Chomsky and Dershowitz

In an appearance on the PBS show Firing Line, in April 1969, William F. Buckley introduced his guest for the evening, Noam Chomsky, as follows, with Chomsky’s reply in full:

Professor Noam Chomsky is listed in anybody’s catalog as among the half-dozen top heroes of the New Left. This standing he achieved by adopting over the past two or three years a series of adamant positions rejecting, at least, American foreign policy, at most, America itself. His essays and speeches are collected in his new book, American Power and the New Mandarins. Usually Mr. Chomsky writes nonpolitical books, for instance, Syntactic Structures in 1957, Cartesian Linguistics in 1966, and Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar, 1965. He is a highly esteemed student of modern language and linguistics who teaches nowadays at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught before at Berkeley, Columbia, and other strife-torn universities [Buckley and Chomsky smile]. He is a member of many organizations and learned societies, including, I am sure he would want me to mention, the Aristotelian Society of Great Britain. In one of his essays, Mr. Chomsky writes: “By accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, such as this one [the U.S. war in Vietnam], one has already lost one’s humanity.” I should like to begin by asking him why, under the circumstances, if by being here he stands to lose his humanity, he consented to appear in the first place?

Because . . . first of all, I didn’t quite put it in those terms, I don’t think. I think there are certain issues, for example, like Auschwitz, such that by consenting to discuss them one degrades oneself and to some degree loses one’s humanity. And I think that that’s true. Nevertheless, I can easily imagine circumstances in which I would have been glad to debate Auschwitz, for example, if there were some chance that by debating Auschwitz it might have been possible to eliminate it, or to at least mitigate the horror of what was going on. And I feel the same way about Vietnam.¹

As an early, unsolicited statement of his abhorrence of the Nazis and the atrocities they committed, which he views as almost literally unspeakable, Chomsky’s reference to Auschwitz as an archetype of Nazi atrocities is worth noting in the context of Dershowitz’s charges years later that “Professor Noam Chomsky took up the cause of a notorious neo-Nazi Holocaust denier named Robert Faurisson,” who claimed that the Nazi gas chambers never existed.² Dershowitz issued this charge, although—as Milan Rai reported in his 1994 book Chomsky’s Politics—“anyone with the slightest knowledge of Chomsky’s work will know, as Brian Morton points out, that from his earliest writings to his latest, ‘Nazism has served him as a benchmark of pure and unquestionable evil.’”³

To illustrate further, in the very first pages of American Power and the New Mandarins, published in 1969, Chomsky wrote essentially the same thing that he would say to Buckley later that year:

For the most part, these essays are elaborated versions of lectures given over the past few years. During these years, I have taken part in more conferences, debates, forums, teach-ins, meetings on Vietnam and American imperialism than I care to remember. Perhaps I should mention that, increasingly, I have had a certain feeling of falseness in these lectures and discussions. This feeling does not have to do with the intellectual issues. The basic facts are clear enough: the assessment of the situation is as accurate as I can make it. But the entire performance is emotionally and morally false in a disturbing way. It is a feeling that I have occasionally been struck by before. For example, I remember reading an excellent study of Hitler’s East European policies a number of years ago in a mood of grim fascination. The author was trying hard to be cool and scholarly and objective, to stifle the only human response to a plan to enslave and destroy millions of subhuman organisms so that the inheritors of the spiritual values of Western civilization would be free to develop a higher form of society in peace. Controlling this elementary human reaction, we enter into a technical debate with the Nazi intelligentsia: Is it technically feasible to dispose of millions of bodies? What is the evidence that the Slavs are inferior beings? Must they be ground under foot or returned to their “natural” home in the East so that this great culture can flourish, to the benefit of all mankind? Is it true that the Jews are a cancer eating away at the vitality of the German people? And so on. Without awareness, I found myself drawn into this morass of insane rationality—inventing arguments to counter and demolish the constructions of the [Martin] Bormanns and the [Alfred] Rosenbergs.⁴

By entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity. This is the feeling that I find almost impossible to repress when going through the motions of building a case against the American war in Vietnam. Anyone who puts a fraction of his mind to the task can construct a case that is overwhelming; surely this is now obvious. In an important way, by doing so he degrades himself, and insults beyond measure the victims of our violence and moral blindness.⁵

An obviously misleading interpretation of this eloquent statement would be that Chomsky was “fascinated” with Nazi policy in Eastern Europe, or that Chomsky once pondered whether the Jews were a “cancer” in Germany in the 1930s. Yet, this roughly resembles the level of analysis that Dershowitz would apply years later to his claim—which he stated in Chutzpah (1991), The Case for Israel (2003), The Case for Peace (2005), and The Case against Israel’s Enemies (2008)—that Chomsky supported Faurisson’s substantive claims about the Nazis and the Holocaust.

Dershowitz’s suggestion that Chomksy, like Faurisson, is a Holocaust denier not only adds to his portfolio of ugly insults of prominent American intellectuals, but also should be seen in the completely clear context of Chomsky’s lifelong record of contempt for the Nazis. Thus, in his 1974 book Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood, Chomsky referred to the Holocaust as “the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history.”⁶ And here is Chomsky speaking to James Peck in an interview published in 1987:

I suppose I am also a child of the Depression. Some of my earliest memories, which are very vivid, are of people selling rags at our door, of violent strikebreaking, and other Depression scenes. Whatever the reason may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate. The first article I wrote was an editorial in the school newspaper on the fall of Barcelona, a few weeks after my tenth birthday. The rise of Nazism also made a deep impression, intensified perhaps because we were practically the only Jewish family in a bitterly anti-Semitic Irish and German Catholic neighborhood in which there was open support for the Nazis until December 1941.⁷

