if only israel leaves

To speak ill of Noam Chomsky in Manhattan (or any other liberal enclave where liberalism rests like an angry tumor) is akin to taking a cinderblock to the face of a beloved grandmother or drop kicking kittens with steel-tipped boots. It just isn’t done - not without outraging a whole bunch of people.

I tried it once.

I had no idea that I was both a Nazi and an evil money-grubbing Capitalist. My versatility astounded me.

Indeed, there are more of Chomsky’s books on any given bookstore shelf in New York City than there are happy mosquitoes at a nudist convention – or peace symbols in Greenwich Village.

Well, I’d like to take a few paragraphs to speak ill of him – and then some - if I may.

Call me a nasty kitten-kicker, if you will. Tag me with a “grandma-smacking” label if it suits you, but I must go on record as saying that Chomsky is a bona-fide moral oaf. To believe what he believes, he would have to be, by definition, a moral idiot.

Period.

(I am aware that I have spiked heavily into the red on the “Incredibly Obvious” meter, but this one requires a response).

Late last week, Chomsky gave an interview to Amy Goodman, host of liberal tea-time’s favorite radio noise “Democracy Now.” In it, Chomsky said that President Obama’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “approximately the Bush position” and said that a solution can be found if Israel simply “leaves.”

In response to Obama’s comments on the Middle-East conflict on Thursday, Mr. Chomsky said:

(Obama) began by saying that Israel, like any democracy, has a right to defend itself. That’s true, but there’s a gap in the reasoning.

It has a right to defend itself. It doesn’t follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. So we might agree, say, that, you know, the British army in the United States in the colonies in 1776 had a right to defend itself from the terror of George Washington’s armies, which was quite real, but it didn’t follow they had a right to defend themselves by force, because they had no right to be here.

So, yes, they had a right to defend themselves, and they had a way to do it—namely, leave. Same with the Nazis defending themselves against the terror of the partisans. They have no right to do it by force. In the case of Israel, it’s exactly the same. They have a right to defend themselves, and they can easily do it.

One, in a narrow sense, they could have done it by accepting the ceasefire that Hamas proposed right before the invasion—I won’t go through the details—a ceasefire that had been in place and that Israel violated and broke.

With all due respect, the gap exists between Mr. Chomsky’s ears.

There is egregious moral impotence in pacifism, and that is precisely what Chomsky advocates. Pacifism is, indeed, his answer to conflict – but his position is more sinister than just that. (Yes, pacifism is sinister when evil is allowed to subsist). He advocates pacifism only when practiced by the United States or Israel. Terrorists, totalitarians, fascists and despots get passes – or at the very least, a whole host of “reasons” and “excuses” for why they have been forced to fire missiles at civilians or strap bombs across their chests.

I invite anyone to summon the creative forces of their imagination to create a scenario of conflict where the likes of Mr. Chomsky would not find some way to squeeze in a denunciation of America.

For example, given a horrific terrorist attack in, say, Washington, D.C., Chomsky might admit it was a terrible thing, but would immediately begin asking what America had done to provoke it. The only correct response, according to Mr. C, would be to do nothing. Condemnations against those who perpetrated the act would be short-lived and fleeting to Chomsky and his self-loathing disciples.

But pacifism is not only a moral failing, it is, literally, a sickness – an act given to self-destruction – because it defies the natural instinct of humans to defend themselves when confronted with attack.

The age old question, “How exactly does one defend itself without force when the enemy exists in a different moral reality?” has yet to be sufficiently answered by Leftocrats. Better yet, “How is retreating from evil a sound defense?” cuts to it with a bit more verve. Mr. Chomsky is so tragically inept on the realities of the world that he truly believes that those who perpetrate evil – like the Nazis or Islamo-fascist terrorists – will cease their aggressions if the other side simply “leaves.”

Thus, in Chomskyville, goodness could never prevail.

How sad that our universities are filled with professors who own this worldview.

Leftists like Chomsky live in cartoon constructs of how they wish things to be. Some of them may, indeed, be wonderful people, but they possess no wisdom and cannot be trusted on matters of survival.

Besides, Israel did leave Gaza, remember? It was in all the papers.

And exactly who lobbed thousands of indiscriminate missiles into Israel on a daily basis? Exactly who violated the ceasefire agreement the moment it expired?

Mr. Chomsky subscribes to his own set of facts here.

It doesn’t trouble him because Israel has the temerity to fight back … and to him (and other moral cowards like him), that’s where the abomination lies.

But in a broader sense—and this is a crucial omission in everything Obama said, and if you know who his advisers are, you understand why—Israel can defend itself by stopping its crimes. Gaza and the West Bank are a unit.

Israel, with US backing, is carrying out constant crimes, not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, where it is moving systematically with US support to take over the parts of the West Bank that it wants and to leave Palestinians isolated in unviable cantons, Bantustans, as Sharon called them. Well, stop those crimes, and resistance to them will stop.

Note the phrase: “Israel can defend itself by stopping its crimes.”

we're so proud of junior

As unsporting of me as it may be to fire back at the intellectually frail with pesky facts, I’ll take the risk … It was Hamas – a terrorist organization that exists, by their own admission, with the goal of eliminating the State of Israel – that fired missiles into Israel by the thousands. It was Hamas who broke the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire. And yet the criminals are the Israelis for defending themselves?

If I may ask directly … Mr. Chomsky, if Israel stopped defending itself in the conventional way – by force – and did so your way – the roll over, bend over and take it method – what is your best educated guess as to what would happen to Israel?

There is not a single Israeli leader who does not agree that there should be, in some form, a two state solution for the Israelis and Palestinians. (Keep in mind, the sizeable Arab and Palestinian populations that live peacefully in Israel proper, with the full rights of citizenship). Yet, Hamas doesn’t want a two-state solution. They want Israel destroyed.

Where exactly is the moral equivalence?

For those who claim that the Middle East conflict is complicated, they are dead wrong. It is simple.

One side wants Israel to go away forever. Israel doesn’t want to.

That the solution may be complicated is a separate issue.

Many thanks to Little Green Footballs for bringing this story to my attention.

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