Guardian and Chomsky, concluded

I was waiting, after yesterday's post, to see if The Guardian would print our letter summarising this subject. The letters editor has, as is his prerogative, replied that the newspaper considers the matter closed. I'm thus posting our unpublished letter here.

We share the perplexity of The Guardian’s external ombudsman, John Willis, at the removal from your website of Emma Brockes’s interview with Noam Chomsky, and the publication of an opinion piece by Diana Johnstone as if Ms Johnstone were a wronged party. The interview should be reinstated, and Ms Johnstone’s pernicious ventures in ‘Srebrenica-denial’ receive the critical scrutiny that The Guardian, of all newspapers, is competent to make.

But Willis’s report is handicapped by the restriction of its remit. Willis investigated the way in which the readers’ editor, Ian Mayes, handled Chomsky’s complaint. Our objection was not about the procedure but about the judgement. As we have shown in our letter to Mayes (available on the websites of two of us) and elsewhere, Chomsky is a fundamentally unreliable guide to his own political history, which on this issue is a lot closer to Ms Johnstone’s position than it has been expedient for him to concede.

Another newspaper that carried the interview, the South African Mail & Guardian, concluded after a similar lobbying effort by Chomsky’s supporters, “Chomsky does try to minimise the Srebrenica atrocity… Brockes cannot be accused of misrepresenting his essential position.” That issue remains unconsidered by The Guardian, as does the oddity that in his judgements the readers’ editor appears to be accountable to no one.

David Aaronovitch
Oliver Kamm
Francis Wheen

Willis is explicit on this point in his report, as he was to me when I met him during his investigation. His remit did not extend to the "complex underlying historical debate", only to the way Mayes had investigated Chomsky's complaint. We have never disputed the procedure Mayes adopted: we take issue with what he said, because it was wrong. That remains the case, and our principal objection - that Diana Johnstone says what she does, and Chomsky says about her "research" what he does, and that Emma Brockes's interview was fair comment on both - remains unconsidered. We are, however, glad to have established that the interview ought not to have been withdrawn from The Guardian's site, and look forward to its speedy reinstatement.