I love how the audience goes into wild applause (reminds me of a Star Wars movie scene). What idiots. Does no one learn history any more? Do they just teach one-sided-story nowadays?
As noted, radical islam has been killing way before we started killing them (for killing us). Note that the start of the more recent attacks (bombings, hijackings, kidnappings) started with the creation of the Israeli state. While I feel for the Palestinians here, it wasn't like the Israelis were given half the Middle East. So much hatred focused on such a small point like a magnifying glass to bake an ant.
Either way you look at it, this is an absurd argument which assumes that only one side is responsible for the actions of the other.
Isn't your position the converse, and thus predicated on the same error? (correct me if I'm wrong).
The kernel of truth underneath Chomsky's ad-lib in a Q+A is
here.
Note the article in the LA Times today about ex-radicals in Libya:
Captivated by videos showing Soviet brutality in Afghanistan and encouraged by fiery Muslim clerics, he created a fake passport, teamed up with six other Libyans and traveled through Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan before traversing the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.
...
I was going to fight over there," he said in an interview at his home, off an alleyway in a run-down section of Tripoli, the Libyan capital. "I was seeing what the Soviets were doing in Afghanistan, what murders and horrible things were happening. I was looking to be killed and die for Islam."
Clearly, the answer is not that America is at fault for every radicalized muslim, or that radical muslims represent some implacable Evil without any connection to political history and are thus a force of nature for which there is no responsibility on Western shoulders.
Its a complicated mixture. We can debate the pros and cons of certain policies of the past. Perhaps it really is a good thing and in America's interest to support Israel. Perhaps supporting the brutal Shah of Iran was a mistake - teaching millions across the Middle East in 1979 that the only way to see your goals realized is through revolutionary violence. We can go through that list.
We can also list the ideological influence of radical interpretations of Islam and the transmission of these ideas, which span decades and many different nations. The home-grown factors of cultural history in the Middle East which made a great petri dish for this particular brand of extremism.
At the end of the day however, I have to agree in part with Chomsky. I don't think you could ever stop terrorism, especially when you're the most powerful country in the world with your fingers in every pie. But you could definitely dampen it, marginalize it and weaken it by pursuing a policy course that makes the environment less conducive the the transmission of violent radical Islam, rather than make the environment
more conducive to its spread.
And I think in many ways American policy has done more of the latter rather than the former.
