Noam Chomsky's Support for Hezbollah!!
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http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=11&x_article=1151
Noam Chomsky's Support for Hezbollah
On May 8, 2006, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky began an eight-day visit to Lebanon where met with leaders of the terrorist organization Hezbollah . Chomsky received a hero’s welcome and effectively acted as a propagandist for the terrorist group as he repeated much of its rhetoric and lies on Lebanese television, including Hezbollah’s own Al Manar TV.
Chomsky expressed support for the arming of Hezbollah, in direct contradiction to UN Security Council Resolution 1559 calliing for “the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias”:
Hezbollah's insistence on keeping its arms is justified... I think [Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan] Nasrallah has a reasoned argument and [a] persuasive argument that they [the arms] should be in the hands of Hezbollah as a deterrent to potential aggression, and there is plenty of background reasons for that. So until – I think his position [is] reporting it correctly and it seems to me [a] reasonable position, is that until there is a general political settlement in the region, [and] the threat of aggression and violence is reduced or eliminated, there has to be a deterrent, and the Lebanese army can't be a deterrent. (Noam Chomsky, Al Manar TV, 13 May 2006)
At the time, Chomsky’s comment drew criticism from commentators in the Arab world who pointed out that, “Most Lebanese are against the Hezbollah arms…the Hezbollah arms scare the Lebanese people more than the Israelis.” (Ali Hussein, "Chomsky needs to learn a lot more about Lebanon," Ya Libnan, May 13, 2006.) But Chomsky’s zeal in defending a terrorist organization that shares his own anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments outweighed any thought as to the practical implications for the wider Arab public.
Little more than a month after Chomsky left Lebanon, Hezbollah has used its arms to launch an unprovoked attack on Israel, seriously destabilizing the Middle East. With Hezbollah’s invasion of Israel’s sovereign territory, kidnapping of two soldiers, and raining of missiles into Israeli cities, Chomsky told Pacifica radio show host Amy Goodman that he hopes the terrorist group’s actions can yield results. He weakly criticized Hezbollah’s kidnapping of soldiers as "irresponsible," but only because, he said, it has exposed the Lebanese to “terror.” According to Chomsky:
It's a ... very irresponsible act. It subjects Lebanese to possible – certainly to plenty of terror and possible extreme disaster. Whether it can achieve any result, either in the secondary question of freeing prisoners or the primary question of some form of solidarity with the people of Gaza, I hope so, but I wouldn't rank the probabilities very high." [emphasis added] (Democracy Now, Pacifica Radio, July 14, 2006)
Judge Richard Posner has written that “a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot” (Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Noam Chomsky’s recent visit to Lebanon and his support for that terror organization as it wages a war in the Middle East is a case in point. Chomsky is widely recognized for his accomplishments as a theoretical linguist, and he has become a deeply influential intellectual. A poll by the magazine New Statesman ranked Chomsky #7 on a list of “Heroes of our Time,” ( Jason Cowley, “Heroes of our time,” New Statesman, May 22, 2006) and a joint poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy declared him the world’s top public intellectual. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar between 1980 and 1992. The professor has used the recognition gained for his linguistic scholarship to become one of the most outspoken critics of American foreign policy, despite his lack of training or academic pedigree in any field related to politics or international relations.
But there is a significant and qualitative difference between being an outspoken critic of one’s government and supporting and embracing a terrorist organization that plots that government’s destruction. Hezbollah and/or its armed wing is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, the U.K., Canada, Israel, Australia, and the Netherlands. Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has frequently called for the destruction of the U.S. and Israel, and from time to time has personally led mobs in chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."
