Noam Chomsky vs. Ezra Levant on Free Speech (Part 1)

Find out about Ezra's upcoming talk with Chomsky HERE

James Woods shreds ‘sh*t rag’ Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner’s ‘erotic fantasies’: ‘F*ck them both’

James Woods belts out on twitter what a lot of America thinks of Jann Wenner 

Could that disgusting piece of shit Wenner have picked a prettier cover shot of his dreamboat homoerotic fantasy? What an asshole...
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) July 18, 2013

Does that puke Jann Wenner harbor erotic fantasies for that other puke, the Boston Bomber? Fuck them both...
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) July 18, 2013

James Woods' twitter feed

More Here

""I remember telling him I thought certain aspects of religion were harmful, and I brought up the 9/11 attacks." 

At which point Jahar, Will says, told him he didn't want to talk about it anymore. Will asked why. "He said, 'Well, you're not going to like my view.' So I pressed him on it, and he said he felt some of those acts were justified because of what the U.S. does in other countries, and that they do it so frequently, dropping bombs all the time." 

To be fair, Will and others note, Jahar's perspective on U.S. foreign policy wasn't all that dissimilar from a lot of other people they knew. "In terms of politics, I'd say he's just as anti-American as the next guy in Cambridge"

And here is the link to the full article at Rolling Stone

That sounds about right. The Boston Marathon bomber's views on 9-11 weren't all that different from MIT's Noam Chomsky. 

His mother's views were more in line with lunatic 9-11 conspiracy theorist and "Independent Jewish Voices" founder Diana Ralph.

"During one facial session, she says, Zubeidat told her she believed 9/11 was a government plot to make Americans hate Muslims."

 

Chomsky - sounds clever until you actually consider what he says

Noam Chomsky is a propagandist, a cultural and moral relativist, and is completely full of crap.

Five Feet of Fury wrote a great little piece demonstrating how the sage of American anti-capitalists occasionally produces clever-sounding quips that prove to be complete lies if one bothers to give them cursory examination.

And here's a little more on that subject.

Noam Chomsky: The Last Totalitarian

...Benjamin Kerstein has published a number of books, and this summer he released what is perhaps the most blistering critique of the radical leftist ideologue Noam Chomsky ever to appear in book form. It’s called Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite and is a collection of essays, reviews, and take-downs that originally appeared on his blog of the same name during a three-year period from 2004 through 2007. 

MJT: What possessed you to spend three years writing about Noam Chomsky?    

Benjamin Kerstein: That's a huge question, and lest people start thinking I'm completely obsessive, I should note that I was doing a lot of other things at the same time. The short answer is 9/11. I grew up in an extremely liberal community where Chomsky was very popular, and as soon as 9/11 happened I knew that all those people I used to know would go straight to him in order to find out what they should think about it, and what they would come back with would be very nasty indeed. I regret that I was proven absolutely correct in that. It was really a disgraceful display by some very disgraceful people. Chomsky had become quite marginal in the years before that, but after 9/11 the left disinterred him and put him back on a pedestal. The New York Times, for example, ran a ridiculously fawning profile of him. He was being mainstreamed again and I felt strongly that someone had to say something...

Read the full interview with Benjamin Kerstein at World Affairs 

Guilt by Association: Why the totalitarian left is so offended by it (unless you happen to be asociated with a "right-winger")

All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. I.F.Stone

A "new McCarthyism" is seen in the manner in which guilt by association has been pursued by the likes of Glenn Beck and "mainstream" GOP leadership (if there is such a thing). Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation

In the United States of America, we don’t practice guilt by association. And let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any one faith, the responsibility to oppose ignorance and violence rests with us all. Jeremy Ben Ami, President, JStreet

This is the story of a late-twentieth century invention, namely the ostensible moral and intellectual sin of accusations of "guilt by association."

This trope, "guilt by association," or GbA, has a curious history and a curious present. It has the following characteristics:

1) The trope user is almost invariably a self-described person of the "Left," or, in somewhat more modern usage, a "progressive." The target is someone perceived as, or at least designated as someone opposed to the Left, a "right-winger."

2) The trope has a surface resemblance to accusations of established errors of reasoning -- fallacies -- but in fact it is the user of the trope who is illogical and irrational.

