As visitors to Hitchens Watch all know, Christopher Hitchens recently published an article bearing the childish title, “Chomsky’s Follies: The professor’s pronouncements about Osama Bin Laden are stupid and ignorant.”
The screed contrasted sharply with the opinion expressed by Hitchens on C-Span more than seventeen years ago:
“Professor Noam Chomsky…is one of the most extraordinary moral human beings of our time, and who has produced a shelf of books and critiques and findings and carefully calibrated work that hold up a mirror to American politics and society that it should look in more often.”
This abrupt change of opinion puzzled me, so I consulted Hitchens’s memoirs, Hitch-22. On page 394, he described Chomsky as a “then-friend.” Because the book left me more bored than enlightened, I had to look elsewhere for an explanation for the failure of this cherished friendship. I wrote to Dr. Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I asked the professor what prompted the journalist’s abrupt ideological shift after September 11, 2001. “Good question,” Chomsky responded. “I thought the shift came about 20 years ago, but have no idea why. I don’t know him well enough to judge.”
Perhaps there is no rational explanation for this behavior, I wondered. “I don’t know much about him (or care), but there may be a perfectly rational explanation: the desire to curry favor with the powerful,” Chomsky continued. “That’s often quite a strong motivation.”
Apparently, Hitchens imagined a former intimacy that had never existed. Apart from rampant careerism, I suspect that an unfulfilled desire for greater contact still lingered from the past, prompting Hitchens to lash out at him. Hitchens claimed that Chomsky “doesn’t trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and society” on 9/11. Since Chomsky said no such thing, the “self-evident premise” is only evident to Hitchens himself.
“As to how to react, we have a choice,” Chomsky had actually written on 9/12. “We can express justified horror; we can seek to understand what may have lead to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators.” He then mentioned the 1996 Israeli assault on the Lebanese village of Qana, which was an American-sponsored atrocity, and the 1982 Lebanese slaughter of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which was an atrocity sponsored by Israel. In support of his point, Chomsky referred to the eyewitness reportage of Robert Fisk. To those who doubt the destructive impact of American and Israeli policy on the Middle East, I would myself recommend Fisk’s profound work, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.
Ironically, on 9/13, Hitchens also connected American statecraft to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. After traveling to Washington State to speak at Whitman College, Hitchens had been trapped by the nationwide grounding of all planes. “On the campus where I am writing this, there are a few students and professors willing to venture points about United States foreign policy,” Hitchens reported to the Guardian newspaper. “But they do so very guardedly, and it would sound like profane apologetics if transmitted live. So, the analytical moment, if there is to be one, has been indefinitely postponed.”
It is difficult to determine precisely when Hitchens decided to commit himself to neoconservatism, but within a few weeks, Hitchens began to distort Chomsky’s work, as well as much of his own. The hatchet job in Slate is only the latest example:
“Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he [Chomsky] wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton’s earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.” The Clinton administration alleged that Al-Shifa, the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, was a nerve-gas facility funded by Osama bin Laden.
In fact, Chomsky refrained from speculating on the true motives behind the bombing of Al-Shifa, the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Rather, the professor simply made a factual comparison on the results of the president’s decision:
“The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no one know, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it.)”
Chomsky only noted that the cumulative casualties of the 1998 Al-Shifa bombing were greater than the casualties of the 2001 terrorist attacks. He suggested that I consult an article written by Werner Daum, who served as German Ambassador to Sudan from 1996 to 2000. According to his piece in the Summer 2001 issue of the Harvard International Review, the night watchman and his family died in the bombing of the pharmaceutical plant. Compared to the nearly 3,000 people who perished on 9/11, these immediate casualties at the plant may seem negligible, but one must place the Al-Shifa bombing in long-range perspective. As Ambassador Daum pointed out:
“It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a consequence of the destruction of the Al-Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess. The factory produced some of the basic medicines on the World Health Organization list, covering 20 to 60 percent of Sudan’s market and 100 percent of the market for intravenous liquids. It took more than three months for these profits to be replaced with imports. It was, naturally, the poor and the vulnerable who would suffer from the plant’s destruction, not the rich.”
Chomsky explained to me exact statistics are still unavailable: “The U.S. doesn’t investigate its own crimes.” He added that Ambassador Daum was not alone in his estimation: “The only other expert analyses are similar. But those are just guesses.”
I inquired whether it would be either appropriate or possible to make an ethical comparison between the bombing of Sudan and 9/11. In other words, could he argue that one attack was worse than the other? Or could he only address the matter in statistical terms?
“Of course when you bomb the main pharmaceutical plant in a poor African country you can be sure that many people will die, just as when you walk down the street you can be sure you’ll crush many ants,” Chomsky answered. “How that attitude compares to explicit murder on ethical grounds is a question worth pursuing. I know my opinion, but I haven’t written about it.”
Nevertheless, solid evidence and common sense proved insufficient for the new darling of the right wing. The intentions of the perpetrators mattered more now to Hitchens than the lives of the victims. He had this to say one month after 9/11:
“The clear intention of the September 11 death squads was to maximize civilian deaths in an area renowned for its cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic character…The malicious premeditation is very evident and manifest: The toll was intended to be very much higher than it was…the cruise missiles fired at Sudan were not crammed with terrified civilian kidnap victims. I do not therefore think it can be argued that the hasty, politicized and wicked decision to hit the Al-Shifa plant can be characterized as directly homicidal in quite the same way. And I don’t think anyone will be able to accuse me of euphemizing the matter.”
Well, I will accuse Hitchens of misrepresenting his original conclusions about the Al-Shifa bombing. In the November 16, 1998 issue of The Nation magazine, Hitchens had charged Clinton with the infliction of deliberate harm on innocent people:
“Moreover, a very large number of people are going to die, or are dying now, as a direct result of the destruction of a poor nation’s chief producer of medicines and agricultural pesticides. And everyone knows how this works in an underdeveloped country; it is the children and the old people and those who are already sick who die when the vaccines and the antibiotics and even the analgesics fail to show up. I look at Bill Clinton’s face –when I can force myself to do it – and ask: ‘People were put to death to save that?’ This is, as far as I know, the only time in recent history when a President has made war on civilians for a contemptibly obvious and personal motive and escaped without any protest from the traditional stage army of the good.”
Hitchens’s contradictions are intentional untruths designed for the execution of a personal vendetta. I would go beyond the scope of this article if I fully addressed the controversy over the Al-Shifa bombing. In fairness to Hitchens, I still must acknowledge the excellence of his reporting on the issue. In his book, No One Left to Lie To, he made a convincing case that the bombing was unjustified.
Then again, Hitchens’s Slate piece was also unjustified. “The article was quite dishonest,” Chomsky observed to me, “even by his standards.” What set off this latest smear was the professor’s criticism of the extrajudicial execution of Osama bin Laden: “It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law.”
Certainly, I also would have favored arrest and legal prosecution. I am very pleased to find myself in agreement with the professor now. As a supporter of Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign three years ago, I disagreed with Chomsky’s position on strategic voting, but honest people can respectfully differ. I challenge the fanboys and Hitch hens to defend the lies of their lord and master.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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