Power and Terror

The German news magazine Der SPIEGEL once described the American philosopher, linguist, and iconoclast agitator Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) as ‘Michael Moor for intellectuals’. This described well a former kibbutz activist who poses as an anarcho-syndicalist and is abrasively critical of both American and Israeli imperialist policy. But it fails to do justice to his enormous scientific role as the father of modern linguistics, having taught for half a century at M.I.T.

The book mainly consists of random, partially outdated interviews - vintage Chomsky - bitterly stigmatizing U.S. double standard policy towards Afghanistan, Algeria (‘one of the biggest terrorist countries’), Bosnia, Iraq, Israel, and Kosovo. His advice for Washington on how to stop this terrorism is simple: ‘Stop participating in it!’ (p. 20).

He even sees a close resemblance between the Nazi and current American propaganda, considering their own wars as ‘just’ and as ‘terror’, i.e. what others do (p. 61). For the author, the United States, a ‘leading terrorist state’ (p. 66), are run by a Godfather (Mafia) president (p. 148) maintaining Israel as an American offshore military base. Everything the two are doing, with their anti-Muslim racism in Palestine are war crimes (pp. 32, 116). The Palestinians have no rights, he quips, because they have no wealth (p. 100).

The conflict over Palestine is unresolved for him because Israel continues to choose expansion over security. The U.S. shows sympathy for its ‘settler- colonialist’ approach, replacing the native Arab population, because American settlers had committed the same crime against their own Red Indian population (p. 173-176).