CULLED FROM DEMOCRACYNOW:

We hear an excerpt of a speech by MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky 
speaking at the 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton. The 
historian and author spoke about Yasser Arafat, Iraq and the military draft. 
[includes rush transcript] 

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was buried in the West Bank this weekend. 
For decades, Arafat was the embodiment of the Palestinian cause and the symbol 
of resistance against Israeli occupation. He was laid to rest in the Ramallah 
headquarters where was confined by Israel for the final years of his life. 
Tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered around his flag-draped coffin as 
it was carried across the compound. Mourners wept and chanted in an emotional 
farewell bid to the only leader many of them have ever known. New Palestinian 
officials has been named to lead in the post-Arafat era but the future remains 
uncertain. 
The new chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Mahmoud Abbas, 
escaped injury Sunday after masked members of the Al Aksr Brigade opened fire on 
a gathering where Palestinians were mourning the death of Yasser Arafat. Two 
of Abbas' bodygards were killed in the shooting. 
This past weekend, MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky spoke at the 25th 
Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New Jersey. The 
historian and author of over 100 books spoke about Yasser Arafat, Iraq and the 
military draft. This is an excerpt of what he had to say. 
Noam Chomsky, speaking at the 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action 
in Princeton, New Jersey.


RUSH TRANSCRIPT 
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AMY GOODMAN: This past weekend, MIT linguistics professor, Noam Chomsky spoke 
at the 25th anniversary of the Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New 
Jersey. Noam Chomsky has written over 100 books, well-known political analyst, 
linguist at MIT. He talked about Yasser Arafat, about Iraq, about the military 
draft here in this country. He spoke on Sunday. This is an excerpt of what he 
had to say. 
NOAM CHOMSKY: I had a little time on the airplane and read this morning's 
Times and there is, as expected, a front page story that is in the weekend review 
by a very good reporter. It's about a highly significant topic, how to 
establish democracy -- or the president's messianic vision, as the Boston Globe 
calls it, my own newspaper. And it discusses a current example, which has had a 
huge amount of media commentary in the last couple days, the Palestinian issue, 
what happens after Arafat. The first paragraph says that the post-Arafat era 
will be the latest test of a quintessentially American article of faith, that 
elections provide legitimacy, even to the frailest institutions. Okay, that's 
our quintessential article of faith. Then it goes on, and we'll skip to the 
last paragraph. The last paragraph on the continuation page says there's a 
paradox. In the past, the Bush administration, and he could have added every 
previous one, resisted new national elections among Palestinians. The thought was 
that the elections would make Mr. Arafat look better, and give him a fresher 
mandate, and might have helped give credibility and authority to Hamas. So in 
other words, we have a quintessential commitment to democracy, but in the single 
example that is given we oppose democracy because the outcome might come out 
the wrong way. Well, there are some conclusions you can draw from that one 
example. Yes, we support democracy, as long as it comes out the right way. 
Otherwise, we'll block it. Now, more has to be said. The first paragraph is not false. 
If by Americans you mean American people, that's quite true. It is a 
quintessential article of faith among the general population that we ought to have 
democracy and elections. It simply is rejected by every single government, and by 
the media and by elite opinion. Their position is we should are democracy and 
elections when it comes out the right way, as in this case. So, there's 
really no contradiction, if you sort of interpret it properly, but the lessons are 
there, and the single example chosen does in fact illustrate them, and 
incidentally, it's not unusual to re-find them. I often discover, probably others do 
too, that if you want to read an article in a major newspaper, the best way to 
do it is to start with the end. The last paragraph quite often has something 
interesting. The first paragraph usually has something for the headline 
writers and for the casual reader. And I don't know if this is done consciously or 
not, but it's pretty consistent. Well, let's continue. What is illustrated by 
this front page article and in a series of front page articles and editorials 
in the last few days is a principle. The principle is that we, and we is 
identified with the government, not the population and - I’ll come back to this, 
there's a radical difference in opinion between them, but that we, the 
government, are always guided by benign intent. That's kind of like an axiom. We can 
make mistakes along the way, but the intention was benevolent. Try to find an 
exception to that way at the left liberal end of criticism in the mainstream. 
Well in conformity with these guidelines, the New York Times before had a front 
page think-piece on Arafat's death. So did many other journals, but I’ll keep 
to the Times, they're all approximately the same. The article begins by 
informing us, first paragraph again, that Arafat was both the symbol of the 
Palestinians' hope for a viable independent state and the prime obstacle to its 
realization. He was never, it goes on, he was never able to reach the heights of 
President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who won back the Sinai through a peace treaty with 
Israel in 1979 because he was able to reach out to Israelis and address their 
fears and hope with his visit to Jerusalem in 1977. That was the same story 
in every newspaper I looked at with slight nuances. There is a documentary 
record, rich as possible sources, unambiguous, and it happens to tell a different 
story. But it's not allowed. And it is not allowed because it would violate 
the fundamental principle that what we do is benign, we, meaning the government, 
not the population. So, let's take a look at that. The documentary record 
shows uncontroversially and explicitly and unambiguously that the main obstacle 
to the realization of the Palestinian state was Washington, and competing 
pretty well for second place is the New York Times and its colleagues, which have 
consistently “mispressed” or misrepresented the crucial facts. And the crucial 
facts are not in doubt. I’ll run through a small sample because it's brief. 
Let's pick some examples. So in 1976, the United States became the chief 
obstacle to a Palestinian state, very simply. The Security Council of the United 
Nations debated a resolution calling for a two-state settlement, a Palestinian 
