As we noted in November, Noam Chomsky appears to have utterly lost his moral compass in his advancing years, jumping on the Bosnia revisionism bandwagon and, in one unsavory incident, engaging in blatanly censorious behavior towards a writer who dared to challenge him. His legions of supporters seem incapable of grasping the irony of this recent episode: On Oct. 31, The Guardian ran an interview ("The Greatest Intellectual?") in which writer Emma Brockes called him out over a letter he signed in defense of Diana Johnstone, whose claims in the Swedish left-wing journal Ordfront that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated had sparked a storm of (well-deserved) protest. Defending Johnstone on free speech grounds (that is, defending her right to publish) would be legitimate, even if an ill-chosen battle. But in the interview, Chomsky went further, praising her disingenuous and distorted claims as "very careful and outstanding work."

From there, the story only gets worse—much worse.

From London News, Jan. 22:

Kosovo president Ibrahim Rugova died on Saturday aged 61, after a long fight with lung cancer. Mr Rugova was a key player fighting for peace in the region for more than a decade. He took on the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic and symbolized the struggle by Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanians for independence from Serbia.

From The Scotsman, Jan. 12:

A man armed with a knife wounded several people, including a rabbi, at a synagogue in Moscow yesterday. One Jewish official said the man called out as he burst into the building: "I will kill people, I will kill Jews."

As if the controversy over the Basque country wasn't enough, now a Spanish general rattles the proverbial sabre over moves by Catalonia, Spain's most industrialized region, to seek greater autonomy from Madrid. A lovely irony: as the world waits for Balkan republics like Croatia to outgrow recent fascistic leanings in order to gain European Union entry, we have EU member Spain displaying its own atavistic fascist tendencies. From Reuters, Jan. 6:

Tensions are mounting between Russia and Ukraine over the former's massive hike in the price of natural gas it sells to the latter. Ukraine has until now received cut-price gas in return for allowing Russia to pipe fuel across its territory to western Europe. But Gazprom, the state-owned Russian fuel company, has announced it is raising the price for gas supplied to Ukraine by more than 400%.

From The Scotsman, Dec. 26:

French police said about 100 vehicles were burned overnight, which marked an average weekend tally for urban violence and did not signify a flare-up of violence after riots last month.

From the BBC, Dec. 19:

Spanish police have arrested 14 people suspected of being members of an Islamist extremist group, with links to al-Qaeda.

The arrests were made in the southern towns of Malaga, Nerja and Seville.

Here's some good news for humanity, but a real no-win for the neo-Ustashe and neo-Chetniks who plague this blog. The neo-Ustashe will be aghast that the proud defender of an ethnically-pure Croatia has been subjected to this indignity—or, the more hypocritical ones will be chagrined by the riots in their civilized, Euro-ready Croatia. The neo-Chetniks, in turn, will have still less plausibility to harp on their long-nourished gripe that the world is picking on the Serbs and giving the Croats a pass. We imagine both varieties of kneejerk extremists will become even more venemous upon being backed into a corner like this. Bring it on! Let the abuse hurl forth! From the Financial Mirror, Dec. 9: