Bernard Lewis - Debates With Noam Chomsky

Debates With Noam Chomsky

In a 2002 interview with the CBC's Hot Type program, linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky stated:

President Eisenhower, in an internal discussion, observed to his staff, and I'm quoting now, "There's a campaign of hatred against us in the Middle East, not by governments, but by the people." The National Security Council discussed that question and said, "Yes, and the reason is, there's a perception in that region that the United States supports status quo governments, which prevent democracy and development and that we do it because of our interests in Middle East oil. Furthermore, it's difficult to counter that perception because it's correct."

Chomsky claimed that Bernard Lewis omitted evidence of Western culpability for failures in the region.

Lewis responded:

It doesn't have to be more civilized, I mean the Roman Empire and the medieval Islamic Empire were not conquered by more civilized peoples, they were conquered by less civilized but more vigorous peoples. But in both cases what made the conquest, with the Barbarians in Rome and the Mongols in Iraq, what made it possible was things were going badly wrong within the society so that it was no longer able to offer effective resistance... Mr. Chomsky's views on Middle Eastern history are about as reliable as my views on linguistics... Obviously imperialist powers are not blameless in this respect. They did contribute, but they are not the cause of what went wrong. What went wrong is what enabled them to come and conquer these places. And the record of the Imperialist powers is by no means uniformly bad. They did some bad things, they also did some good things. They introduced infrastructure, they introduced modern education, they established a network of high schools and universities that previously did not exist, and many other things. They even tried to introduce constitutional government, parliamentary and constitutional government. It didn't take in the Islamic lands, but it worked quite well in India... "It's not our business what goes on inside these countries. Let them have tyrants as long as they're friendly tyrants rather than hostile tyrants." This is the familiar method that's been used in Central America, Southeast Asia and other places... There are people who believe in using the same methods, you know.