I used to admire Noam Chomsky. Since 9/11 he has been a douche. I'm going to try to demonstrate this, using Chomsky's commentary on the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Chomsky's theme, as you might expect, is that while the Paris killings were bad, the West does worse, and dash it all, nobody talks about these other crimes.

Chomsky starts out by equating the Charlie Hebdo murders with the Nato air strike on a Serbian television station during the Kosovo War. Both were attacks on journalists.

The attack on the tv station was a war crime, but it should not be compared to the Paris attack. It should be compared to the vastly worse crimes the Serbs committed, which Chomsky does not mention. If not for those crimes, no bombs would have fallen on Serbia. To talk about the Nato air strike without discussing the context strikes me as fundamentally dishonest. It is rather like comparing 9/11 to Hiroshima--and saying nothing more.

  I will examine some other statements Chomsky makes in this piece.

 "There are many other events that call for no inquiry into Western culture or history. For example, the worst single terrorist atrocity in recent years, in July, 2011, when Anders Brevik, a Christian ultra-Zionist extremist and Islamophobe, slaughtered seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers".

  There are sound reasons why Brevik's crime did not prompt the kind of finger pointing at Christianity or the West which is directed at Islam when jihadist atrocities occur. Brevik was a lone nut, not a member of an organization, and there aren't millions of people who applaud his act. Moreover, Christian-inspired massacres happen much less frequently than Islamic-inspired ones.

 "Also ignored in 'the war against terrorism' is the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times--Barack Obama's assassination campaign targeting people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby".

  Many of the drone attacks--not all--have been war crimes. To call them the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times means seriously underestimating the severity of Islamic terrorism. The Taliban have killed at least twice as many Afghan civilians as we have. 9/11 killed more innocents in one morning than the drones did in eight years. And Arab/Moslem terrorists have perpetrated many other massacres around the world. Although Chomsky considers himself sympathetic to Moslems, I haven't been able to find a comment from him regarding last year's slaughter of Pakistani schoolchildren(I grant that there could be one I missed).

 "Anyone with open eyes will quickly notice other rather striking omissions. Thus, prominent among those who face an 'enormous challenge' from brutal violence are Palestinians, once again during Israel's vicious assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, in which many journalists, sometimes in well-marked press cars, were killed, along with thousands of others".

 The butchery in Gaza was indeed monstrous. The claim that the media paid no attention to it seems to me to be untenable.

"Also ignored was the assassination of three more journalists in Latin America in December, bringing the number for the year to thirty-one. There have been more than a dozen journalists killed in Honduras alone since the military coup of 2009 that was effectively recognized by the U.S.(but few others), probably according post-coup Honduras the per capita championship for murder of journalists. But again, not an assault on freedom of the press in living memory".

  UPDATE: Okay, my bad, U.S. aid to the Honduran military and police does indeed make us at least partly answerable for killings there. But France is certainly not answerable for Washington's actions in Honduras. Many of the killings of reporters in Latin America have been the work of  organized crime. If a dozen Latin American journalists were all killed in a few seconds, I would bet there would be considerable media coverage. Perhaps not quite as much, as Americans feel a greater connection to Western Europe than Latin  America, which may not be inherently unreasonable.

 Chomsky is right to call attention to the air strike in Syria that reportedly killed fifty civilians. This really has been ignored. But even here there are differences. The killing of those innocents was not intentional, and the United States did not bring the war to Syria, as the attackers in Paris brought terror to a place that was at peace.

 For these reasons and others, I don't think the professor should still be regarded as a light to international moralists--as once he certainly was. Where is the glory?