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The Anti-Chomsky Reader

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The Anti-Chomsky Reader is a collection of essays criticizing the political, economic and linguistic writings of Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor and prominent libertarian socialist intellectual. Peter Collier and David Horowitz edited the 2004 book.

Horowitz, a former leftist and one-time editor of the '60s New Left journal Ramparts, is one of Chomsky's most outspoken conservative critics. He has referred to Chomsky as "the Ayatollah of anti-American hate" and has organized a post-9/11 campaign on American college campuses to distribute literature criticizing Chomsky to students. Horowitz claims that Chomsky is the intellectual godfather of leftist anti-Americanism and characterizes him as a congenital liar and academic charlatan. On the other hand, Michael Leon, in a review in CoreWeekly concluded that the "The Anti-Chomsky Reader is mired in a thick haze of loathing and hard-right ideology, short on verifiable facts and long on ideologically-steeped assertions." [1]

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David Horowitz

Contents

The Anti-Chomsky Reader contains the following articles:

  • Whitewashing Dictatorship in Vietnam and Cambodia by Steven J. Morris accuses Chomsky of denying repression and mass murder under the communist regimes of Vietnam and Cambodia. Morris claims that Chomsky adheres to a Marxist derived view of the Indochina wars which refuses to acknowledge the totalitarian nature of the regimes in question.
  • Chomsky and the Cold War by Thomas M. Nichols claims that Chomsky has distorted the history of the Cold War in order to minimize the role of communist ideology and blame the conflict on the United States. He accuses Chomsky of misusing sources and footnoting his books in manipulative and dishonest ways "to create a kind of pseudo-academic smog" often leading back to Chomsky's own work. He also analyzes a 1990 letter from Chomsky to Alexander Cockburn which Nichols claims laments the defeat of the Soviet Union and other communist states and movements at the end of the Cold War, particularly singling out Czech dissident Vaclav Havel for approbation.
  • Chomsky and the Media: A Kept Press and a Manipulated People by Eli Lehrer is a critique of Chomsky's "propaganda model" of the American media as stated in Chomsky's book, Manufacturing Consent. Lehrer accuses Chomsky of being "an outsider who knows relatively little about the media...except to the degree that 'media subserviance' serves to explain why there is no outcry against the evil he sees everywhere in the American enterprise." Lehrer claims that Chomsky's theory holds ordinary people in contempt and sees them as "loathsome" dupes of the ruling class.
  • Chomsky's War Against Israel by Paul Bogdanor criticizes Chomsky's stance on Israel. Bogdanor charges that Chomsky distorts historical fact and falsely accuses Israel of atrocities and rejectionism while downplaying Arab aggression and violence against the Jewish State. An extended version, entitled The Devil State: Chomsky's War Against Israel (PDF), is available online.
  • Chomsky and Holocaust Denial by Werner Cohn analyzes Chomsky's role in the Faurisson affair through his connections to Faurisson's publisher La Vielle Taupe. Cohn accuses Chomsky of close connections to French anti-semites and Holocaust Deniers through this organization. He also extensively criticizes Chomsky's writings on Israel. This chapter is an abridged version of Cohn's book Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers.
  • Chomsky and 9/11 by David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh analyzes a speech given by Chomsky at MIT immediately after 9/11. They particularly attack Chomsky's claim that the US invasion of Afghanistan was planned to result in millions of deaths, labeled by some critics as the "Silent Genocide" claim, named after his quote, "Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide" [2]. They also claim that Chomsky justifies the 9/11 attacks in his speech and distorts American history to make the United States appear to be a terrorist nation.
  • Noam Chomsky's Anti-American Obsession by David Horowitz accuses Chomsky of being an anti-American ideologue who sees the United States as evil and rewrites American history accordingly. Horowitz claims that Chomsky is the intellectual source of left wing anti-Americanism today.
  • A Corrupted Linguistics by Robert D. Levine and Paul M. Postal claims that Chomsky's linguistics work has been largely superseded or abandoned. They also posit that Chomsky's political views are closely connected to his linguistic theories.
  • Chomsky, Language, World War II and Me by John Williamson criticizes Chomsky's linguistics work and recounts a long email debate between Chomsky and the author in which Williamson claims Chomsky repeatedly lied about his own statements and about historical facts and sources.
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