Left-wing activist and author Noam Chomsky is in the New York Times today:

The American linguist Noam Chomsky, a prominent source of intellectual inspiration for President Hugo Chávez, made a new appeal on Wednesday for the release of María Lourdes Afiuni, a judge arrested two years ago by the secret intelligence police.

If you find it a little surprising that Chomsky's views on international affairs would be reported in the Paper of Record, and if you'd be inclined to believe the Times finds his views newsworthy only because Chomsky is criticizing Chavez (which they've done before)... well, you might  not be the only one. Here's what Chomsky said about it to the Guardian:

Despite his appeal for Afiuni's release, Chomsky has been critical of the media's coverage of the case. On Wednesday he suggested the case had received so much media attention only "because Venezuela is an official enemy" [of the United States]. "I am involved in these appeals all the time but I get no calls unless it is an enemy of the US," Chomsky said. "This is more a comment on the media than on the case."

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a tedious column today (10/11/11) about how the real radicals are the centrists, not the Wall Street occupiers. (Read Dean Baker to see what Brooks is getting wrong.) But this jumped out at me:

A third believe the U.S. is no better than Al-Qaeda, according to a New York magazine survey.

How would someone "survey" a leaderless, ever-shifting mass of protesters? I am not sure, and it's not really what New York did. They asked a series of questions--some of them obviously cheeky--to 100 activists at Liberty Plaza. As you can see:

Rank yourself on the following Scale of Liberalism:

Not liberal at all: 6

Liberal but fairly mainstream (i.e., Barack Obama): 3

Strongly liberal (i.e., Paul Krugman): 12

Fed up with Democrats, believe country needs overhaul (i.e., Ralph Nader): 41

Convinced the U.S. government is no better than, say, Al-Qaeda (i.e., Noam Chomsky): 34

It's not surprising that activists at Occupy Wall Street say they identify more with Chomsky than with Obama, regardless of whether you put a description that doesn't reflect Chomsky's worldview next to his name. It's hard to believe that the magazine took this very seriously anyway. But it does provided Brooks with useful anti-protester fodder for his column defending the top 1 percent.

In the Washington Post (7/7/11), Fareed Zakaria tries to defend Barack Obama against the criticism that he needs a more consistent foreign policy. He writes:

All American presidents have supported and should support the spread of democracy. The real question is: Should that support involve active measures to topple undemocratic regimes, especially military force?

Since this is an important part of his argument, it is worth noting that "all American presidents" have no such passion for the spread of democracy. There is a fairly rich history of U.S. foreign policy taking "active measures" to support undemocratic regimes. It is unclear why Zakaria's  "real question" should be based around the opposite notion.

Interestingly, Zakaria's rebuttal to the idea that the White House should have  "a consistent policy toward the Arab Spring" is at odds with his assurances about U.S. support for democracy. Zakaria points out that the U.S. has not stood very strongly on the side of democratic stirrings in many of the countries under discussion,  chalking it up to the usual difference between U.S. "interests" and "values" in places like Saudi Arabia, where the former are far more important than the latter.

There is, of course, a consistency in U.S. policy-- it involves standing by dictators who are aligned with U.S. interests, and moving against those who do not, especially when there is oil involved.

Which is another way of saying that it's a good week to have Noam Chomsky on CounterSpin. Listen here.

Of some of the Arab countries under examination--U.S.-friendly regimes without substantial oil reserves--Chomsky said:

There is a game plan which is employed routinely,  so commonly it takes virtual genius not to perceive it.... When there's a favored dictator, and he's getting into trouble, support him as long as possible--full support, as long as possible. When it becomes impossible to support him--say, maybe the army turns against him, the business class turns against him-- then send him off somewhere, issue ringing declarations about your love of democracy, and then try to restore the old regime.

The New York Times has a piece today (5/18/11) previewing Barack Obama's Israel/Palestine speech, calling it a "chance to reshape the debate," whatever that's supposed to mean. One thing to always pay attention to in coverage of this issue is the language used to frame the discussion. The piece mentioned Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas' recent op-ed in the Times concerning the Palestinian drive to gain United Nations recognition for the Palestinian state. Abbas defined the state as "the lands framed by the 1967 border." In most of the world this is a rather uncontroversial starting point. But look how the Times described it:

In an Op-Ed article in the New York Times on Tuesday that analysts interpreted as the diplomatic equivalent of a declaration of war on the status quo, Mr. Abbas said flatly that he would request international recognition of the state of Palestine, based on the borders of Israel before the 1967 Arab/Israeli war.

Such a move would most likely get a lopsided majority of votes in the General Assembly, diplomats said, with Latin American, African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries all expected to vote in favor of it.

Unnamed "analysts" believe Abbas is declaring war on the "status quo"-- though the resolution he is suggesting would be endorsed in a lopsided U.N. vote. So the "status quo" is really a massively unpopular policy forced on the world. Which would seem to be much closer to the truth--and which apparently cannot be described as such.

