Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Nothing I haven't heard before..., 1 Nov 2009
To be honest, you don't need to buy this book. You've heard it all before, whether conservative or liberal.
The bias in these reviews is blinding - use of the term 'anti-american' to describe someone who disagrees with the government is typical, shortsighted, and frankly a little pathetic. Try going to Italy, and telling someone on the streets of Rome that because he dislikes Berlusconi, he is 'un-Italian', and watch him roll around on the floor with laughter. The idea that disliking a leader and seeing fault with the sytem makes you a 'traitor' of some kind, IS laughable.
Other typical conservative attacks are obvious too - someone who recognises Israel's illegitimacy is 'anti-semitic', a 'nazi sympathiser', even a 'holocaust denier'
The arguments used in the book are no more compelling than those used by the reviewers. The venom, and fear-driven hate are evident throughout, and little to no evidence is used in support of their rebuttals. The slightest digging into the listed sources immediately shows the transparency and shallowness of the arguments used by the authors.
As I said at the beginning, you don't need to buy this book.
If you're conservative, you've probably already denounced Chomsky as a 'red', and this book would serve only as self-gratifying trash.
If you're a fan of Chomsky, you'll know his opinions already (most of which THIS book gets completely wrong, whether intentionally or accidentally it's hard to tell), and the arguments they use against him will be debunked with 5 minutes of further reading.
Either way, it's a waste of money. Save the 11 quid (or 20 when i bought it...)
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122 of 196 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chomsky Chomped, 23 Nov 2004
By A Customer
I first heard of Noam Chomsky when I was reading Psychology at Cambridge, and came across his wonderful work on deep structure. The Anti Chomsky Reader however reveals another side of the great academic. A complete stranger to self-doubt, and apparently lacking any shred of human warmth or humour, Chomsky's towering intellect is matched only by his arrogance and duplicity. The essays collected here by Collier and Horowitz, reveal how Chomsky mercilessly manipulates the evidence, systematically ignores the facts, and traduces his opponents to support his bizarre political theses. The various contributors all come to the same conclusion; whether he is writing about America, the media, the Middle East, or sadly, even linguistics, Chomsky simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Well-written, entirely convincing, this is a systematic and merciless expose of a man blinded by his own IQ. It will have Chomsky's chums frothing at the mouth and biting the carpet. Enjoy!
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70 of 116 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Debunking and Destroying the Chomsky Cult, 24 Sep 2007
If there were any sense in this world, "The Anti-Chomsky Reader" would be distributed to every student in the Western world. Noam Chomsky is the godfather of the anti-capitalist, anti-war Left and is treated like a demi-God by students, journalists and leftists alike.
As you can see from comments here, Chomsky's fan club are about as honest as their Dear Leader is. He is not on TV because of a conspiracy or because of a 'rich mans media'. He simply has no credibility with serious scholars, historians or the public at large. I would recommend too, that people DO read his books and pamphlets. His books are a mish-mash of half-truths, distortions, selective quotations of policy documents and intellectuals, and outright lies and slanders. Horowitz knows these techniques exactly because he used to deploy them when he was a Marxist in the New Left 60's movement.
Most sensible liberals and conservatives quite rightly dismiss his ramblings because they are unscholarly, ahistorical and pathalogically anti-American. However, his influence unfortunately permeates through liberal European culture and is on display in the pages of the Guardian, Independent and the New Statesman. It's a travesty that so many decent people take this hate-mongering fraud seriously.
Collier and Horowitz have done the impossible. They actually made me feel slightly sorry for the Professor (only for a little while). This is a devastating book, but by no means covers the entirety of Chomsky's forty years of lies and pseudo-intellectual posturing. And by the way, he was awarded 'World's No 1 intellectual' for his hateful anti-American leftist politics - not for his linguistic work in the 1950's. Harold Pinter and Jimmy Carter were both given awards for their anti-American, anti-war, anti-Jewish bile too. (The Nobel committe love bashing those capitalist-imperialist Yanks).
Chomsky is an Anarchist, not a socialist (there's apparently a difference in practice) and is an apologist for Communists, terrorists, jihadists and a defender of anti-semitic Nazis. This book brilliantly dissects his sympathizing, apologetics and outright lies, and helps people understand the mindset of the totalitarian Left which worships him.
To the 'No.1 intellectual in the world', the socialist Khmer Rouge genocide was "the result of localized peasant revenge and the acts of undisciplined troops." Communist Vietnam is "a miracle of reconciliation and restraint" and Maoist China is "quite admirable." He has also attacked Israel as "illegitimate" and defended PLO terrorists, and perhaps more infamously, he collaborated with neo-Nazis, as shown in Werner Cohn's brilliant chapter "Chomsky and Holocaust Denial".
And then to top off this, after 9-11, Chomsky claimed that America was trying to starve Afghans by stopping food-supply trucks. At a lecture, he said, "Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide." As was clear at the time, this was complete and utter nonsense. But in Chomsky and the anti-war movements parallel universe, this was seen as self-evident American sponsored genocide.
Further on he says, "The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with not credible pretext." The denunciation of the 9/11 attacks is the usual rhetorical throat-clearing before the REAL denunciation of the REAL war crimes - US state terror.
Noam Chomsky is an unapologetic and unrepentant totalitarian, just like Stalinists' Hobsbawm, Parenti, Pilger and Zinn. He is the 'intellectual backbone' of the Michael Moore-Moveon.org stupidity, which passes for radicalism on campuses these days. Passionately committed to a discredited and destructive political creed, socialism, Chomsky must hate America, whose commitment to the freedom of the individual has done more than any other to disprove the claims of so-called "progressives" to improve human life by giving power to vanguards and elites.
Thus, as Horowitz concludes this indispensable collection, Chomsky must "kill the memory of American achievement along with the American idea. This, surely, is Noam Chomsky's mission in life and his everlasting infamy."
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