Even before its latest aggression, Hezbollah was responsible for murderous attacks on Israelis, rival Lebanese, and Americans, most notably the 1983 Marine barracks bombing that killed 241 American servicemen (Carol D. Leonnig, "Damages Awarded in Beirut Bombing," The Washington Post, 9 Sept. 2003.). According to the U.S. Treasury Department:
Until September 11,2001, Hezbollah was responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist organization. Hezbollah is known or suspected to have been involved in numerous terrorist attacks throughout the world, including the suicide truck bombings of the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marins Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut in September 1984. Hezbollah also executed the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 en route from Athens to Rome and assumed responsibility for the suicide bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992….
Hezbollah was also responsible for the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 Jews. Yet Chomsky insisted in his 1994 book, World Orders Old and New, that Hezbollah was not a terrorist organization at all. Similarly, Chomsky maintained in his book that Hamas, an organization that has carried out numerous attacks against civilians in its stated goal of eliminating the Jewish State, is not a terrorist organization. (Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 228-229.)
Despite being born to Jewish parents himself, Chomsky embraces Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who calls Jews the “grandsons of apes and pigs.” The ideology of Hezbollah, which is deeply rooted in Quranic anti-Semitism, has been described as the “direct ideological heir of the Nazis” ( Jeffrey Goldberg, “In the Party of God,” The New Yorker, 14 Oct. 2002.). Affinity for such extreme Jew-haters is nothing new for Chomsky; he has well-documented connections to European neo-Nazi groups and Holocaust deniers on both the right and left (See Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers, Cambridge:Avukah Press, 1995).
Chomsky’s statements and actions typify what David Horowitz terms “the unholy alliance between Islamic extremists and secular radicals in the West.”(David Horowitz, “Noam Chomsky’s Love Affair with Nazis,” Front Page Magazine, 15 May 2006.) As writer Tzvi Fleischer observed:
Philosophically, of course, anarcho-socialist Chomsky has almost nothing in common with Hezbollah, which seeks to establish an Iranian style theocracy dominated by coercive enforcement of sharia religious law. He wouldn't be caught dead supporting a Christian group with the same violent theocratic tendencies. But as Chomsky and many on the far Left have demonstrated many times, for them, anti-Americanism trumps everything else." (Tzvi Fleischer, “The far Left and radical Islamist international alliance,” The Australian, 8 June 2006.)
Indeed, Chomsky describes the United States as “one of the leading terrorist states,”and claims that the attacks of September 11th, 2001 pale in comparison to the terror that he suggests America perpetrated during the 1973 Allende coup in Chile ( Noam Chomsky, television interview, Lebanon Broadcasting Corporation TV (Lebanon), 23 May 2006).
Noam Chomsky’s decades of promoting virulent anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda have been dismissed by his supporters as simple “eccentricity,” but they in fact represent something far more damaging. Chomsky has used the influence granted him as a prominent linguist to support militant organizations and murderous dictatorships, including not only Hezbollah and Hamas, but also the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. Chomsky’s advocacy for these groups is truly dangerous, for he minimizes the atrocities and murders that they have committed in an effort to whitewash them while implicating those he perpetually paints as the guilty parties—the United States and Israel. Chomsky’s selective use of history and frequent use of lies to advance the agenda of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas is among the most shameful and incendiary behavior ever undertaken by an American academic.
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=11&x_article=1151
Noam Chomsky's Support for Hezbollah
On May 8, 2006, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky began an eight-day visit to Lebanon where met with leaders of the terrorist organization Hezbollah . Chomsky received a hero’s welcome and effectively acted as a propagandist for the terrorist group as he repeated much of its rhetoric and lies on Lebanese television, including Hezbollah’s own Al Manar TV.
