Hitchens takes on Chomsky. Go Hitch!

Two days ago, when I read this Noam Chomsky piece on Osama bin Laden's death, I tweeted that Chomsky has gone off the deep end, and that it is high time he retired.

I may have as well not vented about it, because there is the mother of all responses to Chomsky, from the debater extraordinaire, Christopher Hitchens, who writes that Chomsky is "offensive, inconsistent, and ignorant." 

Hitchens points Chomsky, who claims that there isn't evidence linking bin Laden to 9/11, to the ever mounting evidence against bin Laden, and not all of it is from the US government either:

Chomsky still enjoys some reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual. And in the face of bombardments of official propaganda, he prides himself in a signature phrase on his stern insistence on "turning to the facts." So is one to assume that he has pored through the completed findings of the 9/11 Commission? Viewed any of the videos in which the 9/11 hijackers are seen in the company of Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker"? Followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen, or John Burns, to name only some of the more salient? Acquainted himself with the proceedings of associated and ancillary investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole or indeed the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in the 1990s?

It is this bizarre anti-war left of the Noam Chomskys and Arundhati Roys that then makes the anti-war people like me even hide ourselves in a closet.  Because, normal people think that anybody who is anti-war has to be a fanatical nutcase like a Chomsky or Roy!  And the Chomsky faithful think that people like me are sellouts, to whom I know not!

As Hitchens writes, "With the paranoid anti-war "left," you never quite know where the emphasis is going to fall next."  He knows it all too well--after all, he was a darling of the left crowd until he pissed them off by turning colors soon after, and in response to, the events of 9/11.

Hitchens summarizes a Chomsky (world)view as thus:

In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.

Stage left, Professor Chomsky. And his populist sidekick, Michael Moore, too.