At FAIR's 25th anniversary, Noam Chomsky tried to imagine a future where the New York Times, in a remarkable change, described this debate accurately.  In his hypothetical example, the "peace process" is being led by a truly neutral state, and the debate is understood as the view of the world's majority on one side, and the U.S.-backed minority view on the other. We're still a long way from that.

Today's broadcast of Democracy Now! featured an excerpt of Noam Chomsky's address at FAIR's 25th anniversary celebration. Watch it:

Want to see the whole event--with more of Chomsky, Michael Moore, Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman? Buy the DVD from FAIR today.

A letter in the new issue of Time magazine offers an alternate suggestion for Person of the Year (the magazine chose Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg):

Glenn Greenwald (Salon, 6/3/10), in a compelling blog post on "Victimhood, Aggression and Tribalism," quotes Noam Chomsky from Imperial Ambitions:

In one of his many speeches, to U.S. troops in Vietnam, [Lyndon] Johnson said plaintively, "There are three billion people in the world and we have only two hundred million of them.  We are outnumbered fifteen to one.  If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have.  We have what they want."  That is a constant refrain of imperialism.  You have your jackboot on someone's neck and they're about to destroy you.

The same is true with any form of oppression.  And it's psychologically understandable.  If you're crushing and destroying someone, you have to have a reason for it, and it can't be, "I'm a murderous monster."  It has to be self-defense.  "I'm protecting myself against them.  Look what they're doing to me."  Oppression gets psychologically inverted; the oppressor is the victim who is defending himself.

This is, in fact, one of the standard justifications for violence of the strong against the weak--up to and including genocide. (See FAIR Blog, 2/2/09). That's why when Israeli security forces kill more than 3,000 civilians in Gaza since 2001 and Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza kill 27 Israelis over the same time period, people can argue with a straight face that Israel's self-defense needs require it to impose a crushing blockade on Gaza that has forced 10 percent of the population into chronic malnutrition.

That the blockade's actual purpose has little to do with self-defense is illustrated by the wide array of prohibited goods that have nothing to do with security, as Peter Beinart pointed out in the Daily Beast (6/1/10; cited in Yglesias, 6/3/10):

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations greeted news of the flotilla disaster by repeating a common "pro-Israel" talking point: that Israel only blockades Gaza to prevent Hamas from building rockets that might kill Israeli citizens. If only that were true. In reality, the embargo has a broader and more sinister purpose: to impoverish the people of Gaza, and thus turn them against Hamas. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported, the Israeli officials in charge of the embargo adhere to what they call a policy of "no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis." In other words, the embargo must be tight enough to keep the people of Gaza miserable, but not so tight that they starve.

This explains why Israel prevents Gazans from importing, among other things, cilantro, sage, jam, chocolate, French fries, dried fruit, fabrics, notebooks, empty flowerpots and toys, none of which are particularly useful in building Kassam rockets. It's why Israel bans virtually all exports from Gaza, a policy that has helped to destroy the Strip's agriculture, contributed to the closing of some 95 percent of its factories, and left more 80 percent of its population dependent on food aid. It’s why Gaza's fishermen are not allowed to travel more than three miles from the coast, which dramatically reduces their catch.... There’s a name for all this: collective punishment.

A deal between Iran, Brazil and Turkey to ship some of Iran's uranium out of the country to be enriched in Turkey and returned for use in a Iranian medical reactor has elicited some elite media panic. An early New York Times Web headline read, "Iran Offers to Ship Uranium, Complicating Sanctions Talks." The Wall Street Journal (5/17/10) went with "Iranian Nuclear Deal Raises Fears."

The story in the print edition of the Times (5/18/10) focuses much of its attention on the U.S. reaction to the deal. This passage is especially meaningful:

Rejecting the new deal, however, could make President Obama appear to be blocking a potential compromise. And the deal shows how Brazil and Turkey, which for their own economic interests oppose sanctions, may derail a fragile international consensus to increase pressure on Iran.

Rejecting a deal doesn't make one "appear" to be blocking compromise--that's precisely what you're doing.

More importantly, the idea that the "fragile international consensus" favors increasing sanctions on Iran makes sense only if you believe that that expression refers exclusively to certain major powers, which can force their will via the U.N. Security Council.

This is not the first time the New York Times has explained Iranian nuclear diplomacy in such terms. Here's Noam Chomsky (ZNet,  2/16/08), reviewing an earlier, similar example:

To take another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality, New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino writes that "Iran's intransigence [about nuclear enrichment] appears to be defeating attempts by the rest of the world to curtail Tehran's nuclear ambitions." The rest of the world happens to exclude the large majority of the world: the non-aligned movement, which forcefully endorses Iran's right to enrich Uranium, in accord with the non-proliferation treaty (NPT). But they are not part of the world, since they do not reflexively accept U.S. orders.

