Response to Gad Saad and his "six degrees of Noam Chomsky thinking"

Gad Saad's attempt to repurpose the six degrees of separation theory^[1] to show how apparently "delusional" it is to suggest that United States foreign policy has a penetrating global influence, is barely anything new. Here, I will briefly explain why Saad's thought experiment is simply another confusing and misrepresentative attack, in the grand old line of such attacks, against those critical of the role played by the sole global superpower.

Response to Ian Williams' exchange with Noam Chomsky regarding Kosovo, humanitarian intervention, and East Timor

In August and September 2009, Ian Williams and Noam Chomsky exchanged articles on the website Foreign Policy In Focus^[1] concerning the Kosovo war and NATO military intervention. Here, I would like to evaluate Ian Williams' responses in that exchange.

Response to Tom Suarez's article entitled "Chomsky and BDS"

This article is a slightly modified version of a Facebook comment previously made by me^[1] in response to a Facebook post from the journalist and blogger Jonathan Cook.^[2] In that Facebook post, Cook offers an article by Tom Suarez in Mondoweiss^[3] as being, in Cook's eyes, a good starting point for criticisms of Chomsky's position on the one-state/two-state debate that has been elucidated in multiple fora, for example in a recent article for The Nation^[4], and in a 2010 interview.^[5]

Gatekeeping is in the eye of the beholder: a critique of James Corbett's podcast entitled "Meet Noam Chomsky, Academic Gatekeeper"

SUMMARY

In his podcast on the 27th of October 2013,^[1] online blogger and current affairs analyst James Corbett aims to show that Noam Chomsky,^[2] the influential linguistics professor and political dissident, is an "academic gatekeeper" that is stifling or diverting dissent or critical engagement in three specific areas of public discourse:

• attitudes towards the Federal Reserve System,
• attitudes towards the John F. Kennedy (JFK) assassination,
• and attitudes towards the 9/11 truth movement.

Corbett identifies these three topics as currently lacking sufficiently widespread public examination and proposes that Chomsky's views are a contributing factor in opposing, belittling, or marginalising such public examination of these issues.

In my opinion, Corbett's approach suffers from the following problems that limit diligent exploration of his chosen topic: