“The Zionists are like Hitler” and the Question of the Mufti
The Fateful Triangle contains twelve references to Hitler.
In each case some Jewish action is said to be like Hitler’s
or some attribute of the state of Israel or the Zionist
movement reminds Chomsky of Hitler.
It is clear that Chomsky is fascinated by Hitler in this
book that ostensibly deals with the history of Palestine,
with Israel, with the Arabs. With all that, it is
surprising indeed that Chomsky has completely overlooked the
one political movement in Palestine that openly declared its
allegiance to Hitler, the Arab nationalist movement led by
Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. By
now every school boy knows about the Mufti’s great power and
prestige in the Arab population of Palestine during the
British Mandate, about the Mufti’s admiration for Hitler,
about his banishment from Palestine by the British during
the Second World War, about the Mufti’s state visit to
Hitler in 1943, about the embarrassed distance which today’s
Arab leaders try to maintain from anything that might evoke
his name.
There is no mention in Chomsky’s book of the Mufti’s name or
movement, no mention that this movement may well have
justified fears among Jews — nothing at all to tell the
reader that there ever was a Mufti of Jerusalem who
collaborated with the Nazis. Like the Ministry of Truth in
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Chomsky has consigned
the Mufti’s name to a hole in which, he no doubt hopes, its
memory will be consumed by flames.<76>
Deir Yassin and other Atrocities
Chomsky devotes four pages, pp. 94-8, to a section he
entitles “The War of Independence/Conquest.” Much of this
section bears no ascertainable relationship to the struggle
of 1948, and reports of actual violence are confined to
parts of pages 95 and 96. Chomsky introduces this
discussion with the impartial observation — self-
exculpatory in its judiciousness — that there had been
“terror and violence on both sides.” But his impartiality
vanishes very soon because the only two concrete examples of
violence that he shares with his reader happen to be
allegations against Jews. First he mentions briefly a
Haganah operation at Khissas in December of 1947, reporting
the Haganah as “killing 10 Arabs, including one woman and
four children.” The rest of his section is devoted to
events at the Arab village of Deir Yassin.
There are a number of reports concerning this incident of
April 8, 1948, but the main facts are not in dispute.
Formations of the right-wing Jewish fighting organizations
Irgun Tsvai Leumi (“Etsel”) and the Lokhamei Kherut Yisrael
(“Lekhi,” also known abroad as the “Stern Gang”) seized the
village and in the ensuing events 254 Arab men, women, and
children lost their lives. The behavior of the two Jewish
groups was condemned by the official organs of the Jewish
community, and Ben Gurion sent a telegram of apology and
regret to King Abdullah.
The Deir Yassin episode is reported by all those who write
about the history of Israel, but, as we would expect, the
treatment varies in accordance with the bias and
predispositions of the writer. Jewish and Zionist writers
that I have consulted do not seek to hide the horror of the
incident.<77> The more-or-less neutral Sykes, recommended by
Chomsky for background reading, gives a balanced report and
seeks to understand the military motives behind the events.
Sykes does not in any way excuse or justify the attackers
but he believes their word that the action had been
directed against a military post in the midst of the village
and that the Arab inhabitants had been urged by the Jewish
forces to leave prior to the attack (p. 416).
But be that as it may, all reasonable commentators place
Deir Yassin in the context of the ongoing hostilities.
Chomsky omits this context completely. He does not mention,
for example, that three days after Deir Yassin, seventy-
seven Jewish doctors, nurses, and associated university
personnel, traveling in a Red Cross convoy, were killed by
an Arab ambush. Many similar outrages occurred in the same
period, and neutral observers find blame on each side.
(Nobody in the Arab world, at least no official source,
expressed regret for the killing of the Jewish doctors, or
for any of the other Arab attacks on Jewish civilians.)
Chomsky’s discussion of Deir Yassin actually has at least
three characteristics that distinguish it from any of the
variety of fair-minded comment that could be made. First,
and in stark contrast to his treatment of Arab terrorism in
Hebron and elsewhere, his description of Deir Yassin is one
of a totally unprovoked, totally sadistic Jewish atrocity.
