The "Strange Doctrines" Undercroft

No There There

That's just about what you can always expect when an anti-Noam is quoted with approval. They sure do know how to pack a jot of substance into a lot of words.

Due Diligence

David Bernstein notes that "no one has as yet come up with a Chomsky quote acknowledging that some anti-Zionism is motivated by anti-Semitism" (this apparently offered in the way of support for his earlier contention that Chomsky "wants to deny that ANY manifestations of anti-Zionism are motivated by anti-Semitism").

When I first read this, I thought to myself, "Gee, well maybe that's because no one has ever put that particular question to Chomsky." So I did:

Question: Do you acknowledge the existence of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism?
Chomsky: I can't technically "acknowledge" it, any more than you or I can acknowledge the existence of the moon, and for the same reasons.
Question: Okay, let me rephrase: Is there such a thing as anti-Semitic anti-Zionism?
Chomsky: Yes, just as certainly as there is such a thing as the moon. The only aspect of the question that is of some interest is what "strange doctrine" (to borrow your username) motivates people even to ask it, in either case.

I find the lunar reference particularly apt.

UPDATE: Just to confirm, the above post is an exchange with Noam Chomsky in our email correspondence. (Some doubts were expressed in the comments. [NOTE: Referenced comments were on third-party platform, now defunct.])

The Cult of the Anti-Noam

I'm just getting into exploring the underbrush of this strange group of dedicated cultists who will (if my recent experience over the last 48 hours is any indication) seize upon any colorable error by Noam Chomsky as irrefutable proof of his evil. Daimnation, a member of this privative cult, thinks he really has Chomsky by the nards with a juxtaposed pair of quotations. (If you like, you can skip over these two quotations to my dissection of Daimnation's critique and then refer back to them as you have need.) The first quotation is Chomsky's answer to the question "Where is the "silent genocide" you predicted would happen in Afghanistan if the US intervened there in 2001?":

First, the facts: I predicted nothing. Rather, I reported the grim warnings from virtually every knowledgeable source that the attack might lead to an awesome humanitarian catastrophe, and the bland announcements in the press that Washington had ordered Pakistan to eliminate "truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population". All of this is precisely accurate and entirely appropriate. The warnings remain accurate as well, a truism that should be unnecessary to explain.

The second quotation is from Chomsky's original remarks, referenced to in the question above, dating to October 18, 2001:

After the first week of bombing, the New York Times reported on a back page inside a column on something else, that by the arithmetic of the United Nations there will soon be 7.5 million Afghans in acute need of even a loaf of bread and there are only a few weeks left before the harsh winter will make deliveries to many areas totally impossible, continuing to quote, but with bombs falling the delivery rate is down to 1/2 of what is needed. Casual comment. Which tells us that Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that.... [This] all indicates to us what's happening. Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide. It also gives a good deal of insight into the elite culture.... It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don't know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months . . . .very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it, that's just kind of normal, here and in a good part of Europe.

Daimnation now starts his critique, and I will intersperse my remarks (in bold) with his for ease of reference:

As you can see, [Chomsky] basically pulled "the slaughter of 3-4 million people" out of his ass, with just a casual reference to a New York Times story which made no such claim. Let's see: Take the Times' figure of 7 1/2 million refugees, the information that delivery was down to that of "1/2 of what is needed," define 'needed' as "that minimum required for the refugee population to survive," and then "do the math." Voila, you get Chomsky's numbers. Pretty basic stuff there. And now, two years later, he's trying to disown his dire predictions and say other people misled him. Um, Chomsky rather clearly emphasized that "[a]ll of this is precisely accurate and entirely appropriate. The warnings remain accurate as well...." I call that cowardice. I call that delusional. And if we take Chomsky's response in The Independent at face value, it shows that he was simply repeating what he heard from "virtually every knowledgeable source" without applying even a hint of skepticism to it. That's rich criticism coming from a guy who doesn't apply even a hint of skepticism to those reports either.

And now let me just repeat a sentence from Chomsky's original remarks with some special emphasis:

[These reports] indicate[] that whatever, what will happen we don't know, but plans are being made...on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months. [Emphasis mine.]

