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Noam Chomsky, Kevin Barrett and Academic Freedom

The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Ninth part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question” – Read the eighth part here

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By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 7, 2016

Noam Chomsky has been much worse than hypocritical in the role he has chosen for himself in the study of 9/11. Chomsky treats the subject of 9/11 as if he’s some sort of master of analysis on the subject of what happened. He presents his conclusions without showing the due diligence of going through the relevant primary and secondary sources in a balanced and scholarly fashion. The primary sources Chomsky chooses to disregard include passenger lists, video and photographic evidence in the public domain, eyewitness accounts, original news coverage on the day of 9/11 and the like.

It seems that Noam Chomsky was well aware of Kevin Barrett’s case. Without naming either Barrett or the University of Wisconsin, Chomsky alludes to the matter in a video of an interview posted in 2011 on the You Tube channel of RPShredow. The item is entitled “Noam Chomsky Discusses 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.” The interviewer is Michael Albert. Chomsky’s comments begin with his observation that somewhere between a third and a half of all Americans ascribe to some version of the interpretations brought forward by the 9/11 Truth Movement. Chomsky then tries to alter a perceptual trend that he clearly does not like.

This very revealing and important video captures a low point in Professor Chomsky’s career. The manager of the You Tube channel on which the item appears has removed the comments section reporting that the eliminated responses were mostly from “the dumbest, annoyingest fucktards ever.” The unspoken message of this exorcism of dissenting voices is that it is acceptable to obliterate the remarks of those that dare criticize Chomsky’s position on 9/11.

The evidence of the specific nature of the detractors’ disagreements with Chomsky is eliminated, presumably by someone close to Chomsky, possibly even the unnamed interviewer himself. Much like those that throw up the “conspiracy theorist” label to evade the give-and-take of constructive dialogue, the self-appointed thought police in this case replace a critical exchange of ideas with a smear job calculated to demean and create hatred towards an identifiable group.

In the body of the video Chomsky exudes a remarkably aggressive outpouring of slander and vituperation against the broad array of individuals that have genuinely investigated the lies and crimes of 9/11. As part of this diatribe Chomsky refers to “some guy, who instead of teaching his courses taught about this stuff [9/11] and therefore wasn’t rehired, which is normal.” Chomsky’s prior knowledge of the details of the case to which he refers is well evidenced in a published E-Mail exchange he conducted with Dr. Barrett in 2008.

After introducing the Barrett case, a matter of which Chomsky knows much more than he lets on, the MIT professor then flips backwards in more ways than one. He reminisces that he himself “once taught courses on this kind of stuff but in my spare time.” Chomsky gives no explanation of the obvious contradiction between his blanket condemnations of those that study 9/11 and his recollection that he used to teach classes on similar subjects.

What courses did Chomsky teach in his spare time? What subjects did he decide to relegate to spare time studies? What is Chomsky’s rationale for decreeing that skeptical perspectives on the official narrative of 9/11 do not belong in the curriculum of courses other than those he would assign to spare time studies? Chomsky concludes this important segment on 9/11 and the role of universities by indicating that he himself would have been fired too had he acted like the unnamed “guy” he’s accusing. “You have some duties at the University,” implying Kevin Barrett did not perform them.

Chomsky badly misrepresents the Barrett case by indicating the university instructor in question— “some guy”— abandoned his responsibilities to teach the full curriculum. He accuses Barrett of devoting all his pedagogical energy to the sole subject of 9/11. As demonstrated by the outcome U of W’s internal investigation of this controversy, nothing of the sort happened. Dr. Barrett was found to be conscientious in integrating various perspectives on 9/11 into a much larger multi-faceted survey of Islam, both historically and in contemporary times. The senior academic thus smears the more junior academic, disregarding altogether the best documentary evidence of what happened in the classroom during the teaching of the course in question, namely Dr. Barrett’s offering of Islam: Religion and Culture.

By commenting as he did on a significant precedent-setting case, Dr. Chomsky aligns himself with those that intervened politically to cut short Dr. Barrett’s promising academic career. By acting as an opponent of the principle that the events of 9/11 present a vital subject for legitimate academic research and debate in our universities, Dr. Chomsky demonstrated he is no friend of academic freedom. He does not support the underlying principles that provided him with his own position of academic security from which to develop his oft contested ideas and theories.

The video’s content helps to reaffirm the significance of Barrie Zwicker’s seminal assessment of “Noam Chomsky’s Shame” in Towers of Deception in 2006. Moreover, it helps substantiate many of the allegations made by Kevin Barrett in his Left Forum presentation, “Why Chomsky Is Wrong on 9/11.” Chomsky’s frontal attack on the 9/11 Truth Movement should bring to the surface longstanding questions about the underlying motivations of America’s most highly publicized university professor.

You will read “Truth and Public Policy in the Digital Age” in the next part. 

August 14, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Noam Chomsky and Zionism

The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Seventh part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question” 

By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | July 30, 2016

Understanding of the nature of the lies and crimes of 9/11 has moved quite far in the decade between the publication of Barrie Zwicker’s Towers of Deception in 2006 and Kevin Barrett’s 2016 presentation at the Left Forum. Where Zwicker emphasized Chomsky’s connection to the US deep state, Kevin Barrett views Chomsky as a Zionist with deep attachments to Israel where he lived and worked on a kibbutz in the early 1950s.