Speaking at Harvard University in 1985 about the U.S. overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz and its replacement with a neo-Nazi dictatorship, Chomsky stated: “In Guatemala, in 1954, we managed to overthrow and destroy Guatemala’s one attempt at democracy. There was a New Deal–style, reformist-capitalist democratic regime which we managed to overthrow, leaving a literal hell-on-earth, probably the country which comes closest in the contemporary world to Nazi Germany. And we repeatedly intervened to keep it that way.”⁸ (Years later, in 1999, the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification, referred to informally as the Guatemalan Truth Commission, reported that “acts of genocide” had been committed against the Mayans of Guatemala and that U.S.- and Israel-supported Guatemalan “state forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93 percent of the violations documented.”⁹)

Chomsky not only has repeatedly denounced the atrocities of the Nazi regime in Germany, he has helped to expose the Nazi and neo-Nazi network within the U.S.-supported military dictatorships in Latin America, including in The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (1979), coauthored with Edward S. Herman, which includes an eleven-page section titled “The Nazi Parallel,” and which reported:

Another setting for Chomsky’s anti-Nazi views, his 1991 book Deterring Democracy, was published the same year as Dershowitz’s Chutzpah, and included multiple denunciations of the Nazis and the neo-Nazi military governments in Central and South America.¹⁵ Thus, while Dershowitz was asserting in Chutzpah in 1991 that Chomsky had supported “the merits”¹⁶ and “the substance”¹⁷ of Faurisson’s denial of the existence of Nazi gas chambers and the Holocaust, Chomsky’s readers were seeing something quite different in print in Chomsky’s own words.

The matter of taking the time and space here to document a small portion of the record of Chomsky’s abhorrence of the Nazis might seem unnecessary and perplexing. Yet, a book published in 2004 The Anti-Chomsky Reader, claimed that Chomsky “plays an important role in the neo-Nazi movement of our time,” and that “much like a bigamist who must constantly strain to keep one of his wives secret from the other, Chomsky and his most determined supporters try to prevent his liberal and left-wing followers from knowing too much about his other life, the neo-Nazi one,” in which Chomsky is the “grand patron of the neo-Nazi movement.”¹⁸ The same book claims that aspects of Chomsky’s political work “amounts to a justification of Nazi Germany.”¹⁹ In the only back-cover endorsement to the book, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Dershowitz wrote: “Finally the smoking gun that conclusively proves what many have long known: that Chomsky simply cannot be trusted.”²⁰

In the context of Dershowitz’s charges against Chomsky about Robert Faurisson, and for the purposes of this chapter, a second review exercise is necessary—on Chomsky’s long history of defending academic freedom, free speech, and human rights. On October 14, 1973, the New York Times reported that “Noam Chomsky, the authority on linguistics; Representative Bella Abzug, Democrat of Manhattan; Allen Ginsburg, the poet; E. Y. Harburg, the lyricist; and Paddy Chayefsky, the playwright” had given their support to the “campaign to enable Leopold Trepper, who ran an anti-Nazi underground organization for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe before and during World War II, to emigrate from Poland.” The Times reported that “for several years sympathizers in Western Europe and the United States have been pressing the Polish Government to allow Mr. Trepper, a leader of the Jewish community, to leave.” From the mid-1930s to the fall of Hitler, Trepper was head of “Red Orchestra,” an anti-Nazi spy ring that reportedly “cost the lives of 200,000 German soldiers.” A colleague of Trepper’s told the Times that Poland had refused to permit Trepper to emigrate due to “the anti-Jewish campaign that began in Poland in 1969 and is still going on.”²¹ Chomsky and the others had acted in support of Trepper’s right to leave Poland.

A year later, on January 31, 1974, the New York Times reported: “Yugoslavia’s Communist party is finding itself subjected to growing international criticism for a bitter campaign to oust eight nonconformist Marxist professors at Belgrade University. The campaign has stirred wide protest in the West, especially among scholars concerned about academic freedom.” In the United States, these included, as the Times reported, “the sociologist Daniel Bell of Harvard, the linguist Noam Chomksy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Robert S. Cohen, the Boston University physicist and philosopher, the philosopher Charles Frankel of Columbia, Stanley Hoffmann, Harvard professor of government, and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse of the University of California at San Diego.” President Tito of Yugoslavia had accused the eight professors at Belgrade University of being “anarcho-liberals” defiant of Communist party “discipline and doctrine.”²² Chomsky and the others had acted on behalf of the professors to prevent their ouster by Tito.

A few days later, on February 3, 1974, following Irving Howe’s review in the New York Times of The Case Worker by the Jewish Hungarian writer George Konrád,²³ Chomsky wrote in the Times: “George Konrád, the author of the novel ‘The Case Worker’ which Irving Howe praised so highly in last week’s Book Review, is currently in disfavor in Hungary.” As a result, and as Chomksy reported, Konrád lost his research position at the Sociological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, his freedom to travel, and the right to publish in Hungary. Chomsky added that “several other writers, including some associates of George Lukács,” the Marxist Hungarian writer and philosopher, “have been similarly treated.” Chomsky stated: “Hungary is still more liberal than other Eastern bloc countries, and I hope that the American publication of ‘The Case Worker’ will persuade the Hungarian authorities to restore Mr. Konrád’s—and his colleagues’—right to work, publish and travel.”²⁴

The next day, on February 4, 1974, the Times reported that “a group of American scholars and writers has called on the Iranian Government to free from prison 12 Iranian journalists, writers and filmmakers, seven of whom they said had been sentenced to death for plotting against the royal family” of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the U.S.-backed authoritarian ruler of Iran. The Americans, which included, as the Times reported, “Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Eric Bentley, Noam Chomsky and Dorothy Day, editor of The Catholic Worker,” alleged that the twelve Iranians had been “arbitrarily arrested and brought before a military tribunal solely on the basis of ‘confessions’ obtained after torture.”²⁵

Thus, from January 31 to February 4, 1974—a period of five days—and in addition to Chomsky’s support the year before of the right of Leopold Trepper to leave Poland, the New York Times published two brief news items and a letter noting Chomsky’s support for eight professors in Yugoslavia, one writer in Hungary, and twelve journalists, writers, and filmmakers in Iran. Given the number of people involved, and the diversity of their nationalities and academic and artistic interests, it is unlikely that Chomsky would have been familiar with the work of each one. It is thus rather obvious that Chomsky was defending, if not the content of such work, then the right of academic and artistic expression.

