Israeli-Canadian Thought Police Take Aim…. At Me
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | September 21, 2016
In recent days I discovered that the Canadian branch of the Israeli-US-based Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith is reporting that I am “well known for using academic credentials to deny the Holocaust.” On August 29, Daniel Leons-Marder mirrored the Canadian B’nai Brith report under the title, Facebook Allows “Kill All Jews” Post on Wall of Canadian Professor. In an item Leons-Marder claims has been shared 11,000 times, he asserted “B’nai Brith Canada reported the image, which was ruled acceptable [by Facebook] within two hours, when it was alerted to it having been posted on the Facebook page of Canadian Academic Professor Anthony Hall, who is a holocaust denier.”
The B’nai Brith’s Aug. 29 announcement starts with a bald statement that “Police have launched an investigation into an antisemitic Facebook post that was exposed by B’nai Brith Canada last Friday.” The earlier August 26 statement emphasized the role of Facebook, introducing me in the controversy as being “well known for using [my] academic credentials to deny the Holocaust and promote 9/11 conspiracy theories.”
Under the headline, “Killing Jews Is Now an Acceptable Message, Facebook Says,” the B’nai Brith announced,
“Antisemitism in all forms is rampant on social media, but this is the clearest, most obvious kind of antisemitism one could possibly create,” said Michael Mostyn, B’nai Brith CEO. “The classification of this as antisemitic cannot be challenged, and the fact that this promotes violence towards Jews is beyond dispute. Regardless, Facebook has deemed it acceptable despite its ‘community standards’ containing clear provisions against hate speech. The Jewish community deserves no less protection or respect than any other when it comes to hate speech and threats of violence.”
“Every year, upon publication of our Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, a contingent of detractors accuses us of saying the sky is falling, and that antisemitism does not exist in Canada,” said Amanda Hohmann, National Director of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights. “Content like this is proof positive that not only antisemitism of a genocidal nature exists in Canada, but the systems that are supposed to protect us from racist hate speech don’t consider hatred of Jews to be problematic.”
B’nai Brith has reported the post to Lethbridge Police Services.
The Canadian B’nai Brith’s post, together with those of others that have mirrored B’nai Brith’s announcement, constitute the first time I have seen myself described in print as a ‘holocaust denier.” What is the definition used by the thought police to decide who is or is not a “holocaust denier? Are there many holocausts or only one? Who owns the term, “holocaust?” If there are exclusive rights, how were they obtained?
In the eyes of the B’nai Brith, is a “holocaust denier” anyone who disagrees with any element, large or small, of its favored historical interpretation? Is the B’nai Brith naturally hostile to anyone that retains independent, evidence-based perspectives on some of the most fraught issues of historical interpretation in contemporary times?
What is behind the creation of the original post that set the controversy in motion? Who created it and why? Is this whole episode an engineered crisis? Is one of its purposes to fend off the criticisms of those that accuse the B’nai Brith and related Zionist agencies of claiming “the sky is falling” with their Orwellian system of Annual Audits of Antisemitic Incidents. Please see below the map published to present cartographic interpretations by the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism.
As shall be explained below, the B’nai Brith has failed to perform due diligence in its handling of this matter. Its officers did not even attempt back up their provocative characterizations of me with even a shred of genuine evidence. The organization opted instead to exploit for its own political agenda the shock value inherent in the vile contents of an item allegedly posted, apparently very briefly, on my FB page. The item is said to have been posted by Glen Davidson. I did not ever see it on my FB page. I did not invite nor did I even have any knowledge of it until recently.
In its material the B’nai Brith describe the post as a “depiction of a White man assaulting an Orthodox Jew accompanied by a lengthy, violent anti-Semitic screed beside the photograph.” Here is the post, which I first saw sometime early in September as part of a smear piece published about me at “Aussie Dave’s” Israellycool.
To reiterate and to be absolutely clear, I did not post this social media item myself. I did not create it or solicit it. I do not approve of its contents. In fact I of course strongly condemn the message conveyed in both the image and the text. Due diligence demands, however, that I look further into this matter.
The B’nai Brith in Action
My initial research into the item’s content is leading me to the opinion that the image probably emerges from some sort of staged situation, one that seems to include the application of photo shop techniques. The most basic questions that must now be pressed concern the source of the atrocious text. From whence does it originate? Certainly I did not write it. Glen Davidson did not write it. Who did write it and why? Not once yet have I seen this deeper question posed by those who are exploiting the vile item to dramatize a real or concocted dispute with Facebook.
Quite possibly by design, the miniscule, densely compressed text is very difficult to read especially on small digital devices. Could this attribute be because the text was conceived not as a means of winning adherents but rather as a justification for political actions like the B’nai Brith’s current hate speech campaign highlighting my academic position at the University of Lethbridge?
I first saw the item among a number of screen shots all dedicated to “Aussie Dave’s” nomination of me as “Anti-Zionist-Not-Anti-Semite of the Day.”
I remember being particular interested in the part of the post that mentioned Ryan Bellerose, a Metis man and convert to Judaism who has recently been hired as the B’nai Brith’s new Western Canadian representative. Most of my attention zeroed in on Aussie Dave’s suggestion to his readers that they communications to the president of my University, Dr. Mike Mahon. I also took note of a screen shot of an item on U of L letterhead where Dr. Mahon responds to “JP.” Who is “JP”?
I can trace one thread of this matter’s origins to a recorded telephone call I listened to a year ago. Its source was Amanda Hohmann, National Director of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights. In August of 2015 Ms. Hohmann telephoned the manager of a community venue in downtown Edmonton Alberta. Ms. Hohmann aim on behalf of her employer was to shut down a book promotion event. At the time Dr. Barrett along with his wife, two sons a dog and me were touring Alberta to call attention to an edited text entitled We Are Not Charlie Hebdo. Dr. Barrett edited the volume to which I had contributed an article.
The venue’s manager, Richard Awid, taped Ms. Hohmann’s intervention and subsequently played it back for me. Here is how I described this part of the episode in an article entitled “B’nai Brith Moves to Quash Free Speech in Canada,”
Mr. Awid was somewhat dumbfounded that a small event at his community hall, “one of 100 such venues in Edmonton,” would elicit such an intense response from a very powerful organization in Toronto. He played back to me on his answering machine a recorded message he received at about 9 am on August 12 from Amanda Hohmann. Ms. Hohmann explained that she had received “a few complaints” about “Mr.” Kevin Barrett on the B’nai Brith’s “anti-hate hotline.” (1-416-633-6224; 1-800-892-2624)
Ms. Hohmann asserted that
“Mr. Barrett is a known anti-semite conspiracy theorist, a Holocaust Denier, and 9/11 Denier and all sorts of other things.”
Ms. Hohmann made no effort whatsoever to give background proof of her allegations or to identify the sources of the supposed “complaints.” Nevertheless she proposed to Mr. Awid that he should “cancel the event and let Mr. Barrett know he is not welcome in Edmonton.”
In this telephone call the B’nai Brith’s “human rights” director tried to defame a colleague offering absolutely no proof whatsoever to provide evidentiary backing for her directive from Toronto that Dr. Barrett should not be welcome in Alberta’s capital. I believe the Western world currently supports many Amanda Hohmanns paid very well to target and slander regularly individuals like Dr. Kevin Barrett.
Are the protagonists in these ugly witch hunts ever held accountable for the excesses? Are there any constraints on the increasingly severe incursions of the Zionist thought police? What remedies are or are not available for the likes of Dr. Barrett who is a Muslim man. Along with the rest of the omma, Dr. Barrett and his family are regularly subjected to heavy doses of “hate speech” and sometimes worse?
When Richard Awid, a Muslim himself, did not adhere to Ms. Hohmann’s instructions, the B’nai Brith was able to send in a representative of the “hate speech” unit of the Edmonton police. The officer monitored the first part of the event and then left after informing Dr. Barrett that our presentation deemed was not to be hate speech by the police force he represented. I recall wondering at the time, does that bizarre episode foreshadow an era when all university classes will be policed by officials answerable to agencies like the B’nai Brith? Is that where this is leading?
The B’nai Brith has been front and center in Canada’s increasingly notorious record of aggressively policing citizens for supposed thought crimes and speech crimes. The B’nai Brith’s assault on free speech in Canada includes among its objects for criminalization Doug Collins, Malcolm Ross, Jim Keegstra, Ernst Zundel, Terry Tremaine, David Ahenakew and, most recently, Arthur Topham.
The case against Arthur Topham and his Radical Press is still ongoing. By following at a distance the tawdry prosecution of the self-employed reporter, publisher, editor and carpenter in Quesnel British Columbia, I was made aware of a very significant text published in 1941. Theodore Kaufman’s Germany Must Perish outlines an extremely ruthless strategy of genocidal destruction of a whole people. Has this classic description of genocidal intent and methodology been ever given prominence in a school curriculum in Canada?
My reading of an Internet copy of the text, one that became integral to the proceedings of the Topham trial, caused me to reflect on how one-sided the whole discourse on genocide is becoming. The suffering of one group is highlighted and elevated above all others while the suffering and assaults imposed on other groups is often downplayed, ignored or even denigrated. I had no idea before the B’nai Brith-instigated prosecution of Arthur Topham that there was such a detailed plan to annihilate the entire German people.
I only recently have become fully aware of the extent of the murder, rape and pillage of several millions of Germans after 1945 in American prisoner war camps and in orgies of Soviet-instigated ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe. Where are the museums to promote public education about these crimes against humanity? Where is the museum to commemorate the horrendous intergenerational genocide of perhaps a hundred million Indigenous peoples in the Holocaust of the Americas since 1492? Will future You Tubers make videos to ask elderly members of today’s generation what they did or didn’t do about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians now underway in order to clear the way for Greater Israel?
Thought Police Wreaking Havoc on Campus
The B’nai Brith is becoming especially aggressive in campaigns to have individuals fired from their work for expounding historical interpretations it does not like. The B’nai Brith boasted menacingly on September 15 of having destroyed the career of Nikolas Balakas, a long-serving lab technician at York University’s Department of Astronomy and Physics. The announcement that Canada’s most ruthless thought police agency had succeeded in its campaign to get York University to fire its employee was written by Aidan Fishman. Mr. Fishman is Campus Advocacy Coordinator of B’nai Brith Canada.
After counting coup on Mr. Balaras’s dismissal, Mr. Fishman concludes with the following plea that the University of Lethbridge should follow York University’s example. The B’nai Brith official wrote,
“Unfortunately not every administration is prepared to act with such decisiveness [as that of York University], as the ongoing saga surrounding Professor Anthony Hall at Lethbridge University shows. I hope that the administration in Lethbridge can use the excellent example set by York University on this matter, and take appropriate steps to ensure that their students are not similarly subjected to hatred and antisemitism on campus.”
