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The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective - Second part of the series titled "9/11 and the Zionist Question"

Prof. Tony Hall

Editor In Chief, American Herald Tribune

Read the first part here.

In his recent presentation at the “Left Forum” in New York, Kevin Barrett didn’t mince words. He rarely does. Barrett accused the 87-year old Noam Chomsky of contributing to the fast deterioration of the human condition by purposely diverting skeptical attention away from the true culprits responsible for the lies and crimes of September 11, 2001. In his essay, “Why Chomsky is Wrong on 9/11,” Barrett extended a growing trajectory of suspicion questioning the real agenda motivating America’s most highly publicized professor. What is behind Dr. Chomsky’s zeal to obstruct fair and balanced professional debate about contested interpretations of 9/11?

The contradictions are conspicuous between Chomsky’s oft’ proclaimed ideals as an academic investigator and the personalized vitriol of his attacks on those exposing the litany of lies permeating the most transformative event of the twenty-first century. The stakes in this matter are high indeed given the hagiographic extremes associated with Prof. Chomsky’s worldwide reputation. In the eyes of millions, Chomsky is the primary academic embodiment of anti-establishment dissidence within the US system of higher education.

Barrett’s critique of Chomsky adds to the observations of an already sizeable list of public intellectuals that have come to the conclusion that the celebrity Prof is not what he seems to be. The increasingly insistent accusation is that the crude diversionary tactics deployed by Prof. Chomsky in discouraging skeptical investigation of 9/11 reveals him to be a Trojan horse that has succeeded in subverting the Left from within. Among the commentators that have strongly criticized Chomsky’s work as a limited hangout are Ken Adachi, Barrie Zwicker, Daniel L. Abrahamson, James Corbett, Jeff Blankfort, Douglas Herman, Alfred Schaefer, and Benjamin Marhav.

Chomsky in discouraging skeptical investigation of 9/11 reveals him to be a Trojan horse that has succeeded in subverting the Left from within.

Internet broadcaster James Corbett has encapsulated the consternation concerning the obvious contradictions internal to Chomsky’s academic work. Depending on his subject, Chomsky develops themes that contrapuntally expose and promote the workings of empire. Corbett has argued, “Whatever Chomsky is doing, he is functioning as if he’s working hand in hand with the very elite he proclaims to be fighting against.”

“Intellectuals Are In a Position to Expose the Lies of Government”

Chomsky’s academic work began in the 1950s in the field of linguistics. Chomsky’s analysis of speech, the primary medium of communicative interaction among humans, highlights his theories about the universality of mental structures governing the convergence of perception, abstraction, and articulation. Chomsky famously imagined a “black box” of language formulation as part of a universal feature of human brains. Chomsky’s metaphors on human mental hardware naturally attracted the attention of deep state operatives in the CIA and related agencies with a professional interest in influencing human attitudes and behaviors.

The scholar’s original academic discipline, therefore, provided him with an excellent platform from which to launch his applied study of the connections linking propaganda to contemporary imperialism and warfare. Since the late 1960s Chomsky has entered the outer stratosphere of intellectual notoriety, both pro and con, based on his very public interventions into the big contemporary issues of life and death, war and peace. From his very secure base of academic tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Prof. Chomsky would emerge in the final decades of the twentieth century to become probably the most recognized and oft quoted professor in the entire history of American higher education.

Beginning with his opposition to US military intervention in Indochina, Chomsky applied his expertise in linguistic manipulation to the study of the media’s role in manufacturing consent for many nefarious operations. In a 1967 article entitled “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Chomsky explained his intervention in what was then the most contentious issue in domestic and international politics. In hard-hitting prose that created markers against which Chomsky’s position on 9/11 would later be measured, the MIT professor wrote, “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”

While all citizens have the responsibility to oppose deceptions and crimes committed on our behalf, intellectuals have an added weight of responsibility to act in the public interest against state terror and injustice. “Intellectuals,” he wrote, “are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”

A Jewish Sage and Lawgiver Preaching from

New England’s Most Prestigious Academic Pulpit

The contrasting treatment of Kevin Barrett and of Noam Chomsky by the custodians of US higher education forms a revealing backdrop against which to appreciate the deeper implications of the former’s assessment of the latter at the Left Forum. In recent decades Chomsky’s dramatic career has come to be invested with a kind of Hollywoodized aura. For his adept and incredibly prolific jabs directed at corporate giants, war hawks and the like, Chomsky was embraced as the Left’s most tireless warrior of the pen. He is a wordsmith of the first order who, in his spoken language, articulates frequently with such precise effect that transcripts of his speeches, interviews and panel discussions are often quickly transcribed to become popular publications.

