Anti-war activist Noam Chomsky claimed today that Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad did not gas his own people with chemical weapons last month.
In an interview with Democracy Now the left-wing intellectual argued that, rather, the attack could only have been carried out by "privileged white people" from America or Europe.
"This just doesn't fit the pattern" Chomsky told host Amy Goodman. "Usually the white people are oppressing the brown people. But here you have a brown person slaughtering brown people. It just doesn't add up. Brown people are supposed to be the good guys.
"Clearly what's happened is that America or Sweden or some other blond-haired, neo-liberal country instigated this attack and then framed Assad as an excuse to invade and steal Syria's oil. It's the only thing that makes any sense.
"I'm sure Monsanto is involved too, but I haven't figured out how yet. The Western corporatists have gone too far this time. We need to condemn this heinous atrocity."
Manufacturing Lament
Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist whose theory of generative grammar revolutionized the field in the 1950s and 60s. Recently, however, he has been better known for his political views, in particular his vitriolic criticism of United States foreign policy.
Chomsky became a hero on the left for his cogent opposition to the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s. In recent decades, however, he has opposed all Western military intervention, including humanitarian strikes in places like Kosovo, Libya and Syria supported by others on the intellectual left.
But suggesting that the Syrian chemical attacks were staged by whites in a false flag operation was too much even for Goodman, who took Chomsky to task over his assertions.
"You seem to be implying that only Western countries can commit war crimes," she gently admonished. "Isn't that a bit myopic and ahistorical?"
"Not at all Amy, quite the contrary, " he replied. "White people have the worst human rights record in the world. Who committed the holocaust? White people. Who pretended there was a genocide in Cambodia? White people. Who is responsible for Justin Bieber's music? White people.
"White people are awful. If we really cared about the citizens of Syria we'd be trying to find the real perpetrators of these chemical attacks instead of bombing innocent members of the Assad regime."
Chomsky is a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books including Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media and Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance.
