Who is Noam Chomsky and why is he seeking to compel universities to divest from corporations that have ties to Israel?
I have known Noam Chomsky for more than thirty years. I have debated him on numerous occasions, and I have written extensively about his zealous anti-Zionism and his flirtations with neo-Nazi revisionism and Holocaust denial. I was not surprised therefore to learn that he is the inspiration behind the foolish and immoral campaign for divestiture. I first debated Chomsky in 1973, several weeks after the Yom Kippur War. Chomsky’s proposal at that time was consistent with the PLO party line. He wanted to abolish the state of Israel, and to substitute a “secular, binational state,” based on the model of binational “brotherhood” that then prevailed in Lebanon. Chomsky repeatedly pointed to Lebanon, where Christians and Muslims “lived side by side,” sharing power in peace and harmony. This was just a few years before Lebanon imploded in fratricidal disaster. This is what I said about Chomsky’s hare-brained scheme in our 1973 debate: “Putting aside the motivations behind such a proposal when
