I was browsing through Facebook recently (if you're not careful, you can waste a lot of time doing so), and looked at the page of someone I knew decades ago. In her list of favorite Facebook pages, she included a page about Noam Chomsky.
A number of people (largely on the left, though I am sure he has a significant number of right-wing fans as well) think of Noam Chomsky as brilliant; they regard him as a hero.
I am not in that camp. I think of Noam Chomsky’s ideas as being morally blind, dangerously misguided, frenetic, imbued with distortion.
His animus toward the United States, and its foreign policies, is tiresome, relentless—and routinely offensive. (In a November, 2001 interview, for example, he referred to the United States as "a leading terrorist state.") His obsessive hostility toward the state of Israel—rooted in a cartoon-like apprehension of the Middle East conflict (his views of the United States are similarly cartoon-like)—I have long found repellent.
Also repellent: an event currently underway, worldwide, known as “Israeli Apartheid Week.”
Here are two essays about the latter subject. The first is from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. The second is from Canadian columnist Leonard Stern.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/01/AR2010030102761.html?wpisrc=nl_pmheadline
http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/dark+side+Israeli+Apartheid+Week/2612768/story.html