Who is the real author of this “ongoing saga?” Where is the proof as of today that University of Lethbridge students are being subjected “to hatred and anti-Semitism on campus.” I have not once seen this kind of language appear in 26 years of teaching evaluations. Where is there any accountability for floating this kind of vicious agenda of smear? The intrusion into this matter of a B’nai Brith official described as Campus Advocacy Coordinator is, as far as I know, setting precedents at my school. What is the nature of the “advocacy” Mr. Fishman is “coordinating”?
The effort of B’nai Brith’s “campus coordinator” and possibly others of his group to inject themselves into the internal governance of the University of Lethbridge brings to mind a similar controversy brewing at Oberlin College. Oberlin College is a renowned Liberal Arts school in Ohio whose origins long predate the American Civil War. There Dr. Joy Karega has been suspended with pay from her teaching position as a result of a controversy also involving Facebook posts. I have written a lengthy open latter on the matter to Oberlin President, Dr. Marvin Krislov. The text, which has been mirrored on other web sites, was first published at American Herald Tribune.
In my effort to reach out to President Krislov, Dr. Karega and the other students and faculty involved in what has definitely become a fiasco for the Oberlin community, I proposed in my open letter that we all work together to mount a joint academic conference. I proposed that my own Liberal Education program at the University of Lethbridge ally itself with the embattled Liberal Arts College in Ohio to organize an event aimed at bringing thoughtful academic commentary to address a mounting crisis in higher education in North America.
I hereby invite Aiden Fishman to join this initiative and thereby embark on a constructive course rather than the trajectory of negativity implicit in his present preoccupation with hate talk and advocacy for division. Of course Mr. Fishman is far from alone in the type of “advocacy” in which he is engaged. There is a barrage of interventions currently underway from organizations like the AMCHA Initiative, the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Campus Outreach, Hillel, the American Jewish Congress, David Horowitz’s FrontPage and Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch to mention only a few. As currently on full public display at Oberlin College, these well-funded and deeply staffed interventions invariably wreak havoc on the principles of academic freedom and civil academic discourse on campus?
I suggested the following title for the event.
Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories:
A Rational or Irrational Phrase in Academic Discourse?
In my research research into the Joy Karega/Oberlin debacle I became aware of the concerted campaign in 2014 to destroy the career of Prof. William I. Robinson. Dr. Robinson is Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Like Dr. Joy Karega, Dr. Steven Salaita, Dr. Hatem Bazian, Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, Dr. Richard Falk, me and many others, Dr. Robinson includes in the curriculum some focus on the plight of Palestinian people.
Caption: Prof. Richard Falk, Former UN Rapporteur and Princeton University Professor of International Law, Speaks on the Issue of Academic Freedom at the University of California at Santa Barbara
The sociologist refused to back down from incorporating in his teaching critical perspectives on the harsh treatment of Palestinians especially in Gaza and the so-called Occupied Territories. Amidst proliferating Jewish settlements and the constant repressions of the Israeli police state, many Palestinians continue to eke out marginal existences on the heavily militarized lands set aside for them by the United Nations in Resolution 181. Resolution 181, an international instrument calling for partition of Palestine and UN trusteeship over Jerusalem, constitutes the primary law at the roots of the Israeli entity in its present form.
Prof. Robinson has written of his ordeal in August of 2014 on Truthout. In an article entitled “Repression Escalates on US Campuses,” the sociologist explains,
The persecution to which I was subjected involved a litany of harassment, slander, defamation of character and all kinds of threats against the university by outside forces if I was not dismissed, as well as hate mail and death threats from unknown sources. More insidiously, it involved a shameful collaboration between a number of university officials and outside forces from the Israel lobby as the university administration stood by silently, making a mockery of academic freedom.
The disciplinary procedure initiated against me by UCSB officials involved a host of irregularities, violations of the university’s own procedures, breaches of confidentiality, denial of due process, conflicts of interest, failure of disclosure, improper political surveillance, abuses of power and position, unwarranted interference in curriculum and teaching and so on. As I would discover during the course of the ordeal, individuals inside the university and in positions of authority had linked up with agents of the lobby outside the university in setting out to prosecute me.
Will the same toolbox of wrecking instruments deployed at the University of California be shipped in from the United States and unpacked at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada? Will the administration of my own school continue to uphold the University of Lethbridge’s good reputation as an institution of higher education where the vital principles of academic freedom and civil academic discourse are expressed and defended?
On several occasions I have publicly lauded the U of L for creating an environment of academic freedom. I made this observation, for instance, at the University of Lethbridge’s book event when in 2011 my volume, Earth into Property, was launched. In this 900+ page peer-reviewed academic text published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, I incorporate analysis that the B’nai Brith flippantly trivializes as “9/11 conspiracy theories.”
Deeply corrupt agencies like the B’nai Brith have a lot to lose when the basic facts about what really happened on 9/11–who did what to whom—become the common knowledge of the general public. That day may be approaching far faster than those hiding behind the tired old memes about “conspiracy theories” anticipate.
How much longer can the evidence of 9/11 be concealed behind the ruthless kind of ad hominem attacks that have become the well known-specialty of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in all its many constituent parts? How much longer will the public tolerate the hate propaganda and professional assaults that are obliterating the fundamental integrity of so many of our most important institutions?
What other lies and deceptions are being fed to the public on a regular basis? What is the level of public confidence these days in the trustworthiness of society’s key institutions including government, media, police and agencies of higher education? Who can say public confidence in these entities is high?
What is the appropriate role for universities in addressing issues of officialdom’s fraud and malfeasance especially in situations that have large implications for public policy? If even tenured university faculty can be intimidated into shying away from the professional responsibility to distinguish truth from falsehood, but especially in situations that threaten power’s imperatives, who will perform this vital function? Politicians? Talking heads on TV? Who will speak truth to the unaccountable power that the B’nai Brith in its current reckless demeanor so abundantly epitomizes?
Ritual Defamation in the Social Media Circus
To return to the Facebook post that lies at the root of this controversy, I have already publicly condemned the contents of the offending item in the September 16 edition of False Flag Weekly News. I currently co-host this regular broadcast along with one of its founding partners, Dr. Kevin Barrett.
I noticed a reference to my public condemnation of the item in question in the comments section of the B’nai Brith’s own web post of August 29. A commenter going by the name of Andrew Blair observes,
It is important to realize that Professor Hall publicly condemns that image and text. Go to False Flag Weekly, at minute 36, to see and hear his denunciation.When I put on my “fairness” glasses and look at that image I see Tony Hall in the headlock, and the arms locking his head are the image and the text. Does anyone else see that, or are my “fairness” glasses defective?
“Andrew Blair’s” question certainly resonates with me. The B’nai Brith’s description of the image in its news announcements refers to “a White man assaulting an Orthodox Jew.” Is the Orthodox Jew not a White man too? What is there to say that the aggressor in this image is not Cherokee or Mohawk or Palestinian for that matter?
What are the politics of the B’nai Brith’s choice of words in its racialized approach to its public announcement highlighting this inflammatory image? What effect is being sought? Did the image emerge from a real or staged situation? If it was the former, what was the event? Where did it happen? Who took the photograph? Have the investigators in the B’nai Brith-police-hate-crime-complex explored such matters.
Is the B’nai Brith’s emphasis on “police investigations” itself a staged tactic of sorts? Is it meant to dramatize the main story line aimed ultimately at seizing control of strategic instruments of Internet communication. The subplot, which is certainly intended to harm me personally and professionally, is that crazed and genocidal anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists– even “holocaust deniers”— are running around loose with full Internet access even in Lethbridge Alberta?
My own best assessment is that the offending social media item seems likely to have been produced by photo shop juxtapositions of different images. The “White man’s” head and the “Orthodox Jew’s” crushed glasses both look like inserts. The white wing of the victim’s crushed and displaced glasses seems to have been drawn in. There are signs of graphic tinkering in the relationship between the huge muscular arm in the forefront and the squeezed face of the suffering victim.
The reversal of Talmudic-style contempt for the Other (the Goy) cries out the pictured message of Jewish victimhood. The provocative power of the image is reinforced by the B’nai Brith’s very racialized description. In my recent research I have discovered that this image and other images very much like—images that often feature the same racist “White man”— show up on many Internet posts, even one I found translated into German.
Where the picture provides the main message, the text provides the “evidence” of the antisemitism that the B’nai Brith and its allied agencies are simultaneously engaged in inventing, cultivating, spotlighting and publicly combating. What justification would there be for the existence of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith without the métier of antisemitism? The primary essence of the B’nai B’rith entities is to advance the agendas of the Israeli entity in the Diaspora, in other words in Canada, USA, Britain, France. Australia, and many other countries.
The text in the offending item is perhaps the most appalling excerpt of gutter prose I have ever seen. Its contents are so reprehensible that they demand careful consideration. Like an illegal drug planted by corrupt police on a targeted individual, the reprehensible social media item has been metaphorically put on my digital front door step and then advertised by the B’nai Brith to advance its own political agenda. I am left with little alternative but to respond as decently and as conscientiously to a crime in progress.
The author, it is claimed by the item’s creator, is Ben “Tel Aviv Terror” Garrison. This Garrison person has many nicknames. He is made to exclaim,
“There was never a Holocaust, but there should have been and, rest assured, there WILL be, as you serpentine kikes richly deserve one. I will not rest until every single filthy. Parasitic kike is rounded up and slaughtered like the vermin they are. The White man has had more than enough of International Jewry and we are fully prepared to smite the parasite for the millionth time. The greedy, hook nosed kikes know that there days are numbered and, unlike in the past, they now have nowhere to run. This time, there will be no kikes left alive to spead around the planet like cockroaches. We will get them ALL into the oven and their putrid memory will finally be erased from the planet once and for all. Like all parasites the Jew will continue to reproduce until every last one has been wiped out. This is why it is crucial that all kikes are ruthlessly and mercilesslt butchered for the good of us all. KILL ALL JEWS NOW! EVERY LAST ONE!” Ben “Tel Aviv Terror” Garrison
What kind of demented mind would come up with such a macabre celebration of envisaged mass murder? What would be the motivation to pen such a blatant incitement to hate and slaughter of a specific people?
My research into the offending item’s origins quickly led me to the many Internet profiles and posts of Ben Garrison. Ben Garrison is apparently a real person who lives in Montana. It turns out that this Ben Garrison, the sole named individual in the miniature text of the offending Facebook post, is also the aggressor in the photo shopped image. Adorned with dark glasses and a cowboy hat, Garrison is pictured as (in the words of B’nai Brith) as “the White man assaulting an Orthodox Jew.”
Ben Garrison
The real life Ben Garrison is often described as a libertarian political satirist. He is a prolific cartoonist whose cartoon and personal images lie at the center of an increasingly contentious media circus. Significantly Facebook figures centrally in the many-faceted narrative of Ben Garrison. Perhaps his Facebook connection is a major reason why B’nai Brith and related agencies chose Garrison’s Internet personae as poster boy for its hate speech campaign of fund raising and ritual defamation.
