What happened to Noam Chomsky on Syria?

[Originally posted at NOW]

It seems I owe Noam Chomsky a belated apology. In the days following his summer sojourn to Lebanon, I wrote a rather cross rebuke of his description of Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria as “understandable;” an adjective I thought (and still think) left slightly too much room for interpretation as an endorsement. At the time, some suggested he meant it more in the sense of ‘comprehensible,’ rather than ‘pardonable,’ to which I replied that the linguistics professor wouldn’t have been so evasive in denouncing, say, Saudi intervention in Bahrain.

I now learn, thanks to a subsequent interview dug up by Asaad AbuKhalil, that the optimists were right. Challenged by Syrian playwright Mohammed al-Attar specifically on the word “understandable,” Chomsky immediately backpedalled: “There’s a difference between understanding the reasons for intervening and excusing it. To be clear: nothing can justify Hezbollah’s involvement [in Syria].”

This is certainly strange talk from the man better known for defending Hezbollah’s right to command a private Islamist militia (a stance he iterated publicly after a friendly meeting with Nasrallah in 2006), and more generally lauding the Party of God as the darling of Lebanese secularism.

Indeed, the Attar interview reveals a transformation in Chomsky’s thinking on Syria in several respects. To see how, first rewind to March, when he was advocating straightforward anti-interventionism to The Guardian:

“I tend to think that providing arms is going to escalate the conflict. I think there has to be some kind of negotiated settlement.”

This seemingly remained his view when interviewed by The Daily Star on 14 June:

“The only slim hope that I can see is the Geneva-style negotiated solution […] Any kind of militarization is going to widen that conflict.”

And yet, only two days later, he was telling Attar that should Putin fail to undergo his long-awaited humanitarian epiphany, arming the opposition would only be the natural back-up plan:

“We all want to force Assad to the negotiating table and from there, to resign, but the question is how to achieve this? The first way to do this is to supply the opposition with arms […] The second approach is to go to Geneva with the cooperation of the major powers, including Russia, and force the regime to accept a truce […] I believe you should choose the negotiating track first, and should you fail, then moving to the second option becomes more acceptable.” [Italics added.]

Also remarkably, given the vitriol routinely heaped upon the rebels by the ‘Hands Off Syria’ crowd, the Professor actually spoke quite favorably of the opposition brigades, even comparing them to the victims of Vietnam:

“I don't think the Syrians made a choice [to arm]. It happened in the wake of the Assad regime’s repressive response. Syrians could either have surrendered or taken up arms. To blame them is akin to saying that the Vietnamese made a mistake responding by force when their US-backed government started committing massacres. Sure, the Vietnamese made a choice to arm themselves, but the alternative was [to] accept still more massacres.”

(Amusingly, this comparison infuriated AbuKhalil, who wrote last week of being “quite displeased” with Chomsky’s “woefully ill-informed” analysis, quite out of step with that of “real leftists” such as himself. Like a bad drunk revealing a repressed bigotry, AbuKhalil even lapsed into outright Assadism, scolding Chomsky for omitting to mention “the role of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar in forming armed militant groups […] prior to the eruption of the Syrian uprising.” It must have stung when, asked by Attar what to do with those for whom the whole rebellion is self-evidently an imperialist scam, Chomsky replied: “Just disregard them. They are insignificant.”)

To be clear, Chomsky isn’t about to start scheduling power breakfasts with John McCain. He said last week any military strike on the regime without UN authorization would constitute a “very serious war crime.” Yet it’s clear nonetheless that he’s breaking ranks with most of the pseudo-left on Syria overall, and it’s worth asking why.

One clue may lie in the otherwise-unreported meeting Chomsky had in Beirut, according to Attar, “with a group of independent Syrian media activists, aid workers and individuals active in cultural and economic spheres.” It’s fair to assume they were not discussing the glories of the October War.

Yet even before that, for more than a year there’s been a key divergence between Chomsky and most of his comrades regarding Israel’s view of Assad, and I think it’s this that’s been decisive. While the likes of Ibrahim al-Amin and George Galloway have championed Damascus as Zionism’s worst nightmare (and concurrently smeared the opposition as Likudniks with Qur’ans), Chomsky has seen through this pantomime, correctly noting that Tel Aviv was never as unhappy with Assad as all that, and certainly wouldn’t be thrilled to see what the IDF itself has called “the terrorists” running the show in his place.

Thus freed from the poisonous notion that the rights of Palestinians must be won through the enslavement of Syrians, Chomsky has had the sense to see both peoples as equal victims of oppressors who have a warmer history than either would like to admit.

Glenn Greenwald fails the Orwell test

[Originally posted at NOW]

Given that both Glenn Greenwald and Sam Harris are men without religious faith, their recent tiff over the so-called “New Atheism” is essentially just a political disagreement, and thus mostly boring (we all know, by now, where we stand on the George Bush administration, and few of us are likely to change our minds on the strength of Greenwald’s or Harris’ cases, both of which leave plenty with which to quarrel).

But there was one moment in Greenwald’s latest rebuttal that jolted me out of my half-slumber; an astonishing admission on his part of systematic self-censorship and – there’s no other word for it – bias:

“I find extremely suspect the behavior of westerners like Harris (and Hitchens and Dawkins) who spend the bulk of their time condemning the sins of other, distant peoples rather than the bulk of their time working against the sins of their own country […] spending one's time as an American fixated on the sins of others is a morally dubious act, to put that generously, for reasons Noam Chomsky explained so perfectly” [emphasis in original].

He proceeds to quote Chomsky arguing that America is responsible for more “terror and violence” than any other country, but – this is the crucial part – even if it weren’t, “even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world,” one would still be obliged to write “primarily” about American violence. “It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else,” he concludes. “That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.”

The implications of this are vast, and vastly unsettling. Greenwald is saying proudly that he doesn’t care about injustice per se, but only American-inflicted injustice. You quickly see why his prolific output is conspicuously quiet on (say) the atrocities of Bashar al-Assad, and how Chomsky was able to visit Gaza last year as the guest of the blood-soaked Hamas theocracy and write a 3,000-word essay upon his return that made not one mention of their widely-documented human rights abuses.

Indeed, I’m not convinced Greenwald and Chomsky themselves have followed their own logic to its natural conclusion. Does Greenwald find it “extremely suspect” when Palestinians “spend the bulk of their time condemning” Israel? Is it “morally dubious” for Kurds and Armenians to campaign against Turkish persecution? The Chomsky Doctrine, were it to have been applied consistently throughout modern history, would have silenced every subjugated people from the Algerians under France to the Indians under Britain to, indeed, the Native Americans under the Pilgrims.

Had Greenwald read a little less Chomsky and a little more Orwell, he might have avoided this altogether, for the latter saw keenly that such self-flagellation was every bit as problematic as the jingoism it opposed. In his 1945 essay, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, he wrote scornfully of the pseudo-pacifists who “do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used [by] western countries.” He argued that this selective factionalism was ultimately no better than any other mode of thinking that discriminated between the human rights of one group vis-à-vis another:

“In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy.”

Chomsky and his disciples are the 21st century incarnations of the Britons who, in 1939, argued the most dangerous man in Europe was Winston Churchill. Deliberately turning a blind eye to crimes not committed by Americans might make Greenwald sleep better at night, but it doesn’t do much for the Aleppan baby flattened to oblivion by a SCUD missile. Such victims might expect a fairer hearing from those with the privileges of Guardian columns and 125,000-strong Twitter readerships.