Tag Archives: Noam Chomsky

The CIA, Carl Oglesby, and Business International Corp.

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Update:

[I should clarify that the article on the site, which is devoted to LaRouche is not from the EIR itself, but from a critic, who has added some more interesting details to the story, in the comment section0.

Update:

Just to be clear, my link to the Lyndon LaRouche site (at the bottom) isn’t meant to support the man’s theories.  LaRouche is a Hamiltonian. I am not. He was also involved, allegedly, in cult-like behavior toward followers.

However, LaRouche, as even his strongest critics (like Chip Berlet here) admit, has good research. [ To clarify, the piece is not by LaRouche but by a critic who keeps tabs on his work and thus stores an archive of it.]

Linking to people like LaRouche, Stewart Rhodes of Oath-keepers (whom someone now informs me is considered a neo-Nazi)  is a no-no, apparently, in the PC world.

One is supposed to link only to certified organic, FDA-approved, brand-name thinkers.

On top of that, I just read today that the phrase “Talmudic Jew” is considered “Nazi” language.  Now, I don’t think I’ve ever used it, but I’ve surely written somewhere about Talmudic Judaism.

And to add to my sins, I’ve defended Ayn Rand (not that I am a Randian by any means). But when the media piles on someone,  some instinct in me compels me to rush to their defense.

Dear lord.  We say “Biblical Christian” all the time. And “Shia Muslim.” What about “Vedic Hindu?” Those are fine, aren’t they? Why the difference?

I know I can denounce the “bourgeoisie” as vermin all day long and still be OK. I can even talk about  femi-nazis without a  problem. ….just so long as I approve of Chip Berlet’s employers bombing the right sort of victims.

I give two figs for such puerile nonsense.

Because someone might read the  theories behind Hitler or Mao and try to understand them, it doesn’t follow that they are Nazis or Maoists themselves.

Vegetarianism doesn’t become Nazi become Hitler adopted it.

Hitler, Mao, PolPot…as monstrous as the crimes they enabled might be, they are not qualitatively different from the crimes of the average man.

No untouchables please, whether physically – through legal deprivations of their rights…or intellectually….through ghettoization and demonization.

ORIGINAL POST:

Carl Oglesby: “Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes. . . . Nuns will be raped and bureaucrats will be disemboweled.”

Read more at http://politicaloutcast.com/2013/04/violence-and-mayhem-have-long-been-a-tool-of-the-left/#GbpcTScjJoQ0Mycu.99

One of the most respected student leaders of the antiwar movement in the 1960s was Carl Oglesby, who worked with Murray Rothbard, says Charles Burris at Lew Rockwell.

Not being more than a cursory student of this period, I did a little digging.

Here’s what I came up with:

Oglesby was initially a technical writer/editor with a defense contractor called Bendix, before entering politics. He soon rose to the head of  Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the best-known antiwar group.

The SDS was a splinter group from the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which was affiliated with the  National Student Association, formed in 1947.

The NSA was outed in 1966 as a CIA front.

(also here).

This was in an expose in Ramparts Magazine, a Catholic left-wing magazine.

The writers were Robert Scheer and Stanley Scheinbaum, who is described here as a communist activist.

This Catholic writer says Ramparts was a communist front posing as Catholic outlet to better attack the church.

In 2006, I wrote a piece called “Portrait of the CIA as an artist,” about cultural outlets that were set up or operated by the CIA, as the Cold War developed. Among the CIA-funded outfits was the Congress for Cultural Freedom .

All this is well known.

Besides that, several leaders in the antiwar movement, including feminist leader Gloria Steinem, received funding from the CIA.

Again, this is well-known.

New to me was that there was a  meeting set up between the business establishment and the leadership of the SDS. The  outfit involved was something called Business International, which seems to be the same Business International Corporation for which Barack Obama worked.

It’s long been considered an intelligence front.

So, you have a high-security employee of a defense contractor that was working for NASA and was later affiliated with Raytheon, entering an anti-government student movement, quickly becoming its spokesman, and letting the CIA spy on the movement without a qualm,…..but, yo,  it’s all good…

The ex- Bendix employee  suspects the company is an intelligence front trying to co-opt the movement, but that’s a good thing, because there’s an even worse bunch of business interests called “cowboys” that needs to be bested.

