Recently I had lunch in a
Delhi restaurant with one of our Indian readers, the philosopher and a
sayid (that is a descendent of the Prophet) Professor Syed Zaidi. Zaidi
was concerned with the 9/11 movement and with its investigations that
apparently indicated involvement of some high-placed Jews. Even more he
was concerned with the position of Professor Noam Chomsky, and he
forwarded me a letter by Kevin Barrett (“Chomsky – Hero or Gatekeeper?”)
and an article by our friend Professor James Petras who aired similar
accusations. When I defended Noam, Zaidi wrote: “The general view of
Chomsky is increasingly more harsh than your own. If you do feel he is
after all not so bad, why not write about it. This is a topic,
especially the role of gatekeeper, that deserves to be aired with your
group. Frankly, I find views such as those of Petras, Jeff Blankfort
and Kevin Barrett quite liberating, and I do believe that there is life
beyond courtesy.” Here is my response.
Noam Chomsky and the 9/11 Crusaders
By Israel
Shamir
Walking around town, we are
sometimes accosted by well-meaning people who are greatly devoted to a
cause. It can be a Kurdish refugee replete with blood-curdling photos of
Turkish atrocities, or an Iranian émigré with a petition to sign, or, if
we are lucky, it could be Mia Farrow asking us to condemn the Chinese.
These good people do not take no for an answer. They grasp your
buttonhole and keep it in their sweaty hands until you sign their
petition or ask them rather impolitely to buzz off. Then they explode in
a fury not unlike that of a woman scorned.
Such a thing happened to the
great luminary Noam Chomsky. He was accosted by one Kevin Barrett, a
9/11 enthusiast, whom he tried to reason with politely, but was
eventually forced to tell to get off. An infuriated Barrett
published an acrimonious attack:
“Chomsky, an anemic speaker with
all the charisma of a garden slug, endlessly bashes the USA in a whiney
voice, phrasing his criticism in terms that only the sectarian left will
agree with. Chomsky's boring, unpleasant style, and his obsessively
anti-American argument, identifies anti-Empire with anti-American.”
What did Chomsky do to deserve this
abuse? If one delves into Barrett’s tedious torrent of vituperation, one
finds that his main objection to Chomsky is that the Boston Professor
does not want to fight Barrett’s war for crediting Bush and Mossad with
9/11. And so he does not. Does he
have to? Barrett tried to push Chomsky into immersing himself in the
technicalities of 9/11 “Truth Movement” discourse, and refused to take
no for an answer. You know these guys: anyone who does not agree
with them is an agent of the Enemy. Chomsky did well to retort: “That's
a curious feature of the Truth Movement … the curious ‘with us or
against us’ mentality that pervades much of the movement: either you
accept our claims, or you're a ‘left gatekeeper.’”
There is always a place for
critique and argument -- even against Chomsky, and I have had my go at
that, too. However, there are some red lines we should try to observe in
friendly critique, and this one was a crude ad hominem and
paranoid attack. Barrett is
similar to the holocaust-obsessed Jews (and their ‘denying’
counterparts) who need your confirmation of their narrative and do not
let go of your buttonhole until you respond. Let Barrett fight this war
himself, without Chomsky at his disposal. This is a free country, more
or less. For instance, I do not deny or confirm holocausts and
massacres. Peak Oil does not pique me overmuch. And as for 9/11
whodunit, I feel that the 911 Truth Movement of Barrett et al.
trivializes the event, turning it into a successful insurance swindle. I
wrote about the event, at the time it took place:
“The
kamikaze could be practically anybody: American Nationalists, American
Communists, American Fundamentalist Christians, American Anarchists,
anybody who rejects the twin gods of the dollar and the M-16, who hates
the stock market and interventions overseas, who dreams of America for
Americans, who does not want to support the drive for world domination.
They could be Native Americans returning to Manhattan, or Afro-Americans
who still have not received compensation for slavery.
They could be foreigners of
practically any extraction, as Wall Street and the Pentagon ruined many
lives of people all over the globe. Germans can remember the fiery
holocaust of Dresden with its hundreds of thousands of peaceful refugees
incinerated by the US Air Force. The Japanese will not forget the
nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima. The Arab world still feels the creeping
holocaust of Iraq and Palestine. Russians and East Europeans feel the
shame of Belgrade. Latin Americans think of American invasions of Panama
and Granada, of destroyed Nicaragua and defoliated Colombia. Asians
count their dead of Vietnam War, Cambodia bombings, Laos CIA operations
in millions. Even a pro-American, Russian TV broadcaster could not
refrain from saying, ‘now
Americans begin to understand the feelings of Baghdad and Belgrade’.