I could continue for quite some time itemizing, as before, the occasions in which Chomsky loaned his name to a defense of the rights of academics, writers, artists, and others. To quickly list a few more: Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Simone de Beauvoir, and hundreds of academics and intellectuals signed a petition to protest the Indian government’s detention of “tens of thousands of political prisoners . . . who have been rotting in Indian jails for several years without proper trials” while being subjected “to the most inhuman conditions as well as to physical torture.”²⁶ Thus, was it the aim of Chomksy, Zinn, and the others to defend the detailed political views and conduct of each of the “tens of thousands” of prisoners? Or was the motivation to defend in principle the human rights of those imprisoned without trial? Similarly, in the 1970s Chomsky was a member of the Committee to Free Martin Sostre, “a black Puerto Rican” who, since 1968, had been “serving a 21-to-30 year sentence” in the state of New York for “selling $15 worth of heroin” in a bookstore in Buffalo.²⁷ Was Chomsky’s interest here to defend the sale of heroin or, say, the constitutional ban against cruel and unusual punishment or racial discrimination in sentencing?

These are not difficult distinctions to grasp. Yet, when Chomsky signed a petition in 1979—“in the company of hundreds of others”;²⁸ with “roughly five hundred others”²⁹—defending the academic freedom of a French professor of literature, Robert Faurisson, who had been suspended from his job as a lecturer at the University of Lyon after claiming that the Nazi gas chambers did not exist—the distinction between a principled defense of academic freedom and the substance of Faurisson’s claims should have been clear. That key distinction, however, in many cases, somehow vanished. For example, while referring to the Faurisson petition as “scandalous” in an influential 1980 article in the French literary magazine Esprit, French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet never quoted from the operative part of the petition, which read as follows:³⁰ “We strongly protest these efforts to deprive Professor Faurisson of his freedom of speech and expression, and we condemn the shameful campaign to silence him. We strongly support Professor Faurisson’s just right of academic freedom and we demand that university and government officials do everything possible to ensure his safety and the free exercise of his legal rights” (emphasis added).³¹ A year later, in 1981, Vidal-Naquet published an article titled “On Faurisson and Chomsky,” in which he again declined to cite this key paragraph from the petition, even while purporting to have reproduced the text of the petition in full; the same deletion was repeated in Vidal-Naquet’s 1992 book Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust.³²

Furthermore, immediately after quoting from the petition, and while declining to reproduce the key words “freedom of speech” and “academic freedom” and thus negating the reasons for Chomsky’s signature on it, Vidal-Naquet implied that Chomksy signed the petition because he had found some “truth” in Faurisson’s claims:

What is scandalous about the petition is that it never raises the question of whether what Faurisson is saying is true or false, that it even presents his conclusions or “findings” as the result of a historical investigation, one, that is, in quest of the truth. To be sure, it may be argued that every man has a right to lies and falsehood, and that individual freedom entails that right, which is accorded, in the French liberal tradition, to the accused for his defence. But the right that the forger demands should not be conceded to him in the name of truth.³³

Without advocating on behalf of the truth of Faurisson’s claims, Chomsky situated the issue at stake with respect to the Faurisson affair years later: “A professor of French literature was suspended from teaching on grounds that he could not be protected from violence, after privately printing pamphlets questioning the existence of gas chambers. He was then brought to trial for ‘falsification of History,’ and later condemned for this crime, the first time that a modern Western state openly affirmed the Stalinist-Nazi doctrine that the state will determine historical truth and punish deviation from it.”³⁴

The Faurisson affair, with respect to Chomsky’s involvement, had its origins in December 1978 and January 1979, when Faurisson “published two letters in the French newspaper Le Monde claiming that the gas chambers used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews did not exist.” Faurisson was suspended from teaching and, following a television interview in France in which Faurisson repeated these claims, “was found guilty of defamation and incitement to racial hatred” and “given a suspended three-month prison term.”³⁵ Subsequent to these events, and with hundreds of others, Chomksy signed a petition of protest, which he neither wrote nor initiated.³⁶

Pursuant to criticism in France of Chomsky’s signature on the petition, and in response to a request from a friend of Chomsky’s to explain his reasons for signing the petition, Chomksy wrote a statement, which he titled “Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Free Expression.” By way of introduction, Chomsky wrote: “The remarks that follow are sufficiently banal so that I feel that an apology is in order to reasonable people who may happen to read them. If there is, nevertheless, good reason to put them on paper—and I fear that there is—this testifies to some remarkable features of contemporary French intellectual culture.” Chomsky then wrote:

Before I turn to the subject on which I have been asked to comment, two clarifications are necessary. The remarks that follow are limited in two crucial respects. First: I am concerned here solely with a narrow and specific topic, namely, the right of free expression of ideas, conclusions and beliefs. I have nothing to say here about the work of Robert Faurisson or his critics, of which I know very little, or about the topics they address, concerning which I have no special knowledge. Second: I will have some harsh (but merited) things to say about certain segments of the French intelligentsia, who have demonstrated that they have not the slightest concern for fact or reason, as I have learned from unpleasant personal experience that I will not review here.³⁷

Some time ago I was asked to sign a petition in defense of Robert Faurisson’s “freedom of speech and expression.” The petition said absolutely nothing about the character, quality or validity of his research, but restricted itself quite explicitly to a defense of elementary rights that are taken for granted in democratic societies, calling upon university and government officials to “do everything possible to ensure the safety and the free exercise of his legal rights.” I signed it without hesitation.

The fact that I had signed the petition aroused a storm of protest in France. In the Nouvel Observateur, an ex-Stalinist who has changed allegiance but not intellectual style published a grossly falsified version of the contents of the petition, amidst a stream of falsehoods that merit no comment. This, however, I have come to regard as normal. I was considerably more surprised to read in Esprit (September 1980) that Pierre Vidal-Naquet found the petition “scandaleuse,” citing specifically that fact that I had signed it (I omit the discussion of an accompanying article by the editor that again merits no comment, at least among people who retain a commitment to elementary values of truth and honesty).

