US academic Chomsky: 'isolationist' Trump unlikely

By Ilker Girit

ISTANBUL (AA) – Prominent American scholar Noam Chomsky claimed the U.S. will become more interventionist under president-elect Donald Trump, despite his promises to be "an isolationist".

Speaking to Sri Lanka's DailyMirror, Chomsky said "isolationist is a very funny word" for Trump, who wants to build on the powers of the Pentagon, the U.S. defense headquarters.

Chomsky said that stance is reflected in Trump's choice for National Security Advisor, the "radical Islamophobe" Michael Flynn, who has claimed Islam is a political ideology rather than a religion.

"They talk about our depleted military forces... The US spends almost as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. It is technologically far more advanced. No other country has hundreds of military bases all over the world, actually forces fighting all over the world," said Chomsky.

– Exaggerating fears about Muslims

Chomsky said fears about Muslims and others have played on exaggerations about the community in the same way the Nazis in Germany used stereotypes against Jewish people.

"The typical history of scapegoating is to pick vulnerable people and find something that is not totally false about them – because you have to have some element of truth – and then build it up into a colossus which is about to overcome you," he said, giving the example of the passing of laws in Oklahoma to ban Islamic law, which would have very little chance of ever being imposed.

"I mean you know it is not zero. You can find a woman somewhere who is wearing a veil, so there is something. But that’s the way it works," he said.

- US' supportive policies on radicalism

Chomsky also argued the US policy towards Islam "has been highly supportive of the most radical elements of Islam."

He claimed Saudi Arabia, "perhaps the most extreme, radical, fundamentalist State in the world," is the leading U.S. ally in the Islamic world and "uses its huge resources to sponsor its Wahabist extremism through Madrasas and so on."

However, "at the same time we might be fighting radical Islam somewhere else. The propaganda system would create images of Islamic terror seeking to destroy us when that turns out to be the plausible kind of scapegoating," he said.

"So 9/11 happened and the Tamil Tigers atrocities happened. You can use those as ways of building up fear, anger, and anxiety to support the tendency to hide under the umbrella of power from these forces about to destroy us."

"Like Shari’a law in Oklahoma, got to protect ourselves!" Chomsky added.