It’s none other than “9-11,” in which its author, MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, accuses America of being responsible for that date’s terrorist assault.

When the Times article was published, “9-11” ranked as the #26 most-sought-after tome at the online bookstore Amazon.com, which sells thousands of titles. Two weeks before this editorial was published, “9-11” retained a #128 spot, which is still impressive.

One must wonder, after everything that’s occurred, why Americans are spending their money on something that blames their own country for what Osama bin Laden actually did.

Chomsky is not new at America-bashing or yellow journalism. He has actually used his academic prestige to go around spreading lies about the 1.5 million to 2 million murders committed by Cambodia’s former ruler Pol Pot, and his police force, the Khmer Rouge.

In “The Chomsky Reader,” First Edition, (Pantheon Books: New York, 1987), it says on page 291, "[T]he public was generally offered a version [of the Khmer Rouge story] based on serious distortion of the evidence then available and on much outright fabrication.

“Many felt the facts were unimportant, notably Jean Lacouture, who wrote in the 'Nouvel Orservateur' and the 'New York Review of Books' that the Khmer Rouge had 'boasted' of having 'eliminated' 2 million people by mid-1976; adding a few weeks later (in the 'New York Review' alone) that he had misread his source (Francois Pouchaud's 'Cambodge annee zero') and that the figure might be in the thousands or hundreds of thousands, while adding that a factor of 1,000 (thousands, millions) was of little moment; his figure of 2 million killed remained the standard one even after it was withdrawn, later to be replaced in much Western commentary by the Hanoi figure of 3 million.”

On page 293, Chomsky states, "To place these massacres in a broader context, by calculations similar to [Michael] Vickery's, deaths caused by the U.S.-backed Indonesian aggression in Timor during the Pol Pot period would be in the neighborhood of 200,000 to 300,000, in a country with one-tenth Cambodia's population. These deaths, like those of the first phase of Cambodia's terror, are primarily the responsibility of the United States.”

To repeat, Chomsky asserts that the number of people butchered by the Khmer Rogue wasn’t 2 million, but “in the thousands or hundreds of thousands.” Then he says this was “primarily the responsibility of the United States.”

I decided to ask an expert about this, so I consulted Dr. Rudolph J. Rummel. Not only is he an emeritus political science professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (see http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills), but he’s also the author of an important book titled “Death By Government.”

Throughout his career, Rummel has exhaustively studied government-induced mass murder around the world, including those the Khmer Rouge performed. Rummel is so widely recognized for this work that he was a finalist for the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize.

With all this in mind, I asked Rummel what he thought of Chomsky’s claims. Rummel answered that Chomky’s figures are “just incredibly low. No scholar of Cambodia now accepts this and most believe the figure around 1.5 million -- even 2 million -- which is my estimate.”

Chomsky blames America for the deaths in Cambodia by claiming that the “collateral damage” from U.S. bombing killed more people than did the Khmer Rouge’s executions of political dissidents. But the figures were the other way around in reality.

“You have to be careful of Chomsky,” Rummel told me. “He was sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge revolution and is strongly anti-American, as is clear from his blaming the U.S. for the Khmer Rouge massacres.”

Story continues at "Noam Chomsky's Unfairness and Inaccuracy in Reporting - Part 2"

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com and an index of his past editorials for HawaiiReporter.com can be seen at http://reason_club.tripod.com/stuart_editorials.html (If you would like to continue seeing Stuart Hayashi's editorials on this site, please let Hawaii Reporter know at info@hawaiireporter.com)

Guest Commentary...