The unflattering perspective Part II: Obama taking things backward in the Muslim World, says Chomsky

CAMBRIDGE, MA:

US President Barack Obama is taking things backward and a recent poll by the Brookings Institution showed that the positive attitude towards him has declined very radically, Professor Noam Chomsky says when asked about Obama’s success with the Muslim World.

“I mean, how can anyone take him seriously when he talks about human rights in Iran and the region when Saudi Arabia, one of the most brutal and extreme countries in the region, is his main ally,” Chomsky says.

While accepting that Iran is an interesting case and at the heart of US foreign policy, Chomsky rubbishes the belief that there is an Iranian threat. “What is the Iranian threat? There is no military threat by Iran. It has a very low expenditure on military unlike the US. It says they have a very low capacity to deploy force, their military doctrine is defensive and designed to deter an invasion of Iran,” he says.

Because of their defensive strategy, Chomsky also appears to support Iran’s nuclear ambitions and believes that if Iran is developing its nuclear capacity, it will be designed as a deterrent. “If any country needs a deterrent, it is Iran. Just take a look at the map. It is completely surrounded by US military bases,” he says. “There is a major military presence in the Arabian Sea – about a quarter of the world’s aircraft carriers are deployed there and almost all the big carriers are American. Obama has sharply expanded the US offensive capacity in the island of David Garcia which is a very important military base, following Iran.”

Media

“The corporatised media has pressures and you see that there can be prejudices,” Chomsky says, when asked if media can ever really be free.

Chomsky is a vocal critic of the mass media and has co-authored the book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which was an analysis of the news media as business. Two Canadian filmmakers later also made a documentary based on the book and the film received several awards.

He believes that pressures on mainstream media are almost similar to those in academia but says these restrictions can be ignored. “It’s not that you can’t break out of it. It’s just that there are many restrictions that make it hard and there are strong pressures to conform. They can be independent and there are examples,” he says.

For Chomsky, the way forward for truly independent media is to gain reader loyalty and support instead of being dependent on commercial advertising. “In the western hemisphere, as far as I know, a Mexican newspaper gets very low advertising because the business doesn’t like it but theirs is a very high-quality product. [Thus] it is the second largest newspaper in Mexico. They survive on readership. I usually learn something new whenever I read that paper,” he says.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 20^th, 2011.