Noam Chomsky Quotes
Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It's minuscule, few percent.
Chomsky, Noam. Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance. City Lights Books, 2012, p. 210.
The administration of George W. Bush was the most unpopular in American history amongst most of the countries of the world. By the end of his second term, Bush himself was the most unpopular President in America since polls were taken to measure it. However, when Barack Obama went to Berlin, as a senator and presidential candidate he was very warmly received with a crowd of over 200,000 Germans turning out in Berlin to hear his speech.
The Israeli’s had earlier been urged by America to give control of the Suez Canal back to Egypt. The Israeli’s held control of the Canal so that the Egyptians could not cut off ships from reaching Israel. The US had in exchange guaranteed that Israel would have free and unfettered access and to the sea. Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser had just closed the Red Sea straights to the Israeli’s and the US was working on rolling that action back. However, some of the American oil companies privately were urging President Johnson to reneg on our commitments to our ally in order to ensure the profits of the oil companies. Johnson did not abandon Israel. ARAMCO made more money than ever. America was not finished in the Middle East.
There are many who do not agree with Hayden’s thesis that there was a national consensus about the degree of compromise with Constitutional rights. It is the case that the 3 Presidents maintained a continuity, but there was no great outcry of public opinion for roundups and arrests of Muslims after 9-11. The government never at the time revealed the data on what they were doing. When that became public, it was clear that there was no consensus as was the case with torture. The military authorities who interned American Citizens of Japanese Origin argued that there was little public opposition but many citizens did not even know it was happening, and the ones who did, for the most part, thought that it was only the suspected saboteurs and spies who were interned, not American citizens who were suspected of nothing; not little children; not 90 year old men and women. When the facts were known Americans did form a national consensus—that it was one of the worst practices in which the United States ever engaged.
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
