In a speech delivered at M.I.T. on October 18, 2001, entitled “The New War Against Terror,” Noam Chomsky, in a typical effort to manufacture dissent, asserted that in retaliation for 9/11 the U.S. was “apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people,” that “plans are being made and programs implemented for the death of several million people in the next couple of weeks, not Taliban of course, their victims” and that the coming American strike against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden should be understood as “some sort of silent genocide.”

Moreover, with respect to the Middle East quagmire, he had no compunction blaming Israel (and the U.S., of course) for allegedly “blocking a diplomatic settlement for 30 years now, still is”—this in the face of the well-known facts of Arab uncompromisingness and Palestinian plotting available to anyone who cares to look impartially at the events on the ground and the data beginning to emerge from Palestinian statements of intent. The sheer nonsense of his ramblings somehow escaped his university auditors, as it does the vast sodality of his readers. His orating in Islamabad and offering his support to America’s Islamic adversaries, in the lingering smoke of the Twin Towers, is typical of the man. Indeed, Chomsky’s political acumen and moral substance are perhaps best characterized by his still unrepudiated support for Pol Pot’s homicidal Khmer Rouge regime.

Chomsky is back in the news again, furious that he—one of the most perfervid and contumacious of Jewish Israel-haters and a vociferous enemy of the Jewish state—was refused entry into Israel, which he immediately skewered as a “Stalinist” regime. I suppose it takes one to know one, for Chomsky, a hero of the left and one of its most zealous spokesmen, would have been intellectually at home in Stalin’s police state. Indeed, if there is a “Stalinist” to be found anywhere in the picture, it is Chomsky. Which is obviously why he has been embraced by the treasonous Israeli left, lionized, as David Hornik points out in a recent article for FrontPage Magazine, by the leftist daily Haaretz as an “illustrious American scholar,” “a superior intellect” and a “bold intellectual” unjustly targeted by “a state headed for fascism.” For such urban syndicalists and ultra-comfortable socialists, Chomsky is a kind of latter-say Amos, the prophet who castigated the rich and powerful, and Israel is a North Korean lookalike intimidating its neighbors and sowing discord in the world.

Of course, Chomsky is no Amos and Israel no North Korea—and the Israeli left, like its American counterpart, is no flight of angels singing us to our rest in a beatific future characterized by equality and social harmony. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. The left is a congeries of modern totalitarians intent on building a socialist utopia which, despite their professions of concern for their fellow man, inevitably devolves into a bureaucratic nightmare of blandness, poverty, anomie, repression and forced leveling—and in some cases, with a gulag not far around the corner. As Nathaniel Hawthorne put it in The Blithedale Romance, the worshippers of the socialist idol “never once seem to suspect…that [it is a] false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love.” But, as Hawthorne pointed out, this consuming, egalitarian passion is based on nothing more than an “all-devouring egotism,” leading only to debasement and violence. Such egotism is glaringly evident among the leaders of the movement who all enjoy status, privilege and often immense wealth which, it is fair to say, they have no intention of relinquishing.

Israel, for all its flaws—and what country is without them?—is a beacon nation, the sole democracy in a feral and backward region of the globe. It is an acknowledged leader in the fields of advanced cybernetics, desalination projects, hydrology, energy technology, “green” innovations, productive agricultural methods and life-saving medical technology. Israel graduates a higher number of scientists and engineers per capita than any other country and has produced eight Nobel laureates to date. Indeed, the Israeli “brand” is one that creates value for humankind. Politically, Israeli-Arabs possess the franchise and are represented by elected members in the Knesset and the governing Cabinet. The first Arab women to exercise the vote were those who live in Israel. During the post-Oslo period, the Israeli public has been educated to accept major concessions to the Palestinians, including “disengagement” from the Territories; during the same period, the Palestinians have been indoctrinated to make no real concessions whatsoever, insisting on the inadmissible principle of the “right of return” of millions of manufactured “refugees” which would lead to the demographic end of the Jewish state, and relying on violence rather than arbitration to achieve their ends. In his rabid hatred for the Jewish state, Chomsky takes none of this into account.

The question we should ask is: how far can Chomsky be trusted? His acolytes would do well to consult The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, for a rigorously documented account of Chomsky’s character, scholarship, methods of persuasion and propaganda exploits. This book should be read by anyone who is still impressed by Chomsky’s artfully constructed persona as a civil libertarian and as America’s leading dissident. A significant number of Chomsky’s sources are provided as well, both in the body of the text and the notes, an essential addition since many of these sources are often not fully referenced by Chomsky, are cleverly decontextualized or subtly recontextualized when they are not simply misquoted or abridged, or are so obscure and of such dubious origin as to be almost impossible to find without a guide.

Assembled and explicated here for readerly convenience, what contributor Paul Bogdanor calls the “hallmarks of his intellectual repertoire: massive falsification of facts, evidence, sources and statistics, conducted in the service of a bigoted and extremist ideological agenda” can no longer be ignored. As another contributor to the volume, Werner Cohn, asserts (and explicitly shows), “one of Chomsky’s chief rhetorical techniques is to misrepresent the writings of others.” What is no less troubling is Chomsky’s obvious reluctance to reconsider those of his sources who have gone on to revise or repudiate their earlier conclusions. The shoddy scholarship alone should have alerted any attentive reader to the bad faith of this unscrupulous ideologue. The wonder is that so few have bothered to check the facts.

