'Self-hating Jew'
Sir: Charles Glass should not be permitted to get away with his description ('Senseless censors', 21 March) of Noam Chomsky as a `samizdat writer', appropriately published in a journal that 'gives writers . . . a platform denied them in their own coun- tries'.
The county library right here in Arling- ton, Virginia, has eight of Chomsky's political books in stock, some in multiple copies. Three of these titles, plus one other, are in print in expensive paperback editions, and in stock at several Washing- ton area bookstores (some within blocks of the White House), and can be special- ordered from the rest. And all can be checked out, ordered, or purchased, as the case may be, with impunity: you will not be reported to the FBI, or even sneered at by the clerk behind the counter.
Mr Glass might have told his readers just how Chomsky acquired his reputation. His attempts to deny or minimise the late massacres in Cambodia and Vietnam had something to do with it, but the most significant event was probably his preface for a book by a Frenchman named Robert Faurisson, who claimed that the Nazis never gassed any Jews, that the Holocaust was a lie, 'a gigantic political and financial racket for the benefit of Israel and interna- tional Zionism'. (The whole story may be found in Geoffrey Sampson's article 'Cen- soring "Twentieth-Century Culture": the case of Noam Chomsky' in the New Criterion, October 1984.) It seems to me that a Jew who endorses the grossest of neo-Nazi lies, and who cannot, in view of his writings on linguistics, claim innate stupidity as an excuse, is very properly described as a 'self-hating Jew'.
Noam Chomsky is the great idiot-savant of our times. Glass is about half that.
T.W. Bohu
2500 N. 20th Road, Apt. 202, Arlington, Virginia 22201
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