[lbo-talk] Noam Chomsky is losing it

Joseph Catron jncatron at gmail.com
Wed Sep 28 18:05:45 PDT 2011


On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 2:53 AM, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:

Ask a randomly selected U.S. pro-Palestinian activist how he or she got into
> the subject and chances are they'll say it was Chomsky who turned them on to
> it.

Er, not really. That might have been true a couple of decades ago (that is to say, before my time - I have no idea), but certainly hasn't been for a while. Even if you reduce your sampling to solidarity activists who came on board through reading (rather than news reports, or actual activities around them), Ali Abunimah has pulled in a lot more over the last decade. Honestly, I have this conversation all the time, and it may be that nobody's answer has ever been "Chomsky" - I certainly can't remember when it was.


> It really seems like you're just saying Chomsky is a racist and
> anti-Palestinian because he disagrees with you about specific aspects of BDS
> tactics or about the one-state vs. two-state question.
>

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I would say that anyone supporting a racially-exclusive state on ethnically-cleansed Palestinian land is both of those things. If Palestinian refugees are welcome in the second of your two states, that's a horse of a different color.

-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."



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