NOAM CHOMSKY ON THE EGYPT REVOLUTION AND US POLICIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Yannis Rogan, Noam Chomsky, Sebastian Aulich and Gonçalo Pereira
Last Friday, we conducted a lengthy interview with Noam Chomsky in which we discussed the social media in foreign policy, the Egypt revolution, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the rise of China, a disappointing presidency of Barack Obama and why the GOP stopped to be a party some 20 years ago. We will present the material in several pieces divided by different topics. The below are some of the most interesting comments by Noam Chomsky on the Egypt revolution and the U.S. policy in the Middle East taken from our interview.
Egypt and the Middle East
Noam Chomsky: What happens in Egypt is up to the Egyptians. The Muslim Brotherhood is organized. The dictatorship that the U.S. supported crashed all the secular and labor movements. So what are left are the remnants. Bear in mind that the U.S., Britain, France traditionally supported radical Islam. Consistently they supported radical Islam against secularism. The most dramatic case is Saudi Arabia. It is a center of radical Islam and fundamentalism. The center of funding for jihadi terror and it is the leading ally of the West. The U.S. relations with Israel reached its current stage in 1967. What happened then? There was a war between Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a proxy war in Yemen. And it was basically a conflict between radical Islamic fundamentalism and secular nationalism. The U.S. and the West generally supported radical Islamic fundamentalism. They didn’t like secular nationalism because secular nationalism, as we think about it, does speak about and implements a notion of using the natural resources of the region mainly for the region. […]
The second major center of radical Islam is Pakistan. Why? Well, that’s another of Ronald Reagan’s legacies. Zia ul-Haq, who was the most awful of Pakistan’s many dictators, was radically Islamizing the country with Saudi funding and U.S. support. In fact it relates to the nuclear issue too. The Reagan Administration pretended that they didn’t know that Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons so they could continue support for his radical islamization of the country. Now we’ve got a situation in Pakistan where, as the WikiLeaks revealed, the American ambassador is warning Washington that U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan are raising the threat that radical Islamists may gain access to fissile material. Where does that come from? It comes from the U.S. policies in the 80’s. Those things don’t come out of nowhere. So now when you hear the West worrying about the Muslim Brotherhood you must laugh. Especially Britain and the United States, but France too, because they were supporting radical Islam for years.
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