Monday, May 31, 2010

Marcy Winograd: "Israel murdered Gaza flotilla passengers to discourage aid"

Congressional candidate Marcy Winograd has issued a statement accusing the government of Israel of "murdering" Gaza flotilla passengers in order to discourage humanitarian aid efforts for Gaza. Here's an excerpt of her press release:

Congressional Candidate Marcy Winograd (CA-36) denounces the Israeli military's killing of at least 10 Free Gaza activists and wounding of dozens more on board a flotilla delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza. A founder of LA Jews for Peace, Winograd calls for an international investigation into the Israeli military's use of deadly force and urges Congress to immediately pass a resolution supporting such an investigation. Earlier, CNN reported Israeli troops opened fire on civilians aboard the flotilla in international waters.

As a sign of solidarity with the Free Gaza movement, a Winograd for Congress t-shirt had been sent and worn on the flotilla.

Says Winograd, "I suspect the murders were committed as a warning to others who might want to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. Ironically, the killings are bound to heighten awareness about the brutal blockade and to increase pressure to end the imprisonment of over a million people in Gaza."

read the rest here: OpEdNews - Article: Peace Candidate Winograd Denounces Murders of Free Gaza Activists; Calls for International Investigation


UPDATE #1 (June 1, 2010):

On the other hand, Israeli novelist, intellectual and peace activist David Grossman writes the following in the Guardian (read here):

No explanation can justify or whitewash the crime that was committed, and no excuse can explain away the stupid actions of the government and the army. Israel did not send its soldiers to kill civilians in cold blood; this is the last thing it wanted. Yet, a small Turkish organisation, fanatical in its religious views and radically hostile to Israel, recruited to its cause several hundred seekers of peace and justice, and managed to lure Israel into a trap, because it knew how Israel would react, knew how Israel is destined and compelled, like a puppet on a string, to react the way it did.

I added the bold font to emphasize the truth of the matter: no one but an extreme ideologue could possibly believe that Israel intended to kill people on the flotilla as a way to send a message to those wanting to send aid to Gaza.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Glenn Beck forum: Israel did 9/11

The 9/12 Project, which is Glenn Beck's loose-knit political organization, is promoting Alan Hart's slanderous charges that Israel destroyed the World Trade Center on 9/11 using "controlled ground explosives" and airplanes steered by remote control devices hidden in cell phones. He claimed, first in an internet radio interview by Kevin Barrett, then in a radio interview with Alex Jones, that the world's foremost engineering firm has told him of the truth of this conspiracy. He claims that he is currently unable to provide any further information about this or to identify his sources because he doesn't have access to the computer in which that data is stored. He went on to claim that this story is "well documented". As implausible as his story is, Hart's tall tale has been repeated in a variety of forums, including Pat Buchanan's blog and the website of the Ron Paul campaign. (Previous posts about this are available here in the archives.)


Here's what they've posted at Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project forum:

Greetings all,


Up until a couple of months ago I was always uncomfortable when someone criticized Zionist. I had mistakenly thought they were referring to all Jews and I try to avoid stereotyping. However, recently I have come to the understanding that Zionism deserves more criticism than anyone I know of has given it up until recently. Thanks to Mideast-expert, journalist-author Alan Hart, author of the book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of The Jews, the picture is now clear to me and the task ahead is also clear. We the people must take our government back.

Israel is much like the US in that the people, the Jews, do not control the government. Their government is controlled by the same Zionist criminals who control our government...they are better known here as neocons. I do not expect you to believe me, but if you have a yearning for the truth, spend a little time doing some real research away from the mainstream propaganda that we have been spoon fed. It appears to me that the Zionist are guiding us towards World War III.

This interview of Alan Hart by Kevin Barrett pulls back the curtains and exposes the lies we have been told: http://noliesradio.or... That statement is probably an oversimplification for those of you who have been prone to believe everything that comes from the government or their stool pigeons in mainstream media while discrediting everything from alternative sources. If you lack the truth seekers background research, you may need to read Alan's books to bring yourself up to speed.

Those of us who bother to look beyond the darkness of delusion into the light of truth are used to being thought of and sometimes even called conspiracy theorist or kooks. We have already dealt with the extreme discomfort that many will experience while listening to the above interview. Calling us names may make them feel better about the spoon fed ignorance they parrot, but the ignorance remains and the truth is all that really matters to us.

My original subject line was, It's Not the Arabs Stupid, but I decided that this subject matter is much too important to take the risk of offending anyone right up front and losing the chance for enlightenment. Our future is at stake, and it is not because of the Arabs, it is because of the Zionist. If you are as uncertain about what Zionism is as I was a mere few months ago, you could do much worse that spending some time at this site: http://nkusa.org/...

Here is a quick overview: http://www.nkusa.org/...

Scroll down at this site for an audio interview of Dr. Alan Sabrosky, under the title, 9/11 - The US Military Knows Israel Did It: http://www.informatio...

If you can deal with the discomfort, there is much truth that many of you have been unaware of up till now...excuses for staying in the darkness are just that, excuses.

Mike


Great minds think alike...


UPDATE #1 (May 30, 2010):  

Michael Eck, the Glenn Beck 9/12 Project forum member who posted this column, is a longtime, avid Ron Paul supporter. (Read here.) I guess that explains his avatar, a coin bearing the likeness of Ron Paul:

Ron Paul website promotes "Israel did 9/11" libel

The Ron Paul campaign (yes -- they stay in operation, presidential election year or not) is using one of its websites to promote crazy conspiracy theories blaming Israel for 9/11. In a post dated January 5, 2010, the Daily Paul website has the following posted currently on their blog. From what I infer, the writer refers to a storage space at New York's JFK airport, where, apparently, some of the 9/11 debris was stored, and which, apparently, had been used by a now-defunct airline which formerly flew to Israel. The Zim Corporation referred to apparently is an Israeli shipping firm which moved their U.S. offices from the World Trade Center to Norfolk, VA just before 9/11. Sounds like solid evidence of guilt to me.

...I would like to call your attention to ... the proprietorship of Hangar 17, where the only known 9/11 evidence still in existence is locked away from public scrutiny.

When viewed from a certain angle, Hangar 17 in JFK airport has a prominent, unfaded billboard that says ” Tower Air “. Tower Airlines was an * Israeli * airline that went bankrupt in 2000 . None other than Hangar 17 housed Tower Air’s then brand-new corporate headquarters.

Why does 9/11 evidentiary material that would provide clues such as the absence or presence of Super Thermite or other explosive material in the dust from the blasts sit for “safekeeping” in the former Executive Headquarters of a ten-year-defunct Israeli front organization that contracted heavily for the U.S. Defense Department and still has an unfaded sign hanging on the building?

Mike Ruppert reported that the Israeli container and freight-shipping corporation Zim , who occupied several floors in the Twin Towers and is widely known to do extensive operational support work for the Mossad, vacated all their offices days before the attacks – and they vacated in violation of their lease.


Read it here: More Israeli Mossad Connections to 9/11 | Ron Paul 2012 | Campaign for Liberty at the Daily Paul (UPDATE 8/1/2010:  The Daily Paul administrators have scrubbed this from public view, although it is still available to registered users of the site, and in cached form here and here, minus one page of comments.)

Of course, this is nothing new. Ron Paul has a history of promoting outrageous conspiracy theories blaming Israel for attacking the World Trade Center based on the flimsiest of evidence and logic. He did it in his newsletter, with reference to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. According to the L.A. Jewish Journal:

A 1987 issue of Paul’s Investment Letter called Israel “an aggressive, national socialist state,” and a 1990 newsletter discussed the “tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the Mossad in their area of expertise.” Of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a newsletter said, “Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little.”
Read here.

Rand Paul Says: "No More 14th Amendment, No More U.N., More Electric Fences and Satellite Border Monitors"

Rand Paul, still reeling from interviews in which he advocated the politically extreme position that businesses should be free to discriminate based on race, has given an interview in which he advocated completely eliminating the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to those born in the U.S.  Interestingly, this interview was with the quirky Russian television network Russia Today, which broadcasts a lot of odd, far-right political opinion in a pseudo-news format. (By Russian, I mean that it's sponsored by the Russian government. It broadcasts in English via cable.) That's how far afield Rand Paul now has to go to avoid being asked about the Civil Rights Act.

Is this the strategy of his new campaign manager, Jesse Benton? Remember, Benton was the communications director for Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign, so it would make sense that media image building would be his focus.  Benton probably looked at the options, saw RT and said, far-right, outside the echo-chamber, not highly visible, let's go for it.  And maybe, just maybe, RT agreed in advance not to ask about the Civil Rights Act or BP comments.

