I accept (I must) that that is your position (as stated earlier - he is 'a twit'), but I beg to differ. No matter.

But 'Chomskyspeak' as you call it does not require your translation; as one of the world's leading linguists he is habitually very precise in his use of language. Try this:

"'Terror' is a term that rightly arouses strong emotions and deep concerns. The primary concern should, naturally, be to take measures to alleviate the threat, which has been severe in the past, and will be even more so in the future." A concern at the use of 'terror' in our world - hardly revolutionary?

"To proceed in a serious way, we have to establish some guidelines...
1) Facts matter, even if we do not like them.
2) Elementary moral principles matter even if they have consequences that we would prefer not to face.
3) Relative clarity matters..." - nothing unreasonable in this, that I can see.

But its when he would seek to apply the principle of universality to these 'elementary moral principles', I would suggest, that he begins to lose the doctrinally 'faithful'. Doctrine is embarassed when confronted with passages like the following:

"This most elementary of truisms is sometimes upheld, at least in words. One example, of critical importance today, is the Nuremberg Tribunal. In sentencing Nazi war criminals to death, Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States, spoke eloquently, and memorably, on the principle of universality. 'If certain acts of violations of treaties are crimes,' he said, 'they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us..We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.'

That is a clear and honest statement of the principle of universality."

tsk tsk...Justice Jackson obviously hated the US as well...traitors all?

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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."