An Irishman's Diary

This is a free country, and  Kevin Myers is glad to see that thousands of people were able to listen to Noam Chomsky denouncing…

This is a free country, and Kevin Myers is glad to see that thousands of people were able to listen to Noam Chomsky denouncing our Government's policies on American flights through Shannon as possible war crimes.

That's freedom. It was also freedom (of a kind) for Dermot Ahern to have waived the normal airport arrangements to permit the holder of an invalid passport to enter Ireland. But please, imagine the uproar from the usual liberal suspects if the great Mark Steyn had been shown the same liberality.

Chomsky is a chump - a brilliant and dysfunctional genius, like the autistic child who knows the day of every date in 2001 BC, but can't explain why we have a calendar. He inhabits a fantastic world, in which cabbalistic covens in Washington ruthlessly control the world, conducting genocides here and massacres there, diverting rivers to cause drought, felling rain forests and driving entire species into extinction. These cabals can do this undetected because they control the media - which is presumably why he got an almost unprecedented two-page interview in this newspaper last weekend.

Since this world view is no more than a vast cartoon conspiracy theory, and since both conspiracies and cartoons by their nature conceal the truth, the very absence of evidence for the conspiracy is proof of its existence. It is, at bottom, a faith, and the messiah and the gospeller of this faith is Noam Chumpsky. And he - like all those thousands of people at the RDS - is apparently unaware that we are all engaged in an epoch-making conflict: the sixth world war is under way.

READ MORE

The first world war was the centuries-long assault by Islam on India, Asia Minor, the Middle East and Europe, which finally ended when the Hindu Marathas, the emergent Sikh kingdom and the Hapsburgs halted Islam's global jihad, roughly between 1667 and 1683. The second world war - fought in all four continents - was Napoleon's, an egological attempt to conquer the world.

The third was the so-called Great War. The fourth, like the second, was caused by an ideological despot, and is known as the second World War. The fifth was the Cold War. The sixth is this one, which actually started in 1979 in Iran and Afghanistan; and batten down the hatches, brothers and sisters, because like the first, it will last a very long time indeed.

This sixth world war is moreover made infinitely more trying by the backward nature of Arab culture. Spain translates more foreign books into Spanish every year than the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic over the past thousand years. There are millions of pious Arabs who know nothing whatever about the non-Arab world, and for whom the intellectual processes of enquiry, analysis, scepticism and logic are utterly alien.

To such people, education consists of the endless repetition of sacred scripts, Shariah law and recitations of the jihadist loathing of the infidel enemy. Their brains are thus shaped and warped by the blunt instruments of rote and hate. And far from this backwardness being enlightened by the far more sophisticated Islamic countries of Asia, the reverse is happening.

Pakistani, Afghan, Bangladeshi and Indonesian Islam are being Arabised, though two agencies. One is the madrasahs, the Saudi-backed religious schools which are effectively embassies promoting the foreign policy of the fundamentalist Salafiyya/Wabbahi movements. The other is Al Jazeera, the satellite network which promotes jihad and "martyrdom operations" and whose viewers mostly live within a medieval religious culture which has experienced the equivalent of neither the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter Reformation nor the Enlightenment.

The US State Department analyst Tony Corn has identified five columns to the Islamic insurgency. The first four are the house of al-Saud; the now virulently Islamic al-Azhar university in Cairo, in terms of theological authority the equivalent of the College of Cardinals in Rome; al-Qaeda, and Al Jazeera. The fifth column is just that: it is the academic fifth column in Western campuses (as quintessentially represented by Noam Chumpsky and his followers) which, as Tony Corn says, "is increasingly providing both conceptual ammunition and academic immunity to crypto-jihadists, making Western campuses safe for intellectual terrorism".

Part of Chumpsky's technique is to ignore the empirically inconvenient. Thirty years ago, despite all the evidence, he proclaimed that all was well in Cambodia. Last weekend, he told his listeners in the RDS that he backed an immediate US withdrawal from Iraq, citing as justification "opinion polls" in Iraq. But democratic countries are not governed by polls, but by democratically elected politicians; and the overwhelming mass of Iraqi political parties loudly insist that the US military should stay until their police and army are capable of defending their country's emerging democratic institutions. So what kind of morality is it which would abandon the Iraqi people to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Islamic Pol Pot?

Many mistakes have been made in the past, not least in the US's craven tolerance of an obscure but virulent strain of Islam as it was being exported globally by Saudi Arabia. That is now history: Churchill did not blame Chamberlain in 1939, but joined him in government.

For the world is at war again, and our most potent allies in the coming struggle are democratic Muslims who have Islamic credibility, but whose civil values resemble our own. These are the very people who are fighting for their freedom in Iraq - and the ones that Chumpsky and his chums, enjoying the lazy moralising and the priggish safety of the RDS, wish to leave - once again - to the murderous mercies of the current generation of genocidalists.