In spite of being limited by his new campaign manager to this carefully chosen safe forum, Paul still manages to put his foot in another whopping pile of crap. His problem isn't just bad political instincts, it's that his views like those of his father are truly crazy.  These aren't just unforced errors.  These are the man's core beliefs.

Listen at 9:20 of the video below. He even spells out a motive for opposing the 14th Amendment. He worries out loud that "it helps the Democrats".


In addition to advocating gutting the Constitution in this interview, Paul also gets the facts of the attempted Times Square car-bombing wrong, advocates that the U.S. install an underground electric fence along the entire border with Mexico, and says he wants the U.S. to leave the IMF, World Bank and U.N. He's concerned about the U.N. leading armies in battle, although he makes a point of clarifying this by saying that he "likes diplomacy".



Talk Radio host advocates bombing Ground Zero mosque

This is disgraceful. This is the voice of the right-wing hate behind opposition to Cordoba House. Listen to it.


On Wednesday, a man named “Tony” called into the KTRH-AM (Houston, TX) radio show of right-wing radio host Michael Berry in support of the Muslim center. First, Berry asked the caller whether “Tony” was his real name, because with his accent, he didn’t “sound like a ‘Tony.’” He repeatedly tried to link to the mosque to terrorists, eventually saying that if the mosque is built, he hopes someone blows it up:

BERRY: No, Tony, you can’t build a mosque at the site of 9/11.

TONY: Why not? Why not?

BERRY: No, you can’t. And I’ll tell you this: If you do build a mosque, I hope somebody blows it up. … I hope the mosque isn’t built, and if it is, I hope it’s blown up. And I mean that. … It’s right-wing radicals like me that are going to keep this country safe for you and everyone else from the people who are flying the planes from the country you fled from. If you want to identify with those people, go live with them.



Here's the audio:

Friday, May 28, 2010

Alan Sabrosky: "Large majority of U.S. Jews are traitors" and Israel did 9/11 attacks. So who the heck is Alan Sabrosky?

Sometimes, when an expert makes a serious charge but has no evidence to back it up, it's still newsworthy by dint of the provenance of the charge.  The reputation of a source can play a big role in determining when to believe unverifiable charges, or at least report them with a grain of salt.

Alan Sabrosky bills himself as the former Director of Studies at the U.S. Army War College.  He has made quite a name for himself in recent months by first declaring himself a military expert with high-level connections in the U.S. military hierarchy, then by outrageously claiming that Israel was responsible for 9/11 and that the U.S. military knows this and is concealing it.  While he offers no evidence for this, he claims that he should be trusted because of his expertise.  The truth of the matter -- with respect to both his background and his claims -- is quite different, of course.  Sabrosky has deliberately inflated his role in the military and has used that ruse to promote a hateful, fact-free conspiracy theory.  In fact, while he did work as an administrator at the U.S. Army War College, he was not, as his job title seems to indicate, the director or dean of the college.  Far from it.  According to the Press Office of the Army War College, in the mid-1980s, Sabrosky served as a civilian administrator at a research department of the college, supervising the publication of papers written within that department.  His job title was "Director of Studies" because he supervised publishing studies done within a department of the college.  He was a mid-level civilian manager at a military college, without access to the sort of highly classified material of the sort he now fraudulently claims to have.  Moreover, since his employment at that school was about 25 years ago, his employment there would provide him with no special insights with respect to 9/11.  How on earth could someone who worked on the level of a college librarian in the 1980s be privy to top secret information revealing a vast hidden conspiracy?  And how on earth could he be the only person to know about it or think it worth revealing?


An expert, privy to the highest levels of the military elite?

Over the past few years, Alan Sabrosky has become a fixture of anti-Israel media.  In numerous, articles, interviews and blog postings, he literally does only two things: promotes conspiracy theories and compares Israel to Nazi Germany.  As I mentioned above, most recently, he has taken this campaign to a new level of absurdity by claiming not only that Israel was responsible for carrying out the 9/11 attacks, but that most of the leadership of the U.S. military knows this and is keeping it secret in a vast conspiracy of silence.   I don't know how many of thousands of officers Sabrosky includes in this conspiracy of silence, but, considering that not a single officer has broken it, it would certainly go down as the most successful such conspiracy in history if true.  Only because of Sabrosky's impressive sounding resume, these reckless and baseless charges have been reposted and repeated countless times, albeit in biased and unreliable places.

Sabrosky originally published this conspiracy theory in a column called "Treason, Betrayal and Deceit: 9/11 and Beyond" which he published on the Information Clearinghouse website in September (read here).  That column was reposted verbatim on a number of far-right, pro-Palestinian, 9/11 truth and conspiracy-oriented websites (read here), including, of course, the 9/11 Jewish-Mossad False-Flag Archive.   In March, Sabrosky published his follow-up on Information Clearinghouse, featuring the audio of the interview embedded above. That he called "The Dark Face of Jewish Nationalism: 9/11 - The US Military Knows Israel Did It" (read here).

Based solely on Sabrosky's word, this absurd conspiracy theory has spread far and wide.  Googling the terms sabrosky +9/11 +israel gets about 28,000 hits at the time I'm writing this, reflecting the fact that an ersatz Jewish-American military official's charge that Israel did 9/11 has really gone viral.  (Read here.)  Those Google results include Sabrosky's original column, those quoting or citing Sabrosky's claims, and links to interviews with him.  Among the latter is the Ron Paul Forums website, which posts the above-embedded video  here and here, and touts it here.   The Ron Paul Forums also linked to a posting supporting Sabrosky on the anti-Semitic website TheInformationUnderground.  (Read here.)  More recently, anti-Zionist conspiracy nut Alan Hart and 9/11 conspiracy nut Kevin Barrett gave Sabrosky their seal of approval in a radio interview in which Hart made his own extreme and false charges concerning 9/11, as I wrote here.  Both Hart and Barrett spoke solemnly of their deep respect for Sabrosky and his expertise on Israel and the U.S. military.


Wrapping themselves in the false-flag

A website purportedly devoted to vererens' issues, but which in fact is frequently devoted to promoting conspiracy theories, has been part of the mainstreaming of Sabrosky's views.  Veterans Today (read here) describes Sabrosky's charges as accurate, (falsely) says of him that

What makes him unique is that we have a Jew who can hardly be called “self-hating” or “anti-Semitic” or against Israel.
then quotes Sabrosky that

Zionism is a real witches’ brew of xenophobia, racism, ultra-nationalism and militarism that places it way outside of a “mere” nationalist context...  and goes far beyond the misery for others professed by the Nazis...
Zionism undermines civic loyalty among its adherents in other countries in a way that other nationalist movements (and even ultra-nationalist movements like Nazism) did not.

The column quotes Sabrosky as saying that Zionists regard all non-Jews as "potential enemies".   That's the same column that claims Sabrosky can't be bigoted against Jews because he has some unspecified Jewish family members!

It turns out that Veterans Today isn't quite what it seems.  It's actually edited by another person with an amazingly impressive sounding resume and a penchant for promoting anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.  (Quite a coincidence!)  That man is Gordon Duff, who writes of himself (read here) that he


is a Marine Vietnam veteran, grunt and 100% disabled vet. He has been a featured commentator on TV and radio including Al Jazeera and his articles have been carried by news services around the world. He has been a UN Diplomat, defense contractor and is a widely published expert on military and defense issues. He is active in the financial industry and is a specialist on global trade. Gordon Duff acts as political and economic advisor to a number of governments in Africa and the Middle East. Gordon Duff is currently working on economic development projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan to counter the effects of poverty and global extremism.

I don't know for certain, but excuse me for thinking that Duff's resume sounds more than a bit fishy.


The conspiracy widens...

In a recent radio interview, Sabrosky further widened the dimensions of his conspiracy theory by declaring that "the large majority of U.S. Jews" are "traitors".  After introducing his subject by saying that it was the most important thing he could possibly talk about because loyalty to country is a paramount virtue, Sabrosky told his interviewer that

To my displeasure and my shame, because I have some Jewish relatives -- none of whom is Zionist -- a large majority of American Jews give their allegiance to a foreign country. They may have American citizenship, but their allegiance is to Israel. And as I said in the piece, this is a form of political bigamy that is every bit as dishonest as marital bigamy. And marital bigamy is -- you know -- I'm not married now, but when I was, loyalty to my spouse was absolute. It has to be there. I can look and say "Ah ha! There is Farah Fawcett." You know -- and I could admire someone out there, but I didn't give that person my allegiance. And there's a difference between admiring from a distance and giving allegiance to that thing, and it's the same with a country...