3) The accusation underlying the usage of the trope is as much moral as intellectual; the trope user combines a disdain for the ethics and morality of the target (the ostensible bad faith of so-called right-wing McCarthites, for example) with an accusation of intellectual incompetence (failure to understand elementary logic).

4) The trope enables its users, who are often devoted supporters of totalitarian and other hateful movements, to pose as moral and intellectual superiors.

The totalitarian Left decries "Guilt by association."  And yet, if you remember just a few months ago, after the mass murders committed in Norway by the crazed lone gunman Anders Breivik, they were the same people trying to associate his rampage with Christianity, Israel, and any writer who was critical of extremist Islam.  This is far from being the only example of western totalitarian leftist hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, people like Noam Chomsky and George Galloway came out immediately blaming not the fanatical expression of a religion with which they have allied themselves, but the United States and the West for having angered the Islamists.

I would encourage everyone to read all of Professor Werner Cohn's fascinating essay HERE.

Why are socialist moral relativists silent in the wake of the Norwegian terrorist attack?

After the al-Qaida bombings on 9/11, moral relativists like Noam Chomsky rushed to condemn, not the perpetrators of that horrific atrocity, but the United States of America, for ostensibly having done something to anger the terrorists enough to murder 2977 innocent people.

Rather than outright condemnation of the perpetrators of this abominable mass murder, Chomsky, on the very next day, before the bodies of the victims of Jihadi terror were cold, wrote:

"we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators. If we choose the latter course, we can do no better, I think, than to listen to the words of Robert Fisk, whose direct knowledge and insight into affairs of the region is unmatched after many years of distinguished reporting. Describing "The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people," he writes that "this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia - paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally - hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." And much more.

Again, we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead."

Chomsky was not alone is his morally relativistic justification of Jihad, or even worse, those like Robert Fisk, Richard Falk, Michael Keefer and a cast of irrational or malevolent anti-Capitalists and Jihad apologists who, like Holocaust deniers, strove to deny, and this defend the real perpetrators of the crime against humanity that was committed on September 11, 2001. In some cases, the 9-11 terrorists were even celebrated as heroes, as they were by throngs of Palestinians.

Now that an insane terrorist has murdered dozens of innocent people at a government building and a socialist youth indoctrination camp in Norway, no conservative or Christian of note has come forward to attempt to justify or attempt to mitigate or deflect blame from the depravity of Anders Behring Breivik.

Nor will they. Breivik is a terrorist and mass-murderer for whom there is no justification.

But it is interesting to observe that no anti-capitalist or socialist commentator who was so quick to find a moral justification for 9-11 has not leaped to assuage Breivik's crimes. The question is not why they should do so, for no decent human being possibly could. The question is why they are so anxious to defend and enable the murderers of innocents in the West when the murders are committed in the name of Jihad.

UPDATE: It didn't take long for the crazies to come out of the woodwork. Khaled Muammar, who until earlier this month was president of the Canadian Arab Federation, which was defunded by the federal government for expressing support for terrorist groups, is spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. This one by conspiracy whack-job Stephen Lendman, who says the Breivik killings were a Mossad plot. Lendman is at least consistently crazy. He also says that Bobby Kennedy was killed by the CIA.

(Update h/t Blazing Cat Fur)

Chomsky vs Chavez: Battle of the crackpots

Earlier this year Chávez even suggested Washington make Chomsky the US ambassador to Venezuela.

The president may be about to have second thoughts about that, because his favourite intellectual has now turned his guns on Chávez.

Speaking to the Observer last week, Chomsky has accused the socialist leader of amassing too much power and of making an "assault" on Venezuela's democracy.

The entire transcript of the Chomsky interview is at The Guardian.

More on the story here

Chomsky again proves articulate ≠ smart

An interesting analysis by Werner Cohn:  Chomsky and the Art of Special Pleading

Christopher Hitchens on Chomsky's Follies

Christopher Hitchens can't speak with his mouth right now due to esophageal cancer, but he still speaks loudly and forcefully with his pen.

His column on the stupidity of Noam Chomsky's moral relativism and misrepresentation appears in the current issue of Slate:

The professor's pronouncements about Osama Bin Laden are stupid and ignorant.

Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism. This cognitive dissonance—to give it a polite designation—does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida's martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the "operation." As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.