An anaerobic thinker for whom the presence of free oxygen is repellent, Chomsky is Hawthorne’s “high-priest,” with “no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience,” to whom so many on the left have consecrated themselves, not realizing that they are following him into what Hawthorne calls the “surrounding darkness.” Chomsky is a general in the Terracotta Army of international socialism with its sights set on the faux Arcadia to come. He is also a world-class hypocrite. As Peter Schweizer reveals in his exposé of the patrician left, Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, Chomsky, who rants endlessly against the U.S. “war machine,” wrote his universally acclaimed Syntactic Structures on grants from the three branches of the American military establishment. Schweizer’s study of the real Chomsky, not the media construct who thrives on a factitious reputation, presents undeniable evidence that America is, for Chomsky, a country whose largesse he has impenitently exploited. It is “the land of Pentagon contracts, lucrative real estate holdings, stock market wealth, and a tax-sheltered trust for his children”—aspects of American life that Chomsky has fiercely denounced in his voluminous speeches and writings.

There can be no doubt that Chomsky is a feverish and mendacious simplifier whose storyboard vision of a world minus the America and the Israel we know has endeared him to enemies of the democratic tradition. I regard him as the Bobby Fischer of the intellectual world, another brilliant (in his field), mentally over-specialized monomaniac gone completely round the bend. Israel was well within its rights to refuse this advocate for Hizballah—as of this writing, Chomsky is touring southern Lebanon as a guest of the Shi’ite terrorist organization—the hospitality to which he arrogantly felt he was entitled, and it should abide by that original decision. Bar Ilan University professor Sam Lehman-Wilzig reasonably wondered why Israel should welcome “an outsider who wants to spit in the house.”

America, too, could not be blamed if it belatedly considered revoking his citizenship and Chomsky himself might be applauded for demonstrating a better-late-than-never consistency by refusing to live in America, which he regards as a “terror state.” Surely Chomsky would be happier in Putin’s Russia, Ahmadinejad’s Iran or Chavez’ Venezuela, regimes more in conformity with his political convictions and world-view. And, as an added bonus, he could still hold on to his investments.

Being a leftist Anti-Zionist means not only never having to say you are sorry, such as when you get your facts all wrong.  It also means that you have an obligation to represent yourself as a victim of harassment.   Armchair martyrdom is as fundamental a part of leftist ideology as anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel.

In his now-famous essay from July, 1976, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” Thomas Wolfe wrote about how desperately American academics wish to feel persecuted.  A pretense of being persecuted today seems to do wonders both for their ego and for their web traffic.  The entire “Zionist Lobby” is largely an invention by these same people, anxious to show that they are being oppressed by an evil nefarious conspiracy.  You just need to wave your stigmata and denounce the “Neo-Conservatives,” the “Rightwing McCarthyists,” and – of course the Jews.  Whining about being persecuted seems to be the leading participation sport of today’s far Leftists and the radical armchair postureurs.

As documented recently on this web site, Joel Beinin, the Israel-hating pro-Hamas sometimes-Maoist professor of Middle East Studies at Stanford University is just such a persecution whiner.  Here is what we wrote:

‘“McCarthyism” seems to be Beinin’s third favorite “m” word, after Marxism and Mao, and he applies it liberally to anyone who dares to criticize him. Beinin wrote a 2004 article called “The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East.” In it, Beinin denounced the Ford Foundation’s decision to withdraw funding from any university grantee that finances the promotion of “violence, terrorism, or bigotry or the destruction of any state.” What worried Beinin was that such restrictions could potentially hurt a “Palestinian student group [that] called for the replacement of the state of Israel with a secular, democratic state,” meaning one seeking the extermination of Israel.’

Beinin went on to declare that Bay Area Zionists silenced him and prevented him from giving a talk to a school in San Jose.  The San Francisco Chronicle checked and reported that no one at all from the local Jewish Community had even spoken with anyone at that school.

Well, the good professor is back.  Over the Thanksgiving weekend he widely circulated the following epistle, which we reprint for you here in full, spelling errors and all:

26 November 2009

I arrived in Israel at about 15:00 on Wednesday, 25 November afternoon to visit my mother, brother, and sister who are Israeli (and US) citizens resident in Israel since 1973.  My mother has been ill, and this visit was prompted primarily for that reason. I have visited Israel dozens of times before – most recently December 2008 – and resided in the country for extended periods on several different occasions.  Yesterday, for the first time since my first visit to Israel in 1965, I was detained without explanation at Ben-Gurion airport for nearly two hours and ultimately interrogated.  The questioners asked questions that they surely already knew the answers to.  The asked, for example, my profession and my email.  My position as Donald J. McLaughlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University and my email are a matter of public record, easily obtainable from the website of Stanford’s Department of History.  The questioners also asked whether I had travelled (sic) to “other countries in the region” which, since they had my passport in their hands for the better part of two hours with all the relevant visa stamps, was also not obscure information.  My luggage was not searched nor was I asked any question remotely related to the security of Israel except whether I had traveled (sic) to Iran (I was there once, for two weeks, in 1970 when Israel had warm relations with the Shah’s regime).