Some of my relatives are German, some are Irish. All of them have a measure of allegiance to those cultures, but it's not a political allegiance, it's a social allegiance. It's like - we're gonna stand up on St. Patty's Day or we're gonna stand up on Oktoberfest and we'll celebrate this, and we're proud of being German or Irish or whatever it happens to be. But none of us gives our allegiance to Ireland or Germany. Jews do.

I don't care if we're called anti-Semites or not. If we don't say "truth is truth -- their allegiance is to a foreign country -- they are traitors", then we're dishonest to ourselves...

I've had a bitter argument with one of my cousins who moved to Israel and kept his American citizenship. If someone loves another country enough to go there, more power to them. They go, and they're gone. But they keep the U.S. citizenship so they can continue to participate in our elections, stand in our offices. Look at Rahm Emanuel! I mean, he served in the Israeli armed forces, not the American armed forces! And he is easily the second most powerful person in the country. Easily. That's treason!"

[The audio of this is available at 4:20 of the below-embedded video.]





Opposition from truthers, support from anti-Zionists

Some in the 9/11 Truth movement have quite sensibly pointed out that Sabrosky's conspiracy theory is not only factually false and illogical,  but that's it's also bigoted.  (Read here.)  Amusingly, they deduce from this that Sabrosky must be an agent provocateur  working with a conspiracy to discredit the other, more sensible, conspiracy theorists.  They think that Sabrosky is a one-man false-flag operation!

But not everyone is as suspicious as the truthers.  For example, the anti-Zionist blog Mondoweiss not only cites Sabrosky as an expert on Israel, it actually published a column he authored at Philip Weiss' request!  In the column, which he wrote for Weiss in 2008 (read here), Sabrosky, after claiming some Jewish heritage by dint of having an unspecified Jewish family member and liking Jewish food, went on to call Benjamin Netanyahu a Nazi -- "Gauleiter in spirt" -- although he didn't bother to say why.  Considering the gravity of that charge, one would think it worthwhile to spell out the crimes that elicited it.  Then, citing those infamous drunken bigots in Max Blumenthal's "Feeling the Hate" video, Sabrosky went on to call Jewish Zionists "barabarians" and "evil", and to compare Zionism to Nazism.  In spite of Blumenthal's claim that his "Feeling the Hate" video wasn't meant to be taken as a reflection of all Zionists, Alan Sabrosky and Mondoweiss certainly saw it that way .  Mondoweiss' editors, while admitting in a column for Talking Points Memo (read here) that the interviews in the Blumenthal video were "cherry-picked", still somehow asserted that the video accurately showed that "Americans who are called to Israel ... don't especially believe in minority rights".  In this way, they illogically argue that cherry-picked facts can support an accurate conclusion.  That sort of logic appeals to those such as Sabrosky who generally operate in a fact-free environment.  They have in that video at least a bit of tangible evidence to support their biases.  Generally, Sabrosky doesn't have any.


Alan Sabrosky


Nick Cohen on the Lib Dems ugly side

from: Something Nasty in the Woodshed | Standpoint

Let me say from the beginning that the presence of Jenny Tonge as a peer on the Lib Dem benches in the Lords is not in itself an indictment of the Liberal politicians now in office. Rather, their willingness to defend her as she recycles some of the foulest racist theories in European history indicts them as shallow, slippery men.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict explains the shabbiness of Lib Dem thought as it explains so many other shabby arguments circulating in Europe. Its leaders ought to know that the only moral position to take is to support a two-state solution in which a free and democratic Palestine lives alongside Israel with borders that approximate the dividing lines of 1967. In theory, everyone except far-leftists, Islamists and neo-Nazis knows this. In practice, Lib Dem opinion has been seized by a reactionary version of radical chic in which murder is celebrated and racism dignified.

Let Baroness Tonge stand as an example of a malaise which has gripped hundreds of thousands of people who are playing with ideas previous generations would have described as fascist without hesitation. Instead of supporting the PLO-led Palestinian Authority, which for all its corruption and faults represents the best hope of a liberal democratic Palestine, she supports the clerical fascism of Hamas, and has gone to the Ba'athist tyranny of Syria to describe its leaders as "shrewd, plausible and actually very likeable".

I don't subscribe to "no platform" policies. I believe that the prejudiced must always be confronted. And despite knowing about her support for an organisation whose charter might have been written by Hitler, I gladly accepted an invitation to share a stage with her during a recording of Any Questions for BBC Radio 4. I was struck by the deference with which the apparent liberals in the hall treated her, as much by the coquettishness of her trite interventions on the side of the opponents of liberalism and democracy. At one point, she declared that she backed the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, because she "quite fancied" him, and the image of the pair together still has the power to make me sit bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night.

She admired Putin for the same reason that she applauds Hamas: he was against the West. She did not give a thought about the aspirations of real liberals and democrats in Russia, who want to change their kleptomaniac and oppressive state. All that mattered was that the Russian regime could frustrate Western plans. Do not dismiss her as an eccentric. Hers is a common and highly hypocritical version of Little Englandism found everywhere in modern liberalism. Instead of saying that they want the quiet life and to avoid foreign entanglements, its proponents hide their dislike of the policies of the rulers of their own countries behind a façade of insincere concern for the suffering of others abroad.


READ THE REST HERE

Support the "Ground Zero Mosque"

(I've written a partial retraction of this piece which can be read here.)

I have never before used this blog to endorse a specific public policy in this manner, but there's a first time for everything.  I'm writing to express my support for the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" or "World Trade Center Mosque", although those terms and what they imply miss the mark.  The mosque (actually a cultural center called Cordoba House) is planned for a building which is two blocks north of the World Trade Center site, and has been in operation at another site farther north in the neighborhood for 29 years.  I worked in that neighborhood from 1985-1986 and 1989-2002 and know it very well.  I have known people who were members of the congregation. I have heard the imam and other members of the congregation speak.  These are good people who pose a threat to no one.  They promote a sane and compassionate form of Islam entirely counter to the hatred engendered by extremists whether jihadi or anti-jihadi.  They are Sufi by religious orientation, modernist in philosophy and believe strongly in interfaith outreach and participation in the broader community.   The imam heads a group with the promotion of precisely this outreach and participation as its mission.  (Read here.)

I can think of no better Muslim congregation to welcome into a community, although welcoming is the wrong term considering how long they've already operated there in complete peace and brotherhood with their neighbors.  I whole-heartedly support their building of Cordoba House and look forward to attending public events there when they do.  Regardless of my feelings about Cordoba House, there's a little matter of the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing freedom of religion to everyone in this country.  The idea that anyone would deny someone else the right to worship as they see fit shows an utter misunderstanding of what this country's all about.  Above and beyond supporting this mosque, I support everyone's freedom of religion.

By the way, in an interview this morning with Brian Lehrer of New York's public radio station  (available here), the congregation's imam and his wife cited Manhattan's Jewish Community Center as the inspiration for their project.

I am not going to bother to link to the opponents of the Cordoba Center project.  If you want to bother, Google them.  My understanding is that the disgraceful campaign of opposition to the project is being led by Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs.  If she has nothing more threatening or offensive than this to fight, the world must be in better shape than I thought.  She should be ashamed of herself for demonizing innocent people in this manner.

Pat Buchanan website: Israel destroyed WTC via controlled demolition

Pat Buchanan's website (see note below) has published a column claiming that a major engineering firm has concluded that Israeli agents destroyed the World Trade Center via controlled demolition. (Read here. [11/03/2010: No longer available online.  Click here.]) This conspiracy theory is a recent product of a retired TV reporter named Alan Hart, and was the subject of an earlier post on this blog. (Read here. Another prior column on Hart is available here.) Hart claims that an unnamed engineering firm has concluded that the World Trade Center was destroyed not by fires resulting from planes crashes, but by explosives detonated in the buildings. He further claims that Israeli agents steered the planes which crashed into the World Trade Center using remote control devices in their cell phones. Hart also contends that Israel has stolen an American nuclear weapon which it intends to explode in a major American city. He stated in an interview that Israel intends to use this "false-flag operation" to start a war between the U.S. and Iran in order to conceal a planned genocide of Palestinians by Israel.

Hart, who has made a career of anti-Zionist campaigning in a series of barely-read books and a never-ending tour of public appearances, has thus far been unable or unwilling to name the engineering firm he referred to, or to cite his sources for any of his charges. He maintains that this information is stored on a computer which is currently unavailable to him.



