Tuesday 2 December 2008

Noam Chomsky On Intellectual False Flag Operations

The Fate of an Honest Intellectual

Noam Chomsky

Excerpted from Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, pp. 244-248


I'll tell you another, last case—and there are many others like this. Here's a story which is really tragic. How many of you know about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? There was this best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters—or at least, signed by Joan Peters—called From Time Immemorial. It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants [i.e. to the Jewish-settled areas of the former Palestine, during the British mandate years of 1920 to 1948]. And it was very popular—it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it. Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there's no moral issue, because they're just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. And there was all kinds of demographic analysis in it, and a big professor of demography at the University of Chicago [Philip M. Hauser] authenticated it. That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake.Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He's a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: "Here's what I've found in this book, do you think it's worth pursuing?"

Well, he got back one answer, from me. I told him, yeah, I think it's an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you're going to get in trouble—because you're going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they're going to destroy you. So I said: if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you're getting into. It's an important issue, it makes a big difference whether you eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population—it's preparing the basis for some real horrors—so a lot of people's lives could be at stake. But your life is at stake too, I told him, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.

Well, he didn't believe me. We became very close friends after this, I didn't know him before. He went ahead and wrote up an article, and he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn't even bother responding. I finally managed to place a piece of it in In These Times, a tiny left-wing journal published in Illinois, where some of you may have seen it. Otherwise nothing, no response. Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn't make appointments with him, they wouldn't read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.

By this time, he was getting kind of desperate, and he asked me what to do. I gave him what I thought was good advice, but what turned out to be bad advice: I suggested that he shift over to a different department, where I knew some people and figured he'd at least be treated decently. That turned out to be wrong. He switched over, and when he got to the point of writing his thesis he literally could not get the faculty to read it, he couldn't get them to come to his thesis defense. Finally, out of embarrassment, they granted him a Ph.D.—he's very smart, incidentally—but they will not even write a letter for him saying that he was a student at Princeton University. I mean, sometimes you have students for whom it's hard to write good letters of recommendation, because you really didn't think they were very good—but you can write something, there are ways of doing these things. This guy was good, but he literally cannot get a letter.

He's now living in a little apartment somewhere in New York City, and he's a part-time social worker working with teenage drop-outs. Very promising scholar—if he'd done what he was told, he would have gone on and right now he'd be a professor somewhere at some big university. Instead he's working part-time with disturbed teenaged kids for a couple thousand dollars a year. That's a lot better than a death squad, it's true—it's a whole lot better than a death squad. But those are the techniques of control that are around.

But let me just go on with the Joan Peters story. Finkelstein's very persistent: he took a summer off and sat in the New York Public Library, where he went through every single reference in the book—and he found a record of fraud that you cannot believe. Well, the New York intellectual community is a pretty small place, and pretty soon everybody knew about this, everybody knew the book was a fraud and it was going to be exposed sooner or later. The one journal that was smart enough to react intelligently was the New York Review of Books—they knew that the thing was a sham, but the editor didn't want to offend his friends, so he just didn't run a review at all. That was the one journal that didn't run a review.

Meanwhile, Finkelstein was being called in by big professors in the field who were telling him, "Look, call off your crusade; you drop this and we'll take care of you, we'll make sure you get a job," all this kind of stuff. But he kept doing it—he kept on and on. Every time there was a favorable review, he'd write a letter to the editor which wouldn't get printed; he was doing whatever he could do. We approached the publishers and asked them if they were going to respond to any of this, and they said no—and they were right. Why should they respond? They had the whole system buttoned up, there was never going to be a critical word about this in the United States. But then they made a technical error: they allowed the book to appear in England, where you can't control the intellectual community quite as easily.

Well, as soon as I heard that the book was going to come out in England, I immediately sent copies of Finkelstein's work to a number of British scholars and journalists who are interested in the Middle East—and they were ready. As soon as the book appeared, it was just demolished, it was blown out of the water. Every major journal, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review, the Observer, everybody had a review saying, this doesn't even reach the level of nonsense, of idiocy. A lot of the criticism used Finkelstein's work without any acknowledgment, I should say—but about the kindest word anybody said about the book was "ludicrous," or "preposterous."

Well, people here read British reviews—if you're in the American intellectual community, you read the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review, so it began to get a little embarrassing. You started getting back-tracking: people started saying, "Well, look, I didn't really say the book was good, I just said it's an interesting topic," things like that. At that point, the New York Review swung into action, and they did what they always do in these circumstances. See, there's like a routine that you go through—if a book gets blown out of the water in England in places people here will see, or if a book gets praised in England, you have to react. And if it's a book on Israel, there's a standard way of doing it: you get an Israeli scholar to review it. That's called covering your ass—because whatever an Israeli scholar says, you're pretty safe: no one can accuse the journal of anti-Semitism, none of the usual stuff works.

So after the Peters book got blown out of the water in England, the New York Review assigned it to a good person actually, in fact Israel's leading specialist on Palestinian nationalism [Yehoshua Porath], someone who knows a lot about the subject. And he wrote a review, which they then didn't publish—it went on for almost a year without the thing being published; nobody knows exactly what was going on, but you can guess that there must have been a lot of pressure not to publish it. Eventually it was even written up in the New York Times that this review wasn't getting published, so finally some version of it did appear. It was critical, it said the book is nonsense and so on, but it cut corners, the guy didn't say what he knew.

Actually, the Israeli reviews in general were extremely critical: the reaction of the Israeli press was that they hoped the book would not be widely read, because ultimately it would be harmful to the Jews—sooner or later it would get exposed, and then it would just look like a fraud and a hoax, and it would reflect badly on Israel. They underestimated the American intellectual community, I should say.

