Thursday, March 4, 2010
In order to help some of the student- and other local activists continue to take apart what's developing into the most farcical "Israel Apartheid Week" yet, I chose to do something I've sworn off for the last dozen or so years: a Noam Chomsky event.
I used to go to quite a few of these during the Windows 3.1/BC (Before Children) era when I was just getting into the activist game. And while I was ready to enter similar territory to where I've been in the past, nothing prepared me for the Biblical-level Déjà vu on display at Boston University that evening.
It wasn't just the audience consisting of the usual anti-Israel bobble-heads wearing t-shirts emblazoned with 100-year-old slogans made this scene so familiar. Point of fact, I recognized over a dozen of the non-students in the audience as faces I've seen at every anti-Israel event I've attended over the last two decades. And Chomsky always draws a crowd of student admirers ready to lap up his every word (especially since their understanding of history was informed entirely from books written by or referencing the MIT prof).
No the thing that truly caught me by surprise was the talk itself which did not veer one angstrom in word or tone from what I saw Chomsky yammering on about 15 or more years ago. There it all was (again). The hyper-critical microscope focused on every Israeli or American word or deed, coupled with a Pollyannaish taking of every voice critical of the US or the Jewish state at absolute face value. The denial of documented historical facts, coupled with an understanding that his audience would accept anything coming out of his mouth as Gospel. And, most importantly, the countless sentences starting with "Of course...," "As everyone knows...", "As has been proven again and again...", "As is widely recognized..." all delivered in the same, drawling grumble that's been Chomsky's trademark since the Beatles first took the stage on Ed Sullivan.
And then it struck me. In the decade and a half since I'd last put myself through a torturous Chomsky performance, a character has emerged from literature who at last can describe the Sage of the MIT: Harry Potter's Professor Binns.
Potterphiles will remember Binns as the teacher who died one night while taking a nap by the fire in the Hogwarts teacher's lounge, but whose ghost decided death should not prevent him from giving the same mind-numbingly dull lectures he'd tortured students with for decades previously.
Suddenly, the world made sense! Chomsky has not inhabited the landscape of political discourse for these many years so much as haunted it. It doesn't matter what events happen in America, the Middle East or anywhere else that prove him wrong. It makes no difference how many Palestinians die following his advice to stand firm in the battle against Israeli and "US imperialism." It's irrelevant how many times his predictions are proven wrong and his recommendations prove disastrous. No matter what, Professor Binns-Chomsky will continue to drone on about his version of The Globlin Wars, with the You-Know-Whos playing the role of the goblins ("of course").
That event was Nappy's first trip through the looking glass to Planet Chomsky. Nappy learned many amazing True Facts!™ sitting at the feet of the great sage—Really! Once upon a time, he was a great linguist who did pioneering, groundbreaking work with Transformational Grammar, a meta-theory of how human language works. And it's held up pretty well, though a year or so back an isolated tribe in the Amazon was discovered, and their language is the first counterexample to the theory, so it looks like it might be paradigm shift time (guide, outline). Not that any of this lends any credibility to his historical analysis or political views. Among the astounding insights that Noam Chomsky shared with the audience:
- Israel sent many thousands of rockets into Gaza over the last few years.
- J Street is very moderate, reasonable and centrist.
- The Apologist in Chief President Obama is just another anti-progressive right-wing, US imperialist.
- The difference between Hampshire's College's divestment from Israel apartheid and divestment from South Africa a quarter century ago was not that Hampshire didn't divest but that their divestment was much weaker and didn't go as far.
- By implication, the reason that most
- The world's first suicide bomber was a Jew, the biblical Samson. Chained to the columns of a temple, committed suicide by yanking the columns and bringing the temple crashing down on the Phillipines, killing a great number of them. OK. Let's give Chomsky the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he said Philistines, and Nappy just heard him wrong. But there were other howlers, little slips, that did come out of his mouth.
And so forth and so on. It was all Nappy could do to not bust a gut laughing out loud, as Dexter suggests, at these astounding revelation. (Nappy apologizes for not supplying a link to Dexter's suggestion, but it was probably in one of the recent video interviews Sol did, so the great Google can't find it as text.)Palestinian Christian ArabsChristian Palestinians have left thedisputed territoriesWest Bank and Gaza—Nappy's nothing if not politically correct!—is because of the Occupation, in line with the policy articulated by Moshe Dayan, which Chomsky articulated several times. It was almost a mantra: "Treat them like dogs, and whoever leaves, leaves."Of course, he didn't bother mentioning the dwindling Christian population and dire straits Christians find themselves in this has nothing to do with throughout the region. Had he brought up the sorry plight of Egyptian Copts, Syriac Orthodox Christians, Lebanese Maronites or Iraqi Chaldeans, he would, of course, not have talked about Islamist jihad or Islamic fundamentalism but found a way to blame it all on the Occupation. You see, the reason for Christians' misfortune throughout the Arab and Muslim world is that America props up the fundamentalist dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. And, of course, Imperialist America occupies Iraq. Israel, as America's lackey, does whatever the big mafia don wants, so it's all perfectly clear that it's really due to the collusion of imperialist America and racist Israel.