UPDATE #1(May 29, 2010): 

An observant reader at Screw Loose Change, the great anti-truther blog, has pointed out (here) that the Pat Buchanan website, buchanan.org is, according to a notice buried on a FAQ page on the website (here), not edited or maintained by Pat Buchanan, but by the webmaster for his 2000 presidential campaign, Linda Mueller.  Hard to believe that Buchanan would be so irresponsible to allow a website -- which is named for him, filled with his image, columns and pitches for his books, and which completely buries the notice stating that he's not editing it -- to post material this offensive.  A lot of the other material, including links to Holocaust denial websites, is equally bad.

Buchanan needs to disavow this website or MSNBC needs to disavow him.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Michael Scheuer: State Dept. should publish names and personal info of Americans with ties to Israel

I wrote in March about Michael Scheuer's grossly hyperbolic and ill-considered piece in the National Journal in which he advocated that the U.S. not only leave NATO, but that it entirely disengage from Europe.  (He headlined that piece ""Europe is a wheezing corpse". Read here.)  I wrote that piece in the knowledge that no significant observer of world affairs could take such extreme views seriously, but knowing that Scheuer is still interviewed by journalists as if he were a legitimate expert on foreign affairs.  To the television-viewing public, and apparently to the BBC, Fox News and NPR among others, he's the former CIA agent who had an impressive sounding role in the search for bin Laden in the 1990s.

In the course of writing my blog post, I discovered that Scheuer has started a blog which he calls Non-intervention.com.  Scheuer is using that blog largely to write columns accusing American supporters of Israel of treason, and suggesting that the U.S. take harsh measures against both Israel and its supporters.  As I wrote earlier today, he's also using the blog to bizarrely call for armed rebellion against the federal government, albeit in a vocabulary so antique as to be ignored or misunderstood by most readers.  At the risk of having my blog become all-Scheuer, all-the-time, I've decided to share my thoughts about these proposals.  After that, no more Scheuer for a while.


Ignore oversees threats, fight illusory domestic enemies instead

In a column entitled "Turn Biden's Humiliation to America's Advantage" dated March 12 (read here), Scheuer advocates cutting ties with Israel and subjecting supporters of Israel to scrutiny verging on arbitrary punishment.  He also casts some very harsh words on those who are friendly to Israel: "abject and effete lickspittles" he calls them, and "Israel-firsters".  By this, Scheuer equates friendliness to Israel with disloyalty to the U.S. and, amazingly, treason.  (I realize that this seems hyperbolic, but I suggest that readers sample his blog posts before they conclude that it is.)  Scheuer makes several modest proposals for the Israeli-Arab conflict, all of them strangely oriented toward making a bad situation worse, as if Scheuer is not satisfied with predicting Armageddon, but is intent on bringing it about.  He writes:

"(L)eave the combatants solely responsible for fighting until one, the other, or both are destroyed, or peace is made".  

Characterizing this proposal to stoke the flames of conflict as "getting tough with Israel", Scheuer writes that "the war’s outcome is irrelevant to America".  He goes on to fantasize that, after such a war,

"Washington can consider requests for restored relations with each entity, or with whichever survives.  Palestine’s request would be mostly pro forma; it does not threaten America.  Israel is different story..."
Israel is different, he says, because its U.S. supporters are a domestic threat, a "neo-Copperhead fifth column".  With this bizarre phrase, Scheuer compares American Zionsits both to Civil War-era "domestic subversives" who supported the Confederacy (read here), and to covert supporters of Franco who threatened to undermine the Republic during the Spanish Civil War (read here).

Scheuer, having thus suggested pouring gasoline on a tinderbox and applying lit matches, proposes additional measures to further fix the world.  Here's what he writes:

Washington must insist that Israel take five actions to help destroy the U.S. citizen-led, Israel-First fifth column that has made Israel the most arrogant, avaricious, and treacherous U.S. ally.  Americans always have served God and Caesar, but they abhor fellow citizens who serve a foreign Caesar, as do those who subordinate U.S. interests to their assessment of Israel’s needs.  Four public Israeli government actions will focus loyal U.S. citizens on their disloyal countrymen, those who want their taxes spent and soldier-children killed in a religious war for Israel.

a.) Israel must list all U.S. intelligence and technology it has given or sold to third countries.
b.) Israel must identify all U.S. citizens who have or are serving its military and so have sworn allegiance to a foreign power.
c.) Israel must admit sponsoring anti-U.S. espionage by Pollard and others, and publicly name all U.S. citizens and front companies it has paid in the past or is now paying or assisting to commit treason against the United States.
d.) Israel must list all U.S. citizens, living and dead, to whom it has issued passports, in the following categories: (a) Senators, Congressmen, Cabinet members, and senior political appointees; (b) federal civil servants, especially diplomats and intelligence officers; (c) civilian and uniformed Pentagon employees; (d) journalists, academics, and entertainers; and (e) other citizens.
–The fifth Israeli public action is simple justice.
e.) Israel must publicly admit that it deliberately attacked the USS
Liberty in 1967.
So Scheuer, as starting points, would have Israel confess to subverting the U.S. government and deliberately attacking a U.S. ship.  The possibility that  these outrageous charges are false is not considered by Scheuer.  He would have Israelis in the U.S.and Americans with dual citizenship singled out as suspects -- forced to reveal all their personal and business information to the State Dept. -- then have the State Dept. make these private record public.  That such a gross violation of the Fourth Amendment should be advocated by someone who regards himself, like his candidate Ron Paul, a radical "Constitutionist", indicates just how distorted this movement's view of the document it claims to support really is.  These people would destroy the constitution in order to save it, like a Vietnamese village.  They would undo our liberties based on paranoid suspicions, all in the name of promoting liberty.

Oremus et pro perfidis Judaeis

What could be more offensive, more deliberately offensive, to Jews than the invocation of that phrase in a debate on Israel?  To state that Israel equals Nazi Germany, as some opponents of Israel do?  Yes, that's more offensive.  To state that Israel kills Palestinians as Jews killed Christ, as the Palestinian Protestant  group Sabeel (among others) does?  Yes... that's worse.  The invocation of the traditionalist Catholic charge of Jewish perfidy isn't quite at that level, but it's close.  It's especially offensive in the context of  a column accusing Obama of being a "toady" to the Jewish state, and arguing that support for Israel is unpatriotic (read here).  Here's the money quote:

He (i.e. Obama) ... should make a clear presentation to Americans about Israel’s perfidy.
What are the crimes Scheuer believes Israel to be guilty of?  First and foremost, he fears that Israel subverts U.S. sovereignty by exercising undo influence on our foreign policy via a covert yet all-powerful conspiracy.  His evidence?  That's where things get shaky.  This kind of fear is always based largely in paranoia and Scheuer's is no exception, hence his reversion to traditional ways of poking fingers in the Jews' eyes.  Here's his proof of the grand conspiracy:

Israel-Firsters ... weaken U.S. security from positions in the Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the media, and many Christian evangelical churches, as well from the pages of leading Israel-First journals like Commentary, the Weekly Standard, the National Review, and the Wall Street Journal...
That's it.  In Scheuer's world, support for Israel by definition equals putting Israeli interests before those of the U.S., and this, by definition, equals disloyalty and subversion.  The fact that the federal government includes many supporters of Israel means for Scheuer that agents of a nefarious foreign are working to subvert the government from within.  That few in the media share his paranoia indicates to Scheuer that the press too is part of the conspiracy.  What he makes of the fact that the vast majority of U.S. citizens support Israel, one can only speculate.  Those are the people who elect the Congress and President, who read the periodicals he cited, and who think his views are the ones that seem foreign.  Are they a part of the conspiracy or its victims?   Again, one can only speculate.  Scheuer presumably would call the American electorate victims of Israel-First conspiracy until after election time, then, after they vote down the tea party candidate, resort to accusing them of being part of the problem.  Of course, if the tea party candidate wins, all bets are off.


