Noam Chomsky and genocide
Esad Širbegović is a writer and analyst based in Zurich, Switzerland. He is also a member of the International Expert Team at the Institute for Research of Genocide Canada. In 2022, he served as the Director of the International Expert Team for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, focusing on the Srebrenica genocide denial case at the University of Vienna. Esad’s work is deeply rooted in his personal experiences and centres on the critical issues of Islamophobia and genocide
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Attribution: I, Pyramid
The Nakba marks the genocide of the Palestinians, just as Obmana—meaning “Deception”—marks the genocide of the Bosniaks from 1992 to 1995.
In both cases, victims were misled: Bosniaks, like Palestinians, were lulled into trusting international law and institutions that not only failed to protect them but actively participated in the very genocide against them.
Noam Chomsky played a central role in shaping this deception, a key architect in in the “Manufacturing Obmana.”
Globally revered as a linguist and influential critic of U.S. foreign policy, his legacy is deeply contradictory.
His prominence is overshadowed by deeply troubling positions and associations, including Srebrenica genocide denial and maintaining ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, accused of trafficking women and underage girls —some as young as 14.
Noam Chomsky’s Intellectual Authority
Within leftist intellectual circles, Noam Chomsky’s authority is derived from his formidable dual legacy as a scholar and a political dissident. As the founder of modern linguistics, his academic work commands universal respect. Politically, he has built a decades-long reputation as arguably the most prominent critic of American empire, corporate power, and media propaganda.
His well-known books, such as Manufacturing Consent, offer a basic way to understand how political and economic power influences what people think and believe.
His stance is characterized by a strict anti-imperialism that consistently places blame on Western powers, particularly the United States and its allies, for global conflicts.
For many on the left, Noam Chomsky is a vital moral compass. His rigorous analysis dismantles official narratives and gives voice to perspectives marginalized by entrenched power.
This position has cemented his status as an indispensable icon of dissent against power.
The Epstein files reveal Chomsky’s deep ties to the networks of power he criticized, highlighting a stark hypocrisy. In letters, he called his interactions with Epstein “a most valuable experience.”
Chomsky’s Srebrenica Genocide denial
Noam Chomsky has repeatedly engaged in the denial of the Srebrenica genocide, a well-documented atrocity where over 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were systematically killed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995.
His methods align with established tactics of genocide denial: he has placed the word “massacre” in quotation marks, questioned the scale of the killings, and framed them as overstated or as “retaliation” for other actions.
Noam Chomsky stated:
”The mass slaughter in Srebrenica, for example, is certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it ‘genocide’ so cheapens the word as to constitute virtual Holocaust denial, in my opinion.”
As a linguist, Noam Chomsky is acutely aware of the weight words carry. His claim that the genocide of Bosniaks “cheapens” the term genocide reveals, however, a supremacist perspective. By this logic, Bosniak lives are implicitly rendered less worthy—or “cheap”—and their suffering deemed unworthy of the word’s historical and moral gravity.
For Chomsky, granting the term genocide to Srebrenica—a legal fact established by international courts—amounts to “virtual Holocaust denial.” In doing so, he installs a hierarchy of human suffering, in which different linguistics apply for “cheaper” human beings as those deemed more valuable.
Chomsky’s expertise as a linguist renders his word choice not accidental but authoritative. In denying Bosniak victims the definitive term for their destruction, he performs a final, rhetorical indignity: using his command of language to strip them of recognition, ensuring their erasure extends from the physical to the historical.
In a 2005 interview, when asked if he regretted supporting those who said Srebrenica genocide was exaggerated, Chomsky replied, “My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough”.
The reaction from scholars, journalists, and survivors has been one of condemnation. A coalition of prominent academics, writers, and Srebrenica survivors penned a protest letter to The Guardian after it issued a correction favoring Chomsky.
Critics, including historian Marko Attila Hoare, have explicitly labeled Chomsky’s actions as “genocidal denial,” accusing him of muddying the waters and lacking the moral courage to be explicit about his revisionist views, much like Holocaust deniers.
Influencing Global Opinion by Contradicting International Courts
Chomsky leveraged his global reputation to shape opinion on the Srebrenica genocide, publicly challenging the definitive rulings of international courts.
Both the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have conclusively ruled that the mass murder at Srebrenica constituted an act of genocide.
In a landmark 2004 ruling, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) confirmed the Srebrenica mass murder of 8372 mostly men and boys constituted genocide.
This legal classification was definitively affirmed in 2007 by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which stated that acts of genocide were committed by members of the VRS—the Army of the Bosnian Serbs..
