Reply #12: November 30, 2010 [View All]

snip* AMY GOODMAN: That was Secretary to Hillary Clinton yesterday at a news conference. I wanted to get your comment on Clinton, Netanyahu’s comment, and the fact that Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the King, who’s now getting back surgery in the New York, called for the U.S. to attack Iran. Noam Chomsky?

NOAM CHOMSKY: That essentially reinforces what I said before, that the main significance of the cables that have been released so far is what they tell us about Western leadership. So, Hillary Clinton and Binyamin Netanyahu surely know of the careful polls of Arab public opinion. The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. And the results are rather striking. They show that Arab opinion does—holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, that’s 80 percent; the second major threat is the United States, that’s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent. With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority, in fact, 57 percent, say that the region will be—it would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. Now, these are not small numbers. Eighty percent, 77 percent say that the U.S. and Israel are the major threat. Ten percent say that Iran is the major threat.

Now, this may not be reported in the newspapers here—it is in England—but it’s certainly familiar to the Israeli and the U.S. governments and to the ambassadors. But there isn’t a word about it anywhere. What that reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership and, of course, the Israeli political leadership. These things aren’t even to be mentioned. And this seeps its way all through the diplomatic service. So the cables don’t have any indication of that.

When they talk about Arabs, they mean the Arab dictators, not the population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions that the analysts here, Clinton and the media, have drawn. There’s also a minor problem. That’s the major problem. The minor problem is that we don’t know from the cables what the Arab leaders think and say. We know what was selected from the range of what they say. So there’s a filtering process. We don’t know how much it distorts the information. But there’s no question that what is a radical distortion is—or not even a distortion, a reflection of the concern that the dictators are what matter. The population doesn’t matter, even if it’s overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. policy. This shows up elsewhere. There are similar things elsewhere.

So, just keeping to this region, one of the most interesting cables was a cable from the U.S. ambassador in Israel to Hillary Clinton, which described the attack on Gaza, which we should call a U.S.-Israeli attack on Gaza, December 2008. It states that—correctly, that there had been a truce. It does not add that during the truce, which was really not observed by Israel, but during the truce, Hamas scrupulously observed it. According to the Israeli government, not a single rocket was fired. That’s an omission. But then comes a straight lie: it says that in December 2008, Hamas renewed rocket firing, and therefore Israel had to attack in self-defense. Now, the ambassador surely is aware—there must be somebody in the American embassy who reads the Israeli press, the mainstream Israeli press, in which case the embassy is surely aware that it’s exactly the opposite: Hamas was calling for a renewal of the ceasefire. Israel considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to bomb rather than to have security. Also omitted is that while Israel never observed the ceasefire, it maintained the siege in violation of the truce agreement. On November 4th, the U.S. election, 2008, the Israeli army entered Gaza, killed—invaded Gaza and killed half a dozen Hamas militants, which did lead to an exchange of fire, in which all the casualties, as usual, are Palestinian. Then in December, Hamas—when the truce officially ended, Hamas called for renewing it. Israel refused, and the U.S. and Israel chose to launch the war. What the embassy reported is a gross falsification and a very significant one, since it has to do with the justification for this murderous attack, which means either the embassy hasn’t a clue what’s going on or else they’re lying outright.

remainder: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/30/noam_chomsky_wikileaks_cables_reveal_profound