Isolationist Paranoia Redux

The isolationist impulse is not a new one in this country.  It has a history, a track record, and common features which place it in a political tradition of a sort.  In the post-World War II era, the isolationist right, which had fallen into disrepute after Pearl Harbor, made a resurgence.  Looking both for a reason for being and for scapegoats for their failures, they targeted the domestic left: disproportionately Jewish, well-educated, and urban.  This focus was convenient for the later-day isolationists who wanted to fight Communism without intervening overseas.  McCarthyism met the political requirements of those who followed the Republican right into sort of foreign policy blind alley.  They were led to that dead end by domestic political considerations, found themselves without a mission, then had that political vacuum filled by ideologues like McCarthy and his ilk.  McCarthyism let the right punish those who led the United States into fighting Nazism instead of Communism; and let them look backward and falsely place blame for "who lost China" without addressing the real issues of the then ongoing Cold War.  The fact that this was a counter-productive, irrational, arbitrary, and cynical manipulation of real concerns somehow escaped the attention of a significant portion of the American public for many years. Now, many years later, this history has faded from memory -- hence the resurgence of John Birch Society paranoia, and of classic isolationism in the form of the Ron Paul campaign, the tea party movement and the paleo-conservative/libertarian/far-left coalition which advocates (at least in part) for a neo-McCarthyite response to support for Israel, conflating such support with neo-conservativism, elitism, Hollywood,Wall Street and, as Scheuer makes clear, Jewishness, albeit Jewishness of the current generation, not of the 1950s.

Michael Scheuer is a foreign policy advisor to Ron Paul (although Ron Paul supporters have complained in comments on this blog that I drawing attention to this fact is somehow unfair to Ron Paul)..  As I've written in the past, Paul (like Scheuer) advocates isolationism, and even goes so far as to praise the isolationist movement of the early World War II era.  He explicitly praises figures such as Charles Lindbergh, whose opposition to war verged on support for the Nazis (who they certainly helped by delaying U.S. opposition to Nazi aggression), and who explicitly scapegoated American Jews for drawing the U.S.into the war.   Moreover, Ron Paul and other neo-isolationist supporters of Lindbergh completely overlook Lindbergh's associations with a cabal of far-right, anti-Roosevelt military officers, his close friendship with Nazi collaborators such as Alexis Carrel and his private expressions of admiration for the Nazis.  Ron Paul goes so far as to say that Lindbergh and the isolationists were the truly patriotic Americans of their era -- just don't call them isolationists.  Paul prefers that both he and his historical heroes be called "non-interventionists" and that this movement be regarded as being of a piece with George Washington's opposition to "foreign entanglements", a seemingly overarching principle which Washington clearly intended to avoid U.S. involvement in conflict between Britain and France.  Scheuer has wrapped his isolationism in the mantle of Thomas Jefferson in his writings, apparently forgetting that Jefferson was a strong advocate of the idea that human rights were universal, and that Jefferson involved the United States in conflict with the Barbary pirates, and pursued what was, for its era, a robust foreign policy which made both allies and enemies.  Washington and Jefferson were hardly the monolithic and doctrinaire ideologues Paul and Scheuer see them as.  They weren't the isolationists of their era.  That's what psychologists would call a projection.  Paul and Scheuer see Washington and Jefferson as their mirror image, as Paul and Scheuer in powdered wigs.  Such a distortion requires correction by an objective third party.  Someone to tell Ron Paul and Michael Scheuer just how badly they misunderstand U.S. history.  That could be alled an intervention.

UPDATE (June 4, 2010):


Scheuer has apparently taken his entire blog offline.  I'm not sure why he did this, or whether it's permanent.  I can see why he might want to cover his tracks by deleting the columns I've discussed here from the record.


I'm looking for cached/archived versions of his columns and will update the links in this post as soon as I find them.

UPDATE #2 (June 5, 2010):



At the currently cached homepage for Scheuer's website (here), there's an "Account Suspended" page. Why?  


I've replaced the dead link in the article (the one that goes to Scheuer's now suspended blog) with a link to a cached version.  While doing this, I noticed another post (cached version here) predicting a sort of "race war" scenario of Jews fighting Muslims on U.S. streets, this by way of pleading to end the U.S.-Israeli alliance before it's too late.  This prediction was based on his viewing a video of the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, being shouted down by Muslim students while trying to address an audience at a California university.  If Scheuer can leap from that to predicting war in the streets of this country, he gives Glenn Beck's fevered imagination a run for its money.


Still more.  In this column he writes

In the ongoing debate over the seven attorneys hired by the Department of Justice after working pro bono to defend terrorists is drifting away from what I think is the main point of the issue — the ardent desire of Barack Obama to surround himself with people who either hate America or are intent on fundamentally changing everything America has traditionally respected and honored.

...and...

(President Obama) appointed as his chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, a man who deserted America to stand with Israel’s armed forces during the 1990-91 Gulf War, and has now given this man access to the nation’s most sensitive national security information....
wanted to appoint a self-avowed communist to work on his staff in the White House... appointed a woman to the Supreme Court who out of her own mouth admitted she was a bigot — Latina’s are better judges then white guys... (and) sent Cass Sunstein to the Department of Justice, a man who the media report champions legal representation for dogs in court; regards unborn human beings as a “handful of cells”; and believes the government should decide about who and who does not get life-preserving health care.

That's a whole lot of demonstrably false right wing talking points wrapped in a whole lot of paranoid crazy.

Then there's the hysterically titled column The Tea Party vs. Blind Arrogance (read here), in which he states the following, thus demonstrating that the Tea Party (at least in his case) is blind arrogance.

(President Obama) and all recent presidents have conducted a war on Christianity in America under the banner of the “separation of church and state.” Falsely claiming that they are doing the Founders’ work, these men and women, through their actions and appointments, have aided — or at least have done nothing to stop — the creation of “rights” that are nothing less than attacks on Christian beliefs. Whether by eradicating the term “Christmas” from our public lexicon; by championing nearly every kind of sexual deviance, or by facilitating the murder of 45-plus million unborn Americans by defending and perpetuating a Supreme Court decision even more merciless, anti-human, and lethal than Dred Scott, our political leaders have a message that can only read: “To hell with American Christians, we regard them as out-dated simpletons, we hate their God, and we will create a federal government that takes His place.” [NB: Other religions of course are exempt from the “separation of church and state” sanction. They are, rather, to be favored by our national government and with our tax money. Tyrannical Islamic theocracies are protected by the U.S. military and Islam is called a “religion of peace” whose young men just happen to be killing our soldiers and Marines, and the “Jewish state” receives tens of billions of dollars annually to help maintain its theocracy and involve our soldier-children in its expansionism and endless religious war.

In January, Scheuer infamously claimed in a C-SPAN interview that he was fired from a prestigious position with the Jamestown Institute as the result of a conspiracy by "Israel-firsters". He has gone on since that time to demonstrate in very stark terms why no self-respecting foreign policy think tank would want to be associated with his crackpot ideas. His employment troubles don't stem from a Jewish conspiracy, but from the distorted nature of his thinking about the world.  It makes perfect sense that he can't understanding that.  He can't understand a lot of things.

Michael Scheuer's case for armed rebellion

Outraged at Rand Paul's poor performance on the Rachel Maddow program last week, during which Paul came out against the Civil Rights Act's ban on racist discrimination by public facilities, Ron Paul advisor Michael Scheuer has written a bizarre screed which actually goes so far as to make the case for armed rebellion against the U.S. government. (Read here: Maddow and the Obamas: Killers of hope, spurs of rebellion | Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention.com.) Scheuer writes that Maddow's interview of Paul was an "attack", then goes on to describe Maddow as an "extremist" and an advocate of "a warmed over version of the 1920s’ Bloomsbury ideology: effete, secular, socialist, pacifistic, elitist, and libertine." He writes that "(a)nyone disagreeing with her ... is not just wrong but perverse, racist, badly educated, antiquarian, and could only come from the scum of the earth". (I suppose he means that these anti-Maddow anti-elitists are regarded or portrayed in this manner, not that he believes this to be true.) He also writes that Maddow advocates that the U.S. "lap up humiliation from Israel and Mexico".

Scheuer goes on to oddly single out Michelle Obama for condemnation as an "elitist", citing as evidence only Mrs. Obama's statement that she was proud of her country for nominating a black candidate and the fact that she attended ivy league universities.

Typical of the tea party right and Ron Paul supporters, Scheuer goes on to make much of the fact that some presidential appointees are referred to as "czars", although Scheuer seems to mistakenly believe that this is an innovation of the Obama administration. In fact, this harmless term of art for an appointee who heads some significant office but does not require congressional approval, was an innovation of the FDR administration. It doesn't refer in any way to elitism, arbitrary exercise of power, socialism (!), or any of the other absurd imputations made by the teabag right. In fact, the George W. Bush administration had far more "czars" than the Obama administration does. (Read here.)

Scheuer then runs through a laundry list of far-right talking points, along the way calling the American Medical Association "murderers for hire" because its members "have murdered... more than 47 million unborn Americans".

