Outspoken intellectual Noam Chomsky spoke to Jon Snow ahead of his Amnesty International lecture as part of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen’s. In a wide-ranging interview, he discussed Northern Ireland, terrorism, Israel and the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, South America, nuclear weapons, climate change, healthcare reform and human rights.
The Amnesty International Lecture returns to the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen’s on October 30 with one of the world’s sharpest commentators on international affairs and the struggle for human rights and dignity.
A philosopher, linguist, author and political activist, Noam Chomsky was named the world’s leading public intellectual in 2005 in an international poll.
In the 1950s he developed the theory of ‘generative grammar’, which revolutionised the field of linguistics. He has since become one of the foremost critics of US foreign policy, writing numerous groundbreaking books including the best-selling Manufacturing Consent, Hegemony or Survival and Failed States.
Hope and Prospects is the theme of Noam Chomsky’s Amnesty International annual lecture at the Belfast Festival at Queen’s on October 30. The lecture will be followed by a question-and-answer session chaired by William Crawley.
Here are edited extracts from his recent interview with Channel 4’s Jon Snow:
Tackling Terrorism
The lesson is that terrorism has causes ? unless the causes are addressed; you’re not facing the problem. Now a lot of it is criminal activity, and criminal activity should be punished in the legal system fairly and honestly. But unless you address the grievances, you are more or less in the position of a doctor who’s injecting a patient with poison and then asking what’s the best way to deal with the symptoms.
That doesn’t make any sense — first stop administering the poison. There were real grievances in Northern Ireland and Britain had a substantial responsibility for them. When Britain finally stopped responding to terror with more violence, and responded to terror by addressing the grievances, there was substantial amelioration.
The response to September 11
After 9/11 there was overwhelming sympathy for the United States, including inside the jihadi movement. There were fatwas coming out?condemning Osama bin Laden. How did the US respond? By alienating the people who were sympathising. By invading Afghanistan and Iraq and energising the support for terror.
That’s injecting the patient with poison. Now they’re surprised there’s an increase in terror. The response to 9/11 — as historian Michael Howard pointed out almost straight away — should have been: it’s criminal, let’s try to identify the culprits, bring them to justice and give them fair trials.
The Bush administration refused. It’s possible that they might have been able to extradite al-Qaida and bin Laden. In fact the Taliban made ambiguous offers of extradition if the US provided evidence, which of course any country would do. The Bush administration rejected that attempt, and [said] we’re going to bomb you because you’re not handing him over to us. Well that’s a major crime that welded the jihadi movement back together; the invasion of Iraq completed the task of reconstructing a massive worldwide terrorist movement.
Read more: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk
Artikelen (RSS)