So, no problem.

The student movement thereafter develops a violent faction that blows up – literally as well as figuratively –   while from 1968 onward, the whole antiwar “scene” turns into a drug-addled, bead-wearing, orgiastic escape into self-help.

Oglesby worked closely with Murray Rothbard, about whose interactions with suspected CIA-affiliated figures – James Dale Davidson (of Agora Inc.), Robert Kephart, and Noam Chomsky –   I’ve blogged at length.

The Business International connection adds to the list.

Of course, I make no hard and fast claims. I just raise the issue.

Some links:

“Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy,” Daniel Brandt (NameBase.org):

“Almost everything that happened to the student movement (Lila: the antiwar protests against US involvement in Vietnam) is best explained without conspiracy theories. There are, however, some bits of curious evidence that should be briefly mentioned. Each of these alone doesn’t amount to much, but taken together they suggest that something more was happening — the possibility that by 1969 a significant sector of the ruling class had decided to buy into the counterculture for purposes of manipulation and control:

  • Student leaders James Kunen[19] and Carl Oglesby[20] both report that in the summer of 1968, the organization Business International, which had links to the CIA, sent high-level representatives to meet with SDS. These people wanted to help organize demonstrations for the upcoming conventions in Chicago and Miami. SDS refused the offer, but the experience convinced Oglesby that the ruling class was at war with itself, and he began developing his Yankee-Cowboy theory.
  • Tom Hayden, who by 1986 was defending his state assembly seat against those trying to oust him because of his anti-war record, was quoted as saying that while he was protesting against the Vietnam War, he was also cooperating with U.S. intelligence agents.[21]
  • The CIA was of course involved with LSD testing, but there is also evidence that it was later involved in the distribution of LSD within the counterculture.[22]
  • Feminist leader Gloria Steinem[23] and congressman Allard Lowenstein both had major CIA connections. Lowenstein was president of the National Student Association, which was funded by the CIA until exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. He and another NSA officer, Sam Brown, were key organizers behind the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.[24] (In 1977 Brown became the director of ACTION under Jimmy Carter; his activism, which was more intense and more sincere than Clinton’s, didn’t hurt his career either.)
  • Symbionese Liberation Army leader Donald DeFreeze appears to have been conditioned in a behavior modification program sponsored by elements of U.S. intelligence.[25]
  • The CIA has a long history of infiltrating international organizations, from labor to students to religion. I submit that if an anti-war activist was involved in this type of international jet-setting, the burden is on them to show that they were not compromised. Clinton comes close to assuming this burden.

For more on Carl Oglesby’s meeting with Business International (the CIA front):

“Omnisicient Gentlemen of the Atlantic,” Maureen Tcacik at The Baffler, 2012 (Tcacik is an exceptionally talented writer and astute analyst of politics):

“In one of the many surreal chapters of Journey in Faith, Gene [ Lila: Gene Bradley] later attempted to influence—thought-lead?—what he saw as the perilously bereft civic “education” of the student left. The year was 1968, and the official story is that he was researching a Harvard Business Review feature—which he produced, although the research seems to have been rather more intensive than required. Gene describes consulting with the FBI, a connection made via “mutual good friends,” and a deputy of J. Edgar Hoover’s gladly inviting him to take a look at the Bureau’s secret files on the student left; then traveling through Switzerland, Germany, and France “observing” demonstrations (though none are shared in the book or the story); and, finally, most bizarrely, leading a delegation of fellow businessmen in a “debate” with Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby—hosted (“with the best of intentions but with a full measure of naiveté,” he writes) by a concern called the Business International Corporation.

It seems likely that the 1968 summit at which Bradley “debated” one-time SDS president Carl Oglesby was the same SDS-BI meeting referenced in James Simon Kunen’s SDS memoir The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary. In the SDS version, the purpose of the meeting is straightforward. Certain unnamed businessmen who portray themselves as “the left wing of the ruling class” are seeking to “buy off some radicals”—purportedly because they’re rooting for Gene McCarthy to win the presidency. The businessmen “see fascism as the threat, see it coming from [segregationist George] Wallace,” Kunen reports. The idea is that heavy protests, which the businessmen offer to finance, will “make Gene [McCarthy] look more reasonable.”

