9-11 by Noam Chomsky

Author:Noam Chomsky [Chomsky, Noam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-60980-154-0
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

6.

Civilizations East and West

Based on interviews with European media September 20-22, 2001 with Marili Margomenou for Alpha TV Station (Greece), Miguel Mora for El País (Spain), Natalie Levisalles for Liberation (France).

[Editor’s note: As many of these questions were written by journalists who speak English as a second language, in some instances phrases were edited for clarity with every effort to preserve the intended meaning.]

Q: After the attack in the U.S.A., Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that the U. S. government will revise the laws for terrorism, including the law of 1976 that prohibits assassinations of foreigners. The European Union is also about to apply a new law on terrorism. How might response to the attacks come to constrict our freedoms? For instance, does terrorism give government the right to put us under surveillance, in order to trace suspects and prevent future attacks?

CHOMSKY: A response that is too abstract may be misleading, so let us consider a current and quite typical illustration of what plans to relax constraints on state violence mean in practice. This morning (September 21), the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Michael Walzer, a respected intellectual who is considered a moral leader. He called for an “ideological campaign to engage all the arguments and excuses for terrorism and reject them”; since, as he knows, there are no such arguments and excuses for terrorism of the kind he has in mind, at least on the part of anyone amenable to reason, in effect this translates as a call to reject efforts to explore the reasons that lie behind terrorist acts that are directed against states he supports. He then proceeds, in conventional fashion, to enlist himself among those who provide “arguments and excuses for terrorism,” tacitly endorsing political assassination, namely, Israeli assassinations of Palestinians who Israel claims support terrorism; no evidence is offered or considered necessary, and in many cases even the suspicions appear groundless. And the inevitable “collateral damage”—women, children, others nearby—is treated in the standard way. U.S.-supplied attack helicopters have been used for such assassinations for ten months.

Walzer puts the word “assassination” in quotes, indicating that in his view, the term is part of what he calls the “fervid and highly distorted accounts of the blockade of Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” He is referring to criticism of U.S.-backed Israeli atrocities in the territories that have been under harsh and brutal military occupation for almost thirty-five years, and of U.S. policies that have devastated the civilian society of Iraq (while strengthening Saddam Hussein). Such criticisms are marginal in the U.S., but too much for him, apparently. By “distorted accounts,” perhaps Walzer has in mind occasional references to the statement of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright over national TV when she was asked about the estimates of a half million deaths of Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions regime. She recognized that such consequences were a “hard choice” for her administration, but said “we think the price is worth it.”

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