A very irritating and interesting exchange. Rational discourse can be tricky, but the idea isn't hard. It's like building a bridge, you use tools to form a construction that spans a gap. Chomsky is an expert in language, the most important tool. No doubt he can acquit himself with modus ponens and such logical tools. What he clearly lacks is "curiosity and goodwill." These are dismissed as the irrelevant "tone of the messenger" as if they were two modems communicating over a noisy line. Hostility and contempt are inimical to constructive discourse among humans. What's the point? I am curious about one thing: who was "the perpetrator of by far the worst crime of this millennium who did so, he explained, because God had instructed him that he must smite the enemy"?
The "perpetrator of by far the worst crime of this millennium" appears to be W, who, according to "a translation of a translation of a translation" said "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." God is silent on the matter, and Zis scribes are all in confusion. Details of W's direct line to heaven aside, did he perpetrate the "worst crime of this millennium"? Chomsky may still be writing 1999 on his checks, but let's take this to mean the past thousand years. Wikipedia has the ghoulish numbers: War on Terror (including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan): 0.272 to 1.26 million deaths. Iran-Iraq War: 0.5 to 2 million deaths (citation needed, sigh). You can sort the table and find even more impressive statistics, and few of them ocurred before 1015. Perhaps someone should ask Chomsky to elucidate what he means by "crime." Someone other than Sam Harris.