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Summary: My Introduction to the Mid-East
Review: This book has totally transformed my understanding of world issues that are almost totally invisible to the average American. Up to a few months ago I was as clueless about the Mid-east as the rest of my fellow citizens. Now the world looks much darker, especially in regard to the US and Israel. I'll never take any statement made by the US government as automatically true. (Not that they always are lying. After all, it's pretty hard to avoid stating a truth now and then.) Since reading this book I have been doing a lot of investigating on the internet, and now am aware of many sources of first hand information on this topic. Thus, this book is far from the only source of insight. But to me, it'll always remain my eye-opener on the Mid-east conflict. (Just as a trip to Tiajuana in my early twenties introduced me to the awesome reality of the Third World.)
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Summary: Chomsky Dares Refute Israeli Propaganda
Review: This book is brilliant in its arguments. Love Chomsky or hate him, he tells things like it is and sometimes those truths are pretty painful. But as Chomsky has said, you don't have to believe what you read in here, find out for yourself. Which I have and the results are indeed disturbing. This book outlines the goals of the US in relation to Israel and how Israel continues to "hold the whip over the heads" of the Palestinians. Timely reading considering the times we live in. Chomsky provides incredible depth and historical perspective. A must read for anyone interested in reading a refreshing alternative (and the real story in my opinion) on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
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Summary: This book should be in the fiction section
Review: This book is full of biases and misrepresentations. The author has a political agenda and sees everything from this biased perspective. It is a piece of fiction and not worth one's time.
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Summary: Useful for Hard to Find Facts, but Poor Otherwise....
Review: This book is hard to review. On the plus side, it is an impressive collection of hard-to-find documentation and often ignored sources. Some sources have been ignored by the mainstream for good reason, but many are at least as reliable as those that the mainstream American media consult on a regular basis.But this book can be misleading. First, as anyone familiar with events in the region knows who has read this book, there are numerous omissions of fairly major events which should be included in any comprehensive treatment of the region's recent history. This would be a minor concern if the omissions weren't so blatantly systematic. Mr. Chomsky clearly intends this book as a polemic, and there is nothing wrong with that, but the scholarly format would seem to indicate a more comprehensive review. I recommend this book only to one already familiar with the mideast situation. It is NOT a history of events in the region - it is the prosecution's case, so to speak. So long as this is realized, reading this book should be an enlightening experience. To put it another way, the problem is not that the analysis is "biased", but that the analysandum is incomplete.
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Summary: More preaching and entertainment than information
Review: This book is intellectually dishonest. The author has a point of view and goes through great lengths to edit facts to get to a conclusion. This is a book that is great for learning a way of thinking, an agenda, but not a good book to get to facts. If you can see the difference than this will be an interesting read.
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Summary: A little learning is a dangerous thing
Review: This is a revised edition of Chomsky's well-known study on the Arab-Israel conflict. It has been the bible on the subject for those who have chosen a an orientation in favour of liberation movements and post-colonial critiques of the West, and applied these to the Middle East in the confidence that the theory is sound and that the template fits. The book is both rhetorical and dense, a collage of press clippings and fitful learning, presented more to prove a point than to illuminate a subject. There is no suggestion that the facts might amount to something less than a resounding affirmation of Chomsky's own insights. Every phrase, every fact, serves an overarching purpose, a hallmark of special pleading. The early history of the Arab-Zionist dispute is not his area, and Chomsky is content to rely on whatever selective use of history is made by some of his sources. For example, he uses an instance of Zionist fear in the 1920s that the Palestinians would accept a constitutional programme endangering a future Jewish state to prove his argument that Israel is blind to Arab moderation. What he omits is that on this occasion and others, the Zionists accepted and the Palestinians rejected, the constitutional programme. He would have avoided confounding his readers if he had known that Jewish statehood was then considered a remote prospect, only later embraced as the sole way to assure the prospect of Jewish immigration, which Arabs opposed. But Chomsky is willing to turn to his purposes a quotation from here, an observation from there, that can be presented as confirming his (dubious) point in a quite different context. This updated edition incorporates new chapters (chiefly on the intifadah of the late 1980s and the Oslo process) merely grafted onto earlier ones. Little attempt has been made to modify the earlier text in accordance with new developments or to refine an earlier argument in light of these. The new chapters, however, are in one sense invaluable, as they permit readers to scrutinise Chomsky's method in pouring old wine into new vessels. The old vintages are these: Palestinian "accommodationism", Israeli "rejectionism", "a very broad international consensus" in favour of Israeli-Palestinian accord opposed only by Israel and the US. Chomsky's old (pre-Oslo) thesis was that "the broad international consensus", based on UNSC Resolution 242, envisaged "a political settlement along approximately the pre-June 1967 borders, with security guarantees, recognised borders, and various devices to help assure peace and tranquillity", later supplemented by the concept of Palestinian self-determination. The problem, contends Chomsky, is that Israel and the US never have or would agree to this. (As it happens, neither did Chomsky once, as anyone who has consulted his