that it’s the subject of Bin Laden and/or US foreign policy with the middle east that seems to be the one thing that really has people at this site really disagreeing strongly.
(Ophelia, you may be better placed to respond to that, as you obviously read the comments sections more than I may have, but it does strike me that this subject sticks out.)
Ditto. Chomsky is an anarchist, most definitely not a Marxist.
In respect to this article, I’m not so concerned about ideas of left or right, nor any matter regarding the Middle East. I’m complaining that this article (and to a lesser extent Hitchins’s article) woefully misrepresents Chomsky’s position in his recent essay on Bin Laden.
It seemed clear to me, and surely most reasonable people, that Chomsky was reiterating a desire to uphold international law in the apprehending of Bin Laden. But to Hitchens and co, this suddenly puts Chomsky in league with 9/11 conspiracy nuts. And it goes downhill from there. Now we have this idiot writing of how “Chomsky and his ilk echo fanatical Muslim clerics”, providing no sane evidence of Chomsky echoing anyone, Muslim or otherwise.
Just nonsense.
Wouldn’t a “true” Marxist side with the original Marx, in the necessity (and inevitability) for laissez-faire Capitalism to run rampant and selfdestruct?
What’s this “true”?
There are three important smilarities between Chomsky and Islamists like Choudary:
a) They loath the societies in which they live.
b) They believe that a radically different and superior form of society is possible
c) If asked for evidence for (b), they must either point to societies that only a fool would find attractive or concede that there really isn’t any.
Given these similarities, it will not be surprising if further similarities emerge.
I have to agree, this is a hatchet job – as are some of the comments. Further, these miss the point. Even if Chomsky actually agreed to the letter with one position of a radical cleric, so what? We all share opinions with even the most vile monsters in history – does that make the position (e.g. that Moscow is east of Berlin) wrong?
There one important difference between Chomsky and Anjem Choudhary. Choudhary has a tiny band of supporters whereas there is a very large body of people for whom Chomsky can do no wrong.
That would be awesome. I would love to see that.
“It is astonishing sometimes to what a degree Chomsky and his ilk echo fanatical Muslim clerics” states Koraszewski.
Sure, because “[expressing] great doubt whether bin Laden’s statement about his own responsibility for the attack on the World Trade Center can be taken seriously” is ASTONISHINGLY like calling America “a country of dogs will always remain a country of dogs.”
I’m not so well versed on Chomsky but even I can tell this terrible mischaracterization of the man and his position.
I agree with so much that is said through the myriad atheist blogs. I must confess, these occasional lunatic articles are reassuring to me because they let me check that I’m not simply reading and agreeing with with whatever is posted.
I can see that I have offended many by my sloppy description of Chomsky’s Utopia. Yes, I know, I could have done better. In my youth my friends used to spend their nights discussing their love for young Marx and their contempt for the old one. Being more leftish than left I couldn’t understand those subtle differences. So I’m terribly sorry but I have a bit of a problem if it was Proudhon or Marx that led Chomsky on his way to Damascus or rather to South Lebanon and Nasrallah.
As you know, five years ago, in May 2006, he visited his friend Nasrallah, and we don’t know if he is now saying about his Utopia Inshallah or not Inshallah. The important thing is what he says to millions of his followers. He is talking to people of the left, but what kind of left is it if he can make an alliance with islamists? Does he care about poor in Muslim countries? Does he care about women in Muslim countries? Does he care about children in Muslim countries? No, he just love anybody who hates US. Is it really your idea of being left?
Do you remember pact Ribbentrop-Molotov? For some western lovers of USRR it was the last straw. Not for all of them (not for Sartre). Orwell, Hitchens and people like them are much closer to my heart (and mind) than Noam Chomsky. I’m still leftish but it is a funny world – looking for the best modern slogan illustrating what is left I found that I like best “No child left behind” used by Bush administration for their school reform. (I wish this reform were more successful, but it is not about Noam Chomsky any longer.)
“It is astonishing sometimes to what a degree Chomsky and his ilk echo fanatical Muslim clerics. The same Friday when Chomsky published his article, in Al-Nour Mosque in Cairo people were praying for the death to America, for Paradise for bin Laden, and for death to Obama. Of course, just to round things up, they also chanted “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return”.
