Brian SmallThe Grandin article:^3
Today, almost all of Chomsky’s old political comrades—Zinn, Lynd, Eqbal Ahmad, Grace Paley, Daniel Ellsberg, Marilyn Young, Edward Said, Daniel Berrigan, and Barbara Ehrenreich, among others—are gone. These were friends who could speak to his decency and to his uniqueness in a way that could help us understand what some think, for understandable reasons, was either an unforgivable or an incomprehensible relationship.^3got me wonderingg what Norman Finkelstein might have said. Searches didn't turn up anything, I had to find Finkelstein's website the scroll and guess to find his statement: ^1
I have been asked to comment on allegations of a “relationship” between Professor Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein. It is an incontrovertible fact that Professor Chomsky met and corresponded with everyone. He didn’t discriminate; that was his modus operandi. That disposes of the bulk of the accusations leveled against Professor Chomsky. However, a portion of the allegations do puzzle: for example, a mysterious undated, unsigned, and unaddressed letter that Professor Chomsky supposedly wrote in support of Epstein. Most of the letter does not sound at all like him. How this letter came to be is, at this point, anyone’s guess. ^1Norman Finkelstein was interviewed somewhere about Chomsky taking him and how nice it was to have help in desparate times... Finkelstein also said "but he has weaknesses" and the interviewer asked what they were: "You know what, I'll never tell you, he's a good friend.. " I imagie the weaknesses were thinks like not knowing what Saturday Night Live is or, to notice he was dealing with Borat... Later Chomsky commented what a waste of time it was to talk with the actor playing the role of moron...
Noam Chomsky on Finkelstein: ^2
... [Joan Peters book about Palestinians] everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake.Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He’s a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: “Here’s what I’ve found in this book, do you think it’s worth pursuing?”Well, he got back one answer, from me. I told him, yeah, I think it’s an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you’re going to get in trouble—because you’re going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they’re going to destroy you.So I said: if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you’re getting into. It’s an important issue, it makes a big difference whether you eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population—it’s preparing the basis for some real horrors—so a lot of people’s lives could be at stake. But your life is at stake too, I told him, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.
Well, he didn’t believe me. We became very close friends after this, I didn’t know him before. He went ahead and wrote up an article, and he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn’t even bother responding. I finally managed to place a piece of it in In These Times, a tiny left-wing journal published in Illinois, where some of you may have seen it. Otherwise nothing, no response. Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn’t make appointments with him, they wouldn’t read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.
By this time, he was getting kind of desperate...^2
^1 normanfinkelstein.com/professo…
^2 chomsky.info/power01/
^3 thenation.com/article/society/…
bsmall2