Chomsky has a long tradition of whitewashing human right abuse - in 1977 he did just the same thing for Khmer Rouge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman
> Look at Chomsky's books
I did read his whole book with Herman years ago, and it was nothing else but good old denial. He raised doubt about every single piece of evidence for genocide from Kampucha, basically doing nothing else than people who "asked valid questions" about Auschwitz ("but why the chimneys were so small"), Holodomor ("why would USSR do that"), Gulag ("that would be ineffective") etc etc. And Chomsky continued this even after mass graves were discovered.
"I did read..."
I haven't analysed what Chomsky said, on what dates, to that level of detail. I'm sceptical about "nothing else than". The evidence we have now for past genocides is vastly different to what was available at the time. Anyway, on this specific point we probably just have to disagree in our judgments.
> more political responsibility in Palestine
This very comparison is inappropriate. There may be a million reasons why US diplomatic reaction are different but Chomsky makes human rights abuse in Xinjiang kind of conditional to Gaza, which is nothing but a form of denial.
"This very comparison... kind of conditional ..."
This reading between the lines disagrees with Chomsky's clearly stated motivation. His consistent line over many decades is that he does not deny that genocides are carried out by "official US enemies". Instead, he sees his moral obligation as focussing on genocides and crimes against humanity done by or indirectly by his government, for which he holds (some) moral and practical responsibility.
That is not denial.
> The text is missing context
This is indeed a problem though - I've double checked and Chomsky generally acknowledges human right abuses in China, so this comment seems to be just part of his traditional anti-US rhetoric.
I wouldn't call it "anti-US rhetoric". Opposing the military and economic foreign policy of your country is not opposing "your country", it's rather carrying out one's ethical obligations as a citizen of your country, generalising the Hippocratic oath: "First do no harm."
Something like "anti-US-foreign-policy focus" would be better, or better yet would be "anti-one's-own-country's-foreign-policy focus".
Just one more quick comment: what I find disappointing (but not surprising) is that Falun Gong organ harvesting gets so much less Western mainstream media coverage than Xinjiang:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China
There are *some* recent (2019) media articles:
See also: #TigrayGenocide (ongoing)
Something that I did check in detail: Edward Herman (+Peterson)'s 2010 comment on the 2009 first-round Iranian presidential election was incomplete in terms of checking easily accessible evidence. Herman was Chomsky's co-author on Cambodia. Section 4.6 of [1] briefly comments on the Herman+Peterson blog item.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2789 (Journal of Applied Statistics 41, 164, 2014
https://oadoi.org/10.1080/02664763.2013.838664 )
@kravietz
That Wikipedia section does not provide any evidence of Chomsky whitewashing the Pol Pot genocide; it only provides evidence of people trying to claim that. Look at Chomsky's books themselves rather than how people try to interpret them.
The image of text you've pasted is not denying or whitewashing the Uighur genocide.
The text is missing context (interviewer? audience?), but presumably it's to a US audience, holding more political responsibility in Palestine than in China.