<HTML> This morning I sat in a small school in Brooklyn the staff of which had suffered five times the entire casualties of the bombing of that factory, casualties from New Yorkers who have the origins from all over the world, from the Caribbean to Africa to Europe. One small school in one small part of Brooklyn. Multiply that by thousands, and you begin to have some idea of the scope of what has been visited upon the people of this city. But Chomsky and his apologist here, Estabrook, find this to be a small matter next to a missile raid by the US on a factory that killed one Sudanese. Not even that, but, Estabrook tells us, it is racist to challenge his extraordinary moral calculations where the death of thousands upon thousands is less than the death of one. You have not a clue what racism is, Estabrook. Your sick, myopic system of moral calculation manages to evade the fact that the attack on the factory in Sudan was in response to the bombings of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed hundreds of innocent Africans as well as Americans. I lived in Tanzania, and I knew some among the dead. But they get chalked in the column of deaths in opposition to American imperialism, so they don't count. Your sick, myopic system of moral calculation manages to evade the fact that the government of Sudan which supported bin Laden in these attacks has waged a genocidal war against the African peoples in its south for decades, and operates a system for their enslavement in the year 2001. But they get chalked up in the column of deaths in opposition to American imperialism, so they don't count. Your sick, myopic system of moral calculation manages to evade the fact that even if you made the worst possible case against the American miss! ile attack in Sudan -- and it was simply a pharmaceutical and fertilizer factory that, contrary to the beliefs of American intelligence, had nothing to do with the production of chemical and biological weapons of terror -- supplies are material things that can be replaced, and human lives can not be replaced. The system of moral calculation that Chomsky and you propose here -- one in which one Sudanese night watchman at a factory [and the fact that only one night watchmen died demonstrates clearly that the attack was carried out at a time and in a way to minimize the loss of human life] holds more weight than thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers from every corner of this globe -- is obscene beyond belief. That you could propose it seriously, and think that rhetorical sleights of hand that we do not know how many Sudanese are dead somehow makes it plausible, is a sign of moral corruption of the rankest sort. You have been so blinded by your ideological dogma, by your willingness to embrace every action taken in the name of opposition to American imperialism, no matter what the cost in innocent human life, and your willingness to oppose every action taken by the American government, no matter how justified, that you do not even know how obscene and evil your words appear. <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">This is the sort of discrimination, not to say racism, that recognizes the attacks on Americans as atrocities but doesn't notice the destruction of other peoples (which "was carried out at a time and in a way designed to minimize human casualties" -- as if there was any concern about "human casualties" in Clinton's launching of more than a dozen million-dollar cruise missiles at Sudan).  As Chomsky wrote at the time, "I suppose that terrorist destruction of half of the medical supplies and fertilizers in the United States might be taken a shade more seriously." In fact, the victims of the Sudanese bombing are probably more numerous than those of the attacks on New York.  Not an "aspirin factory"; (as Christopher Hitchens writes rather dismissively in today's Guardian), the pharmaceutical plant that Clinton destroyed (perhaps to keep M. Lewinsky off the front page) "manufactured much of the antibiotics, malaria and tuberculosis drugs sold in Sudan" [Time]. "...the El Shifa plant produced 60 to 70% of the pharmaceutical drugs used to combat the most deadly diseases facing the Sudanese, including malaria, tuberculosis, and cholera. It also produced almost all the veterinary medicine, in a country where much of the economy is dependent on animal husbandry. The plant made vital medicines available to the Sudanese at 20% of world market prices, a matter of life and death in a country with a per capita GNP of roughly $300 per year.  Exact figures are not available, but it is fair to estimate that at least thousands of people have died as a result of the attack, not by fire and explosion, but by slowly, painfully wasting away without the medicine that could save them." [nowarcollective.com]. And Chomsky points out why exact figures are not available. --CGE On Thu, 13 Sep 2001 LeoCasey@aol.com wrote: > ...And what, may I ask, are we supposed to make of Chomsky, when we > read, as the first words out of his keyboard on this topic, that this > crime -- with uncounted thousands dead -- does not carry the weight of > the bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, which left one > person dead [and was carried out at a time and in a way designed to > minimize human casualties]? If this some sort of parody, somebody's > idea of how to make Chomsky look like a complete and utter ideological > fool, ready to go to any absurd length to make an argument minimizing > the gravity of the thousands of bodies of innocent men, women and > children which are entombed in a 10 square block grave in lower > Manhattan? Who needs to discuss what he said about the Khymer Rouge or > the holocaust deniers any more; this piece of blind ideological > "reasoning"; by itself makes him a figure lacking all credibility...</BLOCKQUOTE> Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869) Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --</HTML>