Noam Chomsky longtime professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and idol of leftist academics and journalists everywhere has created what might be called a one-man cottage industry of hundreds of anti-Israel books articles recorded interviews and lectures.
Over a thirty-five year span Chomsky has repeated every distortion and libel directed against Israel that’s ever appeared in Arab Western and left-wing Israeli publications to which he adds some conspiracy theories of his own devising.
Chomsky portrays Israel as a racist state that has driven the Palestinian Arabs from their homes seized their land reduced them to slavery tortured and murdered them and discriminated against them in every way imaginable. In addition Israel is an agent of American imperialism doing America’s dirty work in the Middle East and around the world.
Chomsky the son of a Hebrew teacher vehemently denies that he is an anti-Semite. He accuses Israel and its supporters in the U.S. of accusing anyone who criticizes Israel in any way of being anti-Semitic. He claims Israel and its supporters constantly exploit the Holocaust as a means of creating sympathy for the Jewish state and its alleged aggressive imperialist actions and he represents himself as the victim of false charges of anti-Semitism by Zionists intent on discrediting him.
Chomsky is usually careful to avoid overt attacks on the Jewish people collectively or Judaism per se in material he publishes under his own name. He has however devised ways of assisting overt anti-Semites in getting their message across to a wider public without ever quite saying in so many words that he agrees with their rantings.
The most effective of these tools has been the bestowal of his hechsher – his seal of approval – on anti-Semitic writers which confers on them a degree of legitimacy with the left-leaning progressive intellectual public that idolizes Chomsky. For example Chomsky is the author of the preface to a book by the notorious French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson one of several in which Faurisson claims that Jewish organizations fabricated the Holocaust in order to extort war reparations from Germany and to build international sympathy for the creation of a Jewish state. Or as Faurisson himself puts it:
The alleged gassing and the alleged genocide of Jews are part of the same historical lie which has been the basis of a huge political and financial swindle of which the principle beneficiaries are the State of Israel and principal victims the German people not its leaders and the Palestinian people.
While Chomsky’s preface does not explicitly endorse Faurisson’s thesis neither does it criticize or repudiate it. Chomsky denies that Faurisson is an anti-Semite characterizing him instead as a relatively apolitical liberal of some type.
By writing his preface and allowing it to be published with one of Faurisson’s books Chomsky lent his considerable prestige in academic circles to the Holocaust denial movement. Shortly before he authored the preface Chomsky had signed a petition on Faurisson’s behalf proudly putting his name first above several hundred others in protesting a supposed conspiracy to suppress Faurisson’s findings. These the signers claimed were based on extensive historical research into the ‘Holocaust’ question. The author of the petition was the Holocaust denier Mark Weber a frequent contributor to the Journal of Historical Review (of which more later).
Shortly thereafter Chomsky went so far as to claim in private correspondence that: I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers or even denial of the holocaust. Nor would there be anti-Semitic implications per se in the claim that the holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited viciously so by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I see no hint of anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson’s work…
