The Antisemitism of Noam Chomsky's Far Left Anarcho-Syndicalist Ideological Cult

Explaining what the far left anarchists have in common with the far right anarchists. They may disagree on economics but when it comes to the Constitution and the Jewish state they are in synch.

Feb 03, 2023

Click here to check out the first 30 Installments - Volume I - in this series on Antisemitism and Culture. Among the top 5 most important pieces from this first wave:

This is the twelfth installment in Volume II, intended as another 30 pieces exploring the many manifestations of Jew Hatred and the issues surrounding it in America and globally. See the previous installments in this new collection below.

So a week and a half ago I wrote another too-long installment in this series intended to collect and organize some of the research and arguments for my “A is for Anarchism” essay, the first in my Joy of Political Sects series of explanations on varieties of ideology, most of which I’ve come to despise and polemicize against as inherently dangerous and destructive.

God of the Desert Books

The Antisemitism of Ron Paul's Far Right Anarcho-Capitalist Ideological Cult

Click here to check out the first 30 Installments - Volume I - in this series on Antisemitism and Culture. Among the most important pieces from this first wave: What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites What Causes Someone to Be an Antisemite…

2 years ago · 1 like · David Swindle

I felt I needed to first assemble the pieces before synthesizing them together into a single essay in order to make a seemingly strange point: anarchism manifests on both “the far left” and “the far right” because both ideological tendencies, while disagreeing on economics and culture were actually in agreement on rejecting the American constitution and thus the legitimacy of the American state. This rejection of the necessity of the state then manifested in such intense anti-Israel animus that it led the primary leaders of both ideological movements into the arms of radical Islamists.

This seemingly makes no rational sense: how could those loudly demanding freedom or equality or liberty make common cause with theocratic totalitarians whose primary moral imperative was to murder as many Jews as possible? Well, anarchism in theory manifests into cruel brutality in practice. Those who do not believe in the legitimacy of states, will, in turn support groups seeking to literally destroy states.

And such is the political journey of Noam Chomsky, a figure widely regarded as the preeminent intellectual of “the Left” and among the most influential “American foreign policy critics” in the world.

In a previous post I explained how Murray Rothbard, the primary intellectual theorist of the far right “anarcho-capitalist” movement, rejected the Constitution. He wrote a whole book on the subject that was published after his death, and stated in a speech in no uncertain terms that he felt the Articles of Confederation - widely regarded by most mainstream historians and even the most basic students of American history as too weak to sustain America as a nation - should be the basis of American government instead.

Where does Chomsky, a self-proclaimed anarcho-syndicalist - meaning one who advocates unifying and empowering labor unions as a means to abolish the economic system they regard as “wage slavery” - stand on the Constitution?

In a 2019 interview with TruthOut he explained his views of the inherent problems in the system of government created by the most important document in guiding the American nation:

In the 19th century the U.S. Constitution was in many ways a progressive document, even though it was a “Framers’ Coup” against the democratic aspirations of most of the public…
The document has inherent problems, which are leading to a likely constitutional crisis. The problems are serious enough for law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, writing on “America’s constitutional crisis,” to entitle his article “The First Priority: Making America a Democracy” (contrary to the intentions of the Framers). He reviews some of the familiar problems. One has to do with the Electoral College, which was designed by the Framers because of their distrust of popular government. By now states with 23 percent of the population have enough electoral votes to choose the president. Even more importantly, the same radical imbalance makes the Senate a highly undemocratic institution — in accord with the intentions of the Framers. In Madison’s constitutional design, the Senate was the most powerful branch of government, and the most protected from public interference. It was to represent “the wealth of the nation,” the most “responsible” men, who have sympathy for property and its rights. Furthermore, though the Framers did not anticipate this of course, social and demographic changes have placed this excessive anti-democratic power in the hands of a part of the population that is mostly rural, white, Christian, socially conservative and traditionalist…

Chomsky’s friend and far left anarchist ideological ally, the late Howard Zinn, who authored the highly influential A People’s History of the United States, also articulated a rejection of the Constitution, similarly regarding it as a tool of the wealthy to curtail the class conflicts of the poor.

Chomsky make abundantly clear his embrace of Zinn after the historian’s death:

“He’s made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture… He’s changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can’t think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect.”

From a 1995 Zinn lecture:

In 2009, in a lecture to 8th graders, Zinn further made his point explicit, labeling the constitution a “class document”:

“They wrote a Constitution that would benefit the wealthy classes,” Zinn said.

