ISRAEL’S GREATEST enemies are those who support its decline into moral degeneration and destruction said Noam Chomsky.
In the 1970s, he said, Israel had a choice between security within its existing borders and expansion into settlements and it chose expansion.
It was not possible to carry out the military occupation this required and at the same time maintain elementary moral values.
“The worst enemies of Israel were those supporting it. What they were in fact supporting was its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction,” said Chomsky. philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky has told an audience in Dublin.
Photograph: Matt Kavanagh
Chomsky, who is retired professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Israel was once a civilised society similar to those found in Scandinavia. Now, however, that has changed. There is high inequality just as in the US, and the social security system has collapsed, he said. Chomsky is the son of Jewish parents from Pennsylvania.
Chomsky maintained there were grounds for hope in the conduct of world affairs. Countries such as Britain and the US had become much more civilised, a trend he attributed to the active engagement of citizens, especially young people, in politics. Disillusionment with the policies of John F Kennedy in the 1960s had prompted people to become involved in civil rights campaigns and, later, the feminist movement, he pointed out.
Drawing a distinction between “stories” and “non-stories” in the media and academia, Chomsky pointed out that the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago was followed six days later by the “end of Christianity” through the defeat of liberation theology. This occurred when elite units of the army in El Salvador, trained by the US, murdered six leading Catholic intellectuals. Yet, in contrast to events in eastern Europe, few people knew about this event.
Warning against the pitfalls of humanitarian intervention, he pointed out that British colonists came to the New World with the express intention of helping natives in this manner. “In the process, they helped exterminate them.”
Most of these colonists were religious fanatics, Chomsky said, and this streak in American society has lasted almost up to the present day.
by PAUL CULLEN
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/1104/1224258026838.html
