Anyone who is interested in left-wing politics, particularly in the work of Noam Chomsky, one of the world's most famous dissident intellectuals, is likely sooner or later to run into the commentaries of Times columnist Oliver Kamm. Kamm seems to have a peculiar obsessions with Chomsky, about whom he manages to write in just about every other post on his blog.

A couple of examples are worth noting, just to give us some idea of Kamm's level of reliability. Firstly, his review of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent - the book itself being an important and compelling critique of the way the operation of money, power and ideology serve to delimit the output of the mainstream media. (The review should be available here.) Whether Chomsky and Herman's meticulously sourced claims are on a par with "Holocaust denial" and "flat-earth advocacy", as Kamm claims, is not for me to say: readers of the book should make their own judgments. What is rather remarkable, however, given Kamm's endless commentaries on Chomsky's dishonest, inaccurate use of source material, is the claim he makes mid-way through his review, that the book's authors "rehearse a typical melange of complaints against the policies of the US and Israel".

This is a claim that would certainly confuse anyone who's ever read Manufacturing Consent - or, indeed, anyone who has read the index. In fact, the book does not focus on Israel at all, let alone rehearse a "melange of complaints" - whatever "complaints" is supposed to mean in this context. As Chomsky himself explains,

"We made a decision from the outset not to mention the word "Israel," because once one does, a collection of fanatics goes berserk, rather as when one mentioned "Russia" at a meeting of orthodox Stalinists. And we wanted to increase the (slight) possibility that what we were showing could be looked at sanely, without this nuisance. ...

"There are also no "complaints" against US policies, though there are criticisms of them. Similarly, an orthodox Stalinist would have wailed about the "complaints against Russia" by someone who criticizes its policies. He's in good company."

(correspondence, 23 February 2006)

Today, Kamm dredges up a similar piece of fabrication - noting an observation of Chomsky's in an interview and lifting a "source" for it incomplete and out-of-context so as to accuse Chomsky of making up his evidence. The claim is that Chomsky has completely mangled Phillip Knightley's conclusions about a famous photo based on ITN footage, widely reproduced in Britain, purporting to show an example of the emaciated Bosnian Muslims behind barbed wire in a Serb concentration camp. The conclusions variously adduced by Chomsky and Kamm are worth comparing with the piece appended at the bottom of this article.

As the heroic Kamm writes: "It is a reasonable bet that viewers of Serbian television, still less readers of the 'Chomsky info' site, will not trouble to check Chomsky's empirical claims, which is why it's important that others do."

Indeed it is important, as Chomsky himself continually stresses, that one checks out what he's saying for oneself. But it's equally important not to swallow the line that Kamm feeds you without a hefty pinch of salt. Just as it's important to understand the lengths some will go to to smear and impugn those who dare to dissent in public.

UPDATE: With regard to the ITN photo, Philip Knightley's comments and the misrepresentation of Chomsky, the final nail appears to have been hammered into Kamm's coffin. Correspondence with Philip Knightley confirms that the piece appended to the Counterpunch article, which conforms to the account given by Chomsky, is indeed his witness statement for the Living Marxism case (LM were the small publication that disputed the accuracy of ITN's use of the image).

Let's recall Kamm's conclusion on this matter:

"Chomsky is revealed as a man whose handling of source material is fundamentally untrustworthy. Every claim he makes, every reference he cites, needs to be checked independently. The further you penetrate, the greater are the evasions, short cuts and falsehoods ..."

http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/06/chomsky_bambooz_1.html

Let's also recall that it took me two steps to fully confirm the veracity of Chomsky's claims on this point: a google search, and an email to Philip Knightley. Hardly the height of investigative journalism, I think you'll agree. Yet Kamm could not bring himself to do even this, instead using third-hand information provided to him by a far-from-independent source: Nick Cohen. A generous onlooker might call this carelessness - but I think it was rather more than that. Either Kamm's will to believe his own story overrode his critical faculties (which if exercised would have exposed him to the danger of actually telling the truth), or he simply ignored the truth for his own purposes. Either way, Kamm has thus exposed almost satirically his own "short cuts and falsehoods", his "fundamentally untrustworthy" handling of source material, the necessity of checking "every claim he makes, every reference he cites" for all to see.