Noam Chomsky

[HelenaWaiting]

Another Epstein crony makes a grovelling apology, or rather, his wife makes one for him. Am I being too harsh to think that his comment about "the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women" is pretty much unforgivable?

I just love how rich people can just 'mislay' $270k , and have a rich friend who will help them out. It really is a world far removed from ordinary people

Bill Maher also asked why Cassie didn’t leave Sean Combs (P Diddy) after watching the trial. I think a lot of men can only grasp one piece of the puzzle at a time.

I felt same way. I mean, I'm not surprised, really. Just disappointed. I'm starting to think that it is all men.

Re: Cunt, I liked it better when, while lurking years ago, I used to read mumsnetters saying, 'I'd call him a cunt but he has neither the warmth nor the depth'.

I'd rather call Noam a crushed testicle, myself – gross and useless.

Noam Chomsky accused the Cambodian refugees of lying about the ongoing genocide by the Khmer Rouge and being CIA stooges. When the evidence of the Killing Fields came out and couldn't be denied he refused to apologise and said it was reasonable at the time to doubt the accounts as it was more likely that American bombing was to blame for any mass casualties.

I think his comment about "hysteria" probably sums up a what a lot of men actually believe. Women should just stop making such a fuss about sexual assault and rape.

It's truly sickening.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
I hate c*nt being used as a swear word.
It denigrates women once again

Its an interesting word and has many shades of meaning. But certainly worth considering why it has such force and horror behind its usage.

Hysteria? Oh fuck right off!

I've always thought Chomsky seemed like a fraud and could not understand why people thought he was so great.

However, I did think the way his wife described being kind of groomed by Epstein very plausible. In my experience, people like that, sociopaths, do exactly that kind of thing if they are smart. They know what to say to draw people in, to create a sense of debt or responsibility, to flatter them, and also to put them in a position where they look implicated.

I am sure Epstein engaged in that sort of thing, especially with people who had a lot of public respectability. That seems to be what he tried to do with JKR.

Didn't he also refuse to believe that a genocide took place in Bosnia? We clearly weren't looking at the same photos. I'm surprised he has any reputation left, it's not just in tatters but completely absent.

I dislike using it myself for the same reason I don't like 'bitch' or 'whore', and I exclusively use either unisex insults, or male genitalia. I just don't like sexist language, or the implication that calling someone a vagina is the worst thing possible.

It makes me think of Black people using the n-word as an insult to white people. It feels counter-productive.

He's also a sort of sly Holocaust denier, which is some leap given his background.

He is a self hating Jew. Cannot bear him.

I'm always boggled that 'public intellectuals' can pull stunts like this and then retain any credibility at all. Like all the ones who were so sure that the communists were the good guys, despite there being awkward sods who pointed out the show trials and the inconsistencies. Then we all learned about the sheer scope of the gulags, and the horrors of the Great Leap Forward - but there they all still were, having cocked up so massively, still being paid to write opinion pieces and long-form articles and books, and espousing extreme left-wing ideologies.

Edited for typo.

Yes, the tactic of grooming a girl into prostitution by pretending to be her boyfriend, then getting her hooked on drugs/alcohol, then getting her to have sex with their friends, then using escalating physical violence/threats to family/torture/humiliation to keep them in line and prevent them getting out is called the "lover boy" method. Thats a lovely euphanistic word for what it actually is.
It's one of the most common ways girls are sucked into prostitution, it is often talked about in a way that suggests the girls have more choice than they do, or used to prove a point about how women love "bad boys". And most women in prostitution start before the age of 18. So this isn't primarily adult women being drawn in in this way. The police turned a blind eye to white gangs doing it, then to west Indian gangs, then to Asian (Muslim) gangs.

Many of the major sexual abuse scandals of boys (including in boys homes which were particularly awful) were ignored/covered up by the same police forces that ignored the grooming gangs. When some of the men (as adults) tried to report the horrific abuse to the police they were not so subtly threatened with the public shame that would come from them being identified as a victim. There was a culture of ignoring abuse (or abetting it) in those police forces and noone has been held accountable. I do think letting them argue "oh we did want to help we were just so scared of being called racist" was massively letting them of the hook even if it was true for other.individuals. There was far more complicity than that.

I think it's unfortunate that he's only getting called out now that he's 97. I wish he had been identified as an Epstein associate and challenged about it sooner in his life.

Well, the information was not out there then....

I agree with this, but hey! He'll always be tainted by his association with - that creep - so that's a good thing if you ask me.

Grooming gangs has a particular definition. One of it is that it involves vulnerable children being befriended outside of institutional settings by people not yet known to them. Usually first having one in the group pretend to be their boyfriend and then forcing them to have sex with the rest of the group.
It's a different pattern to the Catholic abuse scandal and within that particular type of abuse Muslim South Asians are overrepresented disproportionate to their size within the general population. Part of that might be practical - South Asians are overrepresented in the nighttime economy (taxi driver, takeaway staff) so had more opportunities for befriending vulnerable children. But it's clear the men also described the girls as worthy of abuse because they were a different race/religion. (However, abusive men will almost always find a reason why some classes of girl deserve abuse. If it wasn't religious differences it's something else.)

I think whether there was something in the cultural/religious beliefs of the perpetrators which encouraged the abuse needs to be part of the inquiry. It can't just be ignored. However, the people trying to focus only on that for political ends are wittingly or unwittingly helping to obstruct other factors/properly getting to the roots of the problem and that's bad too. I don't want Muslim grooming gangs to be replaced by white grooming gangs or Sikh or Jewish etc etc.

America also has grooming gangs but there hasn't been the same level of awareness of it as a problem. There was that girl who shot her pimp and was jailed. She was pardoned after an outcry but there was no real mass examination into the wider parts of that situation or who was behind it- it feels almost accepted that vulnerable (often black) children just get drawn into that world. Some major streets are lined with women, often very young looking and people might feel it's bad but there is no massive outcry that it's teenagers stood on the street. In those cases the perpetrators aren't majority Muslim. They might be black men grooming black girls in a predominantly black area etc. Likewise Eastern Europe. In every country where there are vulnerable children and a police force willing to turn a blind eye there will be adults exploiting them.

The Catholic grooming scandal was really bad. But it was, like the Boy Scouts, a different pattern of abuse. Likewise the abuse in boys homes. Possibly one reason the the grooming gangs were ignored was partly because they didn't fit the "institutional abuse" or "family abuse" patterns that had already been forced into public attention. So it's important to see the differences as well as the similarities.

Sorry, I meant that last post to be in reply to you!

From an earlier graun article

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/04/jeffrey-epstein-files-noam-chomsky

When asked by the Harvard Crimson in 2023 if he regretted meeting with Epstein, he responded: “I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.”

Prashad acknowledged the limitations of Chomsky’s age on any sort of new explanation. “Since Noam cannot speak or write and explain his relationship with Epstein, the matter is fraught,” Prashad wrote.

So hanging out with a sex trafficking billionaire really isn't all that much to him.

The irony of a professor of linguistic theory who wrote about power structures in society and mass media manipulation

1. now being unable to speak
2. giving media handling advice to Epstein

His reputation will rot instead of being respected once he’s gone. He’ll be remembered as a creep, just like Foucault

Good. Long overdue.