Chomsky and the West's new Fifth Column
Open Republic: April/ May/ June 2006

This article originally appeared In the Irish Times on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

This is a free country, and I'm glad to see the thousands of people were able to listen to Noam Chomsky denouncing our Government's policies on American flights through Shannon as possible war-crimes. That's freedom. It was also freedom (of a kind) for Dermot Ahern to have waived the normal airport arrangements to permit the holder of an invalid passport to enter Ireland. But please, imagine the uproar from the usual liberal suspects - David Norris, Liz McManus, a Higgins or two - if the great Mark Steyn had been shown the same liberality.

Indeed, it is utterly impossible to imagine any supporter of the war against Islamic fascism being feted in Ireland as this unelected, self-appointed critic of the US has been. Non-stop interviews, avid and usually cretinous reports of his almost every word, have daily characterised his visit to this country. The attitude of liberal Ireland to this pathological show-off was best summed by Conor McCarthy in a letter to The Irish Times, which simultaneously denounced the newspaper's new right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer.

"But unlike Chomsky, Krauthammer is not answerable to academic community, and does not habitually make himself available for debate with a wider public. ...He has not shown Chomsky's willingness to address the most modest and obscure newspaper..."

Well what is The Irish Times, if not, by Washington standards, just about the most modest and obscure newspaper imaginable? Moreover, the acclaim of an academic community is almost a definition of how a liberal assesses merit: the generality of opinion at large, especially newspaper readers, counts for nothing from such liberals. If academics approve, then all is well.

Chomsky is more than an intellectual exhibitionist. He is a chump - a brilliant and dysfunctional genius, like the autistic child who knows the date of every day in 2001 BC, but can't explain why we have a calendar. He inhabits a fantastic world, in which cabbalistic covens in Washington ruthlessly control the world, conducting genocides here and massacres there, diverting rivers to cause drought, felling rainforests and driving entire species into extinction. These cabals can do this undetected because they control the media - which is presumably why he got an almost unprecedented two-page interview in this newspaper last weekend.

Since this world-view is no more than a vast cartoon conspiracy-theory, and since both conspiracies and cartoons by their nature conceal the truth, the very absence of evidence for the conspiracy is proof of its existence. It is, at bottom, a faith, and the messiah and the gospeller of this faith is Foam Chumpsky. And he - like all those thousands of people at the RDS - is apparently unaware that we are all engaged in an epoch-making conflict: the sixth world war is underway.

The first world war was the centuries-long assault by Islam on India, Asia Minor, the Middle east and Europe, which finally ended when the Hindu Marathas, the emergent Sikh kingdom and the Hapsburgs halted Islam's global jihad, roughly between 1667 and 1683. The second world war - fought in all four continents - was Napoleon's, an egological attempt to conquer the world. The third was the so-called Great War. The fourth, like the second, was caused by an ideological despot, and is known as the second world war. The fifth was the cold war. The sixth is this one, which it actually started in 1979 in Iran and Afghanistan; and batten down the hatches brothers and sisters, because like the first, it will last a very long time indeed.

This 6th world war is moreover made infinitely more trying by the backward nature of Arab culture. Spain translates more foreign books into Spanish every year than the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic over the past thousand years. There are millions of pious Arabs who know nothing whatever about the non-Arab world, and for whom the intellectual processes of enquiry, analysis, scepticism and logic are utterly alien. To such people, education consists of the endless repetition of sacred scripts, shariah law and recitations of the jihadist loathing of the infidel enemy, their brains thus shaped and warped by the blunt instruments of rote and hate.

And far from this backwardness being enlightened by the far more sophisticated Islamic countries of Asia, the reverse is happening. Pakistani, Afghan, Bangla Deshi and Indonesian Islam are being Arabised, though two agencies. One is the madrasahs, the Saudi-backed religious schools which are effectively embassies promoting the foreign policy of the fundamentalist Salafiyya/Wabbahi movements. The other is Al Jazeera, the satellite network which promotes jihad and "martyrdom operations" and whose mostly live within a medieval religious culture which has experienced the equivalent of neither the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter Reformation nor the Enlightenment.

The US State Department analyst Tony Corn has identified five columns to the Islamic insurgency: the house of al-Saud; the now virulently Islamic al-Azhar university in Cairo, in terms of theological authority the equivalent of the College of Cardinals in Rome; al Qaeda, and al-Jazeera. The fifth column is just that: it is the academic fifth column in western campuses (as quintessentially represented by Foam Chumpsky and his followers) which, as Tony Corn says, "is increasingly providing both conceptual ammunition and academic immunity to crypto-jihadists, making Western campuses safe for intellectual terrorism."

These are the campuses which liberals are so fond of, and which Conor McCarthy clearly approves of, where George Bush is reduced to a half-amusing, half-dangerous caricature, a sort of global Idi Amin-type figure. In such places, the deaf do sign language to the blind, and the blind raise their voices to the deaf. They call the result academic enquiry, of which they are usually very, very pleased. And the hero of such places is often enough Noel Chumpsky.

In this culture, where Braille readers communicate with those who use their hands to speak, Chumpsky's technique of ignoring the empirically inconvenient is standard practice. Thirty years ago, despite all the evidence, he proclaimed that all was well in Cambodia. Last weekend, he told his listeners in the RDS that he backed an immediate US withdrawal from Iraq, citing as justification "opinion polls" in Iraq. But democratic countries are not governed by polls, but by democratically elected politicians: and the overwhelming mass of Iraqi political parties loudly insist that the US military should stay until their police and army are capable of defending their country's emerging democratic institutions.

The rest of us can learn from history, even Chumpsky can't. We can say that the US failure to fight communist aggression seriously in South East Asia, in a coherent and militarily sensible way, was a calamity for the people of the region. (But for US intervention in 1963, South Vietnam would have fallen to communist aggression in 1964, with Laos, Cambodia and Thailand probably going soon afterwards. If that had happened, what would our world be like now?)

And one reason why the US attempted to fight a limited, and therefore self-defeating war against North Vietnamese forces, led by General Giap, for heaven's sake, was because of the pro-communist political agitation by people like Chumpsky. He actually supported NLF terror in Vietnam and Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia. The US defeat which he sought - and finally got - turned into a geopolitical disaster for the region, and a genocidal catastrophe for the people of Cambodia. Only a demented and pathologically amnesiac morality such as Chumpsky's would now abandon the Iraqi people to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Pol Pot of Islam.

Many policy mistakes have been made in the past in the US's policies towards the Middle East, not least its craven tolerance of Saudi Wahhabism, that obscure but virulent strain of Islam that developed amongst the strange nomads of the peninsula. This was a sun-baked dementia that could never have endured contact with modern civilisations: unfortunately, it was put on the life-support system of Saudi money, modified and then exported globally through the evil medium of the madrasahs.

That folly of partly blind, partly wishful US tolerance is now largely history: and Churchill did not continue to blame Chamberlain in 1939, but joined him in government. For the world is at war again, and our most potent allies in the coming struggle are democratic Muslims who not merely have Islamic credibility, but whose civil values resemble our own. These are the very people who are fighting for their freedom in Iraq - and they are the ones that Foam Chumpsky and his foaming chums, enjoying the lazy moralising and the priggish safety of the RDS, wish to leave - once again - to the murderous mercies of the current generation of genocidalists.