Where do Chomsky and his ilk echo prayers for the death to America, for bin Laden and death to Obama? Where do they echo “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return“?
What’s astonishing is that you thought you could get away with such an obviously misleading and tendentious paragraph. Arthur and salim have it right, this article is garbage. And I think Chomsky’s an idiot, so it’s got to be real garbage if it even bothers me.
“I agree with so much that is said through the myriad atheist blogs. I must confess, these occasional lunatic articles are reassuring to me because they let me check that I’m not simply reading and agreeing with with whatever is posted.”
Yep. This is what I want to say when fundies and Accomodationists are like “You all agree X” or “You’re all dogmatic!!!eleventy” – look at the reaction to garbage like this! We’re not drones. Maybe you are such drones, never questioning that religion is always good, that you are seeing yourselves reflected in us, but we use our critical thinking skills – as demonstrated every time we get a garbage article like this – we recognise it!
How many posts on the Pope’s blog are allowed to point out his garbage?
There is nothing in the linked Chomsky essay that remotely justifies the ridiculous claims stated here. This is nothing more than a nasty, dishonest smear job. This is the sort of stupid that claims that because terrorists hated Bush, and Democrats criticized Bush, the Democrats were in league with terrorists.
And, like most of the other folks commenting here, I’m not a particular fan of Chomsky or an automatic defender of his views. I find that he’s too intellectual about certain topics where a more strident position should be taken and vice versa. I also find that his critics tend to succumb to more extreme versions of Chomsky’s own flaws.
years ago I was a Chomsky fan, but I tired of his predictable tirades: everything evil was bound up in American imperialism, everything good was whomever stood (or claimed they stood) against it, no matter how corrupt they were.
His single dimension scale involved caused him to reflexively side with some very evil figures.
Impressive.
You call Chomsky a Marxist, and upon correction you dismiss any distinction between various socialisms as irrelevant. We can agree that socialists love to endlessly bicker over minor theoretical differences, but not all of them are so minor. Leninism and left libertarianism – call either part of the `Marxist tradition’ or not – are hardly two peas in a pod. They are as different as `centralized one party authoritarian rule’ and `federated direct democracy’ or `seizure of the state by the party using the masses’ and `control of the state by the masses’.
But they’re just two utopian roads to Damascus between which no one need bother distinguishing?
I also remember the Hitler-Stalin pact, and I remember who saw Leninism and Stalinism for what they were or else would soon become. Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Rosa Luxembourg, and so forth and so on – all socialists, all of different varieties. (Trotsky would have a few years of prescience after his exile as well, though only as regards to Stalin.) But the distinctions between their ideologies are unimportant, correct?
And I do not understand this nonsense about his being in `alliance with Islamists’, except in the trivial sense that both Chomsky and Islamists are opposed to US intervention in Islamic countries. This is on par with canards about vegetarians being aligned with Hitler. Or humanitarians to Gaza generally being allied with Hamas. Apparently, I am in alliance with Obama, Chomsky, Hitchens, Bush, Jesus, Captain Planet, Islamists including heralds of sharia, and you.
This `reflexive anti-Americanism’ stuff is also silly, and it’s very old. (It shows up in the Chomsky-Buckley debate, along with counter-examples.) I’ve never seen Chomsky support aggression by countries hostile to America – the only possible counter-example being a mixed reaction to the North Vietnamese deposition of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. He condemns aggression by Russia, and used to condemn it when committed by the USSR. As far as I can tell, he is a principled non-interventionist – insofar as a proposed intervention is illegal under international law – who supports universal standards in state affairs. And this latest essay is only a continuation of that basic, predictable theme of his.
I do not unambiguously support Chomsky or agree with all of his work, and Hitchens hits some of the reasons. But it is obscene to equate Chomsky’s position with that of Islamists. And it shouldn’t be hard to avoid doing so: his position really isn’t that sophisticated. If anything, it’s boringly clear after one has heard it several times.
For the bored, then, we might ask why Chomsky started talking about reasonable doubt as to bin Laden’s guilt. First, we can recognize that it did not start only after bin Laden died: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200209–02.htm
Perhaps he was insinuating that the conspiracy theorists are correct? But of course he is one of the most hated critics of Trutherism. He has always clearly stated that 9/11 was a terrorist atrocity – and not one committed by the Bush administration.