Anyhow, by that point the American intellectual community realized that the Peters book was an embarrassment, and it sort of disappeared—nobody talks about it anymore. I mean, you still find it at newsstands in the airport and so on, but the best and the brightest know that they are not supposed to talk about it anymore: because it was exposed and they were exposed.

Well, the point is, what happened to Finkelstein is the kind of thing that can happen when you're an honest critic—and we could go on and on with other cases like that. [Editors' Note: Finkelstein has since published several books with independent presses.]

Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support. But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they're likely to be kicked out. The standard thing, though, is that they won't make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young—they'll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line. So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it's not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that's how they got there. And that's pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools—that's the basic story of how it operates, I think.








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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very informative article - thanks for bringing it to the attention of a wider audience.

It shows yet again how the globalist-Zionist agenda seeks to control all information and to divert attention from the negative and soft underbellies of their agendas.

This kind of intellectual manipulation is both disurbing and distasteful. It's what certain nationalists who seem to be somewhat out of favour at present have been saying for years.

As regards the bogus claims that the Palestinians are all recent immigrants, most of them were already there during the period of the Mandate, but most arrive dthere in recent historical times during the Arab conquests of the Middle East in the 7th centuries and later.

As regards the Jews themselves the bogus claims made by Petets should have been exposed much earlier and much wider. The majority of the Jewish population in Israel are in fact derived from European Jewry who originated in a non-Jewish country called Khazar, afluke of history that meant that the Khazar peoples converted to Judaism as a political act and were not in fact ethnic Jews.

Anonymous said...

Mr Potter

So Mark Twain was in on this zionist plot was he? Reading his travels through the land he must've have been. He wrote that the lands were barely inhabited and largely swamps and desert.

Your claim that the zionists are controlling information regarding this is laughable. The world's press have made it clear who they support - fake pictures, lies, pro-palestinian reporting etc. - and it certainly isn't Israel that is for sure.

But there is not and never has been a country called "palestine" and in fact the word is perjorative. There are no such people as the "Palestinians". They are an arab/muslim artificial construct to continue the jihad against Israel.

If these people are not recent immigrants as you claim then I wonder why the UN has designated them as such and maintains an entire agency (UNRWA) just to support them. Even arm them as was the case at Jenin.

The hatred of Israel expressed by many BNP supporters around the blogs is something I am becoming increasingly tired of. I am no fan of zionists, especially those in Britain who put Israel first but to read some of the anti-Israel shite posted around blogs is concerning. The Jews treat the "palestinians" far better than the arabs, go read what jordan (the state that should be palestine) did to them. Then go read what these filth did to the Lebanon and the maronite christians.

They are largely muslims descended from people who immigrated to Israel around 1870 when they saw how the zionists were shaping the new country and they wanted opportunities for a better life. They are fighting jihad against "the descendants of apes and pigs". They are being used by arab-muslim nations whilst the west pays for the privilage.

As regards the refugees from the arab war of 1948, they were created becase Egypt and Jordan told them to leave "so the jew could be driven into the sea". These people number around 700,000none of them were assimilated into these two war-mongering nations. Yet at the same time around 400,000 jews left arab lands for Israel and were assimilated. Contrast this with 10 times these figures in the creation of muslim Pakistan at the same time, all assimilated into India and Pakistan - and you see how duplicitous this "palestinian" issue is. Even Arafat hated these people, he and his wife embezzled millions while sending kids to die.

They are a part of the global jihad and they're our enemy as much as Israel's and we should be doing everything we can to undermine this sham cause. But that would mean supporting Israel, a country that gives far more to the world than the entire Islamic world combined - and we can't have that can we? And if Israel falls Europe will be next. Just imagine all that lovely Jew technology in muslim hands...

Even if it doesn't fall then we'll soon realise what life in Sderot is like.

This anti-israel hatred will cost the BNP votes for sure and give the reds ammunition to support their "BNP nazis" rants.

I stand with Israel and make no mistake about it, what Israel is facing every day will soon come to Europe. You can rely on Islam and the muslims for that.

Cheers

Chris.

Anonymous said...

I agree with you Chris.

I keep getting mixed messages from the BNP on how they view Israel and the Jews. All that Zionist means is a belief in a homeland for the Jewish people. How do you reconcile that with the idea that 14 million people out of 6.5 billion, subtracting those who aren't Zionists, manage to control all the world's money, the world's media, and still have enough time to go home for tea at the end of the day? The media is very anti Israel, so how do you square that? Zionists aren't trying hard enough in England, I guess.

How are some people seeing Zionists (read Jews)around every corner? You might as well hop into bed with the Islamists because they see this issue in exactly the same way.

You've got some decent policies as a party but I am not interested in loony conspiracy theories of clandestine cabals who secretly run the world we can all blame for holding us back in life. Shape up, guys. If I wanted to hear Zionist crap, I'd head down my local mosque. When your views are so convergent with Islamists that there's practically no difference to be seen, you really should ask yourself whether your opinions are worth revising. And since you're the only party with any guts in this country at the moment, don't make me choose between its future and electing a bunch of conspiracy theorists. We all know what happened the last time a party came to power who valued those tales.

You're quoting a man who met with the leaders of Hezbollah and certainly wouldn't take Britain's side in dealing with its own forms of terrorism.

This sort of process of challenging orthodox opinion is very entrenched in academia and doesn't only apply to The Joos. Journals reject many submissions from all fields that are not what they want to publish. It's unfortunate, but it's not a massive conspiracy.

What is it with some of you lot and the bloody Jews? Is there a rational reason for it? Can you demonstrate this Zionist plotting to me using reputable sources? If this sort of machinery exists then show the people proof. And if you don't have it, sort yourself out!