I’ve been reading Benjamin Kerstein’s blog, diary of an anti-Chomskyite, for awhile now. Normally I’m not too keen on defining oneself purely on the basis of who or what one is against, but in Noam Chomsky’s case I’m willing to make an exception.
For those who may be blissfully unaware of Chomsky’s existence, he is one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of the extreme left. His more legitimate claim to fame is in the field of Linguistics, in which he is somewhat of a guru as well, but he has been successful in leveraging this scholastic notoriety to gain an audience for his extreme political views. Most of his quasi-supporters seem to conveniently forget that he is not a Democrat, but an anarchist, who said in his foreword to Daniel Guerin’s Anarchism, “Any consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and … wage slavery…” (the quote is from memory, I may have paraphrased marginally).
Getting to my main point, Benjamin’s latest is a long, interesting article about the extreme left’s view of Israel, in this case in an analysis of the writings of someone who is actually criticizing Chomsky for not being anti-Israel enough. Really interesting reading.