Chomsky expressed support for the arming of Hezbollah, in direct contradiction to UN Security Council Resolution 1559 calliing for “the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias”:
Hezbollah's insistence on keeping its arms is justified... I think [Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan] Nasrallah has a reasoned argument and [a] persuasive argument that they [the arms] should be in the hands of Hezbollah as a deterrent to potential aggression, and there is plenty of background reasons for that. So until – I think his position [is] reporting it correctly and it seems to me [a] reasonable position, is that until there is a general political settlement in the region, [and] the threat of aggression and violence is reduced or eliminated, there has to be a deterrent, and the Lebanese army can't be a deterrent. (Noam Chomsky, Al Manar TV, 13 May 2006)
At the time, Chomsky’s comment drew criticism from commentators in the Arab world who pointed out that, “Most Lebanese are against the Hezbollah arms…the Hezbollah arms scare the Lebanese people more than the Israelis.” (Ali Hussein, "Chomsky needs to learn a lot more about Lebanon," Ya Libnan, May 13, 2006.) But Chomsky’s zeal in defending a terrorist organization that shares his own anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments outweighed any thought as to the practical implications for the wider Arab public.
Little more than a month after Chomsky left Lebanon, Hezbollah has used its arms to launch an unprovoked attack on Israel, seriously destabilizing the Middle East. With Hezbollah’s invasion of Israel’s sovereign territory, kidnapping of two soldiers, and raining of missiles into Israeli cities, Chomsky told Pacifica radio show host Amy Goodman that he hopes the terrorist group’s actions can yield results. He weakly criticized Hezbollah’s kidnapping of soldiers as "irresponsible," but only because, he said, it has exposed the Lebanese to “terror.” According to Chomsky:
It's a ... very irresponsible act. It subjects Lebanese to possible – certainly to plenty of terror and possible extreme disaster. Whether it can achieve any result, either in the secondary question of freeing prisoners or the primary question of some form of solidarity with the people of Gaza, I hope so, but I wouldn't rank the probabilities very high." [emphasis added] (Democracy Now, Pacifica Radio, July 14, 2006)
Judge Richard Posner has written that “a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot” (Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Noam Chomsky’s recent visit to Lebanon and his support for that terror organization as it wages a war in the Middle East is a case in point. Chomsky is widely recognized for his accomplishments as a theoretical linguist, and he has become a deeply influential intellectual. A poll by the magazine New Statesman ranked Chomsky #7 on a list of “Heroes of our Time,” ( Jason Cowley, “Heroes of our time,” New Statesman, May 22, 2006) and a joint poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy declared him the world’s top public intellectual. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar between 1980 and 1992. The professor has used the recognition gained for his linguistic scholarship to become one of the most outspoken critics of American foreign policy, despite his lack of training or academic pedigree in any field related to politics or international relations.
But there is a significant and qualitative difference between being an outspoken critic of one’s government and supporting and embracing a terrorist organization that plots that government’s destruction. Hezbollah and/or its armed wing is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, the U.K., Canada, Israel, Australia, and the Netherlands. Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has frequently called for the destruction of the U.S. and Israel, and from time to time has personally led mobs in chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."
Even before its latest aggression, Hezbollah was responsible for murderous attacks on Israelis, rival Lebanese, and Americans, most notably the 1983 Marine barracks bombing that killed 241 American servicemen (Carol D. Leonnig, "Damages Awarded in Beirut Bombing," The Washington Post, 9 Sept. 2003.). According to the U.S. Treasury Department:
Until September 11,2001, Hezbollah was responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist organization. Hezbollah is known or suspected to have been involved in numerous terrorist attacks throughout the world, including the suicide truck bombings of the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marins Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut in September 1984. Hezbollah also executed the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 en route from Athens to Rome and assumed responsibility for the suicide bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992….
Hezbollah was also responsible for the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 Jews. Yet Chomsky insisted in his 1994 book, World Orders Old and New, that Hezbollah was not a terrorist organization at all. Similarly, Chomsky maintained in his book that Hamas, an organization that has carried out numerous attacks against civilians in its stated goal of eliminating the Jewish State, is not a terrorist organization. (Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 228-229.)