This stated fear and motive seems dubious. Gene, after all, reported in the first chapter of his memoir how effectively he repressed his own fear of fascists. And the only people spooked by Wallace were those powerless enough to intimidate. Whatever the executives wanted from a bunch of college hippies, though, they were willing to both lie about and pay for. It’s all too easy to see in retrospect that lopsided “debates” of this sort had accumulated into a political reality that, for the lifetime of a college kid in 1968 anyway, was inextricable from the concoctions of Cold War propagandists.

Just the year before, the National Student Association, the dominant campus activism network that had spawned SDS, had been outed (along with the CCF enterprises) as a CIA front. It would not be until the late seventies that the bland-sounding sponsor of the Oglesby Bradley forum, Business International, would concede its own dual role as a CIA operation.”

“Ravens or Pigeons: SDS Meets Business International” (From Lyndon Larouche’s archives):

In his monumental history of SDS, Kirkpatrick Sale arguably makes a monumental goof. In his detailed discussion of 1968, he fails to mention one critical incident: the attempt by former SDS president Carl Oglesby to broker an alliance between SDS and the “Eastern Establishment” via Business International (BI), a firm that published sophisticated economic reports and advised top corporations. Sale’s mistake seems especially odd since the debate over Business International inside SDS was hardly a well-kept secret; there was even a long article about BI in New Left Notes.

The SDS-BI talks inspired the discovery of a supposed war between the “Yankee” and “Cowboy” factions of U.S. capitalism. In April 1968, Oglesby wrote a long article in the National Guardian promoting the idea of a deep split in the ruling class between two capitalist factions that he labeled “Yankees and Cowboys.”12 He argued that SDS should align with the Eastern Establishment Yankees, who, he argued, were anti-war, pro-Bobby Kennedy and opposed to newer and meaner factions of U.S. capital centered in the South and Southwest.13 In an August 1974 Ramparts article, Steve Weissman reports that in 1968 there was even a “vague proposal” by the Business International network to do “whatever was possible” to help SDS stage “a massive demonstration against Humphrey” in Chicago and one against Nixon in Miami.14 Weissman then recalled that SDS “refused the offer.”

In his memoir Ravens in the Storm, Oglesby discusses his negotiations with BI president Eldridge Haynes.15 Oglesby recalls that he first met Haynes at the Gotham Hotel in New York in the spring of 1968. As for Haynes:

He was a Harvard man. He had spent much of his career in the Foreign Service but had left government during the Kennedy years to become a consultant to businesses operating in the “frequently turbulent” countries of the Third World. This work had grown into Business International, Inc. CIA, right?16

The next day Oglesby took part in a roundtable presentation about SDS to a select group that included executives from GM, GE, AT&T, IBM, Ford, the AP, and even “a man from the State Department.” Two weeks later, Oglesby helped organize another dialog between BI clients and half a dozen SDSers from Columbia and CCNY. . . . SDS groups without me continued these meetings, sitting down with BI people four times that spring. . . . Haynes and I kept meeting. A little later that same spring, Haynes popped the big question. “Suppose Robert Kennedy were to become a presidential candidate. Do you imagine, Carl, that SDS might be inclined to support him?”17

Oglesby then explains:

I must confess, too, that I’d been scared of heavy-metal politics from the beginning . . . My fears of SDS’s leftward inclinations were strengthened by my sense, as of the BI meetings, that an alternative to a politics of rage was within our reach, and that it was essential that we choose it. . . . There was no way for us to achieve our objectives, I thought, without at some point establishing a sotto voce relationship with mainstream grown-ups.18

Clearly Haynes had done his homework and chose his first big SDS contact well.

Oglesby relates a conversation he had with Bernardine Dohrn who, like the vast majority of SDS members, opposed any alliance with BI, “sotto voce” or not. Oglesby says that he told Dohrn that even if “Haynes or the CIA has a secret agenda, I believe it’s not to screw us up but to use us in some way to help make RFK president.”

[Lila: as I believe the CIA – and Ron Paul’s campaign – used the Ron Paul libertarians to make Barack Obama president again.]