Holocaust Studies experts at Tel-Aviv University are among the most outspoken proponents of the view that Ben Garrison is indeed the kind of bigoted psychopath who would in real life utter provocations to the genocide of Jews. These Israeli academicians would probably argue it is entirely in character for Ben Garrison to have actually declared with sincerity, “Kill All Jews.” The hypothesis that Ben Garrison’s racist screed should be taken at face value is implicit in the wording and headlines of the posts by B’nai Brith, Daniel Leons-Marder’s Everyday Antisemitism and the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism.
The smear campaign’s architects and engineers are attempting a controlled demolition of my reputation in their quest to harness Facebook more fully to their own agendas. These architects and engineers count among their allies the creators and authors at Encyclopedia dramatica, Of Ben Garrison the encyclopedia’s drama experts report, “Scholars from Tel-Aviv University’s Center for Holocaust Studies have ominously described him [Ben Garrison] as the most racist man in the universe, and the biggest existential threat to the Jews since Hitler.”
This characterization runs counter to the dominant view that Garrison is “the Internet’s most trolled cartoonist.” According to a Breitbart article entitled “Ben Garrison: How the Internet Made a Fake White Supremacist”,
Montana-based artist Ben Garrison isn’t a violent Neo-Nazi, or even a white nationalist. He’s a polite, accomplished cartoonist, with no history of overt or covert racism. His true political leanings are libertarian, anti-elitist, and anti-globalist. Garrison is, in fact, the victim of one of the most extraordinary and longest-running smear campaigns on the internet.
For a mixture of amusement and spite, in a trolling spree that has lasted over six years, thousands of online pranksters and real neo-Nazis have been remixing his cartoons into racist caricatures. Most Ben Garrison cartoons attack the government, corporations, and political movements.
However, almost immediately after one is published, it is remixed into a new version that attacks Jews, African-Americans, or other minorities. These are rapidly disseminated in troll communities and sometimes become more widely-shared than the originals.
If Breitbart has it right and Tel-Aviv’s Center for Holocaust Studies has it wrong, then the real Ben Garrison could not have written the disgusting text that goes along with the offensive image of the cartoonist putting his victim in a headlock. If Ben Garrison is not to be understood as the kind of person who could have come up with the wording replicated and publicized by Amanda Hohmann, Daniel Leons-Marder,and B’nai Brith’s CEO, Michael Mostyn, then these individuals are involved in a telling case of false flag deception.
Given the nature of their dubious employment in what Norman Finkelstein has labeled the “Holocaust Industry,” I find it difficult to believe that these individuals as well as their bosses, underlings and associates were not aware of the controversy swirling around Ben Garrison. After all, I was able to discovered the basic outlines of the Garrison controversy in a few google searches after viewing the posts featuring Mostyn’s, Hohmann’s and Leons-Marder’s comments. Is this group merely incompetent? Are its members part of a concerted agenda to change the public policies of many agencies, including those of the Canadian government, Facebook and the University of Lethbridge, through calculated misrepresentations, frauds and incitements?
In an Internet post entitled “Ben Garrison on Trolls” the Montana cartoonist is said to speak for himself. Interestingly, Garrison’s observations begin with his reference to the very same Facebook reference to “community standards” that supposedly initiated the B’nai Brith’s slander of me.
“This page wasn’t removed. We reviewed the page you reported for harassment. Since it did not violate our community standards, we did not remove it. Thanks for your report.”
This is the message [writes Ben Garrison] I received after reporting a hate page on Facebook. Near the top of the hate page was a statement that encouraged the extermination of all Jews. Along with that statement was a photo of my face and the name Ben Garrison. Trolls had stolen my artwork and photos from my blog, my cartoon site as well as my fine art site and had concocted an entire page devoted to spewing libelous hate. The troll entity called the page ‘Ben Garrison Cartoons—the Official Site.’ The trolls had stamped the name ‘Ben Garrison’ onto as many hateful images as possible throughout the page. How does one stop such blatant libel? Where do these trolls come from? Is it even possible to track them down? Why do they do such terrible things? Why me?
As I found out, it’s not just me. Many others have suffered the same outrageous indignity. It appears that trolls are no longer content merely talk to each other on sordid sites such as ‘4chan’ or ‘Stormfront.’ They want to go mainstream. Therefore, social media are a natural target for them. Do they really believe the vitriolic memes they are shoveling, or are they merely playing an elaborate prank? It doesn’t matter. Their memes of hate must not go mainstream. Facebook must wake up and block the hate before it gets established. Hate speech is not free speech. Hate speech is blind, one-dimensional blackness. It is not reasoned debate. It loudly shouts for the murder of human beings and Facebook is providing them a megaphone for that purpose.
In my view the largest weight of available evidence points to the conclusion that Ben Garrison did not write the “Kill All Jews” commentary. If Ben Garrison did not write the planted text, then who did?
Could the B’nai Brith’s highlighted social media item have been produced by a Zionist group, agency or individual? Why might partisans of Israel do such a thing? Could it be to provide the ammunition for smear campaigns directed against individuals and groups that criticize Israel? Could it be to create incidents to justify appeals for money such as those accompanying the B’nai Brith’s slanderous posts aimed at damaging the reputation of the University of Lethbridge and my tenured academic role in it as a 26-year member of the Arts and Science Faculty?
Worse, much worse, can be envisaged. Could it be that the production and planting of the of the Ben Garrison post as well as others like it might be deployed to provide “evidence” in thought crime and speech crime litigation, the ultimate specialty and raison d’etre of the B’nai Brith? It is easy to imagine how such an outlandish and extravagant expression of hostility as that said to come from Garrison could be rendered useful to Crown prosecutors serving the Zionist masters.
Regardless of its source, there is no doubt that the Ben Garrison post could conceivably be exploited as a tailor made item to assist Crown prosecutors serving the agenda of B’nai Brith and related agencies. Such an item could definitely be deployed in a litigious assault on designated targets in order to establish webs of connection linking alleged hate speech with genocidal intent as well as the semantic nuke in the Zionist arsenal of weaponized words.
The conspiracy to advance the public perception that the engineered phrase, “holocaust denial,” has any internal and external coherence as an outlawed category of forbidden thought and speech runs absolutely contrary to the intellectual viability of the academy as well as the health of society more generally. The basic premise of the world’s most fraught term creates a false dichotomy that is coming to epitomize the decline of evidence-based rationality beneath the ascent of a new kind of orthodoxy combining both religious and secular elements.
Those that want to entrench and enforce an outlawed realm of forbidden thought and articulation brandish the weaponized term like an ideological sniper on steroids. They have no interest in providing definitions of where orthodoxy ends and where denial begins. As I am discovering by raising even a simple call for “open debate” on the main platform of Zionism’s unaccountable power, there are harsh new authoritarian forces that need to be called to account if we are even to slow down the police state incursions in our post-911 world.
The new configurations of authority are extending to important agencies like the Royal Canadian Legion, Jasper National Park, and the Alberta Society of Fiddlers. Those overseeing these important institutions are made to feel empowered to impose arbitrary sanctions and punishments against an individual who dared to question enshrined orthodoxy.
The message is made clear that the vibrance of art and culture, the wellbeing of veterans as well as the need to protect some of Alberta’s most majestic Alpine environments have become secondary commitments. The treatment in Jasper National Park of violinist Monika Schaefer signals the end of our free and democratic society. Our right and need to express independent thought, the starting point of collective self-determination, has has been sacrificed in order to enforce supine obedience to the sanctification of an historical interpretation that must not be held subjected to sceptical scrutiny and reconsideration.
How many are now being held, including some Canadians, in dark European dungeons for questioning any aspect of the unrelenting vilification of Germany as home of the most the most evil society of monsters ever to walk the face of the earth? Will we ever be able to liberate ourselves from the spell that is causing us to become so blind and unresponsive to the holocausts we ourselves are imposing on the natural world and also on the besieged worldwide community of our Muslim brothers and sisters?
What are the chances that the nuclear holocaust currently being promoted by our governors can be held back when those most intent on making war not peace are so firmly in charge? Is there a connection between the decline of the anti-war movement and the rise of the militarized police state currently deploying false flag-induced fears to constrain our ability to think, speak and act in conformity with the imperatives of survival? What we most require at this moment is simple affirmations of life’s beauty and integrity. Instead we are delivered coercive dictates demanding we deny what our reason and research tells us to be true.
How did we the academics, but especially we the historians, allow it to happen that a whole category of the European past has been declared off bounds to unfettered discussion and critical investigative scholarship? By allowing this development to proceed, a very sweeping and consequential precedent is being set.
How did we the citizens allow the principle to develop that government can declare that whole subject areas of research and publication have been so perfectly interpreted, so correctly dealt with in every detail, that no revision and modification of existing conclusions can be allowed. What is the role of the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith in enforcing the ruthless bulldozing aside of the most basic foundations of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and adherence to rigorous standards of scientific inquiry.
The B’nai Brith and Ben Garrison, the poster boy for the Zionist organization’s hate speech campaign, are exactly on the same page when it comes to Facebook. Both Ben Garrison and the B’nai Brith seek to constrain free speech on the Internet more tightly. Is this convergence of agendas a coincidence or are more calculated deceptions at play here? To publicize his desire that Facebook be more proactive in censoring the Internet, Garrison produced the following cartoon.
Facebook and Israel; Ben Garrison and the B’nai Brith
My FFWN co-host, Dr. Kevin Barrett, has evaluated the evidence surrounding the Garrison post and concluded it was “very likely produced by B’nai Brith itself, or other Zionist extremists of like mind, as a PR operation. No wonder they are “monitoring” the police to make sure they behave themselves.”
Presenting his own version of the B’nai Brith’s highlighted image, Dr. Barrett continues
The absurd rant with its lurid references to “greedy hook-nosed kikes” and so on does not pass the smell test. Whoever created this image obviously did not do so with the intention of convincing the public to take action against Jews and/or Zionists. On the contrary, it appears to have been designed for the opposite purpose: To convince the public that crazed, foul-mouthed, murderous anti-Semites are a clear and present danger.
Virtually every time a swastika is spray painted on a synagogue, the culprit turns out to be a “self-hating” Jewish Zionist trying to conjure up the specter of an “anti-Semitic threat.” Would an investigation of the provenance of this image find something similar?
Dr. Barrett observes that“the manufactured incident smearing Tony Hall may be part of a coordinated program, orchestrated from Tel Aviv, to try to stop the rise of the ever-increasing virtual army of pro-Palestine social media users.”
As highlighted in Telesur, the government of Israel and Facebook have been represented at the highest level in a series of meetings aimed at conspiring to hold back the growing flood of social media posts subjecting Israel’s maltreatment of the Palestinians to sceptical public scrutiny.
This recent development well demonstrates the specious nature of B’nai Brith’s characterization of Facebook as some kind of rogue agency unwilling to act immediately to pre-empt an existential threat emanating from Lethbridge. More likely the B’nai Brith’s alarmist posts in late August of 2016 were, in part at least, a ploy to divert attention from the reality that social media, but especially Facebook, is more and more being harnessed to Zionist goals and agendas.