Despite being born to Jewish parents himself, Chomsky embraces Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who calls Jews the “grandsons of apes and pigs.” The ideology of Hezbollah, which is deeply rooted in Quranic anti-Semitism, has been described as the “direct ideological heir of the Nazis” ( Jeffrey Goldberg, “In the Party of God,” The New Yorker, 14 Oct. 2002.). Affinity for such extreme Jew-haters is nothing new for Chomsky; he has well-documented connections to European neo-Nazi groups and Holocaust deniers on both the right and left (See Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers, Cambridge:Avukah Press, 1995).
Chomsky’s statements and actions typify what David Horowitz terms “the unholy alliance between Islamic extremists and secular radicals in the West.”(David Horowitz, “Noam Chomsky’s Love Affair with Nazis,” Front Page Magazine, 15 May 2006.) As writer Tzvi Fleischer observed:
Philosophically, of course, anarcho-socialist Chomsky has almost nothing in common with Hezbollah, which seeks to establish an Iranian style theocracy dominated by coercive enforcement of sharia religious law. He wouldn't be caught dead supporting a Christian group with the same violent theocratic tendencies. But as Chomsky and many on the far Left have demonstrated many times, for them, anti-Americanism trumps everything else." (Tzvi Fleischer, “The far Left and radical Islamist international alliance,” The Australian, 8 June 2006.)
Indeed, Chomsky describes the United States as “one of the leading terrorist states,”and claims that the attacks of September 11th, 2001 pale in comparison to the terror that he suggests America perpetrated during the 1973 Allende coup in Chile ( Noam Chomsky, television interview, Lebanon Broadcasting Corporation TV (Lebanon), 23 May 2006).
Noam Chomsky’s decades of promoting virulent anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda have been dismissed by his supporters as simple “eccentricity,” but they in fact represent something far more damaging. Chomsky has used the influence granted him as a prominent linguist to support militant organizations and murderous dictatorships, including not only Hezbollah and Hamas, but also the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. Chomsky’s advocacy for these groups is truly dangerous, for he minimizes the atrocities and murders that they have committed in an effort to whitewash them while implicating those he perpetually paints as the guilty parties—the United States and Israel. Chomsky’s selective use of history and frequent use of lies to advance the agenda of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas is among the most shameful and incendiary behavior ever undertaken by an American academic.
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Comments
nowadays hits you when you're young
Facts hurt???
Facts? Facts? They dont neeeed no steeenkin facts!!!!
www.myspace.com/jensvad
"Chomsky received a hero’s welcome and effectively acted as a propagandist for the terrorist group as he repeated much of its rhetoric and lies on Lebanese television, including Hezbollah’s own Al Manar TV."
"Noam Chomsky’s decades of promoting virulent anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda have been dismissed by his supporters as simple “eccentricity,”"
"Chomsky’s selective use of history and frequent use of lies to advance the agenda of terrorist groups"
"But as Chomsky and many on the far Left have demonstrated many times, for them, anti-Americanism trumps everything else."
Some facts right there. :rolleyes: Just more hate speech from the right to discredit those who stand up against western imperialism and the exploitation of indigenous peoples.
nowadays hits you when you're young
Well said. When the right's main source of argumentative ammunition and fact support are editorials, you just have to shake your head.
nowadays hits you when you're young
Do you guys get some kind of card with those words on them, when you register to vote or suscribe to high times? I swear, you all say the exact same things.
www.myspace.com/jensvad
Lots of big words, I know. I'm sure you can pick up a dictionary down at Walmart.
nowadays hits you when you're young
smart?? maybe racist!!
jews grandsons of apes and pigs?? what a well thought out guy!
Good one. Did you get that from your wisecracks book you got at Walmart?
Byg werds maik mi hed hrt.
www.myspace.com/jensvad
Yea, actually people are evolutionary cousins of pigs and apes, that's probably what he meant.
I wouldn't call him a racist though, just as calling me a racist only serves to ruin the term.
I shop Target.
nowadays hits you when you're young
:rolleyes:
I"m POSITIVE that's what he meant.
atrocious
B-i-g-o-t-r-y is priceless to me.
B-i-g-o-t-r-y is priceless to me.