Dohrn replied:

Well, it could be both, couldn’t it? . . . You say this BI’s thing is to gather intelligence on Third World countries and sell it to the guys you once denounced as corporate imperialists. I don’t understand you, Carl. It seems like you talk one way and act another.“19

Oglesby remarked that Dohrn “was probably right in assuming that BI and Haynes were tied to Kennedy and very possibly to the CIA. . . . But who cared? As far as I was concerned, the more the CIA knew about SDS, the better. We had nothing to hide!”

Gene Bradley was one of the participants in a BI-sponsored meeting with Oglesby. A Christian Science devotee, Bradley headed up the International Management Association. In a 2012 article for The Baffler, Maureen Tkacik notes that Bradley’s life reads like the history of a “big-time spook.”20 In September 1968 Bradley, a vice-president of the National Strategic Information Center as well as a businessman, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled “What Businessmen Need to Know about the Student Left.” In his memoir The Story of One Man’s Journey in Faith, Bradley reports that as part of his research, “mutual friends” invited him to meet Hoover’s top FBI aide William Sullivan, who let Bradley read FBI files on the New Left. Bradley also recalls debating SDS’s “Carl Ogilsvie.”

Lila:

And, finally, here is Russell Kirk on the progression of Carl Oglesby from high-security employee of  defense contractor Bendix, which made telecom equipment for NASA, to president of  SDS, whose parent organization was a CIA front.

Oglesby was a friend of both Bernadine Dorn and of Hillary Clinton…until he finally left politics to write history and make music.

“Humane Letters and the Clutch of Ideology”

(Russell Kirk, The Imaginative Conservative, March 2012, originally published in The Political Science Reviewer, Fall, 1973)

“Indeed, the eagerness of certain contributors to withdraw from political activism into literary scholarship is almost embarrassing. Take Mr. Carl Oglesby, who once led the riots at the University of Wisconsin.

Mr. Oglesby here gives us an essay entitled “Melville, or Water Consciousness 8c Its madness.” Herman Melville, he says, found a madness he could live with. Ahab was evil, exploiting his crew, and Moby Dick was the victim of Ahab’s imperialism.”

QUOTE FROM OGLEBY

“So with a subdued Melville, I ask: Given some broad estimate of the scale, tempo and rhythm at which protoimperial systems condense out and acquire historical outline and social architecture, then swell and grow fevered, finally either to hang suspended a moment before a sometimes luminously sweeping descent, or else to burst all at once and splash blood everywhere, leaving little behind besides shards, cripples and memories that everyone who survives them pants to forget: given ‘these choices, what is the political utility of the concept anti-imperialism?”
END QUOTE

Russell Kirk:

“Is this rich, beautiful prose, transcending the sorry time? Mr. Oglesby clearly hopes so. But Mr. Oglesby’s prose will make no revolution; it may not even make sense. He sedulously avoids any direct reference to Viet Nam, as if he were writing in the Circum- locution Office – as if he would be prosecuted for so heroic a dissent. One thinks of a remark by Georges Sorel, meant to be approbatory: “Our experience of the Marxian theory of value convinces me of the importance which obscurity of style may lend to a doctrine.

They talk of liberty, but hunger for power; they idolize the People, but serve the ego. If one is bound for Zion, it is not well to plod round a prickly pear planted long ago by Mr. Marx of the British Museum; nor is that a good exercise for rousing the literary imagination. Nevertheless, the cactus land of ideology is perfectly safe for an American writer nowadays.

Blessed are the academic revolutionaries, for they shall know tenure.”

Strange Bedfellows: Rothbard, James Davidson, Chomsky and NTU

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From Murray Rothbard, “Know Your Rights,” WIN: Peace and Freedom Through Non-Violent Action,” Vol. 7, No. 4, March 1, 1971::

“Another emerging activity in the movement is the National Taxpayers’ Union, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Headed by James Davidson, publisher of SIL’s The Individualist, and Wainwright Dawson, Jr., a former conservative who has merged his United Republicans of America into the NTU, the organization includes among its officers and advisors Murray Rothbard, A. Ernest Fitzgerald, and the distinguished socialist-anarchist Noam Chomsky.”

