A FEW days ago, Guernica magazine accused me of not citing sources when I criticised Noam Chomsky. I responded by posting a source-ridden chapter from my What’s Left (you can read the book here and the extract on Chomsky here) which detailed at length the shifty way in which Chomsky and all those who imitate him excuse crimes against humanity they cannot blame on the West.
The extract detailed at length Chomsky’s role in boosting deniers of the holocaust, Pol Pot’s genocide and the Serb massacres of the Bosnian Muslims. I am a charitable man, so I have to assume that Guernica’s Joel Whitney is either very dim or extremely busy. For he says, ‘after reading Cohen’s response, I wondered if he proved Chomsky’s point for him. The problem was that Cohen’s response only weighed in on the very general question of Chomsky’s “influence”.’
Er, no it did not. Read it yourself and you will see a discussion not of general influences but of specifics; for instance, of how the apologists for Serbia constructed a conspiracy theory to explain away the massacres of Bosnia’s Muslims. Perhaps Whitney did read it, but lacked the mental ability to understand it. Perhaps he was in such a hurry to get on with whatever journalists at Guernica get on with that his distracted mind just flicked over the page and did not take in the words. (He mentions using a search engine rather than his own eyes, so I suspect that may be the case.)
Nick Cohen
