Renowned Middle East expert and commentator Noam Chomsky has slammed what he described as the double-standards highlighted by the West’s stance on this month’s fatal attack on French weekly Charlie Hebdo.
In a blog post published by the CNN on Tuesday, Chomsky said that while world leaders and media outlets decried the attack as an action of terrorism against press freedoms, they failed to voice a similar outrage at, and even lauded, the NATO’s bombing of Serbian state TV in 1999 during the coalition’s war against former president Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.
“There were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of "We are RTV," no inquiries into the roots of the attack in Christian culture and history. On the contrary, the attack on the press was lauded. The highly regarded US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then envoy to Yugoslavia, described the successful attack on RTV as ‘an enormously important and, I think, positive development’, a sentiment echoed by others.”
Chomsky also pointed to the West’s tolerance of journalists’ killings during the Israel military attacks on Gaza Strip during the summer of 2014.
“Many journalists were murdered, sometimes in well-marked press cars, along with thousands of others, while the Israeli-run outdoor prison was again reduced to rubble on pretexts that collapse instantly on examination,” wrote Chomsky.