He comes back to this Deir Yassin “atrocity” throughout the
book, mentioning it in all kinds of contexts, always to show
the total depravity of the Jewish Zionist enterprise.
Second, as we just saw, he completely suppresses the context
of violence and counter-violence in which Deir Yassin took
place. Third, he treats Deir Yassin as the only military
action worth talking about in the War of Independence, thus
making of Deir Yassin a myth and an emblem of the whole Arab-
Jewish relationship.
Deir Yassin is to Chomsky and his colleagues what Dresden is
to those who would justify the Nazis. To the apologists of
the Third Reich — and of course they overlap with the “anti-
Zionists” — there is only one event in the Second World War
that counts: the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945 and the
heavy loss of German civilian life that it entailed. The
neo-Nazi Holocaust-deniers refer to Dresden as the only
actual holocaust of the War. Dresden and Deir Yassin were
terrible tragedies, but the Holocaust-deniers and anti-
Zionists, separately and together, celebrate these events as
if their retelling in mythic form constituted a punishment
of and victory over the Jews of our time.
Chomsky ends his Fateful Triangle by embracing the notion of
a “Samson complex.” He says that the greatest trouble spot
on earth, barring none, is the conflict between Israel and
the Arabs.<78> The government and people of the Zionist
state, he says, are basing themselves on “the genocidal
texts of the Bible”<79> and may well decide to commit
national suicide and final destruction of the planet by
plunging the world into nuclear war. “This `Samson complex’
is not something to be taken lightly.'”<80>
Chomsky’s notion of a “Samson complex,” much like that of
Howard Stein which we encountered earlier, is in many ways
close to the medieval blood-libel against the Jewish people.
Stein and Chomsky suggest, partly in so many words and
partly by implication, that Jews are exceedingly dangerous
beings, that they lack the human qualities of reason and
mercy, and that they are possessed by a blind hatred of non-
Jewish mankind. Even one of Chomsky’s supporters found this
Samson doctrine too extreme to swallow.<81>
Chomsky is somewhat more cautious than Stein on this matter.
To Stein the Samson complex, insofar as I have been able to
understand him, affects all Jews everywhere. To Chomsky it
is Israel and its supporters who are to be feared, rather
than Jews in general. But like Stein, Chomsky blames
Jewish religious traditions, not “Zionism,” for this
“Samson complex.”
I have come to the end of Chomsky’s story but there is a
final question that some readers may find bothersome. I
have described the politics of Noam Chomsky insofar as they
relate to Nazism, and I have also shown something about
Chomsky’s associates: Faurisson, Guillaume, Thion, the
Institute for Historical Review. Chomsky’s propaganda,
taken by itself, is obnoxious and certainly hostile to Jews
but still does not have quite the same character as that of
his associates. Where they are frankly neo-Nazi and anti-
Semitic, he fudges and covers himself with self-exculpating
formulas. Were it not for his associates we would certainly
wish to recognize a line between him and organized anti-
Semitism.
The reader will have to judge for himself what to make of
Chomsky’s choice of political friends. My summary of the
issue is that his associates are in the business of
justifying the Nazis and that Chomsky helps them to carry on
this business, not at all as a defender of freedom of speech
but as a warm and reliable friend.
Much nonsense is sometimes written about the alleged fallacy
of “guilt by association.” True, if Chomsky happened to be
associated with Faurisson and Thion in a tennis club, that
particular association would not make him a neo-Nazi. But
in fact we saw that Chomsky justified Faurisson’s Holocaust-
denial, we found Chomsky publishing his own books with neo-
Nazi publishers, we saw him writing for a neo-Nazi journal,
we saw that the neo-Nazis promote Chomsky’s books and tapes
together with the works of Joseph Goebbels. It is this
complex of anti-Semitic activities and neo-Nazi
associations, not his professed ideas alone, that
constitutes Chomsky’s war against the Jews.
Last-Modified: 1996/12/05
[Archived with author’s consent]
[Partners in Hate: Page 125]