earlier book, Peace in the Middle East (1974) knows only too well). To maintain this line, it is also necessary for Chomsky to ignore Arab, particularly, PLO opposition to Israel's existence during this period, and he obliges. Israel and the PLO initiating negotiations in 1993, with the blessings of all and sundry (other than a collection of regimes Chomsky had earlier asserted were accommodationist), ought to have presented Chomsky with something of a problem. Not at all. The UN, he argues in a new chapter, in now "virtually a US agency"; the Europeans have cleared off from the Middle East; PLO policies of "more than usual ineptitude" (an elliptic, euphemistic reference to its embrace of Saddam in his invasion of Kuwait) have permitted total US ascendancy overriding the "broad international consensus". That the two-state solution ultimately inherent in Oslo strongly resembles the "broad international consensus" Chomsky once recommended is ignored. That negotiations occasionally emerge in the absence of Cold War rivalries is an unsettling idea with unpalatable implications ' so he ignores it. Put simply, for Chomksy's purposes, the two-state solution has outlived its usefulness. To judge from events since last September, the PLO agrees with him. In method, this book is slippery. Chomsky is adept at producing talismanic qualifiers to confound critics. If Israel is a US tool, "it is not entirely under control ' client states commonly pursue their own paths, to the chagrin of their masters". In one sentence, Chomsky contrives to deal with abundant evidence of cases in which independence is exhibited by any state deemed a US client. Any fair-minded assessment, however, must be that such a qualifier nullifies any force his original proposition might have had. This method is reminiscent of other devices from Chomsky's career. His nimble efforts to escape censure for defending and associating with Holocaust deniers, in the form of Robert Faurrisson and the French publishing house, La Vielle Taupe, come to mind. Queried on this association (which his admirers steadfastly ignore) Chomsky has attempted to argue that there is nothing necessarily anti-Semitic about Holocaust denial. At other times and places, he refers to a past single-sentence condemnation of Holocaust revisionism inconsistent with his associations and other statements. Chomsky's study is not the product on any original research on US foreign policy, strategic studies or the various indigenous Middle Eastern societies. Its density almost precludes the possibility that all errors and distortions will be picked up, for another book would be required for the effort. Chomsky's aim is not to apprehend, as best as can be done, what the truth is, but to confound critics through virtuosity of interpretation. But this is nothing other than the standard operating procedure of partisan revisionists. His is a piece of sustained invective with a parade of real and spurious learning likely to bludgeon the reader into insensibility. There is a time when formidable scholarship, allied to mastery of sources, compels reassessment, undermines orthodoxies, and fashions a new standard version. This is not such an occasion.
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Summary: A work of hate
Review: This is clearly a work of the most extreme and obnoxious hatred against all Israel's men , women and children and is filled with prejudices and untruths.
It is in fact an extreme form of incitement against the Jewish nation akin to Meim Kampf and the Elders of the Protocols of Zion
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Summary: Chomsky defends Arafat and others who kill innocent people
Review: This is not a book about what is right and wrong in the Middle East, it is a memoir about a self-hating Jew.
He feels that Israel has human rights violations and military aggression. Far from it. There are militant Palestinian's whose mantra is to eliminate Israel. What are they to do? Sit and wait for the bombers to kill innocent citizens.
Israel is the greatest ally has in the Middle East.
But Chomsky would rather ignore that and focus on the secondary issues.
If Chomsky could get over his hatred of Judaism, he may be able to open his mind to the truth.
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Summary: Israel's terror tactics against Palestinians and Lebanon
Review: This is one of the most disturbing and convincing indictments of Israel's aggressive policies and terror tactics (supported by the US Government) not only against its captive overpowered palestinian victims in the occupied teritories and Lebanon but also against its peaceful and once prosperous neighbour to the north. Thoroughly documented with evidence and facts particularly about Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon which caused the loss of more than 20000 people mostly civilians. Most of Chomsky's sources are decent israeli and american government, military and media representatives. Noam Chomsky is a noble fair minded jewish/american academic, in the best tradition of the jewish people, who has the courage to say the historical truth as it is, contrary to its constant travesty witnessed on a daily basis in the western mainstream media most of which is now owned or controlled by the pro-israeli lobby who will go to any length to distort history and facts hollywood style in favor of Israel's version of events, i.e transforming the victim into the aggressor and vice versa! A must reading for anyone wanting the true story of what has been happening in the Holy Lands.
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Summary: Best Book on the subject
Review: This is probably the most informative book on the issue of the Middle-East, the fascist tactics of Israel, and the ongoing apartheid/genocide of the Palestinians. As one review stated, one previous reviewer claimed that Chomsky's review was "biased", but this reviewer is probably more biased. How can a man be biased when he quotes all the sources possible. In "Necessary Illusions" Chomsky pointed out that views that differed from the status quo--no matter how true they may be--always required ten times as much documentation to back them up. He does this well in "Fateful Triangle". Anyone who reads this book and feels that Chomsky is "biased" has entered the book with a previous bias, has succumbed to indoctrination, or is rather racist. It's impossible to read this, look at the primary sources he references, and then somehow reject his view. Hundreds of other books have been written with similar views--many by Jewish historians--but none are as well sourced as this.
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