B-i-g-o-t-r-y is priceless to me.
B-i-g-o-t-r-y is priceless to me.
B-i-g-o-t-r-y is priceless to me.
www.myspace.com/jensvad
Not surprised you didn't actually READ the article, but rather resorted to baseless assumptions:
"Despite being born to Jewish parents himself, Chomsky embraces Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who calls Jews the “grandsons of apes and pigs.”"
nowadays hits you when you're young
That's nice! That should be the new slogan of the Arab-haters, eh?
nowadays hits you when you're young
Boy could this guy sit down with Darwin or what?
Assuming that he doesn't think the same thing??? Give me a friggin break!
Catholics have their guilt
Jews have their self loathing.
Muslims have their anger.
www.myspace.com/jensvad
How can you assume that?!?!? Based on this shoddy article? Please. If you know anything about Noam, you know he is the farthest from a racist you can find. This propaganda article gives a comment from Nasrallah (who knows if the comment is legit!), then says Chomsky supports Nasrallah. Because he supports him in some way, however small, it makes him culpable for said statement????
If you support Bush and he said all Chinese people are turds, should I hold you responsible too? :rolleyes:
nowadays hits you when you're young
Ohhhhhh woaaahhh. Now when you don't concur with news, its propaganda???
How the shoe just fell off the other foot!!!!!!!!!
I always see diversion as admittance of being wrong.
This is news? :rolleyes:
Sad state the US is in.
nowadays hits you when you're young
Apparently,from previous threads/posts, if we voted for bush, we would be. Because by voting for him we supported him. Sooooooooooooo yeah, supporting a man who says such things, is indeed suporting what he believes/says/does. By their theory anyways. Its all very cloudy and "grey area" ish. Depends on who you're looking to nail.
www.myspace.com/jensvad
Jessica Alba, actually she's a bit old, but I wouldn't mind Heather Locklear
U.S. a terrorist group? it just keeps getting better every night here. anyway, here are just a few facts on hezbollah.
Party of God
Issue of 2002-10-28 - The New Yorker
Posted 2002-10-21
This week in the magazine, in the second part of a two-part piece, Jeffrey Goldberg continues his examination of the world's most successful, and perhaps most dangerous, terrorist organization, Hezbollah, or Party of God. Before September 11th, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group two hundred and forty-one in the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut alone. Goldberg travelled to Lebanon, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil to report this story; here he talks about his travels, and about the threat of Hezbollah.
THE NEW YORKER: What is Hezbollah? Who are its members?
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Hezbollah is a radical Lebanese Shiite movement, headquartered in Beirut, and backed by the governments of Iran and Syria. It is a political party it has eleven seats in the Lebanese parliament and it is a social-service group that runs hospitals and orphanages and the like throughout Lebanon. It is a movement, one expert said, that operates on four tracks simultaneously: the political, the social, the guerrilla, and the terrorist. From the perspective of the American government, though, Hezbollah's political activities and charity work are irrelevant; it is the terrorism that interests the American government. American officials consider Hezbollah to be one of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world, one that has killed, over the past twenty years, more than three hundred Americans.
In your article, you describe Hezbollah as "the most successful terrorist organization in modern history." Do you mean that it is successful in the narrow sense of having pulled off acts of public violence, or in the achievement of certain political ends?
Unlike Al Qaeda, for instance, Hezbollah has succeeded, on two notable occasions, in achieving policy goals through the application of terrorist techniques. First, it drove American and French peacekeepers from Lebanon in the early nineteen-eighties, after a series of deadly bombings. (In one, two hundred and forty-one U.S. marines were murdered.) And two years ago, through guerrilla warfare and terrorism, it forced the Israeli Army to pull out from Israel's so-called security zone in southern Lebanon.
Does Hezbollah have a final goal, a point at which it would be satisfied? For example, certain groups in Ireland want all the Irish counties to be united.