Was the B’nai Brith’s deployment of the racist side of Ben Garrison’s dual public personae calculated to serve the double purpose of both smearing me and my school as well as leading interested parties to a surprising “libertarian” voice for the suppression of Internet freedom? What should be done about Internet trolls such as those at the B’nai Brith that have shown themselves to be unrelenting in planting lies and innuendo with the aim of silencing criticism of Israel?
Dr. Hall is editor in chief of American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
Pathetic Fail #2: Abby Ohlheiser, the Washington Post, and Facebook
Abby Ohlheiser, Accessory after the Fact [source: Washington Post ]
Winter Patriot | September 18, 2016
Number 2 : Abby Ohlheiser, the Washington Post, and Facebook, for “Facebook’s trending topics promoted an article ‘truthering’ the Sept. 11 attacks”
ON the 15th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, experts are sensationally claiming it is impossible that the towers were brought down by planes.
Instead, leading engineers believe the Twin Towers may have collapsed due to a “controlled demolition” – something it is claimed there is video evidence to support.
They disagree with the investigation done by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that was launched in August 2002.
Video evidence – which was made by people with a similar theory – has been posted online and seeks to offer proof.
Seriously? This is Abby Ohlheiser?
No, sorry. This is Rachel O’Donoghue, writing for UK readers in the Daily Star, under the headline:
September 11: The footage that ‘proves bombs were planted in Twin Towers’.
[source: Daily Star ]
Rachel O’Donoghue needs a good copy editor; I’ve fixed her spelling errors, but I haven’t changed any of her words. She continues:
That six-year analysis of what caused the collapse also looked at the lesser known World Trade Centre 7 building, a third building that sat right next to the towers and fell at 5.20pm on the afternoon of September 11 – more than six hours after the two skyscrapers tumbled to the ground.
Its conclusion was that the “WTC Towers and WTC 7 [were] the only known cases of total structural collapse in high-rise buildings where fires played a significant role.”
The fires were apparently sparked by jet fuel that caused huge fires to engulf the upper floors after American Airlines Flights 11 and 175 smashed into the structures in a series of coordinated attacks on the morning of September 11, 2001.
But since the NIST investigation concluded, it has been pointed out that buildings like the World Trade Centre were specifically designed to withstand a fire and huge impacts like a plane hitting them.
What does this have to do with Abby Ohlheiser? Therein lies an interesting tale…
As you may know, Facebook has built its success on a foundation of really good ideas, and one of those ideas was to give their users an easy way to “feel the pulse” of the Internet, so to speak.
The idea is: With a bit of research, one could answer questions such as: What subjects are people talking about? and What are they reading?
The answers to these questions could be used to create a list of links, and that list could appear on the user’s sidebar, under the heading “Trending Topics.”
It was a fantastic idea, and they hired some people to do it, and it worked out great! But there was a problem.
The problem was not in making the list but in keeping it up to date. That was difficult and expensive and required a large staff working more or less continuously, and wasn’t this the sort of thing that could be done by software?
Well, of course it could. But they didn’t have the software, so the software had to be developed, and now it’s ready, or at least it’s ready enough to be deployed. So Facebook has replaced the people who used to maintain “Trending Topics” with a computer program.
Presumably because this software has only recently been developed, it’s still a little bit naive, so to speak.
That is to say, it was probably written to do what it was supposed to do. Stories like this come up frequently, and they illustrate both the strength and the weakness of doing things by computer. A computer does what it’s told: quickly, cheaply, precisely, and reliably. If it does the wrong thing, it usually means it was following the wrong instructions. And there’s the rub. A computer is “smart enough” to follow instructions, but it’s not smart enough to know when its instructions are wrong!
You would be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) at how often newly developed software is perceived as “faulty” because it was designed according to specifications which did not accurately reflect the needs of the people who had commissioned it. This has happened so often to me personally that I have come to expect it.
In the current instance, the case of Facebook’s “Trending Topics,” the programmers apparently designed the code to search and sort, building its lists according to the criteria I described above, and giving no attention to certain “hidden assumptions” which human editors take for granted.
In particular, the software didn’t know that the facts of 9/11 must be suppressed.
Rachel O’Donoghue’s piece appeared on Tuesday, September 6, and within a few days it attracted so much attention that Facebook’s software noticed it. But the software failed to perceive that the headline, September 11: The footage that ‘proves bombs were planted in Twin Towers’ could potentially be politically volatile.
Needless to say, this is an error that no human editor would ever make, but the software was just too dumb to pick up on the implications of the headline, or to read the article and find out what it said. And nobody was supervising it. The software was “flying solo.”
And it came to pass that early on Friday, September 9, Facebook users found “September 11th Anniversary” on their sidebar, and if they hovered over the topic, they saw this:
click to enlarge [source: Facebook via Abby Ohlheiser]
If they clicked on it, they saw this:
click to enlarge [source: Facebook via Abby Ohlheiser]
And if they clicked on this, they could read Rachel O’Donoghue!
When Abby Ohlheiser found out, she was most unimpressed. As she wrote:
Facebook users looking for more context on why the Sept. 11 terrorist attack anniversary was trending on the platform on Friday were, for a time, directed to a tabloid article claiming that “experts” had footage that “proves bombs were planted in Twin Towers.”
The Daily Star piece promoted by Facebook repeats a lot of common claims from 9/11 “trutherism,” a conspiracy theory based on an idea (unsupported by any actual evidence) that the World Trade Center must have collapsed in 2001 because of a “controlled demolition” and not from the damage caused by the airliner crashes.
This photo shows material being ejected from the South Tower, well below the impact zone and before the collapse of the building. It is prima facie evidence of explosives and therefore must be suppressed. [source: Daily Star ]
Is this correct? Well, no!
Unfortunately for Abby Ohlheiser, the Daily Star piece by Rachel O’Donoghue documents “actual evidence” of explosives in the towers, the existence of which Abby Ohlheiser flatly denies!
Engineers Steven Jones, Robert Korol, Anthony Szamboti and Ted Walter are part of the growing community of experts who say evidence indicates the towers were brought down in a controlled demolition.
They wrote a paper for Europhysics News highlighting four important pieces of evidence pointing to this conclusion.
These were:
– Fires are not normally hot enough to heat a massive steel structure enough for it to collapse
– The majority of high rise buildings have sprinkler systems that prevent a fire from getting hot enough to heat steel to a critical level
– Skyscrapers are protected using flame-proof materials
– And they are designed so that if compromised, they do not collapse.
They go on to point out that the towers were actually designed to stay standing in the event of seismic activity, such as earthquakes, and incredibly high winds.
Abby Ohlheiser tells us what happened when she found out Facebook was linking to this article:
Shortly after The Intersect [i.e. Abby Ohlheiser] reached out to Facebook for a comment on the matter, the article disappeared from Facebook’s page for the topic. The lead article switched to a local news piece about a photograph showing beams of light bouncing off One World Trade Center.
“We’re aware a hoax article showed up there,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement on Friday, “and as a temporary step to resolving this we’ve removed the topic.”
The misstep comes weeks after the company removed the human editors who used to describe and curate the site’s trending topics, leaving the task of providing context for those topics to an algorithmically selected article from another site. As this most recent example illustrates, the algorithms haven’t always been up to the task.
“Algorithm” is a fancy name for a set of instructions. And one question which suggests itself is: Have the algorithms really failed in their task?
I can’t help thinking the answer depends on how the task is defined. If the task is to promote the topics that the greatest number of people want to read about, and the articles that the greatest number of people are reading, that’s one thing. If the task is to prefer relatively safe topics and politically acceptable articles, even if fewer people are reading them … well, that’s different.
And I humbly suggest that this difference was the cause of Abby Ohlheiser’s discomfort.
In an alternate universe where we had a free press and free social media, “trending” would mean “trending,” just as “topic” means “topic.” The most popular article under each topic would appear on the sidebar. And if people started learning about facts that the supporters of an absurd and murderous story wanted to suppress, that would be just too bad for them.
In such a universe, when Abby Ohlheiser “reached out” for a comment, the Facebook spokeswoman would say, “We are in the business of facilitating — not impeding — connections between our users and the rest of the world. We will not bow to pressure from politicians, nor from journalists, nor from anybody else. And you will just have to grow up and accept the fact that ‘trending’ means ‘trending,’ which is not always the same as ‘trending and pleasing to you.’ We thank you for your understanding, and we hope that in the future you will not waste any more of your time on similar complaints.”
But of course we live in the real universe, so Facebook declared Rachel O’Donoghue’s piece a “hoax” and removed the link.
Later, according the the spokeswoman, Facebook removed the whole “September 11th Anniversary” topic, which, as you can see in the screenshot preserved by Abby Ohlheiser, was at the time the most popular topic on the list by far, leading an NFL player who had not stood during the national anthem the previous evening by a margin of 340K to 28K.
This photo, which allegedly shows the beginning of a gravity-driven collapse, looks more like a volcano erupting, and therefore must be suppressed. [source: Daily Star ]
Hoax? What hoax? The official story is a hoax!
As Rachel O’Donoghue notes:
John Skilling, the chief structural engineer of the World Trade Centre, even admitted in 1993 – eight years before the disaster – they were made to specifically withstand the force of a jet hitting them.
In an interview with the Seattle Times he said: “Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed [but] the building structure would still be there.”
He then commented that in his view, the only thing that could bring them down would be explosives of some sort.
Eyewitness accounts describing the aftermath of the attacks supports the theory explosives were planted inside the towers.
Shortly after the planes hit, numerous interviews were recorded in which people who had been inside the World Trade Centre said that when they ran down from the upper floors they found the lobby had been completely destroyed.
Some also described finding people who had not been upstairs with “their faces blown off”.
Eyewitnesses who describe the lobby as completely destroyed, and statements about people who had “their faces blown off” despite not having been upstairs, pose a grave danger to Abby Ohlheiser and her contention that the “conspiracy theory” is “unsupported by any actual evidence” and threaten Facebook’s assertion that Rachel Donoghue’s article is a hoax.
But all these bits of suppressed evidence certainly corroborate the story Bob McIlvaine tells about his son Bobby.
Had Abby Ohlheiser not made such a big stink about Rachel O’Donoghue’s piece, I probably would not have seen it, and I wouldn’t be able to share the details with you here. But this is Abby Ohlheiser’s game, apparently — monitoring other “reporters” and complaining if they happen to cross one of her invisible lines.
Fortunately, if she can bend them to her will, she’s not content to let the matter rest. She uses her platform to tell everyone what has happened, even if it means bringing attention to the very thing she is trying to suppress.
On September 9, Facebook users were given the false impression that the “Topic” “September 11th Anniversary” was “Trending” because of these photos. Thanks to Abby Ohlheiser, we now know how and why this happened. [source: ABC 7 NY dot Com]
So, even if we stipulate that Abby Ohlheiser prevented a very large number of people from reading Rachel O’Donoghue’s piece, she still qualifies as a fail in my book for two reasons.
