posted by one of the readers on our website. I can't attest to its
veracity, but sounds very much in his style:
I looked at it. No plans to respond. It didn't have much to do with
the few paragraphs I've written on this subject, and avoided all of the
main issues. The history is also spotty. As I've mentioned several
times, if the thesis about lobby power were correct, it would be a
great relief to me and others who have been actively engaged for years
in trying organize popular pressure to lead to abandonment of US
rejectionism. We could stop all of that, just go to the corporate
headquarters of Lockheed Martin, Intel, Microsoft, and others and
explain to them that their interests are harmed by US support for
Israel, so they should terminate their investments in Israel and use
their political and economic clout to put the lobby out of business.
Anyone with a little familiarity with American society and political
economy knows that they could do that in their sleep. That in fact is
the sole activist-related conclusion that follows from the thesis. But
none of the believers do it. Why? Noam Chomsky
Weiss: I profess a little familiarity with "American society and political economy" and my conclusion is that the corporate levers of "economic clout"–Chomsky's materialist understanding of the powers that drive policy–are rivaled or mastered by political/religious/nationalist-Jewish clout with respect to the occupation, and the Iraq war. The great Chomsky's complete elision of the religious/nationalist factor in our political life has made him an unreliable narrator, or an insufficient one, on the question of What makes Middle East policy?
