Comically, Stephens complains that, "Today nobody would dream of banning Mr. Chomsky from anything". This, less than a year after Chomsky's work was banned by the US government at the Guantanamo prison library, and a few years after he was banned from entering the West Bank by Stephens' admired Israeli government.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703730804576312923866840988.html?KEYWORDS=chomsky <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703730804576312923866840988.html?KEYWORDS=chomsky>
On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 10:38 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:
> [The following apposite comments come from Elise Hendrick on fb.]
>
> Christopher Hitchens once again proves that, in addition to being the
> Right's favourite apostate, he remains an utter prick
>
> He didn't misuse facts. He made them up out of whole cloth. It would be
> very difficult to list every single fabrication in this piece, because every
> claim is somehow distorted or fabricated, but one key example is the claim
> of Chomsky's 'inconsistency'.
>
> Hitchens claims that Chomsky's statements about the lack of direct evidence
> linking Bin Laden to 9/11 are somehow 'new' and inconsistent with his prior
> statements. In reality, they are an almost verbatim reiteration of what he
> has been saying on the subject every time it's come up since 2001.
>
> His reference to the Moussawi trial is a joke, as was the trial itself.
> Moussawi was prohibited from participating in his own defence, and most of
> the evidence against him was never disclosed to him at all. He took a plea
> because of the threat of being transferred to a military 'tribunal'. The
> evidence, which never saw the light of a courtroom as a result, was that he
> had repeatedly tried to join up with Al-Qaeda groups, but was rejected as
> being 'mentally unstable'.
>
> Similarly, Chomsky did not create a false moral equivalency between the
> destruction of half of the pharmaceuticals production of desperately poor
> Sudan, killing thousands instantly and estimated tens of thousands as a
> result of the lack of medicines (the US prevented a UN investigation). He
> rightly pointed out that its consequences were much worse than those of
> 9/11.
>
> This piece actually represents a new low in Hitchens' abysmal career.
>
> Oh, and there's the supreme (and ironic) dishonesty of trying to associate
> Chomsky with 'Truthers', though he does this in the same way that Bush had
> of associating Saddam with 9/11 - context and implication. It's worth
> remembering that Hitchens was one of Bush's leading propagandists when it
> came to the nonexistent WMDs and the nonexistent Saddam-Osama BFF
> relationship.
>
> In reality, the 'Truthers' hate Chomsky with a passion because he thinks
> they're full of shit and suggests that facts might matter a little more than
> things people on the Internet made up.
>
>
>
> On 5/9/11 6:19 PM, CallMe Ishmael wrote:
>
>> Hitchens' sneering rebuttal
>>
>> http://www.slate.com/id/2293541/
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