Professor Noam Chomsky, the world-famous political and intellectual dissident once described in the Guardian as “one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities — along with Shakespeare and the Bible”, has been barred by the Israeli government from lecturing in the occupied West Bank.
From ABC News:
Israeli authorities admitted today that they erred by denying renowned left-wing, US intellectual Noam Chomsky entry into Israeli-controlled territory.
Subscribe to the New Statesman today and save 75%After hours of questioning by Israeli officials at a border crossing between Jordan and the occupied Palestinian West Bank he was forced to return to the Jordanian capital Amman.
A linguist and political activist with a track record of criticizing Israeli policy, Chomsky had been scheduled to deliver two lectures at the Palestinian University of Bir Zeit. He was also due to meet Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayyed and other officials from the Palestinian Authority.
Chomsky told the Israeli daily Haaretz in a telephone interview that he thought the decision had been taken because of his political views and because he was only visiting a Palestinian college and not an Israeli one as well.
But for me, the best quotation of all comes from the piece in the Guardian (quoting the prof on al-Jazeera):
He told al-Jazeera television that the immigration official who interviewed him had made it clear that “the government of Israel doesn’t like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world”.
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