Vidal-Naquet offers exactly one reason for finding the petition, and my act of signing it, “scandaleuse”: the petition, he claims, presented Faurisson’s “‘conclusions’ comme si elles etaient effectivement des decouvertes [as if they had just been discovered].” Vidal-Naquet’s statement is false. The petition simply stated that Faurisson had presented his “findings,” which is uncontroversial, stating or implying precisely nothing about their value and implying nothing about their validity. Perhaps Vidal-Naquet was misled by faulty understanding of the English wording of the petition; that is, perhaps he misunderstood the English word “findings.” It is, of course, obvious that if I say that someone presented his “findings” I imply nothing whatsoever about their character or validity; the statement is perfectly neutral in this respect. I assume that it was indeed a simple misunderstanding of the text that led Vidal-Naquet to write what he did, in which case he will, of course, publicly withdraw that accusation that I (among others) have done something “scandaleuse” in signing an innocuous civil rights petition of the sort that all of us sign frequently.³⁸

After responding further to the criticism from French intellectuals, Chomsky began the final paragraph of his statement as follows:

Let me add a final remark about Faurisson’s alleged “anti-Semitism.” Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi—such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here—this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense.³⁹

Indeed, the circumstances of the episode involving Faurisson, who was a mere pamphleteer, seemed less noxious than the horrific set of circumstances presented to the Jewish residents of Skokie, Illinois, in the 1970s, and eventually confronted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978 in National Socialist Party v. Village of Skokie (also cited as Smith v. Collin). In essence, an American neo-Nazi group, while intending to wear Nazi uniforms with swastikas, sought to hold an assembly at the city hall in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago with a majority Jewish population, including Holocaust survivors. At the outset of her book When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for Speech We Hate (University Press of Kansas, 1999), Philippa Strum graphically described the circumstances of the case that eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court:

Francis Joseph Collin, known as Frank, called himself a Nazi. He believed that Jews and African Americans were biologically inferior and that the only way the United States could remain strong was to deprive Jews of citizenship and send all black Americans back to Africa. While he claimed not to advocate the immediate death of Jews, his idol was Adolf Hitler, the German Nazi leader who attempted to eradicate European Jews by having six million of them murdered in concentration camps during World War II.

Frank Collin wasn’t German. He was an American, born in Illinois. He never traveled outside the United States. As do all Americans, he possessed inalienable rights, among them the right to believe and to speak in public about whatever obnoxious ideas he chose.

The place Collin and his two dozen uniformed followers chose to proclaim their Nazism in 1977, however, was the Chicago suburb of Skokie, the home of thousands of Holocaust survivors. These residents were among the minority of European Jews who had managed to escape death in Hitler’s concentration camps and immigrate to the United States at the end of World War II. By 1977 they too were American citizens with inalienable rights. One of their rights, they believed, was to live peacefully and safely, dealing as best they could with their unspeakable memories of families brutally separated, of forced labor and starvation, and of those who were forced into gas chambers to die. They shuddered at the idea of American Nazis appearing in their town, wearing the same uniforms as the German Nazis who had enslaved them and killed their families.

The psychological damage Collin’s presence would inflict upon them gave them a right, they thought, that outweighed Collin’s claim to parade his ideas in their village, and they were equally sure the American government would recognize that. So they went to court to keep Collin and his obnoxious ideas out of Skokie.⁴⁰

Ultimately, however, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that Collin and his band of Nazis had a First Amendment right to assemble, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied the petition by the Village of Skokie to review that decision.

Due to its legal representation of Collin and his Nazi cohort, and evocative of the reaction against Chomsky, the American Civil Liberties Union was subjected to a severe backlash within the country at large and from its membership. In a news item in August 1977 titled “A.C.L.U. Members Resign over Defense of Nazis,” the New York Times reported:

The legal defense of Nazis by the American Civil Liberties Union has set off a wave of resignations among members of the A.C.L.U., an official of the organization says. David Hamlin, executive director of the A.C.L.U.’s Illinois chapter, said yesterday that 1,000 out of 8,000 members have quit the state branch of the A.C.L.U., which is devoted to upholding free speech and other constitutional rights. Mr. Hamlin said 2,100 persons have resigned from the national organization since the Illinois branch began its legal battle to allow the Chicago-based Nazi organization to hold a parade in Skokie, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago.⁴¹

And in her book, Strum reported: “By September 1977, David Goldberger and the rest of the ACLU staff were reeling from the public response to the case. . . . So much of the national press was writing about Skokie and interviewing [Holocaust] survivors there that it was hard to find new faces for their stories. Many of [the journalists] turned their attention instead to what Goldberger called ‘the growing flood of criticism and outright verbal abuse’ and to the increasing number of resignations by ACLU members.”⁴²

Strum also reported how Ira Glasser, who would replace Aryeh Neier as the A.C.L.U.’s executive director in 1978, described the backlash as “threaten[ing] to cripple the ACLU” and told New York members that “all our programs were in jeopardy.” Yet, Glasser defended the organization’s decision to represent the Nazis in its suit against the Skokie ordinances that prohibited the Nazis to assemble:

It is the same kind of law that was used in Birmingham, Alabama, and throughout the South to stop civil rights demonstrators. . . . Of course, there is a vast moral difference between the Nazis’ speech in Skokie and Martin Luther King’s demonstrations in the South. What we must all decide, however, is . . . whether it is in our best interests—yours and mine—for the ACLU to have entered the Skokie case in order to strike down the anti-demonstration law. We defend the First Amendment for everybody because there is no other way to defend it for ourselves.⁴³

This was precisely the principled basis of Chomsky’s defense of Faurisson’s speech and academic rights, as stipulated not only in the original petition, cited earlier, but in the statement that Chomksy wrote to respond to the criticism of his signature on the petition.

