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Contempt for democracy: Chomsky says Arab public opinion counts for nothing in US intellectual culture

Noam Chomsky was on Law and Disorder Radio, interviewed by Michael Ratner and Michael Smith. The exchange begins at minute 32 or so. Chomsky is asked about his new Gaza book and says,

“Just to be timely, let’s start with WikiLeaks. There’s not very much of interest in it. But one of the interesting cables… is to Clinton and it discusses… the attack on Gaza, that’s what it’s about, and it tells her that Israel had to attack in December 2008 in self defense because Hamas had violated the truce. Now there are only two possibilities. Either the US Embassy in Israel is so clueless that nobody even reads the press, or else they’re just lying flat out. Because the facts are clear and uncontroversial. In December 2008 Hamas was calling for a renewal of the truce that Israel had broken… Hamas lived up to [the June truce] scrupulously… Israel recognizes officially that there was not a single Hamas rocket until November 4.”

Here’s the cable, actually from Cairo (thanks to Alex Kane):

“the Egyptians, under the leadership of intelligence chief Omar Soliman (the de facto national security advisor with direct responsibility for the Israeli-Palestinian account) have shifted their focus to intra-Palestinian reconciliation and establishment of the Hamas-Israel ceasefire. Soliman brokered a half-year-long truce last year, which Hamas broke in December, leading to the Israeli invasion of Gaza.”

Chomsky goes on, “The fact that this can pass without comment says quite a lot… The most remarkable fact in the whole episode is the absolute contempt for democracy that’s revealed by the embassies, by the State Department, and by the commentators.”

He moves on to the headline, that Arabs want us to bomb Iran.

“They’re of course just citing the Arab dictators, and we don’t know what they really think, how much the embassy officials invented or wanted to hear. What about the Arab population? Now again either they are clueless and don’t know a thing about the Middle East, or else they’re lying. We have good studies of Arab public opinion from mainstream very respectable sources. Arabs do perceive a threat– 88 percent say the main threat is Israel, 77 percent see it as the U.S., Iran is mentioned, way at the bottom, 10 percent.

“For our intellectual culture, what the population thinks is irrelevant. What we care about is what the dictators think… This is pretty striking. I haven’t seen a word about this.”

Re Goldstone:

He did a very good job. As well as you can do to a past war… where the access has been blocked… So he did a pretty good job.

Michael Smith says Israel has long been part of our lives. “It grows increasingly dismaying.” What are the solutions? One state, two states…

All of them. I’d even go on and prefer a no-state solution…. Supporting all of these proposals makes perfectly good sense, so long as we have a way to get there…

Chomsky goes on to say that there is international consensus for two-state settlement. “And then once it’s in force, people would understand that the borders would erode naturally, in natural ways, and then you could move toward a binational federation. Away from imperial borders, integrate with Lebanon.”

Israel lobby stuff too. Chomsky diminishes it. The Chamber of Commerce could put the lobby out of business in no time if it were truly against U.S. business interests. Ah, materialism; if only that is what drove human action.

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