The Riders could be anybody
who lost his house to the bank, who was squeezed from his work and made
permanently unemployed, who was declared an Untermench by the new
Herrenvolk. They could be Russians, Malaysians, Mexicans, Indonesians,
Pakistanis, Congolese, Brazilians, Vietnamese, as their economy was
destroyed by Wall Street and the Pentagon. They could be anybody, and
they are everybody. Their identity is quite irrelevant as their message
is more important than their personalities, and their message is read
loud and clear in the choice of targets.”
This was also the view of
the late French thinker
Jean Baudrillard:
“In
the end it was they who did it but we who wished it. If we do not take
this into account, the event loses its symbolic dimension; it becomes a
purely arbitrary act. . . (A)nd in their strategic symbolism the
terrorists knew they could count on this unconfessable complicity.”
He saw 9/11 as “arguably
the most potent symbolic event since the crucifixion of Christ”,
says
Bradley Butterfield.
In other words, the act of
9/11 was by far too powerful of a symbol to give it away to the Enemy.
Not in vain did people all over the world rejoice when this Mammon
symbol collapsed. The knowledge that the Americans may be beaten on
their home ground has comforted the innumerable victims of the Empire. I
do not know who did it, but it was planned and executed by people of
great spirit.
I can’t
accept the Mossad and/or the Jews as the perpetrators of the 9/11, not
because it is an antisemitic claim. My readers know that this
consideration has never stopped me before. It’s
the other way around: I consider it a deeply pro-Jewish claim implying
that only Jews are capable of enterprises of great pith and moment,
while others prefer to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune and never take arms against a sea of troubles. In a way, the
Jewish perpetration theory shows how far this belief in Jewish
superiority has entered the hearts of Americans and of many Muslims:
“if
it was done and it did not flop, it’s
got to be Jews”.
We Israelis are more critical; we say
“if
it did not flop, it can’t
be the Mossad”.
This does not mean that one
has to subscribe to the 19 Osama warriors’
conspiracy as presented by US officialdom. Of many kamikaze attacks,
that of 9/11 towers above the rest. It cannot be compared with any
other, certainly not with any Islamic suicide attack. The assault on the
very symbol of Mammon and at the heart of its military might was a
great, paradigmatic event. It is easier to believe that this feat was
done by avenging angels, by St Michael in person, rather than by five
merry Mossad agents or by Bush and Cheney’s
accomplices. It is easier to agree with Baudrillard that the Twin towers
had committed suicide in order not to be outdone by the pilots, than it
is with Barrett et al that it was done by crafty Jew Larry Silverstein
in order to collect insurance.
Baudrillard spoke of people
who “try
everything to discredit their actions. Thus we call them "suicidal" and
"martyrs," and add immediately that such martyrdom does not prove
anything. But such a moral argument can be reversed. If the voluntary
martyrdom of kamikazes proves nothing, then the involuntary martyrdom of
the victims cannot prove anything either, and there is something obscene
in making it a moral argument.”
Unwillingly, Barrett and the
Truth Movement are engaged in undermining and discrediting the supreme
sacrifice of those who died to knock off the Towers. I understand Noam
Chomsky, who did not want to support this effort. Nor did he want to
uphold the arrogant American view of 9/11 as the worst lie and the most
dreadful atrocity ever. Chomsky suggested that Barrett compare this lie
with “the massacre of 4 million
people in Indochina or the Reaganite terror, leaving some 200,000
tortured and mutilated bodies in Central America.”
“But qui bono?!” – I hear them
calling. – “The Jews (call them Zionists, or Neocons, if you wish)
profited from 9/11. Even Netanyahu said recently that 9/11 was good for
Israel.”
There is no doubt that the Jews used
9/11 to its fullest extent; but they can make use of any event due to
their media control. Be it a Mars landing, a victory over Germany, a
defeat in Iraq, oil price rise or the dollar’s collapse – they can use
it to their advantage. They do not have to fly to Mars, knock down the
dollar – or the Twin Towers, themselves.
“In order to succeed, a terrorist needs
dynamite and newspaper”, quipped a Jewish terrorist in 1901. In 2001, a
hundred years later, a newspaper alone would suffice. With newspapers,
or rather, with TV under one’s control, one can utilize others’ dynamite
for one’s own benefit. One can expropriate others’ actions freely, even
others’ supreme sacrifices. In such situations, qui bono? does
not apply. Everything, even the most damning event will be turned for
their benefit – as long as they will do the explaining.
