Posted on 05/09/2011 1:34:28 PM PDT by OldDeckHand
The professor's pronouncements about Osama Bin Laden are stupid and ignorant.
Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism. This cognitive dissonance—to give it a polite designation—does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida's martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the "operation." As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
I’m no fan of Hitchens, but every now and then he really nails one.
Chumpski is a one-man advertisement for the end of tenure. He’s an academic has-been whose reputation was built on a once fadish and now more or less discredited theory in a minor academic discipline. He compounds a perverse negative achievement with bizzare social commentary that he is no more qualified to make than a Nigerian cab driver.
He’s a disgrace to his organization in every way that a person can be a disgrace.
Chomsky and Michael Moore are marvelous examples of the same Red double-think we saw in the 1970s—before there had been quite so many books on Alger Hiss where the author set out to clear him of treason, and wound up convicting him, and before the Venona revelations: It was just a frame job when the evil Nixon and Chambers accused Hiss of spying. But . . . not that there’s anything wrong with treason against the evil USA anyway.
Hitchens the raving atheist and Chomsky the raving leftist are similar. Both live in a post-rational mental world.
"This cognitive dissonance" between what were two icons of the left, at least until September 11, 2001, is something quite delightful. At least Hitchens got the war on terror right.
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