Why pick deluded Chomsky for prize?

Since the Vietnam war era, Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor Noam Chomsky has been a veritable paladin of the Left.

Chomsky is in the news because of the announcement that he is to be the recipient of the 2011 Sydney Peace Prize.  A closer look reveals the professor unworthy of such an honour.

Any serious student who delves into Chomsky's written work will discover a sordid underside of moral depravity and intellectual dishonesty.  This taint is particularly noxious on the issue of genocide.

The record shows Chomsky spent the latter 1970s attempting to whitewash the mass murder then under way at the hands of the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. 

But the truth of the Cambodian genocide was there to see for anyone not blinded by ideology.  US Congressional hearings in May 1977 featured exhaustive testimony on the Khmer Rouge campaign of mass slaughter.

But Chomsky views the world through a simple prism in which the Washington establishment is the primary author of global evil.  And if the US is wicked, those who oppose it must be good.

Personal correspondence landed Chomsky in trouble on the topic of another genocide.  In a missive Chomsky declared:  ''I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.  Nor would there be anti-Semitic implications, per se, in the claim that the Holocaust is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence.''

This gives rise to why the Sydney Peace Foundation selected such a morally tainted individual for their 2011 Peace Prize.

A compelling clue is provided by Chomsky's recent essay on the SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.  In this article Chomsky dances perilously close to outright 9/11 denialism, casting sarcastic doubts on bin Laden's own claims of responsibility.  He then goes on to declare that even if al-Qaeda did perpetrate the September 2001 attack, the crimes of George Bush ''uncontroversially exceed bin Laden's''.

The only award worthy of Noam Chomsky is the booby prize for moral perversion.  And that small coterie of activists who make up the Sydney Peace Foundation's board should get runner-up.

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