Chomsky… need I say more?

In a move that should surprise no one, the devoutly anti-American and anti-Semitic Noam Chomsky recently visited Hezbollah's Headquarters and met with their Secretary General, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah in the Southern suburb of Beirut, reported Al-Manar TV. After the meeting he defended Hezbollah's rights to hold onto their arms.

Just for the record, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, Hezbollah has been involved in a lengthy series of terrorist attacks against the United States, Israel, and other Western targets. These attacks include (but are by no means limited to):

• A series of kidnappings of Westerners in Lebanon, including several Americans, in the 1980s;
  
• The suicide truck bombings that killed more than 200 U.S. Marines at their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983;
  The 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, which featured the famous footage of the plane’s pilot leaning out of the cockpit with a gun to his head;
  
• And two major 1990s attacks on Jewish targets in Argentina—the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy (killing twenty-nine) and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center (killing ninety-five).

Of course, because the victims of Hezbollah violence tend to be either Israeli, American, or Western in general, one can be sure that the famous linguist considers Hezbollah’s terrorism to be legitimate (or at least, to be expected). Indeed, during his visit, he did not fail to add his usual rhetoric that has become a staple of his writing:

“When asked about the US list of terrorist states, he said if the US was to stick to the clear and precise definition of terrorism in its code of laws, it would be the leading terrorist state.”

However, this time, Chomsky managed not only to offend Americans with his visit but (unsurprisingly) the Lebanese. According to a Ya Libnan editorial by Ali Hussein, Chomsky’s endorsement of Hezbollah ignores the fact that, as one political observer said, the issue of the arms is not “America versus Hezbollah,” the issue of the arms is Lebanese sovereignty and independence. “Obviously Chomsky didn’t get it this time,” one observer commented. He added “Chomsky needs to live here for a while to understand what happened during the past 30 years and why most Lebanese are against the Hezbollah arms.”

Another observer added that what Chomsky failed to appreciate is that “the Hezbollah arms scare the Lebanese people more than the Israelis.” For a man who believes that Israel is the incarnation of all that is wicked and evil in the universe, such an understanding in unlikely to be understood. The message from Lebanon: “If Hezbollah is not disarmed this could trigger a civil war ... is this what Chomsky wants? Did Chomsky learn what is happening at the Lebanese national dialogue talks?”

As Michael Young of the Daily Star poignantly noted earlier today:

“The snapshot of Noam Chomsky communing with Hizbullah's secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, was a powerful symbol of the poverty of the secular Western left when it comes to Middle Eastern affairs. With dour attention being directed at the American right because of the Bush administration's tribulations in Iraq, it has become less obvious how morally destitute are those on the other side of the political aisle.”

Although one must be careful when using words like “the left,” or “the right,” if his targets are those people whom I believe he is speaking about (perhaps more accurately called the “far left,” or “fringe left” to distinguish it from mainstream political liberalism), than I think he is right on:

“What Chomsky also did was show how many on the political left openly embrace political forces in the Middle East that are their natural enemies, chiefly because of their antipathy for the policies of the United States … Chomsky, in idealizing Hizbullah as a valuable vanguard in the anti-Israel struggle, apparently ignored how hostile the party was to Lebanese secular leftist parties in the past, and how incompatible its worldview is with the one to which Chomsky claims to adhere.”