Note that Chomsky had signed the petition in 1979, a mere one year after the ACLU’s defense of the speech and assembly rights of the American Nazis, and the decisions by the Illinois Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. Furthermore, Dershowitz wrote in 1991 in Chutzpah that he had “defend[ed]” the “rights of Nazis to march through the Jewish community of Skokie.”⁴⁴ Yet, in that very same book, and subsequent ones, Dershowitz accused Chomsky of Holocaust denialism for supporting the same principled right of free speech with respect to Faurisson.

Dershowitz also wrote, falsely: “Chomsky went even further. After signing the petition, he wrote an essay that he allowed to be used as a foreword to Faurisson’s next book about his career as a Holocaust denier.”⁴⁵ Dershowitz published these words in 2003. Yet, more than twenty years earlier, Chomsky had detailed how the statement that he wrote, in response to the criticism of his name on the petition, was issued as the foreword to a book by Faurisson. In an article in the Nation in February 1981 titled “His Right to Say It,” Chomsky described how he had responded to a request from a friend, Serge Thion:

Thion then asked me to write a brief statement on the purely civil libertarian aspects of this [Faurisson] affair. I did so, telling him to use it as he wished. . . . I later learned that my statement was to appear in a book in which Faurisson defends himself against the charges soon to be brought against him in court. While this was not my intention, it was not contrary to my instructions. I received a letter from Jean-Pierre Faye, a well-known anti-Fascist writer and militant, who agreed with my position but urged me to withhold my statement because the climate of opinion in France was such that my defense of Faurisson’s right to express his views would be interpreted as support for them. I wrote to him that I accepted his judgment, and requested that my statement not appear [in Faurisson’s book], but by then it was too late to stop publication.⁴⁶

While claiming more than twenty years later that Chomsky “wrote an essay that he allowed to be used as a foreword to Faurisson’s book,” Dershowitz did not bother to acknowledge Chomsky’s explanation to the contrary.

Rather than retract his claim, issued in 2003 in The Case for Israel, that Chomsky had “flirted with Holocaust denial,” Dershowitz embellished it further in his 2005 book The Case for Peace, where he ominously asks in a bold-type section heading: “Who Is Noam Chomsky?” Dershowitz then wrote: “But not many are aware of the even darker side of [Chomsky’s] record—including supporting, praising, and working with Holocaust deniers. Chomsky’s most notorious bedfellow is Robert Faurisson, who called the Holocaust a ‘hoax,’ denied the existence of gas chambers, claimed that the diary of Anne Frank was a ‘forgery,’ and described the Jewish claims for Holocaust reparations as a ‘fraud.’”⁴⁷ Assuming, for a moment (falsely), that Faurisson is one of Chomsky’s “bedfellows” in Holocaust denialism, who are the others? Dershowitz doesn’t say. But to support his claim that Chomsky and Faurisson are co-conspirators in Holocaust denialism, Dershowitz references “Chomsky and Holocaust Denial” by Werner Cohn,⁴⁸ author of the claims, cited earlier, that Chomsky “plays an important role in the neo-Nazi movement of our time,” that “Chomsky and his most determined supporters try to prevent his liberal and left-wing followers from knowing too much about his other life, the neo-Nazi one,” and that Chomsky is the “grand patron of the neo-Nazi movement.”⁴⁹ Thus, Dershowitz not only wrote the only book-cover blurb for the book in which these statements were made, he went on to cite this very same essay in footnoting his claim that Chomsky “supports, praises, and works with Holocaust deniers.” Dershowitz also implied that Chomsky shares Faurisson’s views that the Holocaust was a hoax, that the Nazi gas chambers did not exist, and that the diary of Anne Frank was a forgery. Yet, in his February 1981 article in the Nation, Chomsky wrote: “Faurisson’s conclusions are diametrically opposed to views I hold and have frequently expressed in print.”⁵⁰ Dershowitz never cited those words either, published in 1981, while accusing Chomsky in 2005 of being Faurisson’s bedfellow in Holocaust denialism.

In addition to the problems noted previously, there are other issues worth reviewing in the context of Dershowitz’s long-standing effort to mark Chomsky as a Holocaust denier. In his 1991 autobiography Chutzpah, Dershowitz described Meir Kahane, the Jewish American founder of the Jewish Defense League, as a “Jewish racist,” and explained why he defended Kahane’s right to free speech: “I decided that I would not impose a double standard on the rights of a Jewish racist . . . as distinguished from other bigots. Whatever rights any racist, sexist, or other –ist would be entitled to, Kahane and his audiences should have as well.”⁵¹ Also in Chutzpah, Dershowitz wrote: “While condemning Kahane’s ideas on their merits, I defended his right to state them.”⁵² Thus, Dershowitz defends the identical right of Kahane, a Jewish terrorist, to express his ideas—without, he asserted, endorsing those ideas—that Chomsky defended with respect to Faurisson. Yet, while Dershowitz is prolifically and viciously critical of Chomsky’s defense of Faurisson’s rights, Chomsky has not criticized Dershowitz’s defense of Kahane’s rights, although he would have had grounds to do so, given that Kahane was not subjected to state censorship, while Faurisson was.

Furthermore, Kahane was a notorious proponent of politically motivated violence in the United States in the “self-defense” of American Jews who, in Kahane’s view, faced a Nazi-like threat of annihilation in the United States. On its Web site, the Anti-Defamation League describes Kahane’s views as follows: “In Rabbi Kahane’s gross distortion of the position of Jews in America, American Jews were living in a fiercely hostile society, facing much the same dangers as the Jews in Nazi Germany or those in Israel surrounded by 100-million Arab enemies. Rabbi Kahane believed that the major Jewish organizations in the United States had failed to protect America’s Jews from anti-Semitism, which he saw as ‘exploding’ all over the country. . . . In fact, Kahane consistently preached a radical form of Jewish nationalism which reflected racism, violence and political extremism.” The same ADL Web page lists many dozens of acts of violence committed by the Jewish Defense League, or supported by it, well before 1991, the publication date of Chutzpah.⁵³