Noam Chomsky does not fight the Truth
Movement. Let these good people continue with their research of steel
and concrete boiling points; let them accuse the administration, the
CIA, the Jews and Mossad as much as they wish. Their struggle has some
positive value: it undermines public trust in mainstream media and in
good intentions of the authorities. They may try to understand that
their position is not the only one possible: others may actually approve
of the attack, or consider it of little importance, or just have other
fish to fry.
People attach the “left gatekeeper”
label to anybody who does not agree with them with great ease; but this
pertinent expression should be used against pundits who fight us, not
against allies and neutrals.
Our friend Jim Petras had
unleashed such philippics against Chomsky: “Noam Chomsky has long
been one of the great obfuscators of AIPAC and the existence of Zionist
power over US Middle East policy... To continue to masquerade as ‘war
critics’ while ignoring the central role of the Zionist Power
Configuration makes pundits like Chomsky, Moyers and Powers and their
acolytes irrelevant to the anti-war struggle. They are part of the
problem, not part of the solution.”
Petras also wants Chomsky to fight his
war, that is the war against Jewish establishment (he calls it ‘Zionist
Power Configuration’). Yes, it would be nice, but then, Petras won’t be
needed. Instead of seeing Noam Chomsky as an enemy (“part of the
problem”), it is better to view him as an important ally covering an
important part of the battle line. He does not cover all, he does not go
to places Petras or I go, but he does not stop us from going. That is
why it is ridiculous to call him “left gatekeeper”, as he keeps no gate
locked.
We have many points of
disagreement with Noam Chomsky. To mention a few:
(1) He supports the obsolete idea of Two States in Israel/Palestine and
thus of preserving the Jewish state, while we call to undo it and
replace it with One state where Jews are equal rather than superior.
(2) He considers the American support of Israel being derived from
“the
imperial interests”,
(‘Chomsky
thesis’:
“Israel
is good for true imperial interests of the US elites, and the Jewish
Lobby is powerful exactly because its line coincides with these
interests of elites”)
while we think that this support is caused by the commanding heights the
Jews occupy in the US discourse.
We argued for our views and
against his, sine ira et studio, in many articles, both our own
and those of other writers published on our site or circulated. My essay
Fiesta of St. FerminRNR (included in the book The Galilee Flowers)
dealt and debunked the Chomsky thesis in 2001. It caused very
interesting
polemics. I
discussed it with Chomsky. In
Spider Web, we brought up the polemics of Noah Cohen who called
Chomsky’s
position on Palestine "Apologetics for Injustice". We published Jeffrey
Blankfort’s ‘The
Israel Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions’ and ‘The
Chomsky/Blankfort Polemic. W e published a very censorious article
by Bob Finch, who described Noam Chomsky as
“the
chief Rabbi of the left who absolves the Jewish state of guilt and
responsibility for its apartheid regime and its military belligerence
against neighbouring countries.”
We published harsh critique of Chomsky’s
views qua the Lobby by Pappe, Blankfort and Petras in
Contra Chomsky and by
Mazin Qumsiyeh., see also
Chomsky under Fire.
Despite many, many attacks on him,
Chomsky never responded in kind. He always remained polite, even
courteous. He had never ever blocked a publication. He is going his way
and let us respect it. Light infantry and heavy artillery have different
modes of operation. Chomsky is our heavy cannon, while Petras or Gilad
Atzmon or Israel Shamir, we are light scouts, the reconnaissance unit.
We should go further than he does, but he is our fallback. Let us
cherish this man and his activity.
The bottom line was
editorialized by Ian Buckley in his
In Defence of Shamir .. and Chomsky
“I
would content that Noam is basically an honest and very knowledgeable
man, despite his occasional personal blind spots. It should be freely
admitted that Chomsky doesn't go far enough on the Middle East. Whatever
the slight defects and blind spots in this particular area, he still
deserves kudos for his excellent, indeed pioneering, investigations into
the distortions of the mass media and the profoundly undemocratic nature
of 'democratic' societies. After a reading of Chomsky, you are
inoculated for good against the foetid netherworld of the mainstream
media. There is nothing wrong at all with a little criticism, but we
shouldn't lose sight of who the 'good guys' really are. After all, there
are so few of them around. And in my book, both Shamir and Chomsky are
good guys.”