Thus, the far left anarchists reject the Constitution because they think it gives the wealthy too much power and does not allow for authentic democracy, which in their view would lift up “the people” out of poverty and oppression. In the Zinn-Chomsky formulation the United States is illegitimate as conceived, purely a form of government created merely to perpetuate the power of the wealthy and exploit the common man.

Well, what’s the problem with more democracy? What’s the problem with “the people” ruling directly instead of the representative democracy which Zinn and Chomsky dismiss?

My favorite founding father, John Adams, articulates the problem of raw democracy, untempered by Constitutional Rule of Law, quite clearly in a letter from December 1814 to John Taylor, my emphases added:

Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty. When clear Prospects are opened before Vanity, Pride, Avarice or Ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate Phylosophers and the most conscientious Moralists to resist the temptation.

Thus, Adams was saying much the same thing which George Carlin ended up proclaiming centuries later, my mantra for a year and a half now: the public sucks. “The people,” “the unwashed masses,” are no more inherently moral or trustworthy than the wealthy elite so despised by Zinn and Chomsky.

But democracy Murders itself? Commits suicide? Gee, where might we find such tendencies in Chomsky’s and Zinn’s activist intellectual output and in turn their shaping of the broader far left movement which took their ideas so deeply seriously?

I concluded the entry on Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul with the video at the top of this post featuring Chomsky visiting the Iran-sponsored Islamist terrorist group Hezbollah.

The video notes that Chomsky proclaimed that all prisoners in the United States and Israel should be released, certainly a suicidal, pro-murder position if there ever was one.

Given their rejection of the legitimacy of America’s constitutional government and thus its alliance with the State of Israel, what else did Chomsky and Zinn say about the Islamist murderers and suicide bombers of the Middle East?

Their positions amount to antisemitism, as articulated in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition embraced by dozens of countries and organizations, including the United States. Among the examples given of antisemitism:

Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

And Chomsky and Zinn have both done that. Defending or justifying the terrorist actions of Hamas, the PLO, and Hezbollah; as well as accusing Israel of engaging in genocide against the Palestinians or other Nazi-style tactics amount to antisemitism.

Here are a few examples of Chomsky doing that.

First, in his 2010 book Gaza in Crisis, as noted in this review of 2019’s The Lions' Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky by Susie Linfield, my emphases added:

One of the worst offenders has been Chomsky, a linguist-turned-social commentator who has long been lionized in leftist intellectual circles with an outsized influence in academia. There are few anti-Israel calumnies to which Chomsky will not readily subscribe. He has warned of Israelis’ sinister “Judeo-Nazi tendencies,” labeled Gaza a “concentration camp... under a vicious siege,” and insinuated Israeli Jews are edging closer to ethnically cleansing Palestinians. And he did all this in just one book of many on Israel, Gaza in Crisis, a collection of his essays published in 2010.
Meanwhile, Chomsky patronizes Palestinians, whom he often treats as mere extras in a reductive Manichean morality play of evil oppressors and their innocent victims. To Chomsky, Palestinians are “unconstrained in their search for peace,” as Linfield puts it, while Israelis are incorrigibly belligerent expansionists. He refuses to take homicidal Islamism among Palestinians seriously, choosing instead to see its purveyors as peaceable souls brutalized into resisting Israel violently.
In Gaza in Crisis, for instance, he posits Hamas “has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus.” In fact, Hamas has never deviated from its stated aim, duly spelled out in its charter, of eradicating Israel. Chomsky’s countless other essays and books on Israel and the Palestinians are similarly tendentious as he turns actual realities on their heads.

Second, in his 2015 book On Palestine he makes the genocide accusation against Israel explicit:

“European settlers coming to a foreign land, settling there, and either committing genocide against or expelling the indigenous people. The Zionists have not invented anything new in this respect.”

What about Zinn? He did not focus on Israel anywhere near as much as Chomsky, but articulated largely the same thing, though he explicitly says the founding of Israel was an outright mistake and blames it for causing more antisemitism. He also accuses Israel of engaging in genocide, comparable to US policy hundreds of years ago against Native Americans:

I think the Jewish State was a mistake, yes. Obviously, it’s too late to go back. It was a mistake to drive the Indians off the American continent, but it’s too late to give it back. At the time, I thought creating Israel was a good thing, but in retrospect, it was probably the worst thing that the Jews could have done. What they did was join the nationalistic frenzy, they became privy to all of the evils that nationalism creates and became very much like the United States—very aggressive, violent and bigoted. When Jews were without a state they were internationalists and they contributed to whatever culture they were part of and produced great things. Jews were known as kindly, talented people. Now, I think, Israel is contributing to anti-Semitism. So I think it was a big mistake.