Jeff Blankfort Deconstructs Chomsky On America and Israel

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Update

I should make it clear that, as a libertarian, I don’t support sanctions against any country. I wouldn’t have supported sanctions against South Africa, didn’t support them on Iraq, and don’t support them on Israel. However, targeted boycotts against specific, responsible parties (journalists, academics, government officials, businessmen or military officials directly involved in genocidal crimes or in their cover-up) would be defensible under international law. General sanctions only impoverish people and undermine resistance.

So my problem here is less with Chomsky’s position on divestment – whatever it is – so much as his apparent double-standards on the issue – one standard for South Africans…… and another for Israel.One for Israel…and another for Palestine. One for the US…and another for Israel.

If the Jews deserved a homeland, and they did, the Palestinians surely deserved land that was already their home and had been their home for centuries…

Original Post [all varieties of emphasis –  underlines, capitals, and italics – are mine, not Blankfort’s]:

The indefatigably brave and honest Jeff Blankfort analyzes Noam Chomsky’s writings on Israel and Palestine. I’ve  been very conflicted about Chomsky’s blind-eye on  9-11 for some time now. What to think about it? This analysis convinces me finally that Chomsky’s bias is not simply an emotional blind-spot, but a deliberate obfuscation that in such a prominent, sophisticated, and powerful voice, must be called out and questioned closely.

“His reluctance to label Israel’s control of the Palestinians as “apartheid” out of concern that it be seen as a “red flag,” like describing it as “inflammatory,” was a red flag itself and raised questions that should have been asked by the interviewer, such as who would be inflamed by the reference to ‘apartheid’ as a “red flag” in Israel’s case and what objections would Chomsky have to that?

A more disturbing exchange occurred later in the interview when Chomsky was asked if sanctions should be applied against Israel as they were against South Africa. He responded:

“In fact, I’ve been strongly against it in the case of Israel. For a number of reasons. For one thing, even in the case of South Africa, I think sanctions are a very questionable tactic. In the case of South Africa, I think they were [ultimately] legitimate because it was clear that the large majority of the population of South Africa was in favor of it.

Sanctions hurt the population. You don’t impose them unless the population is asking for them. That’s the moral issue. So, the first point in the case of Israel is that: Is the population asking for it? Well, obviously not.”

Obviously not. But is it acceptable to make such a decision on the basis of what the majority of Israelis want? Israel, after all, is not a dictatorship in which the people are held in check by fear and, therefore, cannot be held responsible for their government’s actions. Israel has a largely unregulated, lively press and a “people’s army” in which all Israeli Jews, other than the ultra-orthodox, are expected to serve and that is viewed by the Israeli public with almost religious reverence. Over the years, in their own democratic fashion, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have consistently supported and participated in actions of their government against the Palestinians and Lebanese that are not only racist, but in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Chomsky made his position clear:

“So calling for sanctions here, when the majority of the population doesn’t understand what you are doing, is tactically absurd-even if it were morally correct, which I don’t think it is. The country against which the sanctions are being imposed is not calling for it.”

The interviewer, Lee, understandably puzzled by that answer, then asked him, “Palestinians aren’t calling for sanctions?

Chomsky: “Well, the sanctions wouldn’t be imposed against the Palestinians, they would be imposed against Israel.”

Lee: “Right… [And] Israelis aren’t calling for sanctions.”

That response also disturbed Palestinian political analyst, Omar Barghouti, who, while tactfully acknowledging Chomsky as “a distinguished supporter of the Palestinian cause,” addressed the issue squarely:

Of all the anti-boycott arguments, this one reflects either surprising naiveté or deliberate intellectual dishonesty. Are we to judge whether to apply sanctions on a colonial power based on the opinion of the majority in the oppressors community? Does the oppressed community count at all? [7]

For Chomsky, apparently not……

………In an exchange with Washington Post readers, Chomsky was asked by a caller:

Why did you sign an MIT petition calling for MIT to boycott Israeli investments, and then give an interview in which you state that you opposed such investment boycotts? What was or is your position on the proposal by some MIT faculty that MIT should boycott Israeli investments?