Many have come to think of Chomsky as a kind of secular prophet seeking to inspire his followers to save America from its own worst attributes. The intensity of Chomsky’s mission to redeem America invokes Old Testament ideals of the City on the Hill, the New Jerusalem. The theocratic ideals associated with the creation of a New Jerusalem in the New World have churned through the dynamic matrix of US history ever since the Calvinist Puritans founded New England. New England’s founding Protestant patriarchs conceived of themselves as Israelites, as God’s Chosen People chartered by the Lord to realize a special evangelical mission.

The perception that there was a divine charter underlying the Puritans’ creation of Massachusetts extended to the sense of “Manifest Destiny” invoked to explain and justify the transcontinental expansion of the US republic in the nineteenth century. American exceptionalism is the term currently used to identify the secular outgrowth of the old religious justifications for imperial expansion. The psychology of God-given exceptionalism has animated US expansionism throughout its transition from transcontinental to hemispheric to trans-Pacific to global proportions.

In seeming to lead the Left’s quest for the Promised Land of liberation from corporatist tyranny, Chomsky has come to embody key elements of the American Dream. A strong statement is seemingly announced by the fact that Chomsky has been able to perform his dissenting role from a place of tenured academic security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With Harvard and about twenty other prestigious universities nearby, MIT is one of the most well established, stable, and safe platforms of intellectual power in the United States.

Chomsky’s academic home is well known for its old, deep and elaborate ties with the research arms of the military-industrial complex and its attending agencies of so-called national security. In spite of the military attachments and connotations of his academic home, however, Prof. Chomsky was permitted to thrive as a leading critic of the very interests that contributed significantly to his reputation and primary livelihood. One apparent implication of Chomsky’s career path is that a key institution at the very strategic core of the American superpower was made to appear accepting of radical criticism from within. This accommodation of Chomsky’s scholarly political activism conveyed the implicit message that the USA continues to be alive to constant adaptive change in response to a never-ending need for intellectual and logistical renewal.

Shakespearian chords resonate through the drama that has culminated in Professor Chomsky becoming the most high profile academic elder of Cambridge Massachusetts. The scholar grew into the role of a Jewish sage and lawgiver revered as a modern-day prophet preaching from the most prestigious secular pulpit in the American capital of higher education. From this important site of power in the Promised Land where New England’s Calvinist founders once found refuge from their persecutors in Europe, the Left’s favorite scholarly jurist handed down many judgments and dictums.

Chomsky’s decision to side with power and against skeptical analysis of the lies and crimes of 9/11 would prove to be the most consequential judgment of his entire career. In a book first published in November of 2001 and in many judgments delivered extemporaneously from his academic pulpit, Prof. Chomsky condemned as heretics those engaged in skeptical investigation of 9/11. The effect of Chomsky’s fatwa on systematic research into the deep state origins and character of the 9/11 crime was the professional equivalent to an intellectual burning of heretics on the cross of professional infamy.

Chomsky’s academic oversight of the professional assault on 9/11 skeptics amounts to a twenty-first century equivalent in a professional context to the Salem Witch Trials. Indeed, New England’s heritage of Puritan witch trial proceedings is made to weave through many features of the psychological operation attached to the aggressive warfare mounted by the real protagonists of the 9/11 crimes.

By misrepresenting the scholarly and pedagogical work of Muslim academic Kevin Barrett, Prof. Chomsky has led the academic facet of the twenty-first century’s most severe and unrelenting witch hunt. The University of Wisconsin’s professional martyrdom of Dr. Kevin Barrett, whom Dr. Chomsky smears with careless disregard for even the rudimentary niceties of academic protocol, well illustrates the nature of the post-9/11 assault on reason, due process, human rights, civil liberties, evidence-based reportage and decency itself. The episode constitutes a telling illustration of the elaborate psychological operation aimed at diverting Left-leaning activists from paying close attention to the true nature of the 9/11 crime.

At the Left Forum in New York, Dr. Barrett was outspoken in holding Noam Chomsky accountable for his directing role in the Left’s failure to deal cogently with the core realities of who did what to whom in the originating event of the ongoing 9/11 Wars.

You will read "Truth Telling, Whistle Blowing and the American Way" in the next part.