settlement, a Palestinian state alongside of Israel, both states having all the 
rights guaranteed in the international system. This was in accord with a very 
broad international consensus that was supported by the Arab states, backed by 
the PLO and just about everybody. And in fact by then it had crystallized as 
an overwhelming international consensus. The U.S. vetoed. It was vetoed. The 
U.S. veto, incidentally, is a double veto. It vetoes the resolution and also 
vetoes recording in history. So it's out of history but it happened. It happened 
again in 1980, the same resolution, the same again. There is a long record up 
to the present. It continues consistently, General Assembly initiatives from 
Europe, initiatives from the PLO, initiatives from the Arab states. Whatever 
they are, the U.S. blocks them. And that continues, the most recent dramatic 
case, there are plenty of others, was in Geneva in the year 2002. There are a 
series bases for settlement along the lines of the international consensus. It 
was presented by prominent Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. It was strongly 
supported by almost the whole world with the notable exception the United 
States, which alone refused to send even a message of support as was indeed 
reported in the New York Times in a very dismissive article, saying, this is all 
nonsense. Let's go to Sadat. Well again, the facts are clear. Sadat in fact did 
go to Jerusalem and make a proposal, but it was not - but that proposal in 
1977 repeated one that he had made in 1971. In 1971, not 1977, Sadat offered a 
full peace treaty to Israel in accord with official U.S. government policy 
offering nothing to the Palestinians. Their rights had not yet entered the 
international agenda. That was recognized by Israel to be a genuine peace offer. They 
rejected it. They preferred expansion to peace. This is the labor government. 
Expansion then meant into the northeastern Sinai. Important question as always 
is what's the U.S. going to do under Kissinger's initiative. The U.S. decided 
to reject its official policy and to support Israeli rejectionism, the policy 
was what Kissinger called stalemate in his memoirs. Stalemate, we prefer to 
stalemate not negotiations, just force. That led directly to the 1973 war. A 
very close call for Israel. Nuclear alert. Very close call for the world. After 
that, Kissinger recognized that you cannot just dismiss Egypt as a basket 
case, began his famous shuttle diplomacy, that led to the Camp David agreements 
where indeed in 1979 the United States and Israel accepted Sadat's 1971 offer, 
okay. Actually from the U.S.-Israeli point of view, a harsher offer because by 
that time, it included a call for a Palestinian state in accordance with a new 
emerging international consensus, which faced an impossible obstacle, namely 
the U.S. government and its median commentary. Well, that goes down in history 
as a diplomatic triumph for the United States. In real history it's a 
diplomatic catastrophe. The U.S. refusal to accept a peaceful settlement in 1971 led 
to a terrible war, very dangerous one, years of suffering and misery with effec
ts that still are very much there. But it shows the advantages of owning 
history. You can kind of reshape it into your own -- to satisfy your own needs. 
And you therefore get the first paragraph that I just read from the world's 
leading newspaper, front page think-piece, duplicated just about everywhere in the 
media, and that includes journals of opinion. You might try to look for an 
exception. The example does illustrate again the basic guidelines of commentary, 
media in particular, but commentary generally. We're good, meaning the 
government, not the people, we accept the totalitarian notion that we identify the 
people with the state, so when they say we, it means the government. The 
government is good. We are good, benevolent, well-intentioned, that we seek peace 
and justice. We're foiled by villain who cannot rise to our exalted level. It 
doesn't matter what the facts are. Not that it matters what simple logic tells 
us. 
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, speaking on Sunday in Princeton, New Jersey. 
Afterwards, he was asked a series of question, one of them was, would the draft be 
reinstated. 
NOAM CHOMSKY: I think it's extremely unlikely. I should tell you this as a 
word of personal background. I was very much involved in the resistance movement 
in the 1960's. In fact, I was just barely -- the only reason I missed a long 
jail sentence is because the Tet Offensive came along and the trials were 
called off. So I was very much involved in the resistance, but I was never against 
the draft. I disagreed with a lot of my friends and associates on that, for a 
very good reason, I think at least as nobody seems to agree. In my view, if 
there's going to be an army, I think it ought to be a citizen's army. Now, here 
I do agree with some people, the top brass, they don't want a citizen's army. 
They want a mercenary army, what we call a volunteer army. A mercenary army 
of the disadvantaged. And in fact, in the Vietnam war, the U.S. military 
realized, they had made a very bad mistake. I mean, for the first time I think ever 
in the history of European imperialism, including us, they had used a 
citizen's army to fight a vicious, brutal, colonial war, and civilians just cannot do 
that kind of a thing. For that, you need the French foreign legion, the 
Gurkhas or something like that. Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn 
from the country that they're attacking like England ran India with Indian 
mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the 
other place. That's the standard way to run imperial wars. They're just too 
brutal and violent and murderous. Civilians are not going to be able to do it for 
very long. What happened was, the army started falling apart. One of the 
reasons that the army was withdrawn was because the top military wanted it out of 
there. They were afraid they were not going to have an army anymore. Soldiers 
were fragging officer. The whole thing was falling apart. They were on drugs. 
And that’s why I think that they're not going to have a draft. That's why I’m 
in favor of it. If there's going to be an army that will fight brutal, colonial 
wars, and that's the only likely kind of war, I’m not talking about the 
militarization of space and that kind of thing, I mean ground wars, it ought to be 
a citizen's army so that the attitudes of the society are reflected in the 
military. 
AMY GOODMAN: MIT Professor, Noam Chomsky, speaking in Princeton, New Jersey, 
celebrating 25 years of the Coalition for Peace Action. 

Wahh Duul! Noppi Deyh! Yahya's interpretation: Absolutely, no dissenting 
voice against Yahya or A[F]PRC, or NIA thugs will beat, maimed or kill victim; 
Being apolitical or intimidated, ultimate faith is Suddent Death Syndrome, #1 
killer of Gambians since July 22, 1994

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