First, she gave the world a screenshot showing Rachel O’Donoghue’s headline and the name of her paper, so that everyone could see what had been published and where to find it. Now all her readers — and both of mine — know all about it.
Second, she has shown us very clearly how easily Facebook can be manipulated into suppressing vital evidence in a case of mass murder, and who she is and what she wants, and the same about the Washington Post, and the same about Facebook — which may be important if anyone is still in doubt.
Had Facebook not turned tail and fled, its users would have found it easier to maintain the illusion that they have a free press and free social media. But they might have learned a thing or two as well, and no doubt here lies the perceived danger.
Certainly Facebook’s part in this story proves one thing: Even if you can’t please everybody, you can certainly displease everybody. Those who aren’t angry at Facebook for linking to Rachel O’Donoghue are angry at Facebook for taking down the link and calling the truth a “hoax”. Or at least they should be.
Had Rachel O’Donoghue not mentioned her source, I might not have found the article she was writing about.
It’s from Europhysics News, it was written by Steven Jones, Robert Korol, Anthony Szamboti and Ted Walter. It’s called “15 Years Later: On The Physics Of High-Rise Building Collapses,” and it includes:
– a short explanation of why steel-framed buildings don’t normally collapse, even after long hot fires,
– a short history of building demolition techniques, including the most modern ones,
– an overview of the reasons why they believe the towers were destroyed by modern demolition techniques and not by fires,
– a review of the official investigations, showing how far they were willing to deviate from the normal logical and physical constraints, and how little scrutiny their conclusions can bear, and
– a summary of the eyewitness evidence concerning explosives in the buildings, concluding this way:
Some 156 witnesses, including 135 first responders, have been documented as saying that they saw, heard, and/or felt explosions prior to and/or during the collapses. That the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives appears to have been the initial prevailing view among most first responders. “I thought it was exploding, actually,” said John Coyle, a fire marshal. “Everyone I think at that point still thought these things were blown up”.
When John Coyle says, “Everyone I think at that point still thought these things were blown up,” the words “at that point” and “still” indicate the power of the propaganda machine behind the official story. Even though they lived through it, many of the first responders became convinced in the aftermath that their perceptions of the day’s events had been wrong!
And yet! Popular support for 9/11 Truth endures, even after 15 years of relentless and powerful propaganda, partially because so many people know about the evidence that the perpetrators and their accessories after the fact are trying to suppress.
We can see what they’re trying to do. We can figure out why. And we’re not going away anytime soon.
Sorry, Abby! You lose! And so does your sad excuse for a newspaper.
Sorry, Washington Post ! If you don’t tell the truth about something important soon, I may quit letting you use my initials!
Sorry, Facebook, You lose, too! Everyone can see where you stand and why. “Oh, my!”
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present: three pathetic losers on the wrong side of a bloody red line marked “mass murder for profit!”
As I’ve been saying:
The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?
Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Previous: Pathetic Fail #3: Sam Kestenbaum, Naomi Dann, and the Forward
Next: Interlude: Three Encouraging Successes
Whose Rebels? Three years since chemical weapons massacre in Ghouta, Assad found not guilty
Pro rebels demonstration at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin two years after the chemical attacks on the Damascus suburbs
By David Macilwain | American Herald Tribune | September 20, 2016
Three long and terrible years have now passed since the staging of a Sarin attack in the Eastern suburbs of Damascus. These years have cost the lives of twice as many Syrians as had been killed in the preceding two and a half years of this unnecessary war against the Syrian state.
Yet it needn’t have been like this. Following the apparent chemical weapons attack on the Opposition-held suburb of Ghouta in the early hours of August 21st 2013 – for which the Syrian government was immediately held responsible by Western leaders and media – a ‘punitive’ military strike was proposed by the White House. This was averted, at the very last minute, by Russia’s proposal for the UN-supervised destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stocks, or so it seemed.
Writing in a seminal article published by the London Review of Books that December, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that sections of the US intelligence community had also advised the White House to call off the strike, because of serious doubts about who was actually responsible for the Sarin attack.
But Hersh’s article – ‘Whose Sarin?’ – was comprehensively ignored by the Western media and even, it must be said, in the letters pages of the journal which had been brave enough to publish it. By comparison, his revelations were championed in the media of Syria and her allies, as well as by Syria’s supporters in the West, who had never given the slightest credibility to claims the Syrian government had launched Sarin-filled missiles ‘at its own people’. Such an idea, in the straightforward words of Russia’s President Putin, was ‘utter nonsense’.
And yet this idea persists, and continues to poison the minds of so many in the West who might otherwise have put an end to the illicit and covert war against the Syrian state and its people. Not only does the ‘original lie’ about the Ghouta attack get restated by self-described ‘supporters of the Syrian People’, but the facile idea of the ‘regime’ using chemical weapons has been reborn. Even before all the sarin and mustard gas stocks were destroyed, there were warnings that Chlorine might be used instead; now ‘chlorine filled barrel bombs’ have become a preferred method of killing people the government doesn’t like, according to Opposition activists. For the multiple NGOs, media and Western audience who condone the insurgency it matters not that these claims are vacuous and mendacious.
The focus of ‘Whose Sarin?’ was mostly on how much US intelligence knew about the abilities of terrorist groups in Syria – Al Nusra/Al Qaeda and ‘AQI’, later to become ‘ISIS’ – to manufacture Sarin, and the consequent doubts about Syrian government responsibility for the Ghouta attack. While Hersh noted the observations of missile experts Lloyd and Postol that cast real doubts on the origins of the suspect Sarin-loaded missiles, he didn’t offer an opinion on the lack of an ‘a priori’ case against the Assad government; I think it must be restated now.
Following claims that Sarin had been used in a missile strike in the village of Khan al Assal, near Aleppo in March 2013, attributed to Al Nusra by a Russian investigation team, the Syrian government had been demanding a UN investigation of this incident. Although the UN representative Carla del Ponte agreed with the Russian conclusion, the US took the word of the Syrian opposition that the government was responsible, despite those targeted and killed in the strike being government supporters. Not until the 19th of August did a UN team arrive in Damascus to investigate the Khan al Assal strike, as well as opposition claims of two other smaller Sarin attacks.
But before the UN team could arrange their visit to Khan al Assal, the Ghouta attack occurred, as evidenced by videos released and spread through social media. What actually happened there, and in the suburb of Moadamiya where claims of a Sarin-loaded missile were not substantiated in the UN investigation, remains in doubt. Quite startlingly the declarations of outrage from President Obama and John Kerry that 1430 innocent civilians had been gassed were supported by zero evidence; not one single autopsy showing death from Sarin was carried out, as the UN team confined its investigation to a mere 36 supposed victims who survived the attack. Even the evidence from those victims was inconclusive, though that was hardly surprising given these ‘victims’ were supplied by ‘activists’ in Moadamiya, where no Sarin contamination was found.
Notwithstanding this lack of real evidence for a Sarin attack, regardless of the culprit, and the rapid emergence of doubts on the authenticity of the crucial video evidence, a fact that even disturbed some Western commentators was the absence of any rationale for such a chemical weapons attack on the Syrian government side. Not only had the Syrian Army made recent gains in driving back the insurgency, and was working hard on reconciliation in divided communities, but the government quite clearly had a lot to lose by launching such a criminal and militarily useless attack. To choose to launch such an attack, ostensibly against innocent civilians, right under the noses of the UN chemical weapons investigators just after their arrival next-door to the crime scene would have been more than stupid – it was simply incomprehensible!
Perhaps it was at this point that the two sides of the narrative on the Syrian war parted company. No-one whose survival now depended on the Syrian Arab Army and its allies could believe the talk from the West – of ‘humanitarian intervention’, and of ‘moderate rebels’ wanting a secular democracy. And when the support of Syrians for their Army and President was put to the test in the elections of May 2014 the great majority of them offered it enthusiastically. Conversely in the Western sphere of influence, in the countries supporting the insurgency directly and indirectly, and amongst Syrian refugees in those countries, the case was closed against President Assad and the Syrian army. Even though the military strike had been called off, this was on the condition Syria’s chemical weapons stocks were destroyed – an action that clearly assumed the Syrian government had used Sarin and must be prevented from doing so again.
Although the evident plan in some quarters to prosecute an illegitimate war on Syria with direct military intervention using the attack as a pretext was foiled, the success of the Ghouta ‘false flag’ operation was clear in a different respect – as a demonstration that the Western public could now be made to believe almost anything, however implausible, with emotive manipulation. Both before and since the Ghouta operation, opposition videos showing children killed and injured by ‘Assad’s bombs’ have been very skilfully employed to conceal the truth of these vile attacks on humanity. Nowhere was this more the case than with the Ghouta Sarin attack videos.
While most of the bodies pictured in those videos were shown wrapped in white cloth and unidentified, many dead children were pictured as they died in their variety of ordinary clothes, and were soon identified. Some two weeks earlier, one of the most brutal and barbaric attacks by ‘rebel’ forces had been launched against some Alawite villages near Lattakia, with hundreds massacred but also over a hundred women and children kidnapped. Their fate was unknown until relatives recognised some of those children in the videos of ‘Sarin victims’, even though these videos were released 16 days later and 200 kilometres away in Damascus. In subsequent close analysis of the videos it was then observed that some of the same children appeared in videos released in different suburbs, in different positions and surroundings.
The unspeakable barbarity of the ‘rebels’, who all came together to take part in the massacre and then so callously made ‘snuff videos’ to use as a propaganda weapon, should cause us to reflect on how the reporting of these atrocities went virtually unnoticed by our ‘humanitarian’ agencies, and remained uncondemned by the UN. The apparent condoning of this sectarian attack on rural Alawite communities – which was seen by some as a payback for the Syrian Army’s liberation of Al Qusair two months earlier – has unpleasant echoes in the reaction of those same agencies to recent events in Aleppo. Before considering these events, and the renewed threat of a catastrophic war, there is another story to be told for which Seymour Hersh’s further investigations provide a lead.
Having established ‘whose Sarin’ was used in Ghouta – and more recent investigations confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that the Sarin was not from Syrian government stocks – the question that must now be answered is ‘whose Rebels?’. It has been no secret for some time that Opposition forces in Syria are being supplied with ammunition and weapons from neighbouring countries, and that ‘jihadis’ from many countries have been flowing over Syria’s borders to join the fight. The Orwellian ‘Friends of Syria’ countries – the Western and Gulf states supporting the Syrian Opposition against the Syrian state – have long maintained that this support for the insurgency is being assisted and paid for by individuals over whom states have little control. While they might allow that some governments – Turkey for instance – are ‘not doing enough’ to stop the flow of fighters and arms across their borders, no Western leaders or mainstream media organisations will admit to the truth of direct state support for the insurgency.
The reality of this barely covert and illicit support from foreign governments for all the armed groups fighting in Syria is however like the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’, and the inability to see it barely comprehensible. It is as if the whole Western populace has been subject to a feat of mass hypnosis by their corporate media, who have themselves become witless facilitators of their governments’ agendas. The official ‘narrative’ of the ‘Civil War in Syria’ has now become self-sustaining, with the same false memes pervading every part of the Western media echo-chamber.