Kahane was known in the United States and Israel for political and religious views that included proposing emergency Jewish mass-immigration to Israel due to the imminent threat of a “second Holocaust” in the United States, advocating that Israel’s secular democracy be replaced by a state modeled on Jewish religious law, and promoting the idea of a Greater Israel in which Israel would annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In order to keep Arabs, whom he stated would never accept Israel as a Jewish state, from demographically destroying Israel, he proposed paying Arabs to leave Israel and those territories voluntarily, and forcibly removing those who would not.⁵⁴

In Chutzpah, Dershowitz recalled an exchange with Kahane during one of their debates, from which Dershowitz provided a verbatim excerpt. In it, at a minimum, Dershowitz failed to oppose Kahane’s suggestion to remove Arabs from Israel and the Israel-occupied territories:

[Kahane:] “Assuming that the Arabs become saints—and they sit down democratically, and they reproduce saints—I don’t want to live under a majority of Arab saints. So the question that I ask of people who are upset at the things I say, is: What is your answer to the voting question? Do the Arabs have a right to become a majority, democratically, peacefully, in the state of Israel?”

[Dershowitz:] “I tried to answer in a manner consistent with both my Jewish and democratic values. Rabbi Kahane would throw up his hands and say there is no room for democracy, there is nothing Jewish about democracy. I beg to differ. The vast majority of Jews in this world support both Zionism and democracy. The false dichotomy that Rabbi Kahane is seeking to impose on us is not correct, and the ultimate implications of his dangerous view are that once the Arabs are expelled from Israel, then Jews who do not fit Rabbi Kahane’s particularistic definition of his kind of Jew will also be expelled.”⁵⁵

For Dershowitz, in this passage, the “dangerous view” does not appear to be the expulsion of Arabs from Israel, and possibly from the West Bank, but the fate of certain Jews “once the Arabs are expelled from Israel.”

In addition, as he notes in Chutzpah, Dershowitz had a long-standing relationship of a sort with Kahane.⁵⁶ This included debating Kahane, as Dershowitz tells it: “My debates with Meir Kahane are a story in themselves. For years no prominent Jew—certainly no members of the Jewish establishment—would debate Kahane or share a platform with him. Because of his ultraright views and advocacy of violence to rid Israel of Arabs, the major Jewish organizations had imposed a virtual shroud of censorship around him.”⁵⁷ Thus, despite Kahane’s open advocacy of the expulsion of Israeli Arabs from “Greater Israel,” and nearly alone among establishment Jews, Dershowitz was willing to “share a platform with him.” One might ask, however: Where was the compelling interest for Dershowitz to do so? Dershowitz answered: “I had long opposed these attempts at censorship” of Kahane.⁵⁸ But it’s only “censorship” when governments do it as, for example, in the case of Faurisson; when private organizations or individuals do it, it’s merely an expression of personal preference and, in this instance, as the ADL observed, civilized values.

There are other disturbing aspects of Dershowitz’s involvement in the Faurisson affair. In at least ten endnotes in his 2003 book The Case for Israel, Dershowitz referenced a lecture that Chomsky had given at Harvard University on November 25, 2002, at the invitation of the Harvard Anthropology Department. Chomsky’s lecture at Harvard was Dershowitz’s single-most referenced source of Chomsky’s work in The Case for Israel—the same book in which Dershowitz referred to “Chomsky’s flirtation with Holocaust denial.”⁵⁹ Yet, in that very same lecture, Chomsky referred to the Nazis as “the worst mass murderers, maybe in history.”⁶⁰ Dershowitz never quoted or otherwise referred to that statement by Chomsky, despite prolifically citing the very same source in which Chomsky spoke those words.

Two years later, in The Case for Peace, Dershowitz introduced a section on Chomsky by accusing him of “extreme hatred of the United States and Israel.”⁶¹ Yet, Dershowitz no doubt was familiar with the words of Stephen Caton, chair of Harvard University’s Anthropology Department, who introduced Chomsky to the Harvard audience in that same lecture by Chomsky on November 25, 2002, and who eloquently identified Chomsky’s allegiance to a better tradition of the United States than loyalty to its aggressive wars:

It is an honor and a great pleasure to introduce Professor Chomsky. . . . We are located just a few miles from Concord, Massachusetts, and Walden Pond, the site of Henry David Thoreau’s experiment of living in the woods and living independently. And, of Thoreau, Emerson once said: “No truer American existed than Thoreau.” This was not the least because of his classic essay, on the duty of “Civil Disobedience,” which has ever since formed a statement about protest and dissidence, not only in American politics, but elsewhere.

In an important sense, our speaker today is heir of that tradition, a tradition that today is very much in danger of being forgotten and disappearing. His is the voice of a highly informed and reasoned dissent from prevailing points of view in the media and in the U.S. government. Indeed, it is rare to find a public intellectual who so painstakingly unearths facts, then analyzes them in such a systematic manner so as to explain what we are up to. . . .

He was willing to go to jail when he refused to pay his taxes during the Vietnam War as a protest against what he deemed to be illegal and unjust policies of our government. And he has had to endure intimidation of various kinds in his courageously outspoken views on the Middle East and other areas of the world. . . . Let me just say in conclusion that what Emerson said of Thoreau, one could repeat of Chomsky, that “Perhaps no truer American exists today.”⁶²

It is difficult to fathom why an American civil libertarian, which Dershowitz perhaps once was, would transpose an essential element of civil libertarianism—dissent from the lawless conduct of one’s own government—into a claim that Chomsky “hates” his country. Indeed, to characterize Chomsky’s exemplary dissent from perpetual war—waged illegally by government officials in the name of the American people with public funds that would serve this country far better if they were not spent on illegal, aggressive war—as “extreme hatred of the United States,” is an attack on dissent itself. So are Dershowitz’s tireless insults of the other “haters,” “bigots,” and “enemies” already noted in this volume, who also have dissented from U.S. government policies for similar reasons.