He calls upon private citizens along the border with Mexico to take up arms, writing that they should


arm themselves to protect their kith and kin against the brigands flowing across the southern border and the federal officials eager to prosecute U.S. citizens and defend the brigands.


Don't be distracted by Scheuer's antique vocabulary. He's saying that private citizens should take military action against people they believe to be illegal immigrants, and, astoundingly, against federal officials! How Scheuer expects federal authorities to protect the border while under attack from his band of amateur border agents, he doesn't bother to explain.

After running through his extremist bill of particulars against the "elitists" he thinks are ruining this country, singling out both the federal government and "Hollywood" for particularly strong approbation, Scheuer offers a modest proposal for a solution. Revolution. He recruits two of America's greatest revolutionaries as posthumous (and therefor involutary) supporters for his cause: Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson.

So what can Americans do when words, appeals, patience, demonstrations, elections, and petitions have long lacked impact; have no current impact; and appear to have no chance of future impact? That question is yet to be decided. But in thinking about such things, one can fruitfully turn to the Founders. In the great stock of wise guidance they left for posterity, for example, one finds powerful and sobering words written by John Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson in 1775. After describing Britain’s flagrant violation of the colonists’ rights, and recounting the King’s refusal to hear and rectify the colonists’ repeated and peacefully presented grievances, Dickinson and Jefferson wrote a paper that, in part, said:

“We are reduced to the alternative of choosing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of [the king's] irritated ministers, or resistance by force. The latter is our choice. We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery. Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we have received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness that inevitably awaits them, if we basely entail hereditary bondage upon them. …

With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, [and] the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance, employ [them] for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die Free-men rather than live Slaves.”


As Americans move forward, then, their heritage as free men; the responsibilities imposed by their duty to posterity and the Declaration of Independence (1776); and the Founders’ wisdom together constitute a formidable arsenal for fueling a campaign that seeks peaceful political change by any and all possible means, or – as a very last resort — armed redress of grievances. It also is an arsenal that is timeless and indestructible; it cannot be invalidated by the words or actions of our coercive political elites and their media and academic apologists. Whether and when Americans draw on this repository of sanity, self-reliance, courage, and liberty to restore the constitution is up to them.

And, by the way, Dickinson and Jefferson entitled their paper “A Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.” And far from being the conclusion of just the two men, the paper was published by the Continental Congress on 6 July 1775 — in the name of all Americans.


I guess that Scheuer was pretty upset by Rachel Maddow's interview of Rand Paul if he resorts to calling for the armed overthrow of the government in reaction.

Interestingly, this extreme, irrational reaction has garnered support among a certain sector of the electorate who are more comfortable with doctrinaire explosions such as this than they are with rational political discourse. I refer of course to Ron Paul supporters. At the official forum of the Ron Paul presidential campaign in exile, known alternately as the "Ron Paul Forums" or "Liberty Forest", Scheuer's column has gotten raves. (Read here.) It's a special breed of patriot and "Constitutionalist" who calls for the overthrow of the government when their candidate performs badly on television.

Alan Hart: Israel did 9/11 and may nuke the U.S.

In an interview with an internet radio talk show called "truthjihad.com", former television journalist Alan Hart has claimed that Israel was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that it is planning a nuclear attack on the U.S. (Read here: truthjihad.com blog: Senior BBC Mideast Correspondent: "Here's what may have REALLY happened on 9/11"!) According to the interviewer, a former university instructor in Islamic studies named Kevin Barrett, Mr. Hart

said that he has been assured by a top-level demolitions/engineering expert who wishes to remain anonymous that the three World Trade Center skyscrapers were destroyed by controlled demolitions, not plane crashes and fires.


and

During the hour-long interview, Hart discussed Israel's record of engaging in outrageous attacks on friend and foe alike, and spreading even more outrageous lies to cover them up. (Around the midpoint of the show he explained the real reason Israel attacked the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967.)

Regarding 9/11, Hart suggested that while there may have been some original terrorist plot conceived by fellow-travelers of Osama Bin Laden, the Israeli Mossad, with its near-total penetration of Middle Eastern governments and terrorist groups alike, would have quickly detected and hijacked the operation to its own ends, orchestrating a spectacularly successful attack on America designed to be blamed on its Arab and Muslim enemies. Hart added that the Mossad operation that became 9/11 would have been aided and abetted by certain corrupt American leaders.

Sounding a chilling note, Hart added that the U.S. is in grave danger of an Israeli-instigated false-flag nuclear attack, perhaps using an American nuclear weapon stolen from Minot Air Force Base during the "loose nukes" rogue operation of August, 2007. The motive would be to trigger a U.S. war with Iran, and perhaps to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestine under cover of war--which Hart is convinced the Zionists are planning to do as soon as the opportunity presents itself.


I've had an opportunity to listen to the interview. Hart offers a novel explanation of the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, asserting (at about 33:00 of the mp3 of the interview) that the Liberty was monitoring Israeli actions to make certain that Israel did not "take land" from Jordan and Syria. This, according to Hart, was the condition of a deal Israel had with the Johnson administration for its permission to go to war with Egypt. Hart offers no evidence to support this apparently implausible motive. The program's host asks Hart why Israel would go to the trouble of sinking the Liberty to conceal territorial gains which were readily apparent. Hart, after several digressions, asserts that he finds it "highly likely" that President Johnson would have called the Israeli leadership and instructed them to immediately retreat from territorial gains against Syria and Jordan if the Liberty had not been sunk.

Hart then calls the Liberty incident a war crime, and says (at 35:50 of the mp3):

The lesson of the cold-blooded attack on the Liberty was that there is nothing that the Zionist state might not do to its friends as well as its enemies to get its own way.

Hart concludes this pseudo-history by defining Zionism as a war by Jews against the rest of humanity. This explains, he says, the mindset behind a deliberate attack on an ally.

In response, Kevin Barrett, the program's host, states (at 40:45 of the mp3):

This actually lends some credibility to the people who argue that 9/11 -- whatever happened on 9/11 -- that it wasn't what we've been told. That whoever ordered the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center -- there are those who argue that Israel, its Mossad and its U.S. allies could have done it, and that it was essentially a Mossad operation. And there are others who say "that's ridiculous. How could a little country like Israel do something like that?" Well ... if you look at the Liberty incident ... it's not clear that there's really any limit to what the Israeli hawks think they can get away with in terms of attacking America.

Hart replies:

I'm going to break a rule now. I mean, you mentioned 9/11. Basically, in public, I don't talk about it because it makes you such a target for abuse and false charges of anti-Semitism and everything, doesn't it?

Barrett breaks in to heartily agree. Hart continues:

Hart: So basically, I've stayed away from it because it give them the focus to take the attention away from your main message. But, since you've mentioned it, I'll tell you what I honestly believe. I think it probably started out as an all Muslim operation, okay? But I think it would be very quickly penetrated by Mossad agents. I detail it in my book. From almost the moment Israel was born, it had its agents penetrating every Arab government, every Arab military organization, and every Arab terrorist group, whatever. So they certainly would have penetrated this. And at some point they said to the bad guys in the CIA, "this is running, what should we do with it?" And the neo-cons said "let's use it".

The twin towers were brought down by a controlled ground explosion, not the planes. Now I'm going to tell you in passing that one of my friends is a consultant for one of the world's leading engineering firms. I'm not going to name him. They've studied the films and they've found that there's no doubt whatsoever that the planes were brought down... sorry, that the towers were brought down by controlled ground explosion. And then we have the film of the -- what is sometimes called the five dancing Israelis. Are you aware of that Kevin?

Barrett: I certainly am. They were celebrating the attacks. They had set up to film before the attacks and they were high-fiving and flicking cigarette lighters in front of the twin towers.

Hart: That's right. But the point is that they all had mobile phones. Right?

Barrett: Right.

Hart: Now they were initially reported as being Muslims. Are you aware of that?

Barrett: Um... Middle-easterners.

Hart: (Impatiently) Alright, middle-easterners. But the impression was that they were Muslims -- they were the bad guys.

Barrett: Right.

Hart: So the FBI gave chase, and these five guys, they tried to avoid being arrested. But they were eventually caught, and they were arrested. And guess what. They were all Mossad agents.

Barrett: That was confirmed by the Forward.

Hart: That's right. It's established fact. It suggests that they knew that it was going to happen. It was possible, and this is Alan Hart speaking, that the planes were fitted with transponders, and these guys were calling in the planes to the targets. It's not impossible.

Barrett: I suppose not. These are many possibilities, but the possibility of remotely-guided planes is a good one, being that, if one had planned a very complex demolition of three skyscrapers which would have been the three largest buildings taken down in history by controlled demolition, one would have to make sure that they were hit in order to justify that.

