Prospects for Peace in the Middle East by Noam Chomsky at Lehigh University

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Tuesday, February 5, 2013 - 7:00pm
Packard Auditorium, Lehigh University

Lehigh University welcomes Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at MIT, will deliver a public lecture on Prospects for Peace in the Middle East on Tuesday, February 5 at 7pm in Packard Auditorium, Lehigh University. The February 5 lecture is free and open to the public.  Chomsky will also engage in a campus Q&A session between 1:10pm – 3:00pm in Neville 1, located on the campus of Lehigh University.

Chomsky, born in 1928 in Philadelphia, spent his undergraduate and graduate years at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in linguistics in 1955. He is a US political theorist and activist, and Institute Professor (Emeritus) of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Besides his path-breaking work in linguistics, Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most critically engaged public intellectuals alive today.  Chomsky continues to be an unapologetic critic of both American foreign policy and the neoliberal turn of global capitalism, which he identifies as a form of class warfare waged against the needs and interests of the great majority.

Over the past five decades, Chomsky has offered a searing critical indictment of US foreign policy and its many military interventions across the globe, pointing out that the United States’ continued support for undemocratic regimes and its hostility to popular or democratic movements contradicts its professed claim to be spreading democracy and freedom in the world. Chomsky’s prolific writing, and his public lectures around the globe, have documented successive American administrations’ support for political and military dictatorships across Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as the devastating impact of direct American intervention. As Chomsky has stated: "As the most powerful state, the US makes its own laws, using force and conducting economic warfare at will."

Show sponsors for this program are The Visiting Lectures Committee, Lehigh University Humanities Center, Office of the Lehigh Chaplain, South Side Initiative, Center for Global Islamic Studies and the Departments of Political Science, English, History, and Journalism and Communication.