We might tarry for a moment to ask whether there is any solution to the U.S./Iran confrontation over nuclear weapons. Here is one idea: (1) Iran should have the right to develop nuclear energy, but not weapons, in accord with the NPT. (2) A nuclear weapons-free zone should be established in the region, including Iran, Israel and U.S. forces deployed there. (3) The U.S. should accept the NPT. (4) The U.S. should end threats against Iran, and turn to diplomacy.

The proposals are not original. These are the preferences of the overwhelming majority of Americans, and also Iranians, in polls by World Public Opinion, which found that Americans and Iranians agree on basic issues. At a forum at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies when the polls were released a year ago, Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, said the polls showed "the common sense of both the American people and the Iranian people, [who] seem to be able to rise above the rhetoric of their own leaders to find common sense solutions to some of the most crucial questions" facing the two nations, favoring pragmatic, diplomatic solutions to their differences. The results suggest that if the U.S. and Iran were functioning democratic societies, this very dangerous confrontation could probably be resolved peaceably.

Via an interview with Raw Story (3/22/10):

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor added that it's a damning referendum on American democracy that one of the most highly supported components of the effort nationally, the public insurance option, was jettisoned. He partly blamed the media for refusing to stress how favorably it's viewed by the populace.

"It didn't have 'political support,' just the support of the majority of the population," Chomsky quipped, "which apparently is not political support in our dysfunctional democracy."

The provision has consistently polled well, garnering the support of 60 percent of Americans across the nation in a CBS/New York Times poll released in December, days after it was eliminated from the reform package. Democratic leaders deemed it politically untenable.

"There should be headlines explaining why, for decades, what's been called politically impossible is what most of the public has wanted," Chomsky said. "There should be headlines explaining what that means about the political system and the media."

See Extra!: "Healthcare Reform Minus the Public Option—or the Public" (10/09).

In a blog post about how it must have been "So Much Nicer To Be George Will Before The Internet" (2/17/09), A Tiny Revolution's Jonathan Schwarz looks back over how "on Sunday George Will made things up so he can claim global warming isn't happening" to "a funny story of Noam Chomsky's from the book Understanding Power about a column Will wrote in 1982":

[A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called "Mideast Truth and Falsehood," about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: He said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek--you know, four lines--in which I said, "Will has one statement of fact, it's false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down." Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek "Letters" column. She said: "We're kind of interested in your letter; where did you get those facts?" So I told her, "Well, they're published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971" --which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, "Yeah, you're right, we found it there; okay, we'll run your letter." An hour later she called again and said, "Gee, I'm sorry, but we can't run the letter." I said, "What's the problem?" She said, "Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he's having a tantrum; they decided they can't run it." Well, okay.

Theorizing that these days "it must be hard for Will to get used to bluggs, because he's spent his entire career with total impunity," Schwarz doesn't spare those people responsible for publishing Will's damaging claptrap either: "Two days later, Will and Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post op-ed page, still won't explain their behavior." See the newest FAIR Action Alert: "Does the Post Fact-Check George Will?: Columnist's Climate Change Denial Distorts Reality" (2/18/09)

Noam Chomsky points out that a Boston Globe analysis (11/9/08) of the Obama victory claims that the president-elect owes nothing to "traditional Democratic constituencies" like labor, women, ethnic minorities and the peace movement, because a "grassroots army of millions"--seemingly unconnected to such constituencies--"propelled" Obama's win.

It's worth noting, however, that this idea of a Democratic Party set free from the voting blocs that support it is a longstanding dream of corporate media and the political establishment--represented in the Globe piece by corporate Democrat Steve McMahon and conservative think-tanker Norman Ornstein. Ornstein, in fact, offers the same argument in the paper that he gave to CNN (11/14/92) during a similar round of "liberal interest group" bashing after Bill Clinton's election in 1992, when Ornstein claimed that Clinton "enters office with the fewest debts owed to interest groups in his own party of any Democratic president in modern times."

But the reality is not exactly as corporate media dream it. The Globe quotes McMahon--who it identifies as a "Democratic strategist," but not as a flak for PhRMA, the prescription drug lobby--as saying that Obama "owes nothing to anyone except the people who elected him." That's not actually how politics works, as any corporate lobbyist knows full well, but it's instructive to look at who the voters were who "propelled" Obama's victory.

Among white voters, according to exit polls, Obama lost by 12 percentage points, but he more than made up this deficit with his margins with African-American (91 points), Latino (36) and Asian (27) and "other" (35) voters. Women gave Obama a decisive 13-point advantage, compared to his narrow 1-point win among men.

Obama won among those making less than $50,000 a year by a 22-point margin; the votes of those who made more than $50,000 were evenly split. Union households went for the Democrat by a 20-point margin, vs. 4 points for non-union households. Seventy-six percent of those who disapprove of the Iraq War supported Obama; 86 percent of Iraq War supporters went for McCain.

Obviously, voters' opinions don't translate directly into politicians' actions; we'd live in a much different world if they did. But voters do matter enough that corporate media routinely try to wish them away.