Chomsky’s relationship with Israel is outlined in flattering terms in a fluff piece in a publication entitled Tablet, a heavily pro-Zionist venue featuring other interviews with the likes of Elliot Abrams. Abrams was an influential member of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon lobby group that in 2000 notoriously signaled the forthcoming 9/11 strikes by calling for “something like a new Pearl Harbor.”

In the Tablet interview, Noam Chomsky explained the attachments and preoccupations of his Jewish orthodox parents. In his seminal years, Hebrew was the main language of the Chomsky family, a linguistic asset that the younger Chomsky would later call upon in his career as a student of linguistics.

Noam Chomsky’s father pointed his son towards the writings of Jewish philosopher Ahad Ha’am. Chomsky looked back fondly on his father’s account of Ha’am’s advocacy of “a Zionist revival in Israel, in Palestine.” The aim of this revival would be to create “a cultural center for the Jewish people.” Chomsky elaborates, explaining Ha’am’s view that “Jews as primarily a Diaspora community needed a cultural center that has a physical presence. Ha’am was said to be very sympathetic to the Palestinians.” Ha’am wanted kindly treatment of the Palestinians but he left no doubt that they should move aside to make room for what Chomsky refers to again and again as a “Jewish cultural center.”

In the Tablet article Chomsky’s orientation towards Israel is publicly portrayed as that of a loyalist calling for a kinder gentler form of Zionism. As Kevin Barrett sees it, however, Chomsky’s willingness to criticize the Israeli state, but especially its abuses and assaults directed at the Palestinian people, should not be allowed to take away from understanding that he is a committed Zionist intent on protecting and advancing Israel’s interests.

Chomsky’s position on 9/11 has been replicated throughout much of the Left where well-funded gatekeeping, sponsored by the likes of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, is indeed rife. There is a conspicuous absence of leading Jewish intellectuals that have publicly attempted to decipher what actually transpired in New York, Washington and the air lanes of the northeastern United States during the transformative day of September 11, 2001. Consider, for instance, the relationship of Miko Peled, Medea Benjamin, Michael Albert, David Corn, Amy Goodman, George Monbiot, Cy Gonick, Judy Rebick to the enterprise of exposing the lies and crimes of 9/11. Their evasiveness or outright hostility to the 9/11 skeptics is shared by many non-Jewish public intellectuals including Chris Hedges, John Pilger, and Tariq Ali.

Some, but especially Chomsky, have gone beyond maintaining a strategic silence to incite smear campaigns against those that have displayed skepticism towards the official narrative of 9/11. Chomsky sets the bar low in portraying the demeaned “truthers” as an undifferentiated collection of stupid, backward and decrepit souls. “Their lives are no good… Their lives are collapsing… They are people at a loss… Nothing makes any sense… They don’t understand what an explanation is… They think they are experts in physics and civil engineering on the basis of one hour on the Internet.”

These comments reflect the shockingly low level of Chomsky’s near hysterical effort to divert attention away from evidence of what really transpired on 9/11. This type of personalized attack, as if the 9/11 Truth Movement is collectively guilty of some sort of horrific thought crime, replicates on ideological grounds some of the worst attributes of racism and bigotry.

Unfortunately Chomsky’s interventions are fairly representative of the overall quality of many Zionist attacks on the 9/11 Truth Movement.  As is especially clear in the writings of Jonathan Kay, for instance, Zionist smear tactics directed at 9/11 “truthers” extend many of the same themes of induced hatred directed at Muslims by the Zionist propagandists in charge of the Islamophobia Industry.

Chomsky’s critical orientation to the actions and power structure of the Israeli government is similar to his critical orientation to the actions and power structure of the United States. Chomsky’s bottom line, however, is his attachment to the Jewish state as the site of a Jewish cultural renaissance that he seeks to advance and protect.

Chomsky refuses to accept that US foreign policy and the foreign policies of the former dependencies of Anglo-American empire have become subordinate to the imperatives of Zionist lobbies as well as to the networks of media, banking and corporate power that serve them. These lobbies figure prominently in the formulation and execution of the Israeli government’s foreign policies. Organizations like the B’nai Brith or Abe Foxman’s thuggish Anti-Defamation League are in reality ideological and political proxy armies. Their role is to silence critics of the Israeli government, to brand as anti-semitic any efforts to identify fundamental disparities in access to power.

All these factors converge to expose Chomsky’s role in serving the dominant clique that emerged from the global coup d’état of September 11, 2001. Chomsky’s power-serving misrepresentations on this subject present an important window into the study of the relationship between 9/11 and the structuring of national and global hierarchies of power. What is the role of universities and the media in the connections linking 9/11 to the Zionist Question, a contemporary extension of what Karl Marx and others used to refer to frequently in European literature as the Jewish Question?

You will read “A Public Intellectual Outside the Protections of the Academy” in the next part.

August 12, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Islamophobia | , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments