[This essay was first published at the now-defunct website of the Canadian Action Party (10 September 2005); it

was also published online at eight other websites in 2005.]

[Index: Michel Chossudovsky, 9/11, conspiracy theory, antisemitism, higher education,

media criticism]
[Date: September 2005]

In Defence of Michel Chossudovsky:

A Cup of Cool Reason for the Ottawa Citizen's
Fevered Brow

Michael Keefer

During the past two weeks Professor Michel Chossudovsky, an economist,

political analyst and human rights advocate of international reputation who teaches at the
University of Ottawa and directs his own Centre for Research on Globalization and its
widely admired website www.globalresearch.ca, has become the object of a strange
campaign of defamation.
Chossudovsky's website makes available writings on worldwide political issues
by a wide range of academics and journalists. It also offers open forums on which
members of the public can discuss and debate the issues raised by the scores of articles
published each week.
But that, it seems, can be a risky business.
Discovering recently that anti-semites had managed to insert their noxious drivel
into a discussion thread hosted by Chossudovsky's website, B'nai Brith Canada did not
simply alert him to the fact, so that he could take the obvious step of removing the hateful
messages. Rather, with the eager assistance of the Ottawa Citizen, this once universallyrespected organization made the event a pretext for a campaign of character
assassination.

On August 20, the Citizen published an article (Pauline Tam, U of O Professor

accused of hosting anti-Semitic website) the tone of which can best be described as
scurrilous. Conflating the toxic invasion of his website with Chossudovsky's own
editorial work and with his own writings, the article insinuated that anti-semitism and
denial of the Shoah feature prominently in both of them. A follow-up article (Alex
Hutchinson, Controversial site 'not an issue' for university, August 21, 2005) wondered
at the University of Ottawa's failure to take disciplinary action.
There are some obvious ironies here. Michel Chossudovsky is widely regarded as
a leading interpreter and critic both of globalization and of the structural violence and
military aggressions it has entailed. His life's work as an economist and political analyst
has been a finely articulated series of reproaches to injustices of all kinds, including the
foulness of racism. And as it happens, members of his immediate family died at
Auschwitz.
By a further irony, the best brief introduction to his work is a profile published
some years ago by none other than the Ottawa Citizen (Juliet O'Neill, Battling
mainstream economics, January 5, 1998). This article offered a sympathetic account of
Chossudovsky's defiance of mainstream economic scholarship in which 'critical analysis
is strongly discouraged', and also of his studies of the purposeful impoverishment of
people in dozens of countries through IMF/World Bank interventions. It mentioned in
addition his criticisms of major financial institutions for a hidden agenda involving
criminal complicity in drug-money laundering as well as in the social and economic
collapses prompted by the IMFcriticisms that have since been confirmed by the
revelations of former economic hit-man John Perkins and of Nobel prize-winning
economist Joseph Stiglitz.
But B'nai Brith and the Citizen now want this distinguished public intellectual to
carry the leper's rattle of the anti-semite. The August 20 article quotes Frank Dimant,
executive vice-president of B'nai Brith Canada, as complaining that the website's
materials are full of wild conspiracy theories that go so far as to accuse Israel, America
and Britain of being behind the recent terrorist bombings in London. They echo the ageold anti-Semitic expressions that abound in the Arab world.... A second-year University
of Ottawa student worries other students will stumble on the site, where they
presumably risk contamination by Chossudovsky's ideas. B'nai Brith's human rights
lawyer Anita Bromberg is quoted as piously hoping that pressure can be exerted on his

university to hold him to a certain standard of acceptable civil discourse.