Yet ask anyone outside this chamber – and particularly the 17 million Syrians who have remained in and support their country – and they will tell you all we need to know about the ‘elephant’. They have long realised that – at its simplest – there is no ‘civil war’ in Syria, having its origins in an authentic sectarian uprising against an oppressive and brutal ‘Alawite’ government. The conflict is rather seen as a war on Syria being waged by a proxy army of ruthless ‘takfiris’, against which all actions of the Syrian Arab Army are considered legitimate self-defence of Syria and its people. Some Syrians may consider that the war was not like this from the start, but now accept the reality of foreign sponsorship of the insurgency and fully support the government and army’s fight against it.
Within days of the first protest rallies in Dera’a on the border with Jordan however, it became abundantly clear to the government that arms and fighters had infiltrated Syria’s borders, with assistance from foreign agencies and with the express intention of fomenting a ‘popular uprising’. The role played by Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, the state broadcasters for the key Arab states seeking the overthrow of the Assad government, in ‘spreading false news’ and thereby inciting rebellion, was fundamental in this operation. While the better informed and educated populations in the cities and in areas historically supportive of the government were sceptical of Al Jazeera’s reports and soon recognised their bias and fabrications, those in poorer rural areas readily accepted the false accusations against the government and army. What might have been peaceful protests, with legitimate demands that the government initially sought to address, rapidly descended into a spiral of violence. This was not as portrayed in the West, as a result of a ‘brutal crackdown’ by the security forces, but because of the reaction of those forces to lethal fire from ‘agents provocateurs’ amongst the protestors or hidden in nearby buildings. Adding insult to injury, soldiers who were killed by these snipers were reported by opposition fighters as having been shot ‘for failing to fire on protestors’, or for attempted desertion. These false assertions, relayed to the Western media by local and foreign ‘activists’, laid the basis for the ‘information war’ against Syria.
Building on this narrative that the Syrian army, under the command of Bashar al Assad, was determined to stamp out the protests by any means, including by committing massacres of innocent and unarmed civilians, the ‘Free Syrian Army’ was contrived as a self-defence force for ‘the Syrian people’. Thanks to the developing links between Al Jazeera and some Western media organisations the completely false narrative of ‘the Syrian Popular Revolution’ took root in the western mind. This movement was assisted by the formation of the ‘Syrian National Council’ from the expat Syrian community in France, the US and UK. The SNC was strongly affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, ejected from Syria in 1982 by Bashar al Assad’s father Hafez, following the Brotherhood’s earlier violent attempts to undermine the central government. While the political significance of this group was not lost on the Syrian government or amongst Syrians, given that both Qatar – the home of Al Jazeera – and Turkey also had strong allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood, the connection was dismissed or ignored by the ‘Friends of Syria’ and their subject populations. Astoundingly, following meetings with western leaders, this self-elected group of people, most of whom hadn’t set foot in Syria for thirty years, were pronounced as ‘the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people’ by their Western ‘friends’, and proposed as the government-in-waiting once Bashar al Assad was removed.
More astounding even than this was the acceptance by almost all NGOs, the UN, commentators and general public of this self-evident fiction. I shouldn’t even have to explain why people who have been through no conceivably democratic process of selection by any small fraction of ‘the Syrian people’, who don’t reside in Syria, and who seek the overthrow of Syria’s legitimate government cannot be legitimate representatives of anyone – other than the foreign states on whose behalf they are evidently acting. That the ‘Friends of Syria’ consider them so tells us just which foreign states these are.
While the SNC was always presented as a political group, and with only a tenuous connection to ‘Opposition’ fighters in Syria, this may be seen as one of the ways its ‘supporting powers’ concealed their own direct support for the armed insurgency. The years of rhetoric about a ‘peace process’, and vacuous debate over whether Assad could play a role in an interim government, gave false legitimacy to the role of the US in particular in its contribution to the Syrian conflict. Despite the wide acknowledgement of the false claims used by the US in its war against Iraq, the similar role it had played in fomenting and supporting the violent war on Syria went unnoticed, even amongst the most vocal left-wing opponents of US policies and ‘foreign interventions’.
Many mainstream commentators repeatedly represent the US role in the Syrian war as one of ‘reluctance to become involved’, while supporters of the armed insurgency both within and without Syria frequently complain about the ‘US failure’ to help the ‘rebels’, both militarily and politically. This call for intervention is echoed by influential NGOs such as Amnesty International and Medecins Sans Frontieres and charities such as Save the Children, as well as the UN and UNHRC.
Faced with the reality, of significant covert military assistance to the Syrian insurgency by the CIA, as discussed in detail by Seymour Hersh in two later articles published by the LRB, we have a difficult choice. Either these NGOs who are helping the opposition forces in Syria are ignorant of the direct US military support for armed groups conducting daily attacks on Syrian civilians and soldiers, or they condone this support. Clearly it is preferable to believe that these respected humanitarian agencies, who claim to be apolitical and oppose all violence against unarmed civilians, are ignorant of the extent and criminality of US and other foreign military support for the violent extremists and mercenaries who increasingly dominate the opposition forces in Syria.
Perhaps they did not read, or chose to dismiss the unchallengeable evidence for a ‘Rat line’ of both weapons and fighters from Libya through Turkey into Syria, facilitated since 2012 by the CIA and the Turkish Intelligence organisation MIT, as discussed in April 2014 by Seymour Hersh. (LRB, ‘Obama, Erdogan and the Syrian Rebels’). Hersh reiterates and further elaborates on the operation of the CIA’s rat line in his most recent article discussing intelligence sharing between the US and Syria (Military to Military, LRB January 7th 2016), noting the state department’s support for the operation, and apparent carelessness about the final destination of the weapons or the true nature of the ‘rebels’ they were arming. During this period the CIA was also running a training program for opposition fighters in Jordan who then joined jihadist forces fighting the Syrian army up to Damascus. Credible reports put the number of mercenaries so trained and armed at around 10,000 over several years.
While both these covert and illegal US operations were quite visible to those who looked, the false narrative about US reluctance to arm the ‘rebel’ forces remains dominant, sustained by periodic statements from the White House. Following constant calls from sections of Congress and pressure groups, the US finally ‘agreed’ to set up a ‘train and assist program’, selecting suitable ‘moderate’ Syrians for this force, not to fight ‘Assad’s Army’ but Islamic State. Much was made of the failure of this programme and the rapid defeat of its first recruits by Al Nusra. In fact it was a significant success for the White House in concealing the reality of its massive contribution to the violent military campaign to change Syria’s government. Considering the number of innocent Syrians who have been killed by US weapons, used by US trained mercenaries and foreign fighters, it was a truly criminal deception.
This deception continued until late last year, when Russia’s intervention in support of the Syrian army finally brought ‘the Rats’ out into the daylight. The US could no longer hide the armed groups it was supporting within the main Opposition-held area in the north-west as the Syrian army backed by Russian air power advanced towards Aleppo; it was forced to reveal their identity and location, and appeal to the Russians to avoid bombing these US-approved ‘moderate rebels’. No-one thought to point out that if these ‘vetted’ groups were there to fight Islamic State, they seemed to be in the wrong place, at least according to their sponsors. The US had complained since the start of the Russian air-campaign that Russia was targeting the ‘moderate rebels’ – claiming there was no IS presence around Aleppo.
But this left another problem for the US covert operation – Syria’s Al Qaeda. The dominant presence of this group around Aleppo, which has been holding Aleppo under siege for years while subjecting the government-supporting population to constant terrorist attacks, makes it the prime target for the Syrian forces and Russian air-strikes. Unable to deny that the ‘Al Nusra front’ did dominate the armed groups in East Aleppo, or persuade Russia not to target the terrorist group for fear it might kill ‘moderate rebels’ the West is vocally supporting, the US came up with another idea, claiming Al Nusra had cut ties with Al Qaeda and would henceforth be known as ‘Jabhat Fatah al Sham’. Even though this was so transparently disingenuous – and statements from the new ‘Foreign Media Relations Director’ of ‘Fatah al Sham’ confirmed the group’s continuing extremist Islamist agenda – the name-changing ruse worked.
Following a long-awaited campaign to liberate Aleppo from Al Nusra’s siege by the Syrian army, assisted by Iranian and Lebanese forces and the Russian air force, and the breaking of their resupply route from Turkey, an estimated force of 10,000 armed militants launched a huge counter attack on West Aleppo (at the end of July). Quite astonishingly the assistance of Al Qaeda’s suicide bombers in making this a ‘successful’ assault was acknowledged and even welcomed by Western media, who took their cue from aid agencies and others supporting the ‘besieged rebels’ in their hold-out in East Aleppo. One of the most influential of these ‘aid’ agencies is the ‘Syrian Civil Defence’ or White Helmets, whose logo can be seen on many videos showing people being rescued from buildings allegedly destroyed by Syrian or Russian bombs. While the White Helmets’ origins with MI6 are not hidden, – origins which should cast serious doubt both on their reports and their actual activities – Western media agencies have managed to ignore them.
Indeed one wonders now whether the White Helmets’ evident support for Al Nusra would any longer serve to disqualify it as a recipient of the West’s charitable and political assistance. If Al Qaeda’s suicide bombers can now be viewed as ‘good suicide bombers’ for helping the cause, then presumably the White Helmets would also be praised for their supporting role.
Yet it is only a supporting role. Taking advantage of the ceasefire and ‘humanitarian pause’ in the Syrian campaign forced on it by the West, huge new stocks of US weapons and vehicles paid for by local allies were shipped in across the Turkish border to resupply ‘rebel forces’. For the first time these included MANPADS, enabling Syrian or Russian planes to be shot down.
Perhaps now we should consider the disdain and disgust amongst Syrians, not just for those who kill their brave and loyal soldiers, but for those amongst us who would celebrate the brutal deaths of their loved ones and protectors. Consider the particular degree of wrath reserved for ‘terrorists’ who dare to kill just one of our soldiers on our own soil, or for those who seek to justify or even explain such brutality as a response to our own murderous campaigns in their homelands.
Having established, beyond a shadow of doubt, that neither the Syrian government nor any of its agents was responsible for the deaths of civilians from Sarin poisoning in Ghouta three years ago, it follows that all subsequent action taken directly or indirectly against Syria has been illegitimate. It also follows that responsibility for the deaths and injury of tens of thousands of innocent Syrian civilians and as many loyal Syrian soldiers and defence forces at the hands of violent sectarian extremists and mercenaries since August 2013, lies with those who have – in full knowledge of the truth – developed and maintained the fraudulent supporting narrative of the ‘Syrian civil war’ in the Western sphere.
How did it come to this – a situation where the truth of the ‘dirty war on Syria’ is completely concealed from those whose governments are conducting it, while being known to all those who are the victims of it in Syria? How can our comprehension of the motives and methods of our own governments be so lacking that they can literally get away with murder, while claiming the moral high ground and pretending sympathy with their victims?
