Noam Chomsky (14 page)
Authors: Wolfgang B. Sperlich
Chomsky’s devotion to the subject of Israel and the Middle East is perhaps best expressed in
Fateful Triangle
(1983). In a foreword to the revised edition (1999), the eminent scholar Edward Said (1935–2003) wrote ‘there is something deeply moving about a mind of such noble ideals repeatedly stirred on behalf of human suffering and injustice’. Chomsky’s ‘noble ideals’ are tested to the limit in his unremitting denunciation of crimes against humanity.
Fateful Triangle
contains a staggering list of crimes committed (all previously unreported in the mainstream media, or at least under-reported), providing a carefully documented indictment that would serve any war crimes tribunal with irrefutable evidence.
US
foreign policy in the Middle East, as unleashed by its proxy, Israel, is at its most contemptible when it comes to the persecution of a war against civilians – women, children and the elderly. Consider the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon in 1982:
Again, it is useful to ask ourselves what the reaction would be in the United States if an Arab army had conquered half of Israel, leaving a trail of destruction in its path, sending all males to prison camps where they were beaten, murdered, humiliated, while their families were left to starve or be harassed or killed by terrorist bands armed by the conqueror.
50
In few other publications is Chomsky as uncompromising and forthright in his condemnation of the atrocities of war visited upon Israel’s neighbours. As we shall see, this spiral of violence led to even more worldwide calamities that have resulted in the present global ‘war on terror’, perhaps the ultimate chapter of an Orwellian nightmare where war is peace and peace is war.
The reactions to Chomsky’s stance are extreme, as can be expected. As an American Jew, he is vilified like no other by those who call him anti-Semite, traitor and worse. But he gives as good as he takes when he rails against the right-wing Jewish communities in the us:
The Jewish community here is deeply totalitarian. They do not want democracy, they do not want freedom … the American Jewish community is their worst enemy, that it is a totalitarian community, that it does not want democracy in Israel, that it does not believe in democracy in Israel, that it does not believe in democracy here … they have a whole vilification apparatus which is pretty impressive … this vilification apparatus is really effective in shutting people up. It scares a lot of people off, especially people in exposed positions. There is just no way to respond. If you are denounced as being an anti-Semite, what are you going to say, I’m not an anti-Semite? Or if you are denounced as being in favor of the Holocaust, what are you going to say, I’m not in favor of the Holocaust? I mean you cannot win. Stalinist types of the
ADL
[the Anti-Defamation League in the
USA
] understand the beauty of throwing mud is that nobody can follow the details. You write it. Somebody else quotes it. Then somebody else says something. Why not say I am in favor of the Holocaust? I think all Jews should be killed. That is the next thing to say. The point is that they can say anything they want. It is a kind of status that the Communist Party had aspired to but never achieved. And they have achieved it. They are totalitarians.
51
The ADL is the pre-eminent American Jewish organization that is supposed to guard against anti-Semitism in the world. In one of its publications Chomsky is referred to as a holocaust denier and a ‘dupe of intellectual pride so overweening that he is incapable of making distinctions between totalitarian and democratic societies, between oppressors and victims.’
52
So much for a very brave Avram Noam Chomsky, doing battle in an arena that is very close to home, close to his heart. Too close perhaps, so let us move further afield.
EAST TIMOR
. Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 with covert us approval. The
US
supplied 90 per cent of Indonesia’s weapons. For Chomsky,
It is not easy to write with feigned calm and dispassion about the events that have been unfolding in East Timor. Horror and shame are compounded by the fact that the crimes are so familiar and could so easily have been terminated. That has been true ever since Indonesia invaded in December 1975, relying on
US
diplomatic support and arms – used illegally, but with secret authorization, and even new arms shipments sent under the cover of an official ‘embargo.’ There has been no need to threaten bombing or even sanctions. It would have sufficed for the
US
and its allies to withdraw their active participation, and to inform their close associates in the Indonesian military command that the atrocities must be terminated and the territory granted the right of self-determination that has been upheld by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. We cannot undo the past, but we should at least be willing to recognize what we have done, and to face the moral responsibility of saving the remnants and providing ample reparations, a pathetic gesture of compensation for terrible crimes.