Hezbollah is more ambitious than that. It wants to create in Lebanon an Islamic republic in the style of Iran; it wants to destroy Israel; and it wants to unite the Islamic world under its banner. The word "Hezbollah" means "Party of God," and its leaders do not think of their membership as Shiite alone. All righteous Muslims, in their formulation, are members of the Party of God.
You travelled to Lebanon to report this story, partly, you write, in the hope of interviewing one man: Hussayn al-Mussawi. Why him?
Mussawi was one of the original Hezbollah radicals he helped to found the organization in the early nineteen-eighties, and he was involved in the kidnapping of Americans in the eighties. I wanted to talk to someone who had played a direct role in those events. I wanted to gauge whether he'd changed, and also to see what I could learn from him both about the past and about the direction Hezbollah is taking. As it turns out, he didn't give me the chance to ask. As soon as Mussawi's aide heard that I would be asking his boss about his ties to Imad Mugniyah, the head of Hezbollah's terrorism branch and one of those responsible for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983, he cut off discussions about an interview.
Hezbollah is based in Lebanon, and yet it seems beyond the control of the Lebanese government if it can even be called a government. Who controls Lebanon? And is there any state that can be said to control Hezbollah?
The short answer to both questions is Syria. Syria is the power broker in Lebanon; it has occupied the country since the end of the civil war, and it is Hezbollah's patron. Syria's patronage, in fact, explains why Hezbollah was the only militia not forced to disarm when Lebanon was reunified. There is, of course, a government in Lebanon, split up among the country's many confessional groups Christians, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and Druze, mainly. But national-security decisions are in the hands of the Syrians. That said, Hezbollah receives support, inspiration, financial aid, and weapons from Iran. It is not clear, though, if Hezbollah is completely controlled by Iran and Syria, or if it has the capacity and the will to act on its own.
One interesting question you explore is where, in the rhetoric and ideology of Hezbollah, hatred of Israel ends and frank anti-Semitism begins. Can you discuss this distinction? How unusual is Hezbollah in this respect? And how dangerous is it?
To most Israelis, and, indeed, to most Jews, the belief that Israel should be destroyed is itself a kind of anti-Semitism. In other words, the argument approaches anti-Semitism when it goes beyond, say, the rights and wrongs of Israeli policy with regard to the West Bank and Gaza, and becomes a question of whether the Jews constitute a nation that deserves a state at all. That said, something new is happening in the Arab world namely, the melding of Arab nationalist-based anti-Zionism, anti-Jewish rhetoric from the Koran, and, most disturbingly, the antique anti-Semitic beliefs and conspiracy theories of European Fascism. Add Holocaust denial, which is also becoming popular in the Arab world, and you have a dangerous new ideology, an ideology that Hezbollah, despite its assertions that it has nothing against Jews as Jews, propounds quite vigorously.
What about anti-Americanism? At times, the people you spoke to seemed connected to American culture themselves, as with the young man who had lived in Boston and now produces music videos for Hezbollah. And yet they consider America their enemy.
Well, the music videos he produces are meant to encourage suicide bombings, so he is manipulating an American cultural form in pursuit of a distinctly non-American goal. The people I spoke to consider America their enemy, although, for the moment, Israel ranks first on their list. Hezbollah, if nothing else, is a Khomeinist organization, and so they believe in the arguments that Ayatollah Khomeini made against America at the time of the Iranian revolution.
There is some concern that the first act of a military conflict between Iraq and the United States might involve Hezbollah firing missiles into Israel. How real is this threat? Do you see a war between the U.S. and Iraq turning into a regional war?
The short answer is that anything is possible. The threat is real; the only question is whether American pressure on Hezbollah's sponsor, Syria, can keep Hezbollah from opening up a campaign to spark an Arab-Israeli war. Such a war would, among other things, divert the world's attention and hamstring the Bush Administration's effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Can you talk a little bit about your trip to Lebanon? You spoke with people who have, directly or indirectly, been involved in attacks on Americans. What precautions did you take? Were you given any guarantees of safety?