But do we also share some responsibility for these crimes against humanity, for our gullibility in believing only the stories told by one party to the conflict, while rejecting those of the actual victims of the war – the Syrian people and their defence forces?
Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC
Matt Kwong, Accessory after the Fact [source: CBC]
Winter Patriot | September 15, 2016
Number 4 : Matt Kwong and the CBC, for “Why the ‘9/11 Truth’ movement endures 15 years later”
As we saw in the previous installment, when Jack Holmes tried to prove the Truthers wrong on all major points and failed dismally, a head-on, evidence-based attack on 9/11 Truth is sub-optimal strategy. In this episode, we turn to an accessory after the fact who set himself a much different task, but failed anyway.
Presumably because he’s too smart to attack the Truth Movement from the front, Matt Kwong of the CBC comes at it from the rear. Rather than taking on the evidence, which did no good at all for Jack Holmes, Matt Kwong turns to time-honored journalistic tactics: smear and innuendo, woven together with sleight-of-hand that would have made a magician drool if it had worked.
The result is not merely a pathetic fail but a nasty one — a transparently ugly smear against the people who want to know the truth about 9/11, and especially against Bob McIlvaine, who lost his son Bobby that day.
Bob McIlvaine has been trying to find out what happened to Bobby, and trying to get people to care about what happened to all of us, for the past 15 years. To those of us who have followed the story, Bob McIlvaine is something of a role model — because he didn’t believe the lies he was told, and he didn’t cower when he was told to sit down and shut up, and he’s been waging an uphill battle for a long time, and he hasn’t quit.
If Bobby McIlvaine had died under mysterious circumstances in a foreign country, and Bob had spent 15 years trying to find out what happened to him, Bob would be seen as a heroic figure. A paperback writer would churn out a vapid tribute to his dogged persistence and his enduring love for his son, and we would see the result in drugstores.
But because of where, and when, and how Bobby McIlvaine died, Bob’s efforts cannot be praised, only denigrated. This is how far we have fallen.
Under the bizarre sub-heading “Father of 9/11 victim reconciles unconventional beliefs with grief,” Matt Kwong writes:
Robert McIlvaine knows better than to talk, unsolicited, about the research he pores over at home in Oreland, Pa. […] it’s the circumstances around the attacks — specifically, McIlvaine’s beliefs about precisely how the world-altering event unfolded — that he’s cautious to discuss. […] “My wife doesn’t take me out; doesn’t go with me anymore because she’s afraid I’ll bring it up with friends,” he says. […] “No one wants to talk about it,” McIlvaine says. “It’s like you have leprosy.”
… and so on. But there’s a mystery. If no one wants to talk about it, why are people still talking about it?
There must be a reason. What could it be? … Well, maybe it’s the Internet!
Fifteen years later, the devastating attack on America that coincided with the nascent internet age continues to spawn discussions hosted in forums that speculate about the moon landing, the Hollow Earth hypothesis and the JFK assassination.
Here we go! This is called red herring and guilt by association, a truly journalistic combination of logical fallacies to provide just the right context for what comes next — the few relevant details we will ever get from Matt Kwong:
The official account says McIlvaine’s eldest son […] was […] on the 106th floor when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower.
McIlvaine suspects otherwise. Based on injuries his son sustained, including to his face and chest, he maintains Bobby was killed by an explosion, possibly before the plane crash. As Bobby was among the first 10 bodies found, he says, McIlvaine believes his son was in the tower’s lobby.
“If he was on the 106th floor, he wouldn’t have been found so quickly.”
I think Bob’s kidding himself. In my view, if Bobby was on the 106th floor, he probably wouldn’t have been found at all!
But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is the condition of Bobby’s body. “Injuries […] to his face and chest” hardly qualifies as an accurate description of the wounds.
Matt Kwong doesn’t give you enough details to help you understand this aspect of the story. But if you do some research to supplement his so-called journalism, you can learn quite a bit, fairly easily.
According to McIlvaine, the wounds described by the doctor indicated that his son had been hit by flying glass from some kind of massive blast. Bobby’s face was damaged beyond recognition, he had lacerations all over his chest from flying glass, and he had post-mortem burns. In fact, the blast was strong enough to literally blow Bobby out of his laced shoes (they were not on the body when it was brought to the morgue).
“My final summation is that he was walking into the building, and before he got into the building there was a huge explosion, and of course the force of it just threw him back into the open area,” McIlvaine says. “That’s why he was picked up so quickly, because the EMTs came down there so quickly. Someone had gotten him out of there and to the morgue before the towers came down.”
In other words, Bob has good reason to think Bobby was not killed by fire at the top of the tower, but by blast and flying glass at its base. And if Bob thinks these were the result of a massive explosion? Well, what else could it have been?
Matt Kwong could have told you this; anyone familiar with the stories of the 9/11 families could have done the same. Bob’s been speaking in public for a long time, and his story about Bobby — unlike the official narrative — hasn’t changed. He certainly wouldn’t have been reluctant to tell Matt Kwong why he thinks what he thinks.
But Matt Kwong can’t (or won’t) tell you all this. And the reason is simple: If you focus on two things — what Bob knows about his son’s death, and the official explanation behind the attacks — you can’t help seeing the basic contradiction: How could Bobby have been killed by an explosion if there were no explosions?
National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice responds to a question during testimony before the 9/11 Commission in the Hart Senate office building in Washington on April 8, 2004.
(Larry Downing/Reuters) [source: CBC]
What did Bob McIlvaine do about it? According to Matt Kwong, he waited to see what the government would say, thus:
McIlvaine attended the 9/11 Commission [but] he left angry and dissatisfied by testimony from then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
(Curiously (or not!), several paragraphs before mentioning Condoleezza Rice, the CBC inserted a photo of Miss Rice herself, looking cool and comfortable as she testified before the Commission. The photo, the caption, and the placement combine to create a subtle hint that Bob’s got his nose out of joint for nothing. I’ve included the photo and CBC’s caption verbatim, several paragraphs before mentioning it, to give you a subtle hint of what CBC is doing.)
But Matt Kwong doesn’t tell you about Miss Rice’s testimony. And he certainly wouldn’t want you to see a video of her being questioned. Matt Kwong won’t show you video evidence of the other family members who were outraged at the hearings, either.
But I digress. Here’s Matt Kwong again:
McIlvaine began to dig on his own for answers online, watching web documentaries such as Dylan Avery’s 9/11 truth staple, Loose Change, as well as reading more American history.
And this was the dangerous, slippery part. By daring to educate himself, Bob McIlvaine put himself in danger of becoming what’s called a “conspiracy theorist,” of the noxious variety known as “9/11 Truther.”
To help you “understand” what happened to Bob, Matt Kwong takes you on a journey to the land of conspiracy theory research. But he weaves the McIlvaine story through the travelogue, making things very confusing. (I didn’t say the confusion was deliberate.)
In this piece, I have shuffled the order somewhat, separating Bob McIlvaine’s story (which we’ve been reading) from the conspiracy theory research (to which we now turn).
Here’s Matt Kwong:
“People who are more personally distrustful tend to buy into conspiracy theories more,” says Mike Wood, a Canadian lecturer at the University of Winchester in England specializing in the psychology of conspiracy theories.
If anything, Americans seem more distrustful of their government than in a long time. […]
Wood says those suspicious of the government also tend to be more aware of “actual historical conspiracies, where the government did something shady.” […]
Research also shows conspiracy theories tend to reach peaks around “times of uncertainty,” according to Wood. In the case of something as extraordinary as a 9/11, an event resulting in thousands of lost lives, a massive reshaping of the iconic New York skyline and two wars, he says the conventional narrative may be tough to swallow.
It certainly is. And there’s nothing wrong with this analysis as far as it goes. But where does it go?
Matt Kwong again:
Some Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11. And so, alternative explanations filled the vacuum, says Dave Thomas, a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry […]
Dave Thomas may be Skeptical, but I fear he’s not quite skeptical enough!
It may be true that “Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11,” and it may be true that “alternative explanations filled the vacuum,” but there’s no causal connection here, because there’s a link missing.
As the attack was unfolding, and in the immediate aftermath, there was no vacuum. There was an avalanche. No matter where you turned, the news kept talking about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and Afghanistan, and the country was ready to go to war before the dust had settled. The vacuum came later, when more and more people began to see through the lies that comprise the official story. That’s when “alternative explanations filled the vacuum.”
As time went on, we learned more and more about the official story, and the more you know about it, the less credible it is, so the number of people who questioned it — or rejected it outright — grew. Some people started reading American history, just like Bob did. And what they learned was shocking … until all the pieces started to click into place. And suddenly, the nonsensical official story made perfect sense to them, once they saw it as an elaborate deception rather than a series of unprecedented failures.
Had the official story been credible, none of this would have happened. If the story had been even halfway believable, most of us would have been happy to believe it and get on with other things. But that didn’t happen.
I can explain what did happen in a parable. Think of this mystery as a “connect-the-dots” puzzle. From the day of the attack (or earlier in some cases), we started taking note of important dots, and wondering what they could mean. As the official story became clearer, we looked at how the dots were being arranged, and how they were being connected, and how many of the dots weren’t being connected at all, and we started to wonder. But when we realized how many of the dots had been erased, we stopped wondering, because we knew those dots didn’t erase themselves.
So it’s far more accurate to say the vacuum was caused by the holes in the official story.
The fact that “some Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11” doesn’t make any difference at all.
But Matt Kwong can’t tell you that. Instead — if we want to follow his story — we have to think backwards.
Backward thinking regarding 9/11 shows up in many guises. For instance, as I showed in the previous installment, the 9/11 Commission was set up to run backward. They decided who committed the crime, and then they decided which evidence to consider, based on whether it could be used to support their predetermined conclusions. Then they put together a narrative that was supposed to tie all the evidence together. But there was a problem with some of the evidence, namely: the evidence they decided not to consider. And the problem is: We know about that evidence, and it undermines their story. So their solution is: the facts must be suppressed. And now the defenders of the official story claim not only that there were no explosions, but also that there was no evidence of explosions!
This claim is clearly false. The New York Times published an oral history of 9/11, compiled by the NYFD, in which more than 100 first responders described bombs in the towers, or gave other evidence that can only be explained by explosions. Numerous other eyewitnesses, who were interviewed on the day and later, described the explosions they experienced. There are videos in which we can see and hear explosions going off in the buildings. Mainstream media reports on the day of the attacks contained many mentions of explosions. And the whole world watched the towers exploding on television, over and over and over — for two weeks! But according to defenders of the official story, none of this happened — even though much of it, including the NYT oral history, is freely available online.
And the reason why they claim none of this happened is because the official story-tellers couldn’t figure out a way to explain how al Qaeda could have planted explosives in the towers. Their line of backward thinking ran: al Qaeda did it; al Qaeda could not have planted explosives in the towers; therefore there were no explosives in the towers.