So, you see, not only did Chomsky very clearly not make a prediction, but in fact specifically stated that "[w]e don't know what will happen." Now, not being a Chomsky fan myself, I can't say for sure, but I would guess that Chomsky makes lots of authentic intellectual errors (and I don't just mean failures in prognostication). Dedicated anti-Noams like Daimnation would perhaps do well in their project to focus on those.

Scalia on VCP: A Parody of Anti-Noamial Exegesis

Justice Scalia queried in his recent McConnell dissent:

Who could have imagined that the same Court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved of restrictions upon such inconsequential forms of expression as virtual child pornography [etc.] would smile with favor upon a law that cuts to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.

Whoa! Virtual child pornography is "inconsequential"? Perhaps it's not consequential to him, but by any normal standard this is a shocking claim. Simply breathtaking. Note that Scalia didn't qualify his statement in any way. No: It is very clear that Scalia means "inconsequential" on an absolute, not a relative, scale. One can only assume Scalia wants to deny ANY connection between virtual child porn and actual child porn. ADDENDUM: I realize there is a danger that readers might miss that this is a parody of the sort of interpretive practices deployed by some in criticizing Noam Chomsky (practices I criticize back, in various ways, here, here, here, and here. Follow the links in the parody itself to find the corresponding language in the posts of the Anti-Noamies.) Of course I think it would be absolutely ridiculous to read Scalia literally (as I pretended to do in this instance), or to demand that he "qualify" his statement. I take his meaning to be perfectly reasonable and clear: VCP is a relatively unimportant, undeserving object of protection in terms of the free speech values embodied in the First Amendment.

Scarce Existence and False Equivalence

Do oysters "scarcely exist" now? Do fatal gun accidents "scarcely occur"? Even assuming you had some numbers on hand (e.g., "There are n oysters sold/fatal gunshots accidentally fired in the U.S. each year"), could you unequivocally answer those questions without appeal to some further context? Or do they perhaps require an assessment of what the person asking the question has in mind when he or she uses the phrase 'scarcely exist'? David Bernstein seems to think you can answer such questions on an "absolute scale." I would like to see him try. . . . Bernstein also goes on to state that Chomsky implicitly denies any relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. That, Bernstein says, is the "political subtext" to Chomsky's remarks. Of course, Chomsky would deny any logical relation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. He should deny it, because there isn't any logical relation between them--however robust the covariation between the two may be. (Chomsky stresses the distinction because there are those defenders of Israel who conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Or so Chomsky argues.) So then how does Bernstein get from "Chomsky denies an equivalence between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism" to "Chomsky denies ANY anti-Semitic anti-Zionism"? I can only guess it's by force of will, because Bernstein does not provide even a quantum of evidence that would support such an inference. UPDATE: And still Bernstein persists in drawing the illicit inference.

On the Other Hand...

The critics of Chomsky whom I've been tweaking (here and here) have argued badly, but they may be on to something nonetheless.

I still have to research this a bit, but if this chart at Public Eye is any indication, hate crime statistics suggest anti-Semitism in the U.S. is far more of a problem than anti-Black or anti-Hispanic animus. For instance, the number of reported hate crime "incidents" involving anti-Jewish bias in 2001 totals 1,043. In contrast, anti-black incidents total 2,899. Assuming that Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population and blacks about 12 percent, the figure for anti-Jewish incidents is truly astonishing--a victimization rate more than twice that of blacks.

Even assuming these figures are accurate, of course, they are still ill-equipped to tell us whether anti-Semitism exists "abundantly" in the U.S. But they would prove Chomsky is way off when he says that anti-Semitism is on a par with anti-Irish or other anti-immigrant sentiment.

In any case, I would have to count myself as grossly ignorant of the relative magnitudes involved. Which makes me wary and, like I said, prone to research the issue when I get the chance.

UPDATE: Public Eye's figures are on the level. Here is the FBI's hate crimes report for 2002.

I have to say I'm totally astonished, and a little bewildered. The only justification I can summon for the media's not making this fact notorious would be if the majority of anti-Jewish incidents comprised crimes against property. (The FBI's stats don't distinguish crimes against property from crimes against persons.) So what's the deal?