Chomsky replied:

As is well known in Cambridge, of anyone involved, I” was the most outspoken opponent of the petition calling for divestment, and in fact refused to sign until it was substantially changed, along lines that you can read if you are interested. The “divestment” part was reduced to three entirely meaningless words, which had nothing to do with the main thrust of the petition. I thought that the three meaningless words should also be deleted… On your last question, as noted, I was and remain strongly opposed, without exception — at least if I understand what the question means. How does one “boycott Israeli investments”? (Emphasis added). [10]

I will assume that Chomsky understood very well what the caller meant: investing in Israeli companies and in State of Israel Bonds of which US labor union pension funds, and many states and universities have purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth. These purchases clearly obligate those institutions to lobby Congress to insure that the Israeli economy stays afloat. This isn’t something that Chomsky talks or writes about.

The caller was referring to a speech that Chomsky had made to the Harvard Anthropology Dept. shortly after the MIT and Harvard faculties issued a joint statement on divestment. It was gleefully reported in the Harvard Crimson by pro-Israel activist, David Weinfeld, under the headline “Chomsky’s Gift”:

MIT Institute Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky recently gave the greatest Hanukkah gift of all to opponents of the divestment campaign against Israel. By signing the Harvard-MIT divestment petition several months ago—and then denouncing divestment on Nov. 25 at Harvard—Chomsky has completely undercut the petition.

At his recent talk for the Harvard anthropology department, Chomsky stated: “I am opposed and have been opposed for many years, in fact, I’ve probably been the leading opponent for years of the campaign for divestment from Israel and of the campaign about academic boycotts.”

He argued that a call for divestment is “a very welcome gift to the most extreme supporters of US-Israeli violence… It removes from the agenda the primary issues and it allows them to turn the discussion to irrelevant issues, which are here irrelevant, anti-Semitism and academic freedom and so on and so forth.” [11] …….

….

Chomsky’s rationalization of Israel’s criminal misdeeds in The Fateful Triangle should have rung alarm bells when it appeared in 1983. Written a year after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, in what would become a sacred text for Middle East activists, he actually began the book not by taking Israel to task so much as its critics:

In the war of words that has been waged since Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, critics of Israeli actions have frequently been accused of hypocrisy. While the reasons advanced are spurious, the charge itself has some merit. It is surely hypocritical to condemn Israel for establishing settlements in the occupied territories while we pay for establishing and expanding them. Or to condemn Israel for attacking civilian targets with cluster and phosphorous bombs “to get the maximum kill per hit.” When we provide them gratis or at bargain rates, knowing that they will be used for just this purpose. Or to criticize Israel’s ‘indiscriminate’ bombardment of heavily-settled civilian areas or its other military adventures, while we not only provide the means in abundance but welcome Israel’s assistance in testing the latest weaponry under live battlefield conditions... .In general, it is pure hypocrisy to criticize the exercise of Israeli power while welcoming Israel’s contributions towards realizing the US aim of eliminating possible threats, largely indigenous, to American domination of the Middle East region.[ 21]

First, the PLO was seen as a threat by Israel, not by the United States in 1982, particularly since it had strictly abided by a US-brokered cease-fire with Israel for 11 months, giving it a dangerous degree of credibility in Israeli eyes. Second, whom did Chomsky mean by “we?” Perhaps, President Reagan and some members of Congress who gently expressed their concern when the number of Palestinians and Lebanese killed in the invasion and the wholesale destruction of the country could not be suppressed in the media. But he doesn’t say. It certainly wasn’t those who took to the streets across the country to protest Israel’s invasion. Both political parties had competed in their applause when Israel launched its attack, as did the AFL-CIO which took out a full page ad in the NY Times, declaring “We Are Not Neutral. We Support Israel!” paid for by an Israeli lobbyist with a Park Avenue address. The media, in the beginning, was also supportive, but it is rare to find an editorial supporting US aid to Israel. It is rarely ever mentioned and that’s the way the lobby likes it. So is Chomsky creating a straw figure? It appears so.

If we follow Chomsky’s “logic,” it would be an injustice to bring charges of war crimes against Indonesian, El Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Haitian, or Filipino officers, soldiers, or public officials for the atrocities committed against their own countrymen and women since they were funded, armed and politically supported by the US. Perhaps, General Pinochet will claim the Chomsky Defense if he goes to trial.

