Report: Against All Odds
Noam Chomsky the Institute Professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the author of numerous books, his newest, Hopes and Prospects, and the prominent American dissident academic.. Should I go on.. I don't think so. The 81 year-old vociferous Chomsky has made an imprint in every single mind around the world. He's too well-known to be introduced.
After being stopped from entering the West Bank to give a lecture at Birzeit University, and after being held by the "Israelis" for hours 2 weeks ago, Chomsky was still enthusiastic about accepting an invitation to give a lecture in Lebanon.
On Tuesday, Chomsky was invited by Al Likaa Club to give a lecture entitled "US Foreign Policy in the Middle East" at UNESCO Palace in Beirut, Lebanon.
Chomsky's lecture circled around two major points in American foreign policies, the threat of Iran and the unresolved "Israel" Palestine conflict.
With regard to the threat of Iran, Chomsky explained the latest authoritative answer released by the US research center, that Iran has no offensive military capacity and that the primary threat is that Iran is engaged in destabilizing its neighbors. Afterwards he sarcastically said, "The US is involved in Iraq and Afghanistan but that is not destabilizing that is stabilizing the US is there to improve stability and If Iran tries to have influence in its neighboring countries that's destabilizing." He noted that that's a very standard terminology in foreign policy literature and discussion.
As for the second point of the unresolved "Israel" Palestine conflict, Chomsky recited the brief history of the conflict starting from the first settlement proposed at the U.N Security Council in 1976 by the major Arab states, moving on to the failed Camp David agreements in 2000, then to when Clinton introduced the parameters that both sides accepted, then to when the "Israeli". "What this tells us is if a US president decides to join the world in permitting a settlement, a lot can happen", he said.
Chomsky spoke of how the US always controlled history and how many essential facts about the conflict were often ignored by the media. "US continue to erase many facts throughout history and till now, these facts vanish if they don't be conventional to the interests of power", he said.
Chomsky explained the International affairs as being very much like a mafia. "The Godfather doesn't permit disobedience, that's actually explicit in the ground area planning, the US was to have unquestioned power with military and economic supremacy while insuring limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by states that might interfere with its global designs, In the Mafia principle there can't be independence", he said.
After being asked about the right way to fight imperialism he said, "If you want to be at an academic seminar and feel good about how noble your positions are, you go one way... If you are coming to achieve some actual results that will help people you'll go a different way, those are two different paths. Those two paths have strikingly throughout history distinguished the Zionist movement and the Palestinian and Arab movement. The Zionist movement took the second path it said, we'll put all the discussion of principles and we'll just build the facts of the future, and we won't talk about anything that is going to happen."
He noted that the Zionist movement didn't even formally accept the concept of the Jewish state until 1942 in their meeting in New York although they were thinking about it but couldn't achieve it. "They just built the structures which will finally turn into a Jewish state, and they are still doing so in the occupied territories", he said.
Chomsky ended by highlighting the importance of differentiating between Proposal and Advocacy. "We can propose as much as we want, and dream as much as we want, but when we advocate we are setting real plans and so we are walking on the right path", he ended.
