The Greatest Intellectual? -by Emma Brockes

Some excerpts from this interview with Noam Chomsky

Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated?
A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough

and later...

In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone's "outstanding work". Does he regret signing it?

"No," he says indignantly. "It is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work."

How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding?

The Branding of the World's Top Intellectual: Noam Chomsky

An excerpt from Peter Schweizer's new book Do as I say (Not as I do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy

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One of the most persistent themes in Chomsky's work has been class warfare. He has frequently lashed out against the "massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich" and criticized the concentration of wealth in "trusts" by the wealthiest one percent. The American tax code is rigged with "complicated devices for ensuring that the poor -- like eighty percent of the population -- pay off the rich."

But trusts can't be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of $2,000,000, decided to create one for himself. A few years back he went to Boston's venerable white-shoe law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and with the help of a tax attorney specializing in "income-tax planning" set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. He named his tax attorney (every socialist radical needs one!) and a daughter as trustees. To the Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust (named for another daughter) he has assigned the copyright of several of his books, including multiple international editions.

Chomsky favors the estate tax and massive income redistribution -- just not the redistribution of his income. No reason to let radical politics get in the way of sound estate planning.

When I challenged Chomsky about his trust, he suddenly started to sound very bourgeois: "I don't apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren," he wrote in one email. Chomsky offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam. Although he did say that the tax shelter is okay because he and his family are "trying to help suffering people."

Indeed, Chomsky is rich precisely because he has been such an enormously successful capitalist. Despite the anti-profit rhetoric, like any other corporate capitalist he has turned himself into a brand name.

Chomsky Wrecks His Train Set - by John Williamson

A heavy read, found on FrontPageMag.com can be found here

“We are now moving to domains of will and choice and judgment…”

Will…and…judgment…and choice. Oh my!

Language as a matter of will? Language as a matter of choice? Language as a matter of judgment? This cannot be. For everything that Chomsky has ever advocated or argued for has been to support the notion of language as an organic function of the brain. As recently as 2004, he has famously compared the language function to “insect navigation.”

Again, the topic of linguistics is some heavy stuff. I am on my third read of the article and just starting to comprehend some of the material.

Chomsky: The Theory Unified and Deconstructed - by John Williamson

Article Here


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In short, leaving aside his work that is openly political, his linguistics theory doesn’t merely represent bad science; rather, it happens to be politics masquerading as bad science.

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Symposium: Noam Chomsky: Academic Insider or Outsider?

Is Noam Chomsky an icon in academia today? Or has he been marginalized into invisibility? Frontpage Symposium assembled a distinguished panel to discuss this.

Chomsky can't be read seriously, because Chomsky himself pays no attention to even basic rules of evidence or argument. If he needs to invent material to support an argument, he does, and then audaciously creates an empty footnote to make it appear as though he's done his homework and is referencing an actual fact. In his article, Mr. Summers lauds Chomsky's scholarship, but I defy him to do what I did in The Anti-Chomsky Reader, and actually try to follow some of Chomsky's footnotes. As every scholar knows, the whole point of references are to allow other scholars to replicate your research and thus confirm or debate your interpretation, but Chomsky's references are meant to obscure the fact that he's basically making stuff up. When you have, for example, footnotes that support important and controversial points by referencing four or five books in their *entirety*--including, most often, Chomsky's own books--that's not only lousy scholarship, it's a terrible insult to the reader.

Tom Nichols, the chairman of the Department of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of “Chomsky and the Cold War” in Peter Collier and David Horowitz (editors),

Noam Chomsky: A Critical Review - by Russel Wvong

A very critical review that gives equal treatment to those arguments and beliefs that the author and Noam Chomsky have in common as well as those very same things that the author disagrees.

Finally, and perhaps most seriously, I would expect that when a writer quotes someone, the quote should fairly represent what the other person is saying. Chomsky does not appear to adhere to this rule.

Chomsky's Linguistics Refuted - by John Williamson

Ok, for those of you who may want to challenge Chomsky on linguistics this is an excellent article. For the novice (such as yours truly) it may take several reads to fully appreciate.

Thus, in Chomskyan linguistics, sentences which violate the rules of the language are lumped in with sentences which don’t, in an attempt to create some overarching theory which explains all human utterances.