Another peculiar feature of Dershowitz’s accusations about Chomsky’s “flirtation” with Nazism is the fact that it was Chomsky, and not Dershowitz, who worked assiduously to expose the Nazi legacy in Latin America, including the U.S.- and Israel-supported fascist military dictatorships in Central America. Recall Chomsky’s statement in 1985 at Harvard that “probably the country which comes closest in the contemporary world to Nazi Germany” was post-1954 Guatemala.⁶³ The date, 1985, is significant, since by then, the major human rights organizations at the time—Amnesty International and Americas Watch⁶⁴—had issued reports on Guatemala that supported Chomsky’s assertion. In reading excerpts from the reports quoted further on by Amnesty International and Americas Watch, and the practices and policies of the neo-Nazi fascism that the reports invoke, note that it was Chomsky, not Dershowitz, who spent years bitterly opposing the fascist dictatorships of Central America, and that it was Dershowitz, not Chomsky, who would do more than “flirt” years later with such pillars of totalitarianism as unending war, preventive detention, torture, extrajudicial killings (state-sponsored murder), and the rejection of enlightened law.

In its 1981 report “Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder,” Amnesty International introduced its findings as follows: “The human rights issue that dominates all others in the Republic of Guatemala is that people who oppose or are imagined to oppose the government are systematically seized without warrant, tortured and murdered, and that these tortures and murders are part of a deliberate and long-standing program of the Guatemala Government.”⁶⁵ In its 1982 report “Human Rights in Guatemala: No Neutrals Allowed,” Americas Watch reported:

Against this background [of extreme wealth disparities, an economic crisis, and an armed conflict between the government and anti-government insurgents], we examined the status of civil and political rights in Guatemala. We came away profoundly disturbed by the policies and attitudes of the Rios Montt government. That government, whose legitimacy and authority derive only from the military, is committed, and has been committed from the outset, to a military solution. Indeed, we believe that the government of Rios Montt is committed to total war. . . .

Obviously, such a policy of total war ensures that fundamental rights, such as the right to life, the right to physical integrity, the right to personal security and the right to liberty, will be little respected. Massacres of Indians that may be committed by the Guatemalan armed forces cannot be blamed solely on undisciplined, rogue troops. They flow directly from the announced policies of the Rios Montt government that recognize no neutrals.

The total war policies of the government of President Rios Montt are reflected in its decrees. Those decrees . . . abolish virtually all the rights of Guatemalans. Indeed, our close examination of the decrees promulgated by President Rios Montt since the March 23 coup persuades us that the Guatemalan Government has overtly abandoned the rule of law and that it has overtly substituted a system of government that is both despotic and totalitarian.⁶⁶

In 1984, Americas Watch reported that “the killing continues” in Guatemala, that “the government of Guatemala continues to engage in the systematic use of torture as a means of gathering intelligence and coercing confessions,” and that “there has been a sharp increase in the incidence of disappearances, both urban and rural.”⁶⁷

Coincidental to these reports is the fact that by the mid-1970s and into the 1980s, Guatemala’s main military supplier was Israel—a fact about which Dershowitz has written nothing. In a lengthy analysis in 1986 titled “Israel and Guatemala: Arms, Advice and Counterinsurgency,” Cheryl Rubenberg reviewed the Israel-Guatemala military relationship:

In 1975 [following an Israel-Guatemala arms agreement], Israeli-made Arava aircraft (adaptable for counterinsurgency tasks) arrived in Guatemala, followed by deliveries of armored cars, artillery and small arms, including [Israel-made] Uzi submachine guns and the [Israel-made] Galil assault rifle, which became standard issue for the Guatemalan army. Israeli technicians and military advisers accompanied the Aravas. . . . In 1977, a series of events resulted in Israel becoming Guatemala’s principal arms supplier and primary source of counterinsurgency advice.

Three months after Jimmy Carter became president in January 1977, the [U.S.] State Department issued a report condemning human rights violations in Guatemala. The Guatemalan regime retorted that it would reject in advance any military aid from a government which dared to impose conditions or interfere in its internal affairs. At Carter’s request, Congress suspended military aid to Guatemala, and the administration included Guatemala on a list of “gross and consistent violators of human rights.”

The Israeli government immediately stepped in to fill the vacuum and a flourish of activity ensued. Israel did not put “strings” on its arms or advice and was indifferent to the repressive practices of the Guatemalan regime. The flow of arms and “agricultural development” advisors picked up considerably.⁶⁸

Ultimately, according to Rubenberg, Guatemala bought armed patrol boats, tanks and armored cars, other weapons and munitions, military communications equipment, radar systems, and field kitchens from Israel. “By 1980,” Rubenberg wrote, “the Guatemalan army was fully equipped with Galil rifles at a cost of $6 million.”⁶⁹ In her 1987 book Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America, Jane Hunter reported that “Uzis and the larger Galil assault rifles used by Guatemala’s special counterinsurgency forces accounted for at least half of the estimated 45,000 Guatemalan Indians killed by the [Guatemalan] military since 1978.”⁷⁰

Hunter also reported that “Israeli advisers have worked with the feared G-2 police intelligence unit,” which “has been largely responsible for the death squad killings over the last decade.”⁷¹ Israel also “bestowed upon Guatemala the technology needed by a modern police state,” according to Hunter, including computer systems used by “the nerve center of the armed forces” and “to sort through dossiers and to distribute lists of those marked for death.”⁷² Rubenberg reported that “by early 1982, there were at least 300 Israeli advisors in Guatemala.”⁷³