UPDATE: In an update to this post, Pejman gives me credit for my willingness to admit error. I appreciate the encomium, but I still think he and the others I mentioned here were "playing the fool" when they belched their sundry accusations in response to Chomsky's assertion. The figures on hate crime notwithstanding, there is a sense in which it is perfectly reasonable to say that anti-Semitism "scarcely exists anymore," and only the most willfully uncharitable interpreter would fail to see that.

It should (but of course in the current climate can't) go without saying that I could give a rat's ass whether Chomsky is factually correct about any of this. I'm neither an accolyte nor a detractor, either of his linguistics work or of his political activism. I will say that Chomsky's remark about anti-Semitism in the West largely resonated with my own family's experience (my father's side of the family is at least nominally Jewish), and even if that experience isn't representative, Chomsky's claim can't be dismissed out of hand--not to mention be used as a license for boiler plate ad hominems.

And of course there is still the matter of Bernstein's utterly unargued-for assertion that Chomsky "wants to deny that ANY manifestations of anti-Zionism are motivated by anti-Semitism," which assertion was the main focus in my original post. That remark is far more foolish than anything Chomsky said, and I can only hope that Bernstein soon will summon the courage to admit it. Perhaps then Pejman will extend to him the same round of congratulations he did to me?

UPDATE: In another update to the same post, Pejman thinks I'm getting "defensive": I've already acknowledged my astonishment, so why can't I just admit I was wrong?

Well, I was wrong: I would've thought that the rate of anti-Semitic hate crime was far below that of anti-black hate crime.

It's just that I wasn't wrong about the issue at hand. As I answered Pejman in his comments: Yes, I am bewitched, bothered and bewildered both by the rate of anti-Semitic hate crime relative to the rate of anti-black hate crime and by my own ignorance of that statistical relationship.

But then that relationship says next to nothing about whether there is a meaningful sense in which anti-Semitism "scarcely exists today, though it once did." Which of course there is: If after a long lifetime as a Jew you (like Chomsky) had perceived the rate of anti-Semitic prejudice drop from 7 or 8 or 9 in 10 to 1 in 10, and had personally witnessed well nigh all institutional manifestations of anti-Semitism disappear, you too might be inclined to say that anti-Semitism now "scarcely exists." You also might be inclined to say the same thing about anti-Black-ism, were you to have the corresponding background experience.

Nonetheless, such claims might be arguably wrong, and so we might want to make a suitable argument to that effect (which argument of course would have to establish some common criteria for the relative concept of scarcity). Very well, then, let's make the argument and not turn a factual dispute (or could it merely be a dispute about semantics?) into something else.

This back and forth has to end, so I'll leave the last word to Pejman if he choses to take it.

CORRECTION: I had said that anti-Semitic hate crime rate was "nearly twice" as high as that for anti-Black hate crime. But given my figures, it's actually more than twice as high (2.19 times as high). I've corrected the post accordingly. (Thanks to Dr. Weevil for the remedial math.)

Is Anti-Semitism "Scarce" in the West?

Pejman contends:

There must be something in the Chomskyite DNA that causes the MIT Professor and his acolytes to...botch the reading of the English language to the point of laughability.

Given his expressed concern for linguistic fidelity, you'd think that Pejman would have had the gumption at least to consult his dictionary: scarce, adj. not plentiful or abundant. Pop quiz: Is anti-Semitism in the west "plentiful" or "abundant"?

