The Guardian has retracted the Emma Brockes interview with Noam Chomsky, about which I commented here. It appears that Brockes was sloppy on some key points, yet the Guardian‘s correction statement is just as misleading. Bill Weinberg gets it right, I believe:
Chomsky did not merely come to the defense of Johnstone’s freedom of speech. He praised her work as “outstanding.” And if Johnstone has never “denied the fact of the [Srebrenica]massacre,” she has stayed out of the outright-denial camp only through the most narrow and slippery use of (if you will) deniability. Her recent spewings on the ever-dependable CounterPunch make all the same bogus arguments we have seen here: that the victims somehow deserved it because of Naser Oric’s abuses, that the Bosnian leadership sold Srebrenica and allowed the massacre to happen to win world sympathy for the Muslim cause, that the numbers of the dead were inflated, et cetera. And, of course, she always puts “massacre” in quotes.
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Finally, pulling the interview from their website was utterly spineless of The Guardian. They should have left it there, with a link to the letter from the ombudsman clarifying the editorial errors that were committed and taking responsibility for them. A good thing we quoted some of the incriminating passages here, and saved them from the Orwellian Memory Hole.
**Update: Oliver Kamm contends that the Guardian should run a correction to its correction. And Dr. Marko Attila Hoare makes an even stronger case here.
**Update II: Kamm reports on this statement from South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, which carried the original Brockes interview and has declined to take it down. The M&G’s Drew Forrest takes aim at “the hard left’s characteristic tone of outraged moral whipcracking”:
So what is all the over-the-top clamour really about? There is a clue in Fortin’s complaint about the interview’s “generally mocking tone”. The suggestion appears to be that, because of a kind of “benefit of clergy”, Chomsky should be immune from mockery. Brockes’s real sin is to show disrespect for one of the major saints in the hagiology of the left.
The left has a depressing tradition of guruising radical thinkers — consider the worshipful climate around Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s — and of cracking whips over its articles of faith.
But the Brockes saga illustrates that Chomsky is not infallible. Apart from his eccentric stance on Srebrenica, his complaint to The Guardian tends to confirm Brockes’s depiction of him as an arrogant and cantankerous old man.
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