Similarly, we have a whole new field of academic research now, in which Conspiracy Theories are studied as a sociological or psychological phenomenon. Bright, well-educated people, who really ought to be doing productive work, are now paid to track conspiracy theories, to watch how they grow and spread, and to explain, if they can, why people believe them.
But explaining this is more difficult than I’ve indicated, because they have to explain them in a politically acceptable way. That is to say: they cannot ever consider the possibility that some “conspiracy theories” may be more credible than the corresponding official stories.
This consideration is essential, in my analysis, because of the fact that so many official stories are impossible. In each of these cases, all conspiracy theories are more credible than the official story, even if they are only marginally plausible. But no academic researcher can say this; they have to pretend that the official stories are all true.
So all their research has to run backward. They can’t connect cause and effect in the logical way, so they do it in reverse. And this is how they get the idea that we believe conspiracy theories because we don’t trust the government.
To be sure, some researchers will grant that we don’t trust the government because we know more about the government than those who do trust it. But they can’t admit that what separates conspiracy theorists from the people around us is our greater knowledge of topics such as history and government!
Instead they claim that we believe conspiracy theories because we don’t trust the government, when in fact the opposite is true: We don’t believe the official stories because they are clearly false. And this is why we believe conspiracy theories, and this is also why we don’t trust the government.
But this is a path which accessories after the fact dare not tread.
Instead Matt Kwong continues this way:
Distrust in authority “plays into this rejection of the reigning or orthodox narrative of some subject,” says Syracuse University professor emeritus of political science Michael Barkun, author of A Culture of Conspiracy.
“We want stories and narratives that make sense of the world,” Barkun says. “The idea that such an event like the sudden destruction of landmark buildings like the World Trade Center could be caused by 19 nobodies belonging to an organization that almost no Americans had ever heard of, living in ragged encampments in Afghanistan, simply, I think, made no sense to some people.”
It made no sense to a lot of people!
Some of them went on with their lives and didn’t think about it anymore. What could they do about it? So why should they worry about it? What’s so mysterious about that?
The rest of us did worry about it. We didn’t just get on with our lives, because we could see that something fundamental had changed, in a truly awful way, based on a story which couldn’t possibly be true. It bothered us, and we thought we lived in a democracy, because we’ve been taught that we have some influence in the political process, so we got active. What’s so mysterious about that?
But NO! NO, NO, NO! We are definitely not going there! We’ll go sideways instead, with Matt Kwong:
Researchers who study conspiracy theorists point to the dismissal of an official “lone nobody” conclusion on 9/11 as sharing similarities to the continued obsession with the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy in 1963.
It’s a diversion and a red herring, and the word “obsession” is a smear, but in sad fact, the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks display many similarities, some of which are relevant enough to discuss here.
For serious researchers, the main point of interesting similarity is not that “Oswald was a nobody” and “Nobody had ever heard of al Qaeda,” although these curious facts may have piqued some interest for some of them at one time. Personally, I’ve never given either of these ideas any thought at all, except when I’ve stumbled over them in propaganda pieces.
The main point for me, and for many other serious researchers, is this: neither Oswald nor al Qaeda could possibly have done what they are alleged to have done.
Does this matter? YES! As Webster Tarpley keeps reminding us, we always need to ask: Did they have the physical and technical capabilities to cause the observed effects? And the answers, in the cases of JFK and 9/11, are clearly “NO!”
Why? The sight on “Oswald’s rifle” was out of alignment. The FBI fired it for testing, and their expert marksmen couldn’t hit any targets with it. So they adjusted the sight and tested it again. But Oswald, who was not a marksman at all, was said to have caused 7 wounds with 3 shots, firing at a moving target, all in 6 seconds, with that rifle, before the sight was adjusted.
Oswald’s pistol was in even worse shape. It wouldn’t fire at all because the firing pin was bent. So the pistol was disassembled, the firing pin was straightened, and the pistol was reassembled so that it could be tested. But Oswald was said to have killed Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit, with that pistol, before it was repaired.
This information came into the public domain through the Warren Commission itself. So the facts themselves can hardly be disputed, and therefore the accessories after the fact would prefer us to ignore them. Otherwise the situation would be too clear.
We don’t have problems with the story because “Oswald was a nobody.” We would have been much more reluctant to accept the story if we’d been told that JFK was killed by somebody famous — like Frank Sinatra or Doris Day. On the contrary: aside from the obvious tampering with evidence, we have problems with the official story because Oswald lacked the physical and technical means to commit the crimes for which he was accused.
With 9/11, we have the same pattern, and the primary illustration is this: al Qaeda could not have put explosives in the towers, so the official story doesn’t try to explain how they did; instead it pretends there were no explosives in the towers at all.
How do we know al Qaeda couldn’t have put explosives in the towers? We have two main ways of knowing this. First, according to defenders of the official story, nobody could have put explosives in the towers. It would have taken too long, somebody would have noticed, and so on. Presumably this logic applies equally, or especially, to nasty-looking foreigners who have no reason to be in the towers at all. And second, if al Qaeda could have put explosives in the towers, then the official story-tellers would admit the presence of explosives and blame them on al Qaeda, which would be much easier than trying to suppress all the evidence of explosives, if only it could be done at all.
But that’s not the only impossibility in the story. The alleged hijackers had no idea how to fly a jumbo jet — according to their instructors, they could barely fly a Cessna — and yet they were said to have performed low-altitude maneuvers that the best pilots in the country couldn’t match, at speeds which would have been far beyond the capabilities of the aircraft.
The terrorists had no way of disabling America’s security systems, from airport surveillance videos right up to the US Air Force. But they are said to evaded every defense along the way.
And no magician has ever made a jumbo jet disappear into a field, leaving only a 20-foot wide hole and no wreckage. But that’s what the plane in Shanksville is supposed to have done.
The list of impossibilities goes on and on. But we don’t have to examine all of them to see the same pattern that we saw in the JFK case.
It doesn’t matter whether anybody had ever heard of al Qaeda. We don’t buy the official story because the alleged hijackers lacked the physical and technical means to cause the effects for which they were blamed.
In other words: we know both official stories are false because the events they describe not physically possible.
So why should we believe them? According to Matt Kwong, the answer lies in Popular Mechanics.
Despite an exhaustive 2005 special report by Popular Mechanics debunking 9/11 theories, polls still show a sizeable population of Americans dispute the official account.
As I mentioned in the previous post, no “report” in such a format could be anything but cursory and shallow.
The format: (1) Reduce all the implausible aspects of the official story to a short list of bullet points. (2) Then, for each point: Reduce all the relevant evidence and all its implications to a single sentence, a crazy one if possible; then “debunk” it with a “telling quote” from an “expert source.”
It’s a combination of logical fallacies, primarily Special Pleading, Straw Man, and Appeal to Authority. And it’s all predicated on the notion that “denied” means the same as “debunked.”
But in PM‘s case, the format was the strongest part of the “report.” The so-called “evidence” presented by PM wasn’t even weak — it was ludicrous.
Thus, contrary to Matt Kwong’s assertion, the “report” from Popular Mechanics was neither “special” nor “exhaustive,” and because they can’t give us anything more convincing, and because nobody else even wants to try, it may be time to consider the possibility that “a sizeable population of Americans dispute the official account” because it’s simply not true!
But Matt Kwong won’t go in that direction. He’s going this way instead:
For his part, McIlvaine doesn’t care about the Truther movement one way or the other, or about the many articles and investigations that have debunked 9/11 conspiracy theories.
He remains convinced about his own narrative.
“I feel good about what I’ve done. My wife’s happy about it, my [other] son’s happy about it. I still go to bed,” he says. “And I’ll say I did what I did for Bobby.”
Bob McIlvaine is tired of being lied to, he’s tired of being belittled and betrayed, and he doesn’t care what anybody thinks anymore — all of which is entirely understandable in my view, given what he’s experienced.
Matt Kwong paints him as a stubborn crackpot who started wondering why his son’s body was found so soon, fell into a hole called the Internet, and wound up believing the craziest nonsense — and he leaves it to the reader to fill in the gaps: the 9/11 truth movement endures because it’s made up of stubborn crackpots who started out asking simple questions and fell into the same hole.
That may be true in some instances, but for me personally it’s despicable slander. I know the official story is false because so many of its features are physically impossible. I don’t care how many accessories after the fact call me crazy. And I am not one in a million — I am one of many millions!
This is why the 9/11 Truth movement endures.
We’re smart enough to spot an obvious lie, even though we’ve heard it a thousand times. And we’re brave enough to say so.
If that makes us stubborn crackpots, so be it. Like it or not, that’s the reason we haven’t gone away. And we’re not going away anytime soon.
Sorry, Matt! You lose! You had all the pieces in your hand and you couldn’t — or wouldn’t — put them together.
Sorry, CBC. You lose, too! There will be a special place in Heaven for any mainstream news organization that’s brave enough to treat this issue with the integrity it deserves. But so far we have none.
In any case: Matt Kwong and CBC, you both stand clearly and willingly on the wrong side of a mass-murderous lie, and an obvious one at that. May God have mercy upon your souls.
On the other hand, Congratulations! You’ve made my list!
As I’ve been saying:
The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?
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Book Review
New paperback: Butchered by “Healthcare”
Lies are Unbekoming | October 20, 2026
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
Butchered by “Healthcare” is available on Lulu now.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iraq shuts key border crossing with Iran under US pressure: Report
- Undersea Internet cables could be targeted in retaliation for attacks on Iran: IRGC deputy chief
- EU sending ‘biased’ observers to interfere in Serbian election – president
- White House envoy declares kinetic action against Yemen ‘fruitless’
- Ukraine deployed thousands of microdrones in Iraqi Kurdistan: Tasnim
- Iran calls for emergency UNSC meeting over Trump’s ‘brazen’ bomb talk, Israeli threats
- Iranian sources reveal details of Russia-China Hormuz proposal
- Plan for more US-Israel integration puts our military tech at risk
- Another Round Against Iran Will Break What Is Left of the Gulf
- SVR Report on Ukraine’s Mexican Drug Gang Links Could Pressure Zelensky, Won’t Change US Policy
- If Americans Knew
- Christiane Amanpour exits CNN with a legacy shaped by the debate over Israel
- Israel’s war on Iran is the final move in a decades-old strategy
- Israel Denies Entry to French Journalist, U.S. Researcher Amid Rise in Entry Denials
- Gaza’s hospitals are running out of life-saving fuel – Daily Update
- Mysterious bot accounts reportedly spread fake ‘man on the street’ videos for Michigan Senate candidate
- Israeli Defense Minister Katz Says Over 60 Lebanon Villages Have Been Destroyed
- Why Is Israel Running TV Ads in Iowa Ahead of the Midterms?
- Hind Rajab’s Alleged Killer Is in the United States. HRF Demands His Arrest.
- US Officials Face Fresh Pressure After Another American ‘Brutalized’ by Israeli Settlers in West Bank
- Israel-Backed Palestinian Militias Terrorize Displaced Families in Gaza
- No Tricks Zone
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