And finally, a purportedly sympathetic political scientist who specializes on the
use of the internet by terrorists declares himself disturbed by a conspiratorial element
in Chossudovsky's writings, and finds not much that resembles them in recent work on
retail or anti-state terrorism.
This dismissive conclusion is not quite the coup de grce the author of this article
evidently meant it to be. Political scientists who have some acquaintanceship with current
scholarship on development economics and on state (as opposed to retail) terrorism might
be less likely to think Chossudovsky's work marginal or eccentric.
And while the weather-beaten axiom that power elites would never dream of
engaging in conspiratorial behaviour may still hold a certain faded charm for journalistic
Howdie Doodies and pundits of all kinds, the clear function of the taboo against
conspiracy theory in present-day public discourse is to shut down critical inquiry into
matters of what Gore Vidal has called unspeakable truth.
What, one wonders, did the seven leaked Downing Street memos reveal, if not
that the American and British governments conspired between 2001 and 2003 to launch
what they knew to be a criminal war of aggression against Iraq? And what did
Congressman John Conyers' minority judiciary committee report on electoral
irregularities in Ohio reveal, if not that the Bush Republicans conspired in 2004 to steal
the presidential election?
Michel Chossudovsky has shown courageous persistence in exposing zones of
unspeakable truth to principled analysis. Ironically again, his chief offence against
orthodoxy appears to have been his refusal to racially delimit his opposition to human
rights abuses. Articles published on his website have criticized not just the horrors of the
Iraq occupation, and Canada's and the UN's grotesquely hypocritical participation in the
overthrow of democracy in Haiti, but also the state of Israel's shameless violations of
human rights, international law and common decency in its treatment of the Palestinians.
B'nai Brith and CanWestGlobal (which owns and controls the Ottawa Citizen)
would like to enforce a standard of acceptable civil discourse that effaces any
distinction between criticism of Israel and anti-semitism. But as is made clear by an
editorial in which the Citizen returns to the attack (The right to be wrong, August 26,
2005), they want not merely to silence critics of Israel, but also to regulate and restrain
free critical thought in a much wider sense.

Behind a pallid pretence of defending Chossudovsky's academic freedom, this

editorial sets about ensuring that his exercise of it will, as the Citizen charmingly says,
have consequences. His exotic opinions are mocked as arising from a procedure of
throw[ing] facts into a pot and hop[ing] conspiracies boil out. The editorial describes as
particularly absurd one of his recent articles, which drew attention to parallels between an
anti-terrorism exercise run in London on the morning of July 7 that scripted bombings in
the same three underground stations that were actually attacked, and CIA and military
anti-terrorism exercises in the US that shortly preceded or coincided with the 9/11
attacks. We are told that B'nai Brith shares this view, objecting not just to the discussionthread postings inserted by anti-semites into Chossudovsky's website, but also to the
tone of the site more generally. One of the scraps Mr. Chossudovsky's piece on terrorism
exercises throws into the cauldron is that Israel's former prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu was in London during the July 7 attacks.
The editorial's tactic of ridiculing Chossudovsky by attributing to him its own
feeble treatment of facts and arguments as disconnected bits and pieces is childishly
obvious. But any chain of discourse can be made to seem silly if one snips it into bits and
shakes them in a hat. (If I sang it badly enough, I do believe I could make God Save the
Weasel sound like Pop Goes the Queen.)
The Citizen's editorial urges Chossudovsky's colleagues and bosses to make a
point of explaining why he's wrong. Let's pause for a moment, then, over the article that
has aroused such a flurry of contempt (Michel Chossudovsky, 7/7 Mock Terror Drill:
What Relationship to the Real Time Terror Attacks? Centre for Research on
Globalization, www.globalresearch.ca, August 8, 2005).
Readers of the Citizen who take the trouble to look up this article may be
surprised to discover that it is cautious and tentative rather than accusatory in tone. It
confines itself to a sober gathering of information from mainstream media sources. And it
concludes by recommending against the drawing of hasty conclusions and by calling
for an independent public inquiry into the London bomb attacks.
So why the complaints? Bibi Netanyahu indeed gets a mention: Chossudovsky
quotes from that wild and exotic source, the Associated Press, a report from Jerusalem
according to which Scotland Yard gave the Israeli Embassy in London advance warning
of a bombing attack, thanks to which Netanyahu was able to cancel a meeting scheduled
in a venue close to the site of one of the bomb blasts.

Does that sound troubling to you? Do you think Michel Chossudovsky may have
been right to suggest that The issue of foreknowledge raised in the Associated Press
report also requires investigation? Or should we just shoot the messenger and be done
with it?
There is, to conclude, one point at which I find myself in agreement with the
Ottawa Citizen's editorial writer: I think a controversy of this sort should indeed have
consequences.
I believe the Citizen's editorial team, together with Frank Dimant and Anita
Bromberg of B'nai Brith, should bow their heads in shame.
I think they should offer a public apology to Michel Chossudovsky and make a
serious effort to avoid disgracing themselves in future by any repetition of this kind of
sordid campaign of defamation.