It's true that reporting in the Bekaa Valley presents certain challenges (and having the name Goldberg probably adds to them). I wasn't given any guarantees, but I took the usual precautions. I didn't let too many people know ahead of time where I was going, but I made sure that a handful of Lebanese friends knew my schedule. And I would try to assess the intent of someone who agreed to meet with me before actually meeting him. But, despite its hostility to Jews and Americans, I don't believe that Hezbollah currently believes it is in its best interest to kidnap reporters. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, to be sure, but it has become a slight bit more sophisticated over the past twenty years.
Why, in reporting on a Lebanese terrorist group, did you travel to Paraguay? And what did you find there?
Hezbollah, like other Middle Eastern terrorist groups, has sympathizers, financiers, and even terror operatives spread out across the globe. One of the places that Hezbollah is strongest is in the area of South America known as the Triple Frontier, or Tri-Border area, where Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil meet. Law enforcement is lax, which, of course, is attractive to terrorists, and there is a large Arab community in Paraguay and Brazil in which to hide. What I found in the Triple Frontier was a very complex and lucrative funding network for Hezbollah, as well as proof that Hezbollah maintained training camps in the area. I also found that two of the worst terrorist attacks in South American history the attacks in Buenos Aires on the Israeli Embassy and on a Jewish community center may have been planned in the Triple Frontier.
You describe shakedowns of businesses in Arab immigrant communities in South America. How important are these? Where does Hezbollah get its money, and how does it move it from country to country?
Hezbollah is the best example in the world today of a state-sponsored terror group; it receives most of its budget from the government of Iran, something in the range of a hundred million dollars each year. But it takes in more money than that from its criminal operations, from its fund-raising activities, and from shakedowns of legitimate, or nonaffiliated, Middle Eastern businessmen. This is what happens in the Triple Frontier. Law-enforcement officials I spoke to in the region told me that Hezbollah took in twelve million dollars in the year 2000. It moves its money in much the same way that drug cartels move their money: by washing it through legitimate businesses, and by moving it through shell companies and offshore bank accounts.
Many aspects of Hezbollah's overseas terrorist operations, as you describe them, are reminiscent of drug cartels' operations the areas where state control is unclear, the illicit transfers of money and guns, the networks governed by personal loyalties, the corrupt officials, even the South American venue. But the war on drugs, despite its occasional victories, has been notably unsuccessful in stopping the flow of drugs into the United States. Are there lessons there for the war on terror?
These activities by terror groups, while potentially more lethal than the activities of drug cartels, are smaller in scale, so they may be more controllable. Also, for many of these countries, the protection or the tacit acceptance of Middle Eastern terrorists in their regions is a project of diminishing returns, as the U.S. demands more and more help in the war on terror. In other words, it may be easier for many of these governments to coöperate with the U.S. in the war on terror than it would be for them to coöperate in the drug war. That said, the lessons here are the same: Terrorists will invariably be found operating in tandem with, or at least in proximity to, criminal organizations; they both require the absence of robust law enforcement in order to act effectively; and, in places like the Triple Frontier, there has been only limited success in fixing the underlying economic and political conditions that allow illicit activities to flourish.
this is a legit question. But how have you come to trust Chomsky? I'd be interested to know. Also, enlighten everyone on teh "facts about hezbollah" and how they are on teh side of truth and justice? Is it b/c they want isreal gone? I'd read up on Hezbollah and then see if you agree with Chomsky (as i'm sure you will). Not the other way around.
Also think, who are the people that are spoonfeeding us bullshit that hezbollah are the good guys? It's people who are always critical of America, no matter what.
He actually said he hasn't read up on Hezbollah.
I have and came to some of the same conclusions as Chomsky without ever hearing his conclusions. I don't idolize the guy, I just stumble upon him whenever I am researching these issues and usually he's supportive of my opinion.