Noam Chomsky: Charlie Hebdo outrage demonstrates West's double standard on terrorism

Travis Gettys
20 Jan 2015 at 08:50 ET                  
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Americans and other westerners ignore atrocities committed by their own governments because government officials and the media have a narrow definition of terrorism, said Noam Chomsky.
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To demonstrate, the linguist and political scientist compared two reports by the New York Times' veteran correspondent Steven Erlanger - one following the Paris attacks and another from an April 1999 missile attack by NATO forces on Serbian state television headquarters.
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Erlanger reported at the time that the U.S. and NATO defended the missile strike, which killed 16 journalists and knocked the station off the air, saying the TV station was a legitimate target because it helped promote the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
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"There were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of 'We are RTV,' no inquiries into the roots of the attack in Christian culture and history," Chomsky said. "On the contrary, the attack on the press was lauded. The highly regarded U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then envoy to Yugoslavia, described the successful attack on RTV as 'an enormously important and, I think, positive development,' a sentiment echoed by others."
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