Hart: And isn't it the case, Kevin, that quite a lot of your top pilots have said that it would have been a bloody difficult job to drive those planes into those buildings.

Barrett: Well, that's right. I've had a number of pilots who are members of Pilots for 9/11 Truth come on my show, and they said that the clocked speed of the aircraft, when it hit the South Tower, was nearly 600 miles per hour at sea level. And that's a speed that, well, some of them say that these 767 aircraft couldn't possibly reach that speed at ground level. They would be torn apart at substantially lower speeds than that by the air pressure of the much thicker air at sea level. But, in any case, that nobody in their right mind could claim that it would be possible to guide a plane at that speed at sea level and hit those targets in the way they were hit.

Hart: So the speculation is that were fitted with some kind of transponder and they were called to the target electronically is not totally irrational?

Barrett: Uh... well no it's not, and in fact, it's even somewhat questionable whether normal passenger aircraft would be able to do that consistently at that kind of speed. In any case, it seems very doubtful that pilots who couldn't even solo in a Cessna would be performing these amazing stunts to hit their targets.

Hart: Well, that and two other things Kevin. We know as a fact that at least six and maybe nine of the alleged hijackers who died are in fact alive and living in...

Barrett (interrupting): Well, that's right. And that's confirmed in Jay Kolar's article "What we now know about the 9/11 hijackers", which was published, actually, in a volume by Europe's top scholarly outfit (inaudible). It's amazing that the scholarly literature is all so one-sided. There's no scholarly counter-literature except for...

Hart (interrupting): Except for "how dare you be so anti-Semitic". That's the only counter-literature.

Barrett: Right, right. And then there's Cass Sunstein's counter-literature published in the Harvard Law Review. He's that Harvard guy who's advising Obama...



After Barrett discusses Cass Sunstein's article on how to counter conspiracy theories, Hart spends several minutes detailing how Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle were likely conspirators in planning a Pearl Harbor-like attack (i.e. 9/11) designed to involve the U.S. in a war with Iraq. After discounting the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran, Hart claims that

The reason why the Israelis are hyping up Iran is to take attention away from the continuing Zionist colonization and genocide in Palestine.

Barrett replies by citing anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists Gordon Duff and Alan Sabrosky to the effect that the Mossad carried out 9/11 and that many in the U.S. military establishment know this to be so. Hart responds by saying that he knows Sabrosky and respects him. Then he drops the big one, so to speak. He unleashes a conspiracy theory for the ages, claiming that Israel has been covertly supplied with a nuclear weapon by Dick Cheney, who Hart calls "Dr. Strangelove". Hart speculates that this nuke is still in the United States and the Israelis intend to detonate it here as a "false flag" operation designed to implicate Iran.

Barrett: Do you have any sources where we could follow up on this?

Hart: I would have to dig deeply into my computers to find this, but it's been very well documented.

With that dismissive statement, Hart leaves the listener to either wonder in amazement at the audacity of such an undocumented claim, or to cower in fear that his tin-foil hat will fail to protect him.



The interview can be heard via a player embedded on Hart's website here or at a website called noliesradio.org. A direct link to an mp3 of the interview is available here.

By the way, in the course of the interview, Hart makes several less sensational if equally false arguments, including claims that Israel's existence has never been threatened by its enemies ("not in 1948, not in 1967, not even in 1973") and that the 1967 war "was a war of Israeli choice and aggression". These run-of-the-mill, doctrinaire falsehoods are hardly surprising coming from a man who believes that the World Trade Center attack was accomplished by Mossad-operated remote control planes and planned demolitions and Israel will soon be nuking the U.S. to cover up a genocide in Palestine, but I thought it worth mentioning if only to show that, however extreme his current conspiracy theories may be, Hart is nothing if not a monomaniacally consistent ideologue. The facts, and even a desire to maintain a semblance of sanity, has never interfered with his spinning a good anti-Zionist yarn.


From the truthjihad website:







UPDATE #1 (May 28, 2010):

Bloggers at a truther website called 9/11blogger.com have picked up on this interview and on my reaction to it (read here).  They are for the most part supportive of Hart and Barrett, although a few raise questions as to why Hart would make such explosive charges (so to speak) without having any supportive documentation or even being better identify his sources or, for that matter, cite any evidence.  One blogger at that website points out that, as with Alan Sabrosky, it is the news that someone with the appearance of an impressive resume is making that charge that makes the charge notable.  I would point out to them that, both in the case of Hart and Sabrosky, this veneer of expertise is hardly sufficient to cover the paranoia and bigotry underlying their fraudulent conspiracy theories.  As I intend to write here within the next few days, Sabrosky has been dining out on his having worked at the Army War College in the 1980s and his allegedly having a Jewish grandparent, hardly enough to compensate for his promoting without any evidence whatsoever the charge that most of the military elite in the U.S. believe the Mossad responsible for 9/11, a charge with is patently false.  Similarly, Hart unintentionally reveals just how foolish and reckless he is by making his extreme charges without any documentation -- and even asking his interviewer if the charges seem plausible -- all the while falling back on his having been a TV reporter many moons ago in order to lend some credence to his drivel.

For the most part, however, those at 911blogger.com support Hart's charges.  They link to a conspiracy theory website called propagandamatrix.com where a blogger called Paul Joseph Watson has posted an article which swallows Hart's charges hook, line and sinker.  His headline: "Top Construction Firm: WTC Destrtoyed by Controlled Demolition".  Watson describes Hart as "Respected Middle East expert and former BBC presenter".  He goes on to write:

Given his biography and standing, Hart's comments are not to be taken lightly. Hart is a former Middle East Chief Correspondent for ITN News and has also presented for BBC Panorama specializing in the Middle East. He was also a war reporter in Vietnam and the first journalist to reach Suez Canal with the Israeli army in 1967. Over the decades, Hart has developed close relationships with numerous high profile political figures, including the Shah of Iran, Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres.  Hart has been a successful author for years and has no reason to fabricate the fact that a top construction firm told him point blank that the towers were brought down in a controlled demolition.


On of the bloggers at 911blogger points out that the cartoon posted above, which I found on Kevin Barrett's website, was authored and originally published by a Nazi website.  I haven't verified this.  Any readers with information about the source of that cartoon should feel free to comment here.


UPDATE #2 (May 28, 2010): 

Pat Buchanan's website has signed onto this conspiracy theory.  Read here.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Rense is a pro-Nazi website

My research on conspiracy theories sometimes leads me to the Rense website. Maybe it's the wacky UFO articles or Jeff Rense's truly startling 1970s hair style, but I've always regarded the website with a sort of amusement in spite of its promotion of bigotry. After reading the following article, however, I've had a change of heart. The Rense package may be laughably bizarre, but their 2008 publication of an anonymously written column entitled "German Labor Camps vs The Soviet Gulag" indicates that the views espoused on Rense.com are nothing to laugh at.



People who complain about the German concentration camps in WW2, rarely complain about the very much larger Soviet Gulag camps, which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (in his magnum opus The Gulag Archipelago,paperback edition, vol 2 p 79) describes as being under the control of the Jew Matvei Berman, the "Chief of Gulag". Yakov Rappoport was deputy chief of construction (p 78). Solzhenitsyn credits Naftaly Frenkel, a 'Turkish-born Jew', with being works chief / chief overseer of the one-hundred-and-forty-mile-long Belomor (Baltic -White Sea) canal, built entirely with slavelabour (p72). Frenkel, Berman and Rappoport are amongst six men described by Solzhenitsyn as 'hired murderers', 'each of whom accounted for thirty thousand lives' (p 91).


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Hitler saw the tremendous danger posed to Germany by Communism. He appreciated the desperate need to eliminate this threat, a fact that earned him the immense hatred and animosity of the Jewish organisations and the media and politicians of the west which they could influence. After all, according to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant, although Jews formed less than five percent of Russia's population, they formed more than fifty percent of its revolutionaries. According to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant in his book The Jews (1977, chapter 8):

'It must be added that most of the leading revolutionaries who convulsed Europe in the final decades of the last century and the first decades of this one, stemmed from prosperous Jewish families.. They were perhaps typified by the father of revolution, Karl Marx.. Thus when, after the chaos of World War I, revolutions broke out all over Europe, Jews were everywhere at the helm; Trotsky, Sverdlov, Kamenev and Zinoviev in Russia, Bela Kun in Hungary, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria, and, most improbable of all, Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin.

