Chalk, cheese, Chomsky, Bunting

If you want a demonstration - through contrast - of the miserable quality of the Bunting treatment of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi on Saturday, you can read Emma Brockes' interview with Noam Chomsky today. It isn't a hatchet job. Brockes gives Chomsky his voice, as well presenting something of the man and the background out of which he came. But she also poses him one or two tough questions, and she offers some critical comment. She lets Chomsky answer these tough questions in his own words. There's no single representative excerpt, but I'll go with this:

"... One of the good things about the internet is you can put up anything you like, but that also means you can put up any kind of nonsense... There's a kind of an assumption that if somebody wrote it on the internet, it's true."

Is there? It's clear, suddenly, that Chomsky's opinion can be as flaky as the next person's; he just states it more forcefully. I tell him that most people I know don't believe anything they read on the internet and he says, se[a]mlessly, "you see, that's dangerous, too." His responses to criticism vary from this sort of mild absorption to, during our subsequent ratty exchange about Bosnia, the childish habit of trashing his opponents whom he calls "hysterical", "fanatics" and "tantrum throwers".

From the ratty exchange:

And so it goes on, Chomsky fairly vibrating with anger at [Ed] Vulliamy and co's "tantrums" over his questioning of their account of the war. I suggest that if they are having tantrums it's because they have contact with the survivors of Srebrenica and witness the impact of the downplaying of their experiences.

Read it all.

Back now to Madeleine Bunting. She could find no question to put to Qaradawi when he talked of Israeli women and children killed by 'mistake'. Here's an account of one such mistake:

The girls were killed hugging one another.