The ICJ affirmed that Bosnian Serb forces acted “with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina”
Despite these obvious hard legal facts, Chomsky has consistently rejected the term “genocide” for Srebrenica.
He has instead engaged in comparative minimization, arguing, for instance, that the crime was “much lesser” than Indonesian actions in East Timor– . By doing so, he provided intellectual cover for a narrative of denial propagated by Serbian nationalist circles.
Chomsky’s stance deliberately ignores the judicial processes and mountains of forensic evidence—including mass graves and DNA analysis—that underpin the international legal consensus.
His influence gave weight to revisionist narratives, undermining global recognition of the Bosnian genocide and providing reassurance to those aiming to obscure or diminish its historical reality.
The Epstein Connection: Financial and Family Ties to a Convicted Sex Offender
Recently revealed legal and financial documents have exposed a close, enduring relationship between Noam Chomsky and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, shattering the foundation of Chomsky’s moral authority.
The evidence shows regular, in-depth contact for years, continuing long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction. Far from distancing himself, Chomsky maintained direct ties with Epstein, with documented communication extending nearly a decade past the financier’s criminal conviction for procuring a child for sex slavery.
In 2015, Epstein offered Chomsky the use of his private residences , and Chomsky wrote an undated letter praising Epstein’s “limitless curiosity,” “extensive knowledge,” and calling him a “highly valued friend” . Financial records show Chomsky acknowledged receiving approximately $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein for managing a marital fund dispersal .
The connection extended beyond Chomsky himself, reaching into his family. His wife, Valeria, maintained warm correspondence with Epstein and even suggested meeting to “have a toast” for his birthday. Emails released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reveal that she sent Epstein a friendly message: “Hope you had a good celebration! Noam and I hope to see you again soon and have a toast for your birthday.”
By maintaining close ties to Epstein, accepting financial favors, and praising a convicted predator, Chomsky has tarnished his reputation as a dissident and exposed his links to the elite networks he claimed to criticize.
Historians may one day judge that Chomsky’s intellectual framework was tested not through books or debates, but through his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein’s operation—leveraging immense wealth to manipulate institutions, ingratiate himself with academia, and exploit the vulnerable—offered a grotesque yet precise illustration of the immoral power structures Chomsky spent decades critiquing.
Yet the most damning test of Chomsky’s intellectual framework came elsewhere, and it was one he unequivocally failed: his denial of the Bosnian genocide. That failure went largely unchallenged for more than two decades by much of Western media and academia, a silence facilitated by pervasive Islamophobia and entrenched biases against the Bosniak nation.
Chomsky failed both tests. Western historians may eventually seek to frame these failures as mere ethical blind spots.
Predator Ties, and Genocide Denial: Manufacturing Deception Exposed
Taken together, these two undeniable facts—the denial of the Bosnian genocide and Chomsky’s association with Jeffrey Epstein—reveal something far more consequential: an intellectual framework he constructed in which the critique of power ultimately served to manufacture deception and, in doing so, reinforced the very power it purported to oppose. In this framework, the language of power critique functioned not to challenge domination, but to disguise and perpetuate it.
Noam Chomsky’s legacy cannot be judged solely by the brilliance of his linguistic theories or the force of his critiques of Western imperialism. True intellectual authority demands moral clarity, particularly when confronting genocide and predatory power. Chomsky failed that test twice: first by denying the Srebrenica genocide despite overwhelming legal and forensic evidence, and again by maintaining a close relationship with Epstein long after his crimes were known. These failures are not incidental contradictions; they reveal the true nature and purpose of Chomsky’s life work—the use of the language of dissent not to expose domination, but to obscure it.
The two-state solution, which Noam Chomsky supported for decades, worked as a long-running political deception. It gave diplomatic cover to ongoing dispossession while Palestinian land was steadily taken.
He dismissed the Srebrenica genocide as a term that “cheapens” the word, implying a hierarchy of victimhood.
In Gaza, he refused to name genocide, retreating instead to “ethnic cleansing,” a term no honest person could mistake for what was happening.
As Professor Stanton warned: “‘Ethnic cleansing’ is a term invented by Slobodan Milošević and Serbian propagandists as a euphemism for forced deportation and genocide, the most successful euphemism in history for genocide denial. Milošević is laughing from his grave.”
Crucially, Chomsky never invoked the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, the right that was denied in 1948. As if Palestinians were “cheaper” people, the same as Bosniaks for him.
Chomsky’s intellectual framework acts as a sedative for conscience that promotes comfortable numbness: it converts honest moral outrage into analysis which systematically dismantles the language of liberation.
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