53
Australia was a minor player in those days, but its role as the US’s regional sheriff was indefensible. It was the only country to recognize East Timor as part of Indonesia, even though during the Second World War some 60, 000 East Timorese had given their lives to fend off a Japanese invasion of Australia. In return for their treachery, the Australians gained important oil and gas concessions in the Sea of Timor from the Indonesians. In 1991 the brutal Indonesian oppression of the East Timorese independence movement was noticed by Western war correspondents. Two American journalists, Alan Nairn and Amy Goodman, were present at the 1991 Dili massacre, and Nairn testified before the
US
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on 17 February 1992:
I saw the soldiers aiming and shooting people in the back, leaping bodies to hunt down those who were still standing. They executed schoolgirls, young men, old Timorese; the street was wet with blood, and the bodies were everywhere. As the soldiers were doing this, they were beating me and Amy [Goodman]; they took our cameras and our tape recorders and grabbed Amy by the hair and punched and kicked her in the face and in the stomach. When I put my body over her, they focused on my head. They fractured my skull with the butts of their
M
-16s. The soldiers put us on the pavement and trained their rifles at our heads. They were shouting, ‘Politik! Politik!’ We were shouting back, ‘America! America!,’ and I think that may have been the thing that saved us. They had taken my passport earlier but Amy showed them hers, and the soldiers seemed impressed when they realized that we were indeed from the States. We were, after all, citizens of the country that supplied them with
M
-16s.
54
Such testimony made the American public wonder what was going on. As usual the mainstream media protested its innocence in not having informed the people: information was until then hard to come by. Not so! If the corporate media had published what Chomsky and Herman had been talking and writing about since the Indonesian invasion of 1975, there would have been no surprises. As usual it was in the interest of the corporate media to keep it covered up for as long as possible.
Chomsky was speaking about East Timor regularly from 1976 and writing about it within a year or two after that. The extensive discussion in the first volume of
Political Economy of Human Rights
(1979), co-written with Edward S. Herman, became well-known in Australia because it contained leaked national intelligence documents that had been banned from publication in Australia, and a mysterious fire then burned down the warehouse that held copies of the book. Chomsky also testified on the situation in East Timor at the
UN
Decolonization Commission in 1978 and 1979. That testimony was published, but not in the mainstream media, of course, although in the early 1980s he managed to get the
New York Times
to write an editorial and persuade the
Boston Globe
to publish the first good article on the topic in the us. Chomsky’s book
Towards a New Cold War
(1982) also contains the basic data on East Timor, but without the background facts. He attended the first international conference on the East Timor crisis in Lisbon in 1979, and returned to Lisbon in the early 1980s to meet with East Timorese refugees. He also remained in close touch with the Australian support groups and refugees; indeed, most of his information was coming from Australian friends.
When Chomsky finally visited Australia, for nine days in 1995, it was at the invitation of the East-Timorese Relief Association (
ETRA
) and the National Council for East Timorese Resistance (
CNRM
). He gave several talks for them, including big meetings at town halls in Melbourne and Sydney. It was the first time the refugees had really appeared in public at meetings of this size. He also accompanied their representatives to meetings in Canberra and a talk at the Royal Press Club, which was broadcast live and rebroadcast several times over
ABC
nationally. An interview was also broadcast to Indonesia, thanks to the Rupert Murdoch media empire – unwittingly, no doubt. The talk in Canberra was a bitter denunciation of the treachery of the Australian government, particularly of Gareth Evans, the then Minister of Foreign Affairs. Together with the other talks Chomsky gave in Australia, it is published in
Powers and Prospects
(1996); the Australian edition has an introduction by Agio Pereira, head of
ETRA
.
The visit to Australia was closely followed by Alex Burns, an Australian journalist of the alternative media, who wrote an interesting piece entitled ‘Operation Mindcrime: The Selling of Noam Chomsky’.
