Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
Last week USA Today ran a column by Walter Shapiro berating Noam Chomsky and his book 9-11, which concludes with "The best response to the frenzied e-mailed dispatches from this left-wing crank remains public disclosure and ridicule."
But ridicule is all Shapiro offers since he never actually refutes any of Chomsky's claims. Rather he just labels them as "shrill assertions."
This paragraph is particularly telling:
At the beginning of 9-11, Chomsky briefly puts aside his virulent anti-Americanism to label the Sept. 11 attacks as "horrifying atrocities." But pretty soon, he declares that bin Laden's "call for the overthrow of corrupt and brutal regimes of gangsters and torturers resonates quite widely." And rather than pursuing bin Laden, Chomsky suggests that it would "make a lot more sense" to "consider realistically the background concerns and grievances, and to try to remedy them."
There is nothing the least bit inconsistent about deploring the September 11 attacks but then recognizing there is a reason why people felt justified in committing them and why others some the attacks as justified. It is a fact that some people hate the United States enough to want to attack it so it would seem someone like Shapiro would want to understand why they feel this way. Keep in mind that understanding does not necessarily mean agreement.
Shapiro ends the piece by asserting that Bush's policies have plenty of faults but that "Chomsky's momentary popularity overshadows infinitely more reasoned critiques of Bush administration policies." He doesn't name any of these critiques. Apparently attacking "anti-Americanism" is more important to Shapiro than America attacking other countries.
