Chomsky bitch-slaps Bernard Lewis:
SOLOMON: All right. There's a popular phrase now, Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. And writers like Bernard Lewis ask, "What Went Wrong?" He claims there's a historical clash of civilizations between Islamic culture and Western Judeo-Christian culture. They resent us, there's enormous amounts of hatred. It goes back in history, because of resentment.
CHOMSKY: Yes, there's hatred against us. Why? It's easy to find out. The U.S. is a very free country. We have enormous internal classified records, so let's look at them. In 1958, the U.S. government faced, you know, from internal records, three major crises in the world. North Africa, Middle East and Indonesia, all with oil producing states, all Islamic states.
President Eisenhower, in an internal discussion, observed to his staff, and I'm quoting now, "There's a campaign of hatred against us in the Middle East, not by governments, but by the people." The national security council discussed that question and said, "yes, and the reason is, there's a perception in that region that the United States supports status quo governments, which prevent democracy and development and that we do it because of our interests in Middle East oil.
Furthermore, it's difficult to counter that perception because it's correct. It ought to be correct. We ought to be supporting brutal and corrupt governments which prevent democracy and development because we want to control Middle East oil, and it's true that leads to a campaign of hatred against us."
Now, until Bernard Lewis tells us that, and that's only one piece of a long story, we know that he's just a vulgar propagandist and not a scholar.
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