Letters

Chomsky and Draper

Editor:

In the Winter 1975 issue of Dissent, there is a “Public Notice” consisting of a paragraph from a review of my book Peace in the Middle East? by Theodore Draper, in which he alleges that my criticism of a Dissent editorial “utterly distorted [its] plain sense.” Had the editors checked the original (pp. 179, 195), they would have discovered at once that Draper simply fabricated the position that he attributed to me, lifting two phrases from a sentence that is entirely different in content. The actual criticism that appears, which is quite different from the one that Draper invented, is based on a reading of the editorial which is quite accurate. I will not give details here. There is an explanation in my response (New Republic, November 23, 1974). A more detailed analysis of this and other equally serious misrepresentations and errors of fact and logic appears in a let...