For what it's worth, I had an exchange with Blankfort over his apparent inability to comprehend Chomsky's position on a range of issues.
http://mondoweiss.net/2010/01/chomskyabunimah-the-left-and-zionism.html
Among other things, I asked him: ------------------------------------------- According to you, Chomsky has done a valuable service with his “detailed descriptions of the injustices that had been heaped upon the Palestinians by the Israelis”, but that he “is providing cover for the pro-Israel lobby” because he still has “one foot still in Zion”. There is an obvious question here that you don’t address. If he still has such a “determination to protect Israel”, why would he have spent so much of his life documenting and publicizing the “injustices that had been heaped upon the Palestinians”? It seems to me it would have been much simpler to have simply not done that to begin with. ------------------------------------------- And Blankfort responded: ------------------------------------------- The answer is quite simple. His documenting “injustices that had been heaped upon the Palestinians” at the hands of Israel gave him the necessary credibility that enabled him to gain the confidence of most of those who support the Palestinian cause, including mine at one point, and make them susceptible to his distortions of the history of US-Israel relations and to accepting his theory that the pro-Israel lobby is, as he once described it, “a paper tiger.” -------------------------------------------
Nobody else commented on this, but looking it over again, I have the same reaction as before. This is insane. Chomsky spends a life documenting and speaking out against Israeli crimes as part of an effort to protect Israel by throwing people like Blankfort off the trail of the Israeli lobby. Is there any other way to read this?