It therefore appears that this “investigation” had no purpose other than to harass and intimidate me.

Upon leaving I was told that I would be contacted further by one “Amos” from the Ministry of Defense.  For my convenience, I was given his phone number: 054-*******.

Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History
Professor of Middle East History
Joel Beinin
Contact in Israel: 054-565-2320

The main reports about the horrific suffering by Beinin at the hands of the security personnel at Israel’s airport have been on web sites run by Israel’s own predominantly-Arab Stalinist communist party and on one of its front groups named “The Left Bank.”

Now the above Beinin hysterics about being “intimidated” need a dose of deconstruction.  Beinin routinely travels to countries that happen to be at war with Israel, and has visited Iran, which happens to be officially on record as calling for the annihilation of Israel and its population.  By his own admission, Beinin’s passport is bristling with visas from such countries.  One would expect even the sleepiest airport passport inspector at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport to sit up and take notice of someone coming into the country with such visas.  Most passport inspectors at Tel Aviv airport, by the way, are teenage girls.  So you can imagine the terror and intimation experienced there by the poor professor.

Now Beinin’s insistence that the airport security staff must have known who he is rings a bit curious.  I did a search of the Hebrew web, and – sure enough – there are some internet mentions of him in Hebrew, but almost all of those are on the web sites of communist party and its fronts, which the airport inspectors may not visit on a regular basis.  There are two mentions of Beinin’s getting sued by Los Angeles journalist Rachel Neuwirth for his posting false smears about her.

What about Beinin’s claim that being questioned about his travels in belligerent countries constitutes “harassment” and “intimidation?”   (We have only his word that the questioning took two hours, and no mention at all of his being offered cookies and tea; I have waited in that airport for longer just to get a guitar case out of the belly of a plane!)   Well, an acquaintance of mine named Julia is an Israeli Jew born in Libya, a fact noted on her Israeli passport, and you would not believe the hassle she goes through every time she wants to come to the United States for a visit!  My wife was questioned at length and searched at Tokyo airport after 9-11 because her passport says she was born in the Middle East.

More to the point, Joel Beinin is an anti-Israel hate propagandist, someone who has made a career out of rationalizing anti-Jewish terrorism and endorsing Arab demands for Israel’s annihilation.  Other countries routinely bar hostile propagandists for far less provocation.  Canada banned ultra-leftist and Saddam’s agent George Galloway from entering, and also banned some other radicals.  Canada also banned a controversial rap group from entering.  The US banned Tariq Ramadan due to his terrorist connections.  It has banned others for security reasons, including Cat Stevens, the British author Sebastian Horsley, a pro-LSD Canadian psychologist, and at least one Israeli.  The UK banned radio host Michael Savage (along with 15 other people) for being insensitive to Moslems, and tried to ban Dutch politician Geert Wilders.  Egypt has barred Hamas members from entering.  The Ukraine banned the mayor of Moscow from entering the country because of things he said.

Now as it turns out, Israel almost never prevents anti-Israel propagandists and anti-Semitic hate-mongers from entering the country.  For example, it rather stupidly allows lots of “anarchists” from the “International Solidarity Movement” and similar pro-terror groups to enter the country and then to attack its policemen and soldiers as their attempt to help Palestinian terrorists.  The only two anti-Israel propagandists of note who have been barred from entering Israel in recent years were: 1.  Norman Finkelstein, a Neo-Nazi who was fired by DePaul University and who was barred from entering Israel due to his intimate ties with the Hezb’Allah, and 2. Richard Falk, the anti-Semitic retired professor from Princeton who was barred from entering Israel as head of an anti-Israel UN propaganda “commission.”  (When Falk arrived earlier as a private person to give university lectures, he was admitted.)

Anti-Israel fanatics, like Noam Chomsky and the Swedish journalist who recently invented a medieval blood libel about Jews stealing the body parts of Palestinians, have been admitted to Israel freely, although they never would be if I had anything to say about it.  Even Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose nasty diatribe, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, has become the Koran for Israel-bashers and Jew-haters around the world, were welcomed in Israel for a speaking tour.

It goes without saying that Beinin has never expressed any criticism of the fact that Israelis are prohibited altogether from entering Iran and most Arab countries.  Some of those countries prohibit entry to Jews from anywhere.  In Saudi Arabia you will get expelled and beaten to a pulp if you have a Hanukka Menorah or a Christmas tree.

Of course the greatest irony in all of this is that Beinin was not banned from Israel at all, in spite of being a fanatical pro-terror anti-Israel propagandist.   He was simply interviewed by an alert young passport inspector, suspicious of all those visas in Beinin’s passport from countries seeking Israel’s annihilation.  For Beinin, however, the incident was a priceless opportunity to wave his stigmata and show the world what a persecuted martyr and victim he is.  His questioning in the airport proves he is being intimidated and harassed by them damned Zionists!