'To many outside observers, the Russian revolution looked like a Jewish conspiracy, especially when it was followed by Jewish-led revolutionary outbreaks in much of central Europe. The leadership of the Bolshevik Party had a preponderance of Jews.. Of the seven members of the Politburo, the inner cabinet of the country, four, Trotsky (Bronstein), Zinoviev (Radomsky), Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Sverdlov, were Jews.'


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"The major role Jewish leaders played in the November (Russian) revolution was probably more important than any other factor in confirming (Hitler's) anti-Semitic beliefs." (J&S Pool, Who Financed Hitler, p.164).

Jews in pre-war Germany were accepted as enemy aliens after Samuel Untermeyer, the leader of the World Jewish Economic Federation, declared war on Germany on August 6 1933. (Edwin Black The Transfer Agreement: the Untold Story of the Secret Pact between the Third Reich and Palestine (1984) pp272-277) According to Black, 'The one man who most embodied the potential death blow to Germany was Samuel Untermeyer.' (p 369). This was the culmination of a worldwide boycott of German goods led by international Jewish organizations. The London Daily Express on March 24, 1933 carried the headline Judea Declares War on Germany.



According to Rense, Hitler's anti-Semitism was a legitimate response to a real threat posed by Jewish revolutionaries, and the Third Reich's anti-Jewish policies merely a reaction to hostilities initiated by Samuel Untermeyer of the World Jewish Economic Federation. Those gross perversions of history should be called what they are: pro-Nazi..

"Jew = Socialist": Manuel Miranda on AIM podcast

Hamas destroys dozens of homes in southern Gaza

read here

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Margaret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh against BDS

Read here: The Dan David Prize Speech, and the Context � Margaret Atwood: Year of the Flood.

Atwood and Ghosh, recipients of this year's Dan David Prize for fiction, were subjected to pressure by anti-Israel activists to boycott the award ceremony in Israel. Atwood quotes Anthony Appiah, President of PEN American Centre as follows:

We have to stick with our founding conviction that writers must reach out across nations. To stand anywhere else would be to betray our history and our mission.

What motivates some who want to boycott israel?




Norwegian columnist Morten Strøksnes has published a piece advocating boycotting Israel which is illustrated with the image above: an orange bearing a green Star of David with the word "Jude" ("Jew" in Norwegian) written on it in Gothic letters, like the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis. The blog Norway, Israel and the Jews points out that this unintentionally self revelatory propaganda goes so far over the line it could serve to illustrate an anti-boycott column. (Read here: Boycott the Jew-Orange!)

By the way, Morten Strøksnes is also the author of a column alleging that Israel is developing a secret weapon called an "ethno-bomb" which would somehow only harm Arabs. (Read here.) That very obviously false work of science fiction masquerading as reporting originated in a bizarre story published by the Sunday Times  in 1998. A planned second part to that article never appeared in the Times after experts on the subject denounced the story as an absurd fabrication. They rightly pointed out that, firstly, Jews and Palestinians are genetically virtually identical, and, second, that a weapon targeting genetic traits would be virtually impossible to create in any event. The editors of the Times apparently agreed and killed part 2. The story's authors have never identified their sources and have steadfastly refused to comment on the subject, although the story has since been republished widely in anti-Israel outlets (here for example), and its claims repeated as true by others (such as Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- read here). Strøksnes jumped on that weird bandwagon to claim that this story was not only true, but that it was also indicative of Israel's true nature. He went on to denounce Israel as having produced nothing of value beyond the Uzi submachine gun.

(By the way, the Sunday Times article quoted former MK and B'Tselem founder Dedi Zucker denouncing the planned weapon:
"Morally, based on our history, and our tradition and our experience, such a weapon is monstrous and should be denied".
Presumably, he was referring to fictitious super-weapons purported to be used by Jews against Gentiles. )

Friday, May 7, 2010

French Jewish grandmother banned from telling school gendarmes handed her over to Nazis

from the Telegraph:



During the war, Ida Grinspan, now 79, was deported to the Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland in 1944 but was one of the few survivors to make it back to France. She wrote a letter about her wartime experiences to children at a school in Parthenay, western France. But when the town's deputy mayor, Michel Birault, a former policeman, found out she was to tell the children it was "gendarmes" who arrested her aged 14, it was censored. Mayor Xavier Argenton then said she could only speak to the teenagers if she referred to the police simply as 'men'. French media have now accused both men of trying to cover up France's shameful collaboration with the Nazis during World War Two.

During the war, French officials helped the SS round up tens of thousands of French Jews and take them to their deaths in the gas chambers. Mr Argenton reportedly told Ms Grinspan: "We do not want to stigmatise a profession who were simply obeying the orders of the legitimate authority in those troubled times. "This wording will do nothing to appease the resentments, and will sadly only bring them more to the fore." Ms Grinspan agreed to the changes but said she never intended to offend anyone, rather "to simply give a true account of history." Mr Argenton insisted he "never censured her or banned her speech. I said that it would be good to avoid stigmatising an entire profession, that we should avoid that word. I gave my opinion. I find it inappropriate to talk about censorship and I am astonished by the polemic this has caused," he added.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Farrakhan blames Jews and U.S. for 9/11. Why is he supported by the Brussels Tribunal, NPR/PBS host Tavis Smiley and Princeton professor Cornel West?

I found the following video posted on the Facebook page of the Brussels Tribunal. According to their website, this organization is based on the Bertrand Russell Tribunal in both its name and objective. (Read here.) Where the original organization was set up to look into U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, this successor group's original focus was on the crimes of the "Project for the New American Century". As the video below indicates, it's area of inquiry has expanded to include other matters.


In this talk to his followers, Farrakhan states that the United States government, Jews and unnamed financial interests carried out the 9/11 attacks and framed Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Needless to say, his evidence is false, his reasoning deliberately deceptive and his conclusions completely absurd -- even insane. The fact that he delivers all this with great conviction and that it is met with the thunderous approval of his audience may be troubling, but Farrakhan's history and know what to expect of him: anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories and hate speech disguised as human rights advocacy. Now I know what to expect of the Brussels Tribunal as well.







The Brussels Tribunal's participating membership is listed here. It includes Gilad Atzmon, Cyntia McKinney, Noam Chomsky, Francis A. Boyle, Ramsey Clark, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, John Pilger, James Petras, Michel Chossudovsky, Jeffrey Blankfort and Stephen Lendman, among many others. (Read here.)



You may think that Farrakhan is all washed up and so wonder why I devote my time to this. But this isn't true.  He's still being promoted by people with great influence who describe him as a "religious leader, opinion-maker and visionary"!  Take a look at the following video of a public forum ("We Count: The Black Agenda is America's Agenda") hosted by Tavis Smiley of NPR and PBS in March of this year. Watch it to experience the palpable anti-Semitism of the man and judge the motives of those responsible for continuing to promote him in spite of his well-established record of promoting hate. Audio of this event was broadcast on NPR. Other participants included Professor Cornel West of Princeton who expressed his support -- in fact, his love -- for Farrakhan.




Farrakhan's obvious paranoia does not represent the "black agenda" or "America's agenda" except to the lunatic few who accept his belief in conspiracies and to those like Smiley and West who get a kick out of associating themselves with the extreme while maintaining more moderate positions.

If you think that this was a momentary error in judgement on their part, you're wrong.  Farrakhan has occupied a position of honor in each of these annual forums since they started in 2005. (Read here.)  Here's the 2005 video:



 In 2006, Smiley and West hosted a similar Farrakhan love-fest.  That's West's voice in the background during Farrakhan's speech, saying "yes, yes, yes, yes, yes..."





Here is Farrakhan's report back to his flock concerning his participation in Smiley's 2006 forum.



Stanley Crouch had a bit to say about Smiley's poor judgement in promoting Farrakhan in the Daily Beast in April. (Read here.) He reminds us that Farrakhan seemed to take credit for "dealing with" Malcolm X "as a nation deals with a traitor". My humble suggestion to Tavis Smiley, Cornel West and everyone else is that they deal with Farrakhan as a nation deals with a hate-filled lunatic. Stop promoting him as a leader.


Just to lighten the load of thinking about the hate promoted by Farrakhan being promoted by NPR and PBS, I leave you with some comic relief. Check out this video of Farrakhan describing his visit with space aliens on their space ship.







UPDATE (MAY 15, 2010): It seems that Cornel West and Tavis Smiley share their love of Farrakhan with Holocaust denier and hate-monger Fredrick Toben, founder of the Adelaide Institute. Toben has posted the following video of a hateful Farrakhan rant, entitled "Architects of the Synagogue of Satan", to YouTube.

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