He only says that it is only plausible that bin Laden bears responsibility, meaning of course that he should be tried in accordance with international law. Instead, the US Government ignored Taliban requests – the Taliban being guilty of tentatively sheltering the accused – and then started attacking. This and other events were in violation of international law and universal standards in the affairs of nations – and was explicitly defended as such.
Was Chomsky’s point really that hard to miss? Look at the beginning of his recent comment:
This really isn’t that difficult. Chomsky is arguing what he has always argued, that the US response to 9/11 has violated international law on several levels. You can argue that the laws are inapplicable, or wrong, or out-dated, or whatever leads you to the conclusion that it was correct to kill bin Laden instead of capturing and trying him. But your problem is there and not with Chomsky.
Or mullahs at the Al-Nour mosque. Or Choudary. Or with whomever you group him next. (Chomsky sees Caliphate restoration as a lofty goal?)
Or is it that I and the other commenters here have missed something?
Sinister stuff.
Offense is the wrong word, surely? I’m not offended. It seems others aren’t either, they’re justifiably calling you out on what they see as misrepresentation. Give people some credit, we can read Chomsky, or whoever, and sort the wheat from the chaff.
All I would ask of anyone having a crack at someone like Chomsky (or Hitchens, or Harris, for that matter) is you at least pay them enough respect to give their work some serious consideration. The op-ed in question is, well, an op-ed. The reason even non-fans of chomsky might gag on what you’ve written is that, even if they disagree, they admit that over the course of his career he’s not just pulling his opinions out of his backside. Having read a fair chunk of chomsky, I think the least you would have to do to properly discredit him is to go to his sources and show that he has firstly lied or misrepresented them and secondly attack his overall narrative, presumably using other facts and sources. It would take some work.
Anyhoo.
I am sorry, maybe we are reading different articles, but can you really stand behind Chomsky’s analogy on the legality of the murder of Bush and Osama and not see the similarity in tone and meaning, to a certain position of fundamentalist islamists?
I think the article was well written and the tone was spot on. Its angering when someone with the respect that Chomsky has earned in his career writes a piece of drivel like that one.
Chomsky is saying, and convincingly, that both assassinations would be illegal under international law. Further insinuations about being `like an Islamist’ are disgraceful smears, not meaningful similarities.
And you make it sound as though Chomsky is a respectable figure who suddenly wrote a disgraceful thing. And so you would be surprised to know that he has been saying the same thing for about 10 years? Have you been angry for 10 years? Or were you angry before that, when Chomsky employed similar analogies under other circumstances? This is no deviation; it’s a continuity.
You are correct, Chomsky has been rather consistent on being wrong about the middle east, he has some very good books on imperialism, but he sees everything as an extension of his thesis, rather than examine its nuance, this is specialy true in the middle east were is as muddled as it can be.
And no, the analogy fails, Osama was a valid military target, he was an enemy leader in hidding and still issuing orders, the last time I checked this was, according to the Geneva convention, permited by international law. Killing an expresident of a nation who is no longer issuing orders would very much not be.
The strange thing is that Chomsky had the good example of Bosch (except it would be cuban comandos) in the same column, but neglected to mention it, this is as much an hyperbole as the “Death to america” bits, just more “studied” which was the point of the article.
That’s an extraordinary smear, Mr Koraszewski. George Scialabba elegantly trashes such guesswork…
Good link, bensix. An excellent read.
http://www.zcommunications.org/there-is-much-more-to-say-by-noam-chomsky
The expanded version of the Chomsky letter.
If you think that Chomsky no longer believes that Al-Qaeda, or Bin Laden, were responsible for 9/11, then I urge you to read what he said again more carefully. That’s not what he said and not what he believes.
Rather than believe that you were so careless as to not notice that, I would remind you that it strengthens one’s own argument, not to mention that it’s common courtesy, to address the strongest interpretatiion of one’s opponents argument. As opposed to a weak-assed one bordering on a straw-man that smacks at best of laziness, or at worst dishonesty. Or something else, but I don’t want to be too uncharitable.