He pressed the point of US responsibility for Israel’s sins again in his introduction to The New Intifada, noting that as one of the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions, “It is therefore Washington’s responsibility to prevent settlement and expropriation, along with collective punishment and all other measures of violence… .It follows that the United States is in express and extreme violation of its obligations as a High Contracting Party.” [22]

I would agree with Chomsky, but is the US refusal to act a more “extreme violation” than the actual crimes being committed by another signatory to the Conventions, namely Israel? Chomsky would have us believe that it is.

It is a point he made clear at a talk in Oxford in May, 2004, when he brought up the killing a week earlier of the Hamas spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin by the Israeli military as he left a Mosque in Gaza. “That was reported as an Israeli assassination, but inaccurately” said Chomsky. “Sheikh Yassin was killed by a US helicopter, flown by an Israeli pilot. Israel does not produce helicopters. The US sends them with the understanding that they will be used for such purposes, not defense, as they have been, regularly.”

Chomsky is correct to a point. What is missing from his analysis is any reference to the demands from Congress, orchestrated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s officially registered lobby, to make sure that the US provides those helicopters to Israel to use as its generals see fit. (In fact, there is not a single mention of AIPAC in any one of Chomsky’s many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict). What Chomsky’s British audience was left with was the conclusion that the assassination of Sheik Yassin was done with Washington’s approval.

While its repeated use of helicopters against the Palestinian resistance and civilian population has been one of the more criminal aspects of Israel’s response to the Intifada, absolving the Israelis of blame for their use has become something of a fetish for Chomsky as his introduction to The New Intifada [23] and again, in more detail in Middle East Illusions, illustrates:

On October 1, [at the beginning of the Al-Aksa Intifada] Israeli military helicopters, or, to be more precise, US military helicopters with Israeli pilots, sharply escalated the violence, killing two Palestinians in Gaza… . The continuing provision of attack helicopters by the United States to Israel, with the knowledge that these weapons are being used against the civilian Palestinian population, and the silence of the mainstream media is just one illustration of many of how we live up to the principle that we do not believe in violence. Again, it leaves honest citizens with two tasks: the important one, do something about it; and the second one, try to find out why the policies are being pursued. (Emphasis added) [24]

What to do Chomsky again doesn’t say, but he does try to tell us why:

“On that matter, the fundamental reasons are not really controversial… It has long been understood that the gulf region has the major energy sources in the world… ” [25]

Chomsky then goes on for two pages explaining the importance of Middle East oil and the efforts by the US to control it. It is the basic explanation that he has repeated and republished, almost verbatim, over the years. What it has to do with the Palestinians who have no oil or how a truncated Palestinian state would present a threat to US regional interests is not provided, but after two pages the reader has forgotten that the question was even posed. In his explanation there is no mention of the lobby or domestic influences.

Chomsky does acknowledge that “major sectors of American corporate capitalism, including powerful elements with interests in the Middle East [the major oil companies!]” have endorsed a “two-state solution” on the basis that

the radical nationalist tendencies that are enflamed by the unsettled Palestinian problem would be reduced by the establishment of a Palestinian mini-state that would be contained within a Jordanian-Israeli military alliance (perhaps tacit), surviving at the pleasure of its far more powerful neighbors and subsidized by the most conservative and pro-American forces in the Arab world… .This would, in fact, be the likely outcome of a two-state settlement.” [26]

Such an outcome would have little direct influence on regional Arab politics, except to demoralize supporters of the Palestinian struggle in the neighboring countries and around the world, a development that would clearly serve US interests. It would, however, curb Israel’s expansion, which is critical to Israel’s agenda, not Washington’s. Chomsky also fails to recognize a fundamental contradiction in his argument. If the support of Israel has been based on its role as protector of US strategic resources, namely oil, why does not that position enjoy the support of the major oil companies with interests in the region?…”

(Lila: My emphasis)

Barry Zwicker: Noam Chomsky And The Left Gatekeepers

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My Comment:

This piece was published on the web in October  2008 2007 and is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of “Towers of Deception,” Barry Zwicker, New Society Publishers, September 1, 2006. The left gatekeepers referenced in the piece include well-known and well-respected activists like Amy Goodman, Sonali Kolhatkar, David Basarmian, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky.

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