Pirates and Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World

by Noam Chomsky. New York: Claremont Research & Publications, 1986. 174 pp. $17.95

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

Do words mean what they say? Lawyers sometimes argued they didn't, especially when awkward facts stymied their clients. Then legal doctrine said they meant what they were ordinarily taken to mean. Lewis Carroll's Alice had them mean whatever she wanted them to.

Now comes a passionate denunciation by Noam Chomsky of hypocritical verbal sleight-of-hand employed by the United States government in the Middle East. Chomsky's Pirates and Emperors relates a story of St. Augustine, in which Alexander the Great berates a captured pirate for molesting commerce on the sea. The pirate argues that he is labeled a thief only because he employs a little ship in his plundering while Alexander, using a great navy, is called an Emperor. Chomsky depicts Emperor/United States employing large-scale violence in the Middle East righteously according to its current ideological values, while denouncing Arabs, especially Palestinians, as "terrorists" for committing lesser crimes.

Chomsky fully documents the dark thought that just as surely as someone dreams us a chamber of horrors, someone else puts it into actual practice. In George Orwell's 1984, black was white, war was peace and historical facts to the contrary disappeared down convenient "memory holes." Orwell's "newspeak" became reality in 1982 when Emperor/United States first approved and then excused the slaughter by Israeli forces of 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians because Israel said it would bring "peace for Galilee."

Chomsky's brilliance, sustained passion, and wealth of supporting detail permeate the book's sparkling preface and three chapters: Thought Control: The Case of the Middle East; Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System; and Libya in US Demonology.

Chomsky sees the "peace process" as "new-speak," with words used in a technical sense divorced from their ordinary meaning. As used by mainstream American journalists and scholars, "peace process" means peace proposals advanced by the US.

This permits the New York Times' Bernard Gwertzman to ask if Palestinians are ready to seek peace. The US-proposed "peace process" to date does not guarantee Palestinians self-determination, and they are unwilling to participate without such a US guarantee. Ergo the Palestinians do not seek peace. Gwertzman does not have to ask if the US itself seeks peace, for we do so by definition.

In such a world of "necessary illusion," Chomsky asserts, inconvenient facts are suppressed, or relegated to Orwell's useful memory hole. In describing the history of Mideast peace efforts, the Times cannot cite any Israeli peace proposals because no serious ones have ever been advanced. Instead of reporting this remarkable fact, Chomsky notes, the Times leaves it unmentioned.

Chomsky: Peace Process is Rejectionist

Chomsky argues persuasively that it is the US "peace process" that is explicitly rejectionist. The US and Israel, he points out, do not even plan to permit the Palestinians to select their representatives in eventual negotiations about their own fate. Chomsky wields his intellect like a scythe as he cuts rapidly through the thickets of misinformation, half truths, and simple lies that permeate so much of American media coverage of the Middle East.

Yet, one of Chomsky's basic themes, that the US uses Israel as its catspaw in the Middle East, is troubling. In Chomsky's view, since Israel is so totally dependent on the US, it quite reliably carries out US purposes. In other words, the US dog wags the Israeli tail. Most experienced US Middle East specialists would argue, however, that the reality is the reverse. Except for one exceptional period in late 1956 and early 1957, when Dwight Eisenhower broke up the Israeli attack on Egypt and later forced the Israelis to evacuate Sinai, Israel has successfully pursued its own short and long-range goals in the Middle East with virtually no restraint from the US. This has been consistently true, even when those goals were clearly contrary to America's, as has been the case throughout the 1980's.

If Chomsky is correct and it is the dog wagging the tail instead of the tail wagging the dog, why must Israel's American lobby bribe US politicians with so many millions of dollars in order to get Israel's annual infusion of $3 billion in gifts? If the US is getting its money's worth from Israel, it would not be necessary to bribe the Congressmen and intimidate the mainstream US media from open discussion of the matter.

Whether they believe it is the dog that wags the tail or vice versa, readers will benefit from this book by one of America's most distinguished, and outspoken, scholars.

Andrew I. Killgore is President of the American Educational Trust.