"Tendentious whimsy"

Jonathan Rauch is a commentator whose writings I first came across 15 years ago in the wake of the Rushdie affair and have valued since. He wrote a fine book called Kindly Inquisitors, 1992, on the threats to free speech arising from claims to compassion and the avoidance of hurt. I drew on this book's argument and quoted from it in a piece I wrote recently for the magazine Index on Censorship. Rauch has also written a book advancing a compelling case for gay marriage; I cited that book too in a recent post.

Rauch has now written a review for the Washington Post of a new book by Noam Chomsky, Interventions. I have just read the book myself and was thinking of reviewing it somewhere. I cannot express my feelings on it more accurately than in Rauch's words, however:

To be sure, Chomsky's trademark barbs and provocations are here, but so are his flights to a separate reality. In Chomsky's universe, the 2001 U.S. attack on Afghanistan's Taliban "was undertaken with the expectation that it might drive several million people over the edge of starvation." And North Korea's counterfeiting racket may actually be a CIA operation. And the Clinton administration intervened militarily in Kosovo not in order to prevent ethnic cleansing but to impose Washington's neoliberal economic agenda. And President Bush -- the first and only U.S. president to declare formal American support for a Palestinian state -- is the obstacle to a two-state solution that Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran are all prepared to accept. (I am not making that up.)

This kind of tendentious whimsy is more peculiar than interesting; as the pages turn, one becomes inured to it and begins to yawn. Also working against readability is that some columns ramble, some repeat, and some are compilations of news clippings. None of those flaws, however, would condemn Chomsky's collection to instant forgettability if it offered fresh analysis or supple argument. Instead the reader gets the sneaking suspicion that the author has not felt the need to adjust an opinion in 30 or so years.

The last sentence I've quoted is especially apt. (I would add that the format as well as the thesis of the book is characteristic of Chomsky's output over at least the past two decades.) Chomsky's appeal is directed to a generation with a short attention span, limited historical appreciation and a susceptibility to conspiracy theory. In the circumstances he is under no pressure to adjust or even reconsider an opinion from a generation ago. Let me give an example that was in my mind when I referred to him last week in the context of conspiracy theory.

In his book Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, 1983, Chomsky is at pains to argue (and as he argues still) that the obdurate and rejectionist parties in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are the US and Israel. He acknowledges, in a peculiarly bizarre attribution of equivalence, that (p. 64): "In the immediate post-1967 period, the Arab states and the PLO took a rejectionist position comparable to the stand that has been consistently maintained by Israel and the US." But that, apparently, soon changed.

The merits of the case were minuscule in 1983, and his argument in 2007 has ended up in the bizarre taxonomy of the protagonists' positions referred to by Rauch. But look in particular at how Chomsky deals with the hard facts of threats to Israeli civilians. In a footnoote on p. 78 of Fateful Triangle, Chomsky writes of the terrorist Abu Nidal:

The PLO has charged that he is an Israeli agent, noting that his operations "frequently serve Israeli interests indirectly," a charge that is "one of the assumptions you bear in mind" according to a French secret service specialist. It is generally assumed that he is supported by Iraq, sometimes Syria, where his offices are located and where he appears to have access to considerable funding.

This is an extraordinary passage and is typical of Chomsky's technique. He doesn't come straight out and commit himself to an the charge that Mossad controls anti-Jewish terrorists. Instead, he neatly infiltrates a crank notion alongside what is known about Abu Nidal in order to imply that they are statements of comparable standing and reliability. In his book The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism, 1986, the Irish historian and diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien quoted the first of the sentences in that passage by Chomsky (I've added the second, because it amplifies O'Brien's point) and commented (p. 622):

This "assumption" would require me to believe that Israeli intelligence organized, among other things, a murderous attack on a synagogue in Vienna (at the end of August 1981) as well as the attempted murder of Ambassador Argov [i.e. the Israeli Ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, who was shot in the head the following year]. If anyone is to believe that charge, those who insinuate its credibility should be prepared to produce some kind of evidence for it, other than statements by PLO spokesmen. Abu Nidal's supposed "Israeli connection" is an unsubstantiated theory of the PLO and its admirers. But Abu Nidal's complex connections with Arab leaders are a matter of record.

To O'Brien's observation of Abu Nidal's murder of Jews we can add the attacks on El Al counters at Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, which killed 18 people, and the shooting at a synagogue in Istanbul in September 1986, which killed 22. Saddam Hussein also resumed his support for Abu Nidal after the Iran-Iraq War. The notion that Abu Nidal was a Mossad agent is morally and intellectually akin to the supposition that 9/11 was an "inside job". So far as I'm aware, Chomsky has never explained to his readers in later years that the "assumption" he floated so disingenuously in the early 1980s remains devoid of evidence and is unfalsifiable. Tendentious whimsy, indeed.