So said a wise old sage.

Actually, I just made it up, and I don't think it'll make a book of quotations anytime soon, but it'll do as good as an introduction to yet another column on a genuine wise old sage, Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky, as you'll surely be aware by now, is scheduled to make a visit to Ireland next week to give the Amnesty International lecture at Trinity College, Dublin. In advance of his visit, he was persuaded to make some mild observations on Irish foreign policy, accusing the taoiseach of being a poster boy for the US and of shining George Bush's shoes. Personally speaking, I thought he was being far too polite, and he might have addressed a few words in the direction of Dermot Ahern, the government's shoeshiner-in-chief, but he made his point well, and will no doubt return to the subject during his lecture.

Other than the Irish Independent's decision to make Chomsky's criticisms its lead story, the reaction to what the professor said was fairly predictable. Those on the left, who'd been saying much the same for the last few years, shrugged and got on with enjoying their Christmas holidays. Those on the right, for whom Chomsky's mainly accurate, though often savage, criticism of US foreign policy, represents the unacceptable face of free speech, recycled the usual untruths and falsehoods about his career, and invented a few others.

He is not an uncontroversial man, in other words.

If you've not followed his career, either as a professor of linguistics . . . his day job, if I can put it like that . . . or as a critic and commentator on world events, especially in so far as they are influenced by US foreign policy, it's difficult to provide a clear sense of just how controversial he is. Suffice it to say that he believes that most of the recent US presidents could, if you applied the standards of the Nuremberg trials, be tried for war crimes. The US assault on Fallujah in November 2004, in which hundreds of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered by US troops, involved "war crimes for which the political leadership could be sentenced to death under US law", he wrote last year. (You can read much of his writing on www. chomsky. info, which also includes some of the many interviews which have been done with him around the world, including the hostile ones. ) The reaction from the usual right-wing nutters on the internet is hostile, to say the least. Conspiracy theories abound. Chomsky is accused of supporting mass murder, and lazy remarks he made in the 1970s about the nature of the genocide in Cambodia are treated as definitive proof that he is some kind of terrorist. (He has since amended those remarks, and now agrees that what happened in Cambodia was genocide, but his critics prefer to hold him to account for his original remarks, rather than the clarified version. ) The most recent controversy involving Chomsky to be chewed over on the internet involves an interview he gave to The Guardian newspaper in London a few weeks ago. The Guardian subsequently pulled the interview, which was done by a journalist called Emma Brockes, from its website, following complaints from readers and from Chomsky himself.

To the anti-Chomskyites, these complaints were a sign that their nemesis was unable to take the kind of criticism which he regularly doles out himself. Brockes, who was, to say the least of it, sceptical about Chomsky, was held up as a heroine for her chutzpah in taking on the great man; The Guardian was vilified for removing the interview from the website.

What actually happened was that Brockes invented a quote from Chomsky, whom she presented as having raised doubts about the massacre at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war. She quoted him as saying that the "massacre" was probably overstated, and then accused him of putting the word massacre in quotation marks to undermine the importance and seriousness of what had happened. "In print at least, " she wrote, "it can come across less as academic as witheringly teenage; like Srebrenica was so not a massacre."

Chomsky never denied there was a massacre at Srebrenica, never used quotation marks when writing about it. The furthest he ever went was to defend the right of an author called Diana Johnstone to express controversial views on the Bosnian war. There were other problems with The Guardian interview and its presentation, and ultimately the newspaper apologised as well as withdrawing the article from its website. That, of course won't stop the antiChomskyites from claiming for years to come that the professor denied there was a massacre at Srebrenica.

Chomsky has a reputation as being a man of the far left, although it seems to me that his views are more mainstream than they have ever been. Where once he seemed like a radical, he is now in a position where the warnings he has issued for decades about the imperial, acquisitive and dangerous nature of US foreign policy have become widely accepted fact.

He has stayed true to himself and watched as events unfolded more or less as he predicted them. He has been wrong on occasion . . . of course he has . . . but he is more accurate in his analysis than his critics would have you believe.

That is the man who will fly into Dublin next week, not some crypto-terrorist on a mission to undermine democracy and the rule of law.

You don't have to agree with him, but he deserves your respect and the favour of not having his views misrepresented at every turn.