Chomsky Lectures to Najah Students via Video Conference

 29 march, 2005

Under the patronage of Edinburgh University and the Palestine Solidarity Committee in the UK, a seminar was organized with the well known American intellectual Naom Chomsky that was broadcast through video conferencing to many universities in different parts of the world, Croatia, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Palestine, a total of twenty-seven universities at the same time.

Professor Chomsky made his presentation in one hour; he spoke about the United Nations resolutions in regards of the Arab Israeli conflict as well as the UN's Resolutions against Syria and Iraq. American double standards were discussed as were American corporations and their power, lobbying in the United States, American media and how it functions and forms public opinions. Chomsky went on to speak of the framing of other nations, activism in the USA, Globalization and the war in Iraq and the war against “terror.” The Israeli ideology, the Israeli occupation and its effects on the Palestinian economy, the recently launched war against Hezbollah and the Arab league summit were all also discussed very informatively in the short time frame available.

The faculty members and students of the different attending universities asked Prof. Chomsky about his theories and perspectives towards the Middle East Conflict and American foreign policy. The faculty and students of An-Najah were very excited to listen to him and get this great opportunity to learn from Chomsky’s opinions. Professor Chomsky answered the questions objectively and clearly expressed his opposition to American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928, educator and linguist; he has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, developed a theory of transformational grammar that revolutionized the scientific study of language.

Chomsky is a prolific author whose principal linguistic works after Syntactic Structures include Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Language and Mind (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), and Knowledge of Language (1986). In addition, he has wide-ranging political interests. He was an early and outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and has written extensively on many political issues from a generally left-wing perspective. Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East! (1974), Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding (1982), Manufacturing Consent (with E. S. Herman, 1988), Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s controversial bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he names “a leading terrorist state.”