55
This offers some insights on the increasing media circus surrounding Chomsky, and what it means to be a journalist at the outer fringes of the media game. Burns first noted that
18 January 1995 was an extraordinary day for Sydney. Pope John Paul 11 arrived for the beatification of Mary MacKillop and the resulting media circus. Early morning commuters were greeted with an overcast sky and the news of a massive earthquake in Kobe, Japan. Microsoft’s Bill Gates unveiled plans to dominate the Internet to business leaders.
REM
were scheduled to play at the Sydney Entertainment Centre later that evening. Virtually unnoticed, dissident Noam Chomsky slipped into this kaleidoscope for the beginning of a 3-city, 9-day tour. Sponsored by the East Timor Relief Association (
ETRA
) and the National Council for East Timorese Resistance (
CNRM
), his tour started low-key, but became increasingly surreal as events unfolded at a fast pace.
56
One should note that Pope John Paul 11 certainly did not use his visit to advance the cause of East Timorese independence, even though East Timor is heavily Catholic, and, second, that the media circus around the Pope was the real thing, not the one around Chomsky. Still in activist circles and among the chic New Left there might well have been an alternative media circus, if Burns is to be believed. One of his more cynical observations was about the audience responses after a talk given by Chomsky, saying that:
after a five minute standing ovation, question time followed a similar pattern that I had noted before, where people ask generic questions that were virtually identical to those asked by the asinine media at the Canberra press conference. It degenerates into people attempting to impress Chomsky by asking smart questions that take two minutes, and emotional statements by local activists to promote their local causes.
Indeed such occasions do not allow for any genuine exchanges, however much Chomsky might want to facilitate it himself. Things get worse when the speaking engagements get mixed up by chaotic local operators, who attach ‘minders’ to Chomsky and whisk him from place to place. As Carol Chomsky, his minder in later years, has pointed out, in such situations Chomsky tends to agree to yet another unplanned speaking or interview situation and thus, quite unwittingly, disappoints those who have been waiting patiently at a planned/advertised venue, arriving hours late or never. Burns writes of one such occasion:
By this time a crowd of twenty people had formed around Chomsky, thrusting microphones and cameras into his face as he autographed books at a frantic pace. ‘Who do you think assassinated Kennedy?’, another voice asked. ‘I’ve written a book on it, why don’t you go and read that?’ Chomsky was visibly seething and his voice betrayed a tired frustration at having to answer a question asked many times before. Flanked by minders, Chomsky was hurriedly escorted to another destination. Behind him lay a group of bitter writers, angry at not having had the opportunity to question him further. They were too busy arguing to realise that asking the right kind of question was just as important as asking any questions at all. Some were dismayed at coming face to face with their hero and having their rhetoric rebuffed and their ‘commitment’ shown to be shallow and reactionary. They were unable to separate the man from the myth. The activists were still locked into ‘revolutionary techniques’ that were outdated by the information revolution. The diehard journalists had attempted to gain interviews or only a few minutes of Chomsky’s time, and whilst he was keen to speak to as many people as possible, his minders shielded him from direct contact in many cases.
57
Burns and his fellow activists in Australia were certainly amazed to hear Chomsky say what few in his position would ever have said:
In terms of world affairs and international law this isn’t a difficult situation to solve … This isn’t Rwanda or Bosnia – we don’t have to bomb Jakarta. What we need to do is withdraw from the Timor Gap Treaty, which seems to me to be offensive to decent human beings. The same government which signed the treaty in 1991 also revoked recognition of the Soviet control of the Baltic States. Australia led the way in formulating international laws protecting human rights, yet the ratified treaty with Indonesia is the only one to my knowledge that exists in the world that violates the principles you signed. According to a secret cable of August 1975, the Ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, felt that ‘we should take a pragmatic rather than a principled interest’ in the impending invasion. He felt that a favourable treaty could be ‘more easily negotiated with Indonesia … than with Portugal or an independent East Timor.’ So we have East Timorese being slaughtered just so that an oil company can make a few more profits.
58