New York 9/11 Memorial "9/11 Truth" Conference to Highlight Conspiracy Theories
Both anti-mosque fanatics and 9/11 conspiracy theory fanatics are targeting NYC for major rallies around 9/11. Nine years after the attacks there's been a shift in thinking about them. The city that was the main target of the attacks is now fair game for those who stand to gain politically from exploiting them.
It's bad enough that Pamela Geller is planning an anti-Muslim rally to commemorate and/or desecrate 9/11 in New York City this year. (Geller is campaigning to make Lower Manhattan a First Amendment-free zone.) Now New York will also be subjected to a series of 9/11 truth conspiracy theory meetings and rallies to mark and/or mar the tragic anniversary, featuring a number of speakers associated with extreme anti-American and anti-Israel views verging on the paranoid. (Read here.) Under the aegis of a 9/11 truth group called WE ARE CHANGE, the scheduled speakers include a number of potentially offensive participants. Here's a partial list, highlighting some problematic participants:
Both anti-mosque fanatics and 9/11 conspiracy theory fanatics are targeting NYC for major rallies around 9/11. Nine years after the attacks there's been a shift in thinking about them. The city that was the main target of the attacks is now fair game for those who stand to gain politically from exploiting them.
It's bad enough that Pamela Geller is planning an anti-Muslim rally to commemorate and/or desecrate 9/11 in New York City this year. (Geller is campaigning to make Lower Manhattan a First Amendment-free zone.) Now New York will also be subjected to a series of 9/11 truth conspiracy theory meetings and rallies to mark and/or mar the tragic anniversary, featuring a number of speakers associated with extreme anti-American and anti-Israel views verging on the paranoid. (Read here.) Under the aegis of a 9/11 truth group called WE ARE CHANGE, the scheduled speakers include a number of potentially offensive participants. Here's a partial list, highlighting some problematic participants:
- Jonathan Elinoff
- Cynthia McKinney
- Wayne Madsen
- Mike Gravel
- George Galloway
- Paul Craig Roberts
Jonathan Elinoff is a conspiracy theorist who blogs with the makers of the most most popular truther video, Loose Change. In 2009, Elinoff made his own video called In the Shadows, the first of an intended series called Core of Corruption. He has devoted his career to promoting the idea that a small army of Israeli intelligence officers pretending to be art students infiltrated the United States and carried out the 9/11 attacks. An example of his writing on this can be read here: Israeli Art Students Had WTC Construction Passes. Here's the trailer for his video:
Cynthia McKinney has in recent years gone from being a U.S. Congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, to devoting herself to campaigning against Israel and promoting absurd conspiracy theories, sometimes making common cause with the racist far-right to do so. (Read here and here and here.) She has, in recent years, argued that the United States government is completely under the control of "Zionist agents", and that it deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen. She has also endorsed the conspiracy theories of Matthias Chang who claims that a conspiracy of Zionist "shadow money-lenders" is destabilizing the world both via false flags attacks and economic crashes in order to take it over.
Wayne Madsen is an internet journalist and conspiracy fabulist who runs a website called the Wayne Madsen Report, where he promotes conspiracy theories blaming Israel, "neo-cons" and "Zionists" for 9/11. Read here for examples. He somehow connects his Mossad 9/11 conspiracy to everything from Israelis working at shopping mall kiosks (read here) to alleged Pakistani intelligence involvement in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto (read here) to the influence of "Jewish mobsters" (read here). Madsen routinely writes columns without any indication of sources, making outlandish and unsupportable claims without any provenance, such as that he made in a 2009 column alleging that Israel is secretly colonizing Iraq (read here and here). The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan reported that Madsen's anti-Israel columns were translated into Arabic and published in Iraq and other Arab countries, where they actually had their desired effect (read here.) Those who fail to take the lunatic fringe seriously should take note of this dangerous real world impact of throwing rumors into an already smoldering conflict. On a more comical note, one of Madsen's most recent conspiracy theories claims that Obama is literally a "CIA creation". Madsen writes that, not only was Obama groomed for the presidency by the CIA, but that this grooming started with his actual conception, which Madsen comically claims was a CIA covert op. (Read here and view video below.) (Warning: if you're not used to reading this sort of stuff, prepare yourself to laugh hysterically.)
Madsen, like Lyndon LaRouche, also implicates financier George Soros in a sort of unified field theory of conspiracies, writing that (read here):
Soros’ agents of disinformation and influence have moved in to “manage” the stories about jailed Alabama Democratic Governor Don Siegelman, the 2004 vote fraud in Ohio, the Turkish and Israeli intelligence penetration of the highest echelons of the U.S. government, the presence of Israeli spies among the accused 9/11 hijackers in the months prior to the terrorist attacks in 2001, and Russian-Israeli “Kosher Nostra” criminal activity from London to Kyiv and New York to Moscow.
Mike Gravel, a former U.S. Senator from Alaska and a quirky pro-peace candidate in the 2008 Democratic primaries, only made my list for one reason. In 2003, he participated in a Holocaust denial conference featuring neo-Nazi participants. (Read here.) He subsequently claimed that he didn't notice the goose-stepping going on all around him. He said that he thought that it was just a quirky pro-peace group. That seems consistent with his attendance at the truthers' conference.
George Galloway, as readers here undoubtedly already know, is a former Member of Parliament who had extensive ties to Sadaam Hussein's Ba'athist regime, with whom he is said to have had a profitable business relationship, and to Hamas, to whom he has provided material support via his Viva Palestina group. He currently works for PressTV, an English-language propaganda television station owned by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and under the control of the mullahs. In a relatively brief period of time, Galloway seems to have gone from a 9/11 conspiracy theory doubter who warned the left not to discredit itself by associating with nuts (watch here) to a truther who is willing to throw at Israel and the U.S. any accusation his constituency will buy (listen here).
Paul Craig Roberts has had the most dramatic transformation of anyone on this list, having gone from being an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and an editor at the Wall Street Journal to a being a far-right, conspiracy-bedeviled internet columnist with a penchant for prophecies which fail to come true. His columns are widely posted on the websites of that fringe beyond the mainstream left and right, including the white supremacist website VDARE, Willis Carto's American Free Press, Pat Buchanan's American Conservative, Antiwar.com, Lew Rockwell, Information Clearing House and Counterpunch, -- places where resume gravitas is sometimes in short supply. Roberts not only believes that 9/11 was an inside job, carried out with planted explosives, not planes (read here and here), in 2006, he also stated that George W. Bush was planning another such attack, a warning which was obviously not worth the bandwidth it was written on. (Read here.) That the extremely paleo-conservative Roberts' anti-Israel extremism is central to his world view can be gauged by his habit of referring to the U.S. government as a puppet of Israel (read here), and decrying Jewish influence on the news media (read here). Roberts blames precisely that influence for concealing what he sees as the true story of 9/11.
Conclusion
In choosing New York City on 9/11 for their anti-freedom rallies, Pamela Geller and other anti-mosque activists desecrate the sacred ground they purport to defend. Similarly, the 9/11 truthers, in choosing New York City on 9/11 to promote their paranoid world view, desecrate not only the site of that terrible crime against humanity, they desecrate the truth.