Bernstein's World

Noam Chomsky contends that anti-Semitism "scarcely exists" in the West. David Bernstein counters with an appeal to reported studies allegedly suggesting "a core 10-20% of the public holds strong anti-Semitic views." (Bernstein's link points here, so it's not clear what article he meant to link to.) Bernstein says Chomsky doesn't want to acknowledge this fact because Chomsky "wants to deny that ANY manifestations of anti-Zionism are motivated by anti-Semitism." Now, Bernstein must really mean "any," since he sets the word in ALL CAPS. So let's explore this claim: Is it really true that Chomsky wants to deny there is ANY anti-Semitic anti-Zionism? Um, NO. Chomsky knows very well that there are critics of Zionism whose views are driven by anti-Semitic animus. And Bernstein knows very well that Chomsky knows it. (Bernstein must also know full well that Chomsky has explicitly argued that much pro-Zionism is driven by anti-Semitism as well.) But other bloggers are shocked, shocked as well by Chomsky's supposed stupidity (so far their ranks include Pejman, Instapundit, and Sully). Of course, anyone who isn't willfully playing the fool like these folks would immediately realize that in speaking of the "scarcity" of anti-Semitism in the U.S., Chomsky had in mind the difference between the experience of Jews in, say, 1950s America with the experience of Jews in 2003 America. And even if Bernstein & co. opted not to practice the virtue of interpretive charity before going on the attack, Chomsky's meaning would have been made clear even to their ilk had they but bothered to click the first hit on a Google search for "chomsky israel 'anti-semitism,'" which links to an interview with Chomsky in which he states:

Anti-Semitism has changed, during my lifetime at least. Where I grew up [in Philadelphia] we were virtually the only Jewish family, I think there was one other. [] And the anti-Semitism was very real. There were certain paths I could take to walk to the store without getting beaten up. It was the late 1930s and the area was openly pro-Nazi. I remember beer parties when Paris fell and things like that. It's not like living under Hitler, but it's a very unpleasant thing. There was a really rabid anti-Semitism in that neighborhood where I grew up as a kid and it continued. By the time I got to Harvard in the early 1950s there was still very detectable anti-Semitism. It wasn't that they beat you up on the way to school or something, but other ways, kind of WASP-ish anti-Semitism. There were very few Jewish professors on the faculty at that time. There was beginning to be a scattering of them, but still very few. This was the tail end of a long time of WASP-ish anti-Semitism at the elite institutions. Over the last thirty years that's changed very radically. Anti-Semitism undoubtedly exists, but it's now on a par, in my view, with other kinds of prejudice of all sorts. I don't think it's more than anti-Italianism or anti-Irishism, and that's been a very significant change in the last generation, one that I've experienced myself in my own life, and it's very visible throughout the society.

So you get Chomsky's drift: There was a time in 20th Century America when Jews were mostly excluded from white Protestant hotels, neighborhoods and campuses. Now they can run for president. See how Chomsky might believe anti-Semitism now "scarcely exists" in America? There is also the question of intensity. How intense is the anti-Semitism in issue? Apparently not all that intense, given that (as alluded to above) more than 90% of Americans have expressed willingness to vote for a "generally well-qualified" Jewish presidential candidate. (In contrast, the "acceptability" figures for hypothetical homosexual and atheist candidates run at about 50%.) Only 6% would oppose voting for such a candidate. And I would bet dollars to donuts that a significant portion of that 6% consists of Christians who would exercise their suffrage only on behalf of Christian candidates--a policy that I find stupid, but not in any important sense anti-Semitic. So on the whole, I think it's fair to say that anti-Semitism in America is relatively scarce. Which is only how any reasonable person would read Chomsky's remarks. . . . Incidentally, Pejman affects incredulity before Chomsky's bold claim that compared to the low-level intensity of anti-Semitism in the west, the intensity of anti-Arab sentiment is "shocking." Pejman responds with links to cherry-picked incidents of anti-Semitism in France as somehow a disproof of Chomsky's statement. But of course, only some solid statistics would be relevant evidence on that score. Pejman offers none of those. Not being keen on the relevant statistics myself, of course, I really can't say who is right. But a hint that it might be Chomsky comes in today's New York Times, from Dexter Filkins' article "Tough New Tactics by U.S. Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns":

As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire. In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in. [] "You have to understand the Arab mind," Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the gates of Abu Hishma. "The only thing they understand is force ? force, pride and saving face." [Emphasis added.]

A though experiment: Rate the probability of a U.S. Army captain's making a similar remark about the "Jewish mind" and its associated stereotypes. Not too likely, is it? UPDATE: Brian Leiter chimes in. UPDATE: The info Bernstein meant to link to on anti-Semitism is here, an ADL press release discussing the ADL's poll results.