And it wasn’t merely Guatemala that enjoyed Israel’s business as an arms supplier and counterinsurgency adviser. Leslie Gelb of the New York Times reported in 1982 that “Israel entered the Central American arms market in the mid-1970s, largely to supply small arms to the Nicaraguan regime headed by Anastasio Somoza Debayle,” and that “those supplies continued nearly until the collapse of the Somoza regime despite entreaties by the Carter Administration to stop much earlier.”⁷⁴ And Hunter reported that “between the 1977 U.S. cutoff [under President Carter] and the resumption [under President Reagan] of U.S. aid in 1981, El Salvador obtained over 80 percent of its weapons from Israel.”⁷⁵ While Rubenberg wrote that “Israel’s increasingly visible presence throughout the Third World, including such disparate places as the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Botswana, El Salvador and Argentina, raises a number of questions about the objectives and character of Israel’s foreign policy,”⁷⁶ Hunter observed that “the export markets open to Israel are frequently among the world’s most unsavory; indeed, to be off limits to the superpowers, they often are located inside the very gates of hell,” including “the white clique in South Africa, Somoza of Nicaragua, Duvalier of Haiti [and] Mobutu of Zaire.”⁷⁷

Surely, as a leading American expert on Israel for the past several decades, Dershowitz would have been knowledgeable about Israel’s support for the post–World War II fascist military dictatorships in Central America. Yet, in the four books in which he accused Chomksy of having Nazi and neo-Nazi sympathies—from Chutzpah in 1991 to The Case against Israel’s Enemies in 2006—Dershowitz never mentioned the word “Guatemala,” or otherwise reviewed in any way Israel’s close military support of post-1954 Guatemala.⁷⁸ The same search results apply to the words “Nicaragua,” “Somoza,” and “El Salvador.” In other words, Dershowitz launched his Nazi “flirtation” campaign against Chomsky in Chutzpah in 1991 after more than a decade of Israeli military sales to the neo-Nazi governments in Latin America—a fact that Dershowitz ignored while Chomsky did not. A brief survey follows.

On the first page of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, published in 1979, Chomsky and Herman wrote: “Since 1960 over 18 Latin American regimes have been subjected to military takeovers.” This fact and its consequences would occupy much of what Chomsky and Herman would write about in subsequent books and articles, including The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda (1982) by Herman and Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace (1985) by Chomsky. Chomsky and Herman continued: “U.S. influence has been crucial in this process [of military takeovers in Latin America], in some cases by means of deliberate subversion or even direct aggression, but invariably important given the substantial economic and military penetration and presence of the superpower.” The authors then noted: “The fate of Guatemalan democracy, subverted by the CIA in 1954 in favor of a regime of torture and oppression, can be matched with that of Iran a year earlier; and the Philippines, brutally subjugated at the turn of the century, has now been stripped of its short-lived democratic façade without a word of protest by the United States. This, and the subsequent sharp increases in economic and military aid to the martial law government of Marcos, not only reflect a familiar and traditional pattern, they are also compelling evidence of approval and support.”⁷⁹

Another extremely important reflection of a resurgence of [Guatemalan state] terrorism has been the growth of “disappearances,” a phenomenon mentioned by Hannah Arendt as one of the last and most terrible phases in the evolution and degeneration of totalitarian states. The term refers to cases where individuals are seized by military, paramilitary or police agents of the state, who secretly murder and dispose of the bodies of their victims, often after torture, always without acknowledgment and admitted responsibility of the state. Disappearance, as described by a report on this subject by [Amnesty International], is “a particular government practice applied on a massive scale in Guatemala after 1966, in Chile since late 1973, and in Argentina after March 1976.” It was a tactic used by the Nazis in the occupied territories in the 1940s under the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) Decree to dispose of those resisters “endangering German security” by means of what Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel described as “effective intimidation.” The victims, in Germany as in Chile, were subject to an often violent arrest, torture, secret imprisonment and usually death.⁸⁰

In a brief report of the murder of yet another professor at the national university [of Guatemala], the [New York] Times noted in passing that more than 40,000 people have disappeared and more than 95,000 “have died in political violence here since 1954” according to “the Mexican-based Guatemalan Human Rights Commission”: to translate from Newspeak, some 140,000 have been eliminated by the governments installed and kept in power by the US since the US overthrew Guatemalan democracy in 1954 (the crucial fact, regularly omitted in news reports and editorial comment), according to a Human Rights Commission which is Mexican-based because its members could not long survive in Guatemala. In May 1982, the conservative Guatemalan Conference of Catholic Bishops stated that “never in our history have such extremes been reached, with the assassinations now falling into the category of genocide.”⁸¹

In short, while the Israeli government played a key role for a time in arming and supporting the military dictatorships of Central America, it was the United States that mainly conducted the post–World War II orchestra of fascist regimes throughout Latin America. While falsely accusing Chomsky of having Nazi and neo-Nazi sympathies, Dershowitz did nothing to oppose the far-right governments in Latin America; this while Chomsky and Herman generated valuable first-rate scholarship and thereby contributed to the downfall of the neo-Nazi governments in Latin America, where both are highly esteemed as anti-fascist intellectuals.

The result is similar when we apply the relative “truth” standards of Chomsky on the one hand, and Dershowitz on the other, to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, where Chomsky also is highly regarded. Whereas Chomsky wrote, over forty years ago, that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to tell the truth and expose the lies of governments—on behalf of human rights and in opposition to the coercive powers of the state—it seems that Dershowitz’s view of his role as an influential intellectual is the opposite in each of those respects. From the start Chomsky has denounced state terrorism quite literally on a global scale—from East Timor to Nicaragua to the West Bank. In contrast, with a one-client practice in the court of public opinion, Dershowitz is a leading advocate of the coercive powers of the state in virtually every conceivable realm: what Dershowitz depicts as “preemptive” and “preventive” wars are in fact wars of aggression—the “supreme international crime” in international law; Dershowitz’s support for extrajudicial killings is support for state-sanctioned murder; his well-known support of torture in ticking-bomb scenarios, with a presidential or court signature, would formally establish state-sanctioned torture in the United States; his apparent support of the surveillance state and preventive detention as counterterrorism measures is squarely within the tradition of the extinct neo-Nazi governments of Latin America. To paraphrase Henry Stimson, there is something wrong with a country where few people question this. Finally, Dershowitz openly markets his dystopian “preventive state” by campaigning for a “reinterpretation of constitutional principles,” which is Dershowitz’s would-be coup against the Bill of Rights.

“Big Brother, Where Art Thou?” Thou art, of all places, at Harvard Law School.