I would urge anyone who has the time to check out and support Ed Vulliamy's open letter to Amnesty International regarding Chomsky's annual lecture on Human Rights. It is an open, honest and deeply passionate piece of work. Vulliamy describes his own experiences in Bosnia during the war, as a witness to the crimes that took place in the Prijedor Region. With heartfelt emotion he condemns what he rightly sees as Chomskys denial of these crimes.
Chomsky has since penned a response, and it is quite underwhelming. There is none of that humanitarian concern that is felt in Vulliamy's letter. Rather, in a cold and didactic manner, Chomsky attempts to deny and dodge Vulliamy's charges. Chomsky starts off by writing:
"It is a nuisance, and a bit of a bore, to dwell on the topic, and I always keep away from personal attacks on me.."
Firstly lets just get one thing straight Chomsk, it is not a personal attack. He is not suggesting that your hair looks bad. Rather it is a justified condemntation of some of the views you have shared on the Bosnian war. Secondly, there is no need to act like your too cool or slick for this. This is human rights and peoples lives we are talking about, not some neighbourhood gossip.
You dodge most the accusations, and then throw in a few arguments that have nothing to do with the letter at hand. I know this isn't going to mean much, because really why would you care about what some young woman like me thinks, but I have lost a lot of respect for you. On the other hand, I never knew who Ed Vulliamy was before, but I have gained a lot of respect for him. It takes great courage and compassion to put yourself right in the middle of a war zone, expose what you have seen, and then care enough to passionately condemn those who have trivialized the suffering and loss of life.
Chomsky, I understand you've had similar letters in the past and have reacted in a very much similar way. Well let me tell you, it is easy to write about human rights abuses with cold, jaded intellectualism-it is not so easy to witness and fight against them.
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12 comments:
You've put your finger on it. It's not the inaccuracy, lack of research, ambiguity, misrepresentation, hypocrisy, etc., in the end that gets you, it's the sheer lack of humanity. He'll grudgingly concede that nasty things may have happened, in Bosnia "Awful things happened and so on and so forth", before getting on with the business of justifying his own political spin, it's the contempt he expresses for someone who's experienced the reality of the situation he misrepresents and responds in the way any normal human being ought to.
How do you know that he is lying?
Muslims from Bosnia pretend in the western world, that they are victims in oder to get more power in Bosnia.
But you should know the muslims in Bosnia dislike gipsies the most.
Here is an independent research:
http://www.fes.ba/publikacije_bo.php
So I do not understand why you support this lying group.
Well, according to a December 1994 CIA report titled Bosnia: Serb Ethnic Cleansing,
"The Vast Majority of Reporting Indicates that Ethnic Serbs Are Probably Responsible for at least 90% of the Destruction, Displacement, and Lose of Life associated with ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.
Now Kate, if you have evidence that the CIA was and still is, grossly inaccurate or in secret alliance with the Bosnian government, I'd be quiet.
If you want the document reference, just fax the CIA a FOIA request for ecember 1994 CIA report titled Bosnia: Serb Ethnic Cleansing and they'll get it you about two weeks in the US, probably longer elsewhere.
I was following up a couple of links and I discovered that Bob from Brockley got there ahead of us back in 2005:
http://brockley.blogspot.com/2005/11/whats-wrong-with-chomsky.html
Kate, are you going to tell me how many Roma death camps the Bosnian Muslims set up?
You introduce the word "lying ", I won't argue with you but I don't want to cause problems for our host so I'll stick to misrepresentation. I know Chomsky is misrepresenting reality when he calls the photograph of Fikret Alic fraudulent and he pretends that Trnopolje was simply a refugee camp which inmates could leave as they chose.
The truth about the Prijedor camp system was established years ago. Chomsky denies it. He's part of the clique that seeks to magnify the phony dispute about the Alic image in order to divert attention from the terrible atrocities that were perpetrated at Omarska and Keraterm.
Chomsky promotes Phillip Knightley's discredited view that the Western media communicated a false notion that the Prijedor camps were Nazi-style concentration camps. That of course is precisely what they were, torture and death camps where the leaders of the local non-Serb community were killed and innocent civilians were beaten, starved and degraded.
http://www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/part1.pdf
http://www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/part2.pdf
The general idea, as you and Chomsky know (or at least he as a professor and renowned intellectual pronouncing on the matter should know) was to secure the ethnic cleansing of an area of strategic importance to the consolidation of the Greater Serbia project.
Chomsky is an attention-diverter, so are you. Try to convince someone who's not already seen where the truth lies.
Kate,
I don't think he's lying, as he wasn't there and did not witness the events, but I do think he's ignoring or as Owen rightly put it misrepresenting the facts.
I know these facts to be true not only due to evidence of mass graves, thousands of eyewitness testimonials, the trials at hague etc..but also because I lived through it myself. Albeit I was younger so I didn't really know the full extent of what was going on, but I have family and family friends who were in those concentrations camps; and two of my parents best friends were killed in them.
I checked out your link but I couldn't really see anything relevant?
I don't know what muslims in bosnia disliking gypsies the most has to do with the post, but I can tell you that that is not true. Gypsies face alot of discrimination not only in the balkans, but everywhere in Europe .It is not something that is unique to Bosnian muslims, and in my opinion as a half muslim/half serb- bosnians, serbs and croats are all guilty of this equally.
Owen,
thanks for that link! It definately hit the nail on the head. It was exactly what I was thinking in regards to Chomsky! Its interesting that others have noticed it aswell, yet you don't hear much about it from the left.
"..it's the contempt he expresses for someone who's experienced the reality of the situation he misrepresents and responds in the way any normal human being ought to."
Definately agree with that.
History punk,
thanks for the source :)
Not a problem. In fact, I'll do one better and tell you to get right now.
Go to http://www.foia.cia.gov/search.asp
Type in SANITIZED BOSNIA: SERB ETHNIC CLEANSING
Clink the only document to appear.
Owen, a rather belated thank you for the mention.
Dancing, a great post.
some time ago, chomsky had regreted that he did not condemn srebrenica genocide.
sorry, i do nor recall where he wrote thats.
on the otherhand, he's now or had been always before against ROR or onestate solution.
thus differs only slightly from other knd of land robbers in paleunderlinestina! tnx
the above comment is from bozhidar baljkas fro sibenik now living in vancouver and in canada for the last 60yrs.
for the record! i find all 'religions' [read, please, cults, or peculiar sciences; thus open for look-see w.o, fear] as extremely vitiating, divisive, hateful, warlike, etc.
tnx bozhidar
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