Two
hours beforehand, a crowd was already pressing the gate outside Ewart Hall on
the Tahrir Square campus of the American University in Cairo. When American
linguist and author Noam Chomsky arrived on stage, the packed audience of
twelve hundred rose in a thunderous standing ovation. Few Americans could
expect a hero’s welcome in Cairo, but Chomsky has long been a cult figure here
for his stinging critiques of American imperialism and Israeli treatment of
Palestinians.
The
84-year-old sage did not disappoint his admirers. Topping the list of Chomsky’s
concerns is the possibility of an American-backed Israeli military attack aimed
at destroying Iran’s nuclear program. The irony, Chomsky said, is that people
in the Middle East and even Europe believe it is the U.S. and Israel, rather
than Iran, which represents the greater threat to international peace. He noted
that despite the focus on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, Iran is a signatory to
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel, widely believed to be a
nuclear weapon power, is not. To Chomsky, the U.S. and Israel are “two rogue
states that disregard international law and are powerful enough to get away
with it.” He called for serious negotiations toward a nuclear-free Middle East
as a means to avoid a war with Iran.
Chomsky
cast the struggle with Iran as part of America’s efforts to reverse a
precipitous decline in its geostrategic position in the world. The waning of
American power, he explained, can be mirrored in the rise of China, the growing
independence of Latin American states and, more recently, in the Arab Spring.
Said Chomsky: “Movements to independence and democracy are the biggest threat
to [American power]. U.S. foreign policy and control interests rely on
dictators that ensure that public opinion does not democratically manifest in policy.”
Chomsky, author of more than one hundred books and Institute Professor and
Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, said his political writing is motivated by a genuine concern about
the “world we are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren.”
It
is, in his estimation, “not a pretty picture.”