I can't immediately decide whether or not this is an improvement on what Chomsky wrote at the time. Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton's earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (I haven't been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaida's work to begin with.) He is still arguing loudly for moral equivalence, maintaining that the Abbottabad, Pakistan, strike would justify a contingency whereby "Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic." (Indeed, equivalence might be a weak word here, since he maintains that, "uncontroversially, [Bush's] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's.")

Read the rest here at Slate

UPDATE : Alan Dershowitz on bin Laden's defender

An interesting Noam Chomsky interview

Noam Chomsky is an interesting fellow. He is a moral relativist, which of itself suggests hypocrisy and lack of insight, so he becomes an easy target for mockery.  But nonetheless, he is, by several orders of magnitude, more intelligent and nuanced than his acolytes, such as Naomi Klein and Norman Finkelstein.

He has done some very positive things, such has his campaign for East Timor, that helped draw attention to the situation there, and he was about as wrong as a person could have been regarding the Cold War and the approach to the former Soviet Union, which would still exist if Chomsky's counsel had been followed.

Here is an interesting interview where he discusses his take on aspects of the Israel/Palestine issue, boycotts and the legitimacy of states in general. I disagree with much of what he says, but this provides a good window into his mind:



A Conversation with Noam Chomsky on Palestine/Israel from Frank Barat on Vimeo.


h/t TVO's Agenda blog

Professor Werner Cohn: Prolegomena to the Study of Jews who hate Israel - Not to Weep or to Laugh, but to Understand

Professor Cohn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of British Columbia

"Broadly speaking, Jews who hate Israel fall into three categories: a) the famous, of which Noam Chomsky is about the only one; b) the well-known, like Norman Finkelstein and Tony Judt, and c) others who are not known beyond their immediate circles but who do lurk in various crevices of the Internet. Altogether, as I will explain below, it is not likely that there are more than a few thousand of these haters active worldwide, say fewer than 10,000 and probably no more than half that number. Considering that there are more than 13 million Jews in the world at the moment, the proportion of those who actively hate Israel, about 0.04 of one percent, might well be considered to be modest indeed. "

In Canada, we have one or two in the locally "well-known" category, such as non-credible players like Naomi Klein and her husband, what's-his-name, and Judy Rebick.

For more about this very interesting look at a sad phenomenon, read Professor Cohn's entire piece here.

Liar or Boob? Noam Chomsky claims he had never heard of Hustler when he gave an interview to Larry Flynt's porn mag

Noam Chomsky must have taken a lot of flack from his regressive allies about a perceived endorsement of pornography by his giving an interview to Hustler magazine in 2004.

Chomsky came out with this after-the fact video in which he claims he "never heard of (sic) the Hustler" though he agreed to being interviewed for it.

Now, some people might not take Chomsky's word on this. Some people might think he's such an incredible media whore that he'd gladly appear anywhere we he could get attention and promulgate his conspiracy theories. They might think he's only backtracking, lying and weaseling out of what he did when the angry leftists of yesteryear took offense at their deity being associated with one of the most graphic, exploitative pornography magazines.

Billions wouldn't, but I for one am prepared to take Chomsky at his word.

His word that in 2004, if he's not lying, means he'd never heard of Hustler Magazine or Larry Flynt.

If he's not lying, it means he never heard of or saw Milos Foreman's 1996 hit movie, The People Vs Larry Flynt, that received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor and Best Director.

It means he never heard of that famous and notorious American magazine, its publisher who survived an assassination attempt that received enormous publicity. He'd never heard of the many news stories about the prosecutions of Flynt and the famous, precedent-setting US Supreme Court decision involving Hustler, Flynt, Moral Majority Founder Jerry Falwell and the protection of First Amendment rights that case enshrined.

If he's not lying, it means he didn't even bother to do the rudimentary due-diligence of a google search of Hustler Magazine to find out by whom he had agreed to be published.

Chomsky very well may be telling the truth.

Because if he's telling the truth, it shows how out of touch Chomsky is, his lack of intellectual rigour, and demonstrates his inattentiveness to basic fact and detail.

That I can believe.

You can see Chomsky talking about it in this video:




Here's Stewie Griffin finding a copy of Hustler. I think it's the one with the Chomsky interview: