Informed Speculation

Chomsky didn’t literally say that in this piece of excrement posted (where else?) in the ultra-left Guardian, but the message is unmistakeable. Consider:

In Lebanon, a little-honoured truce remains in effect – yet another in a decades-long series of ceasefires between Israel and its adversaries in a cycle that, as if inevitably, returns to warfare, carnage and human misery. Let’s describe the current crisis for what it is: a US-Israeli invasion of Lebanon, with only a cynical pretence to legitimacy.

Notice the outrageous claim that kidnappings of soldiers from sovereign terroritory are not casus belli, this from a man who has been trumpeting the ‘right’ of Hamas to retaliate because of some mythical kidnapping of two people without names that no one seems to be able to confirm even exist, with the exception of the omniscient Chomsky.

Note, too, how the loathsome fool calls this a “US-Israeli invasion of Lebanon”, despite the fact that the US had nothing – nothing – to do with it, other than pushing Israel into a miserable ceasefire agreement, and that Hezbollah has been occupying southern Lebanon in defiance of the UN for years.

Chomsky then engages in his most frequent activity, the rewriting of history:

What would break the cycle? The basic outlines of a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict have been supported by a broad international consensus for 30 years: a two-state settlement on the international border, perhaps with minor and mutual adjustments.

The Arab states formally accepted this proposal in 2002, as the Palestinians had long before. Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has made it clear that though this solution is not Hizbullah’s preference, they will not disrupt it. Iran’s “supreme leader” Ayatollah Khamenei recently reaffirmed that Iran too supports this settlement. Hamas has indicated clearly that it is prepared to negotiate for a settlement in these terms as well.

The US and Israel continue to block this political settlement, as they have done for 30 years, with brief and inconsequential exceptions. Denial may be preferred at home, but the victims do not enjoy that luxury.

Two pertinent facts should be enough to dispose of this claptrap: (1) George W. Bush is the first U.S. President to explicity call for a Palestinian state, and (2) it was the utterly failed leadership of the Palestinians that threw away the best chance for peace at Oslo.

Chomsky is a moral relativist of the highest rank; watch, now, the audacity as he implicitly blames America for 9/11:

It is no secret that Israel has helped to destroy secular Arab nationalism and to create Hizbullah and Hamas, just as US violence has expedited the rise of extremist Islamic fundamentalism and jihadi terror. The latest adventure is likely to create new generations of bitter and angry jihadis, just as the invasion of Iraq did.

Israeli writer Uri Avnery observed that the Israeli chief of staff Dan Halutz, a former air force commander, “views the world below through a bombsight”. Much the same is true of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and other top Bush administration planners. As history reveals, that view of the world is not uncommon among those who wield most of the means of violence.

Oh, sure, he cloaks his words in obscurantist phrasing that leaves him an out (he doesn’t even have the courage to state his convinctions, he would rather imply them), but if this isn’t an apology for terrorism, then words have lost their meanings. Chomsky is in rarified air; of public Western figures, only George Galloway as consistently engages in such routine support of terrorism…