Chomsky's what the Brits call a nutter. As William Shockley on race and Linus Pauling on Vitamin C, so Chomsky on and history and politics. Before Tuesday, Nappy had only heard Chomsky speak about Israel on Internet streams, so Nappy missed the full effect of his alternate reality and counterfactual history. It's so outrageous that it hardly matters that he was wrong on so many factual details, e.g., Israel's
retreatDisengagement from Gaza was not in August, 2005, right after Tish'a b'Av, but sometime around December or January. It's only by travelling to his parallel universe and hear him drone on unchallenged by someone like Dersh that you can fully appreciate how seriously deranged he his.When I was a student at Columbia, which was umpteen quadrillion years ago, I went to a talk that Chomsky gave there about the Middle East. I expected an in-depth, intellectually challenging presentation.
The reality shocked me. Chomsky stood up at the lectern and mouthed nothing but slogans. There weren't any fully developed arguments backed by figures or anecdotal evidence. In fact, he didn't speak in paragraphs; he barely spoke in sentences. With a kind of rapid-fire delivery, he spoke one slogan or sentence at a time, waited for the applause from the audience, and then spoke another line, and then got another applause. It was barely what you could call a speech.
There were many Arab listeners in the audience, and several of them were vocal in their support for Chomsky. In any case, the audience was friendly to him, especially one young woman sitting not too far from me who applauded everything Chomsky said, including one especially inane comment that didn't win applause from anyone else. I don't remember what the comment was, but I do remember that the audience was politely quiet, letting the gaff pass; except that you could hear the sound of this one person clapping. She stopped quickly, and Chomsky moved on...to his next line.
I remember thinking that it was as if he were just picking sentences out of a hat, in no particular order. Maybe he was having a bad day.
It was a surreal experience.
It has been noted elsewhere that Chomsky has always used the same yellowed dog eared sheaf of notes for decades. That is, his thoughts his very words are absolutely the same now as they were untold years ago.
Just bumping this thread as I've just approved Nappy's message.
Well the point about other minorities and how they are treated in the Middle East is valid and this is a real problem with antizionists who don't see the big picture.
This also should be extended to include violence between various Muslim sects.
The way "progressives" deal with the Middle East is like a wrestling match.
Ever see a wrestling match where there are two teams battling each other and the referee only sees what is going on in front of him, while the audience is SCREAMING that in the opposite corner of the ring there is a guy beating the hell, out of another guy?
The referee doesn't look behind him, just at the relatively minor infraction infront of him.
Obviously wrestling is FAKE, the referee is FAKE (like the "anti-war" activists), the BBC claim to evenhandedness is FAKE, the claims that Israel is an apartheid state is FAKE, the claims that Islam is the religion of peace is FAKE, the claim that "scotland" released the bomber of Pan Am 103 on compassionate grounds is FAKE, and on and on.
Oh yes, Ron Newman, did Saddam Husseins Iraq ever have WMDs???
The highlight of the evening was the last question of the Q&A after the "lecture" posed by Rabbi Chananel Weiner, the Boston Campus Dude for Aish HaTorah.
R. Weiner is a young man with a gift for working with people—a real charmer. He has a warm, gentle manner that puts people at ease. Because it was late and the organizers realized his question might not be sympathetic, they hustled him as he stood at the mike to make it quick—to just ask the question or they would turn off the microphone. Instead of being intimidated or frazzled by this harassment, he smiled, reassured the guy that it would be OK, and went on to pose his question. It was disarming and caught them off-guard. As he reports below, people came up to him afterward to thank him for the question. Here's what he wrote in his weekly email:
Amen.Oh, Nappy admits to sputtering a little incoherently in #1. Stuff happens when you're in a rush and don't proofread carefully.
Follow Sol's recent quick-link for another trip report of the journey to Planet Chomsky: Noam Chomsky's Visceral Hatreds
Update: Rabbi Weiner's remarks, with a picture of him standing in front of the IAW "literature" table in the auditorium's lobby, is in Boston North's The Jewish Journal.
One gets the sense that Israel is being conflated with "imperialism," regardless of whether the shoe fits and regardless of regional and Jewish, Christian and Muslim history and also Greek and Roman history (etc).
I don't know how intelligent and supposedly well-educated people espouse what is, to me, a logical fallacy.
Regardless, the rabbi's question about "apartheid week" vs real peace seeking efforts was right on.
There's no doubt in my mind that ugly, inflammatory rhetoric in the West is at least partially to blame for conflict in the East.