Noam Chomsky Replies to Norman Podhoretz

Norman Podhoretz asserts (Editorial Pages, June 26) that I am one of those who “equate the deliberate murder of civilians” in terrorist attacks “with the collateral and inadvertent damage to civilians that may result from a military action against a military target.”

The latter phrase is the one regularly used by Communist Party hacks when the Soviet Union conducts murderous bombardment of Afghan villages or by their counterparts here, Podhoretz being a notorious example, when B-52 raids are targeted against villages in the Mekong Delta or Israel bombs defenseless West Beirut.

No state admits that it is murdering civilians; rather, mass slaughter of civilians is always just “collateral and inadvertent,” even when specifically directed against the civilian population, as in the cases just mentioned.

Podhoretz errs when he states that those he condemns “equate” the retail terrorism of airplane hijackers and the like with the wholesale terrorism conducted by states in pursuit of their foreign policy ends. Only a moral imbecile would equate the two. Thus it was certainly a crime when Israeli terrorists murdered U.N. mediator Folke Bernadotte and David Ben-Gurion concealed the identity of the assassins, or when Israel carried out the first airplane hijacking in the Middle East in 1954 “to get hostages in order to obtain the release” of Israeli soldiers caught on a mission inside Syria (Prime Minister Moshe Sharett).

But, it is a vastly more horrifying crime when the U.S.S.R. carries out what it calls “legal military operations” in Afghanistan, to borrow the words Podhoretz applies to similar crimes. As usual, Podhoretz descends below moral imbecility with his apologetics for wholesale slaughter by his two favored states. He furthermore lies outright when he denounces those who condemn all forms of terrorism, retail and wholesale, as “apologists for terrorism.”

As for Podhoretz’s willingness to “sentence a number of Americans to death” and to “risk life itself”--that is, the lives of others--by bombing Lebanon, Iran and Syria, thus “comporting oneself with pride,” perhaps no comment is needed, apart from an expression of thanks that sick minds are unable to indulge their Rambo fantasies in the real world.

NOAM CHOMSKY

Cambridge, Mass.