Raza: Can you comment on the terrorist attack that occurred in Paris on November 13, a few days ago
And how should Europe, by that I mean the European population
and as well as European politicians at this crucial moment – react
Chomsky: Well it depends what they want to do.
Do they want to encourage further terrorism, or do they want to end that kind of terrorism?
That’s the choice. If you want to end it, the first question you ask is: why did it take place?
What were the immediate causes and what were the deeper roots? And then you try to address those.
So what were the immediate causes? Well, we don’t know a lot.
About the only information we have is the explanation given by ISIS.
Not only for these acts but for the blowing up of the Russian airplane
killing a couple of hundred people in the Sinai.
They say, look "if you bomb us we’ll attack you"
Well, that’s probably the reason. As far as we know that’s the short-term cause.
The longer-term causes are the ones that we’ve been discussing.
Where did all this come from? The invasion of Iraq, the Wahabisation of Sunni Islam,
the brutality of the Assad regime and so on.
So if you want to reduce the possibility of further attacks, you address these causes.
If on the other hand, you want to increase the attacks,
you do exactly what President Hollande is announcing right now.
Let’s bomb them more. Let’s destroy ISIS by military force which is probably impossible.
But if it did happen, it’s pretty likely that something worse would emerge from it.
Because the roots are not addressed and they are real.
Raza: Noam Chomsky, anarchist, political philosopher, linguist and political commentator
thank you so much for joining us!
Chomsky: Thank you.