This sentiment also falls into another example of antisemitism cited in the IHRA definition:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Also like Chomsky, Zinn refuses to acknowledge the reality that the Palestinians are disinterested in actually pursuing a two-state solution, that they continue to seek the destruction of the state of Israel. He too primarily blames Israel for perpetuating the conflict:

Ideally, there should be a secular state in which Arabs and Jews live together as equals. There are countries around the world where different ethnic groups live side by side. But that is very difficult and therefore the two-state solution seems like the most practical thing, especially since both Jews and Palestinians seem to favor it. It’s odd: All these people on both sides want a two-state solution, but it can’t come into being. The basic problem is the fanaticism of people like Benjamin Netanyahu and people who don’t want to give up the occupied territories.

Of course it’s well worth pointing out here: in the current state of Israel, Jews and Arabs do live together as equals. Arab citizens of Israel (21.1% of the population) have equal rights with Jewish citizens. It’s also worth pointing out that Zinn is advocating the end of the Jewish state. Much of the point of Israel is having a state with a Jewish majority, operating according to Jewish values. Islam is the official religion of 26 states. Why can the Jews not have a single state in which their religion, values, and cultures dominate?

The basic problem is not Netanyahu’s and his allies’ steadfast defense of the Jewish homeland, but the problem my late mentor Barry Rubin explained to me over a decade ago which I laid out in this previous installment in the series:

God of the Desert Books

Why I Don't Expect the Palestinians Will *Ever* Make Peace with Israel and Thus Gain Statehood

2 years ago · 1 like · David Swindle

It is not in the interest of Palestinian leadership to try to end the conflict. The consequence of doing so is twofold: putting a target on their backs in which more extreme groups of Palestinians would attempt to assassinate the peacemakers, and ending the gravy train of foreign aid which makes Palestinian leadership wealthy, enabling lives of luxury. As the statistics I cite below demonstrate, even the Palestinian people by a massive majority know their leadership is corrupt.

It’s also further worth pointing out that the problem with the Palestinian people goes well beyond their leadership. Here are the findings of a December 2022 poll:

Seventy-two percent of Palestinians support the creation of additional armed groups in the West Bank akin to the Lion’s Den terror group that operates against Israel, according to a new poll.
…
Support for a two-state solution fell to just 32% among the Palestinian respondents — five percentage points lower than three months ago. A decade ago, that figure was above 50%. A similar trend has been taking place in Israel, though support for the concept has always been higher there than in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
…
Three months ago, 48% supported a return to violent resistance against Israel.
…
If presidential elections were a two-way contest between Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, only 46% would participate. Haniyeh would come out on top with 54% support among those who would vote, leaving Abbas trailing with only 36%. The poll was similar to results from three months ago, when the numbers were 53% and 38%, respectively.
…
As for who is most deserving to represent and lead the Palestinian people, a plurality of 40% said neither Fatah nor Hamas is up to the task. Twenty-eight percent said Hamas is most deserving, and 25% selected Fatah.
Eighty-one percent of respondents see PA institutions as corrupt, and 69% hold the same view of institutions under control by Hamas, PCPSR said.

I will also again remind everyone, via the ADL Global 100, that the highest rate of antisemitism is to be found in the West Bank and Gaza at 93%.

How could Chomsky and Zinn - two of the supposed brightest lights of the Left, inspiring more “progressives” than just about any other “intellectuals” for roughly the last 40 years - be so blind as to be unable or unwilling to see the obvious fact of Palestinian intransigence as the primary sustaining factor of the conflict?

Perhaps it’s the same reason why they are both unable to or unwilling to recognize that the principles of the Constitution have enabled the United States to become the world’s most powerful beacon of freedom and prosperity which it has been now for at least a century?

Intense ideology makes even the smartest, most gifted of thinkers blind to the most obvious realities that even teenagers and undergraduates are capable of perceiving with ease upon examining a handful of uncontroversial, nearly incontestable facts.

The Antisemitism of Noam Chomsky's Far Left Anarcho-Syndicalist Ideological Cult

Explaining what the far left anarchists have in common with the far right anarchists. They may disagree on economics but when it comes to the Constitution and the Jewish state they are in synch.

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