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)
Mark F Weber
An excerpt from the Bill Peale Political Blog (http://vealetruth.com/2006/08/07/chomsky-vs-will/)
“Game over, I moved to get close enough to talk. I don’t remember if I bothered to introduce myself, or just said, â┚¬Ã…“excuse me, Mr. Will, would you debate Noam Chomsky?â┚¬Ã‚Â
“His reply will never leave me. He did his best not to show annoyance at having his serenity disturbed. â┚¬Ã…“No, we don’t share enough premises to make it interesting.â┚¬Ã‚ Doing my best to defend that position, at least for the only sort of debate that George Will would find interesting, one that considers the effective strategies of world domination and delicately balances the sayable and unsayable Kissingerian tenets of realpolitik, I suppose he has a point. But would it not be of value to the citizens of the world to retreat momentarily from the heights of grand power manipulation and begin with some essential assumed commonly possessed premises? The survival of mankind, the value of an individual human life, the long-term devastation wrought by the continued compromising and destruction of individual citizens’ or soldiers’ underlying moral sense, the value of truth?”
For the same reason, I presume, when it comes to the Middle East, Will would never condescend to debate Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan pappe, Neve Gordon, Michael Neumann, Jeff Halper, Amira Hass, Jonathan Cook, Sara Roy, or Richard Falk: “Too few shared premisses.” But this is only half of Will’s real reason. The other half, unmentioned by George “the lying coward” Will, is a mendacious or cravenly aversion on his part to having those different premisses explored and clarified. One “premise” of the aforementioned individuals that Will clearly does not share is “respect for facts, empirical evidence, and internal consistency.”