Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” (p. 315)
In a chapter subtitled The New Face of Anti-Semitic Conspiracism, Kay refers to Barrett as nebbish, as a “say-anything bad boy.” (p. 287) In Kay’s opinion Barrett’s adherence to the Muslim religion has helped transform him into a “militant, left-wing anti-Israeli obsessive” who has made “common cause” with his fellow “hatemongers in the Muslim Middle East.” (p. 292) As Kay sees it, Barrett’s record of research, publication and popular punditry directed at exposing the true nature of the 9/11 crimes is reprehensible because “It absolves Islam of a terrible crime.” (p. 167)
Kay should be held to account for this stunning characterization of 9/11 as a crime committed not by specific human beings but rather by a religion. The clear implication of Kay’s profanity is that 2,000,000,000 Muslims are collectively responsible for the 9/11 debacle. Me thinks Kay doth protest too much.
Putting aside for a moment, the significance of this statement as a part of the 9/11 cover up, such generalizing rhetoric is emblematic of the hate speech used to inflame the violent assaults of race wars. Kay’s blood libel comment is representative of the kind of language used to drive on genocide in, for instance, the US Indian wars or the Maori wars in New Zealand.
The Pied Piper
In the You Tube video entitled “Noam Chomsky discusses 9/11 Conspiracy Theories,” the famous professor argues that all the effort that has gone into exposing the lies and crimes of 9/11 “diverted a lot of energy from trying to stop the War on Iraq.” This single statement points to the irony of his tenure as the peace movement’s darling. Throughout the twenty-first century Chomsky retained his position at the center stage of the anti-war movement during a period of rampant and unbridled militarism.
Chomsky’s power-serving position on 9/11 discouraged progressive resistance to the ascendance of the neoconservative Right with all its covert operations, militaristic ambitions and neoliberal corporatist obsessions. During the period when he was treated like the Pope of the Left, Chomsky was instrumental in blocking the 9/11 Truth Movement from embracing its natural role near the animating heart of the anti-war movement.
Chomsky established the pattern adopted by many of his followers that the necessary critiques of war and repressions arising after 9/11 should not extend into any serious focus on the 9/11 event itself. This prohibition on drawing essential links between cause and effect has been instrumental in rendering the anti-war movement lame and bereft of significant political influence. There are obvious problems at the base of anti-war protests not rooted in sound analysis of the underlying dynamics of the conflicts at issue. Who did what to whom and why?
By keeping the window open to the possibility that the 9/11 debacle resulted from the independent actions of genuine Islamic jihadists acting alone, strategic high ground was sacrificed to the engineers of the most ambitious Black Op of all time. The harsh realities yet to be faced in our core institutions are that those who were supposed to protect us in fact facilitated many-faceted attacks against us that have dramatically undermined the quality of life for most human beings.
As long as officialdom can escape any reckoning with the pattern of violation that has rendered most of our core institutions of governance, communications, education and law enforcement as complicit partners in the 9/11 crimes, the same patterns of violation will continue. There is no decent future without assertive action by the citizenry, to hold accountable for their crimes the real culprits of 9/11 with all its related violations. This kind of understanding points to the aptness of the slogan that 9/11 Truth Ends 9/11 Wars.
Because of the aggressive interventions of Chomsky many peace activists were left ill-equipped, lacking the necessary orientation to counter effectively the neocons’ expert incitement and exploitation of public fears of radical jihadists. In the light of this experience, how are we to view the Left’s # 1 public intellectual during a period of heightened warfare and unprecedented loss of ground for the rights of workers and average citizens, but especially Muslim workers and citizens?
Drawing the Obvious Conclusions
At the Left Forum Kevin Barrett attempted to hold the Pope of the Left accountable for helping give cover to the perpetrators of the global coup d’etat that radically transformed geopolitics on September 11, 2001. As Barrett wrote on departing his family home in Lone Rock Wisconsin, “To criticize Chomsky at the Left Forum in New York is sort of like going to the Vatican to criticize the Pope. But the doctrine of Papal Infallibility does not apply to Chomsky, despite what some of his admirers seem to think. So I do not expect to be met by the left-wing version of the Spanish Inquisition.”
There was a kind of sadness that swept over Kevin Barrett near the end of his commentary on “Why Chomsky is Wrong on 9/11” at the left Forum in New York. Barrett has observed that so much of the dominant psychological operation since 9/11 has been engineered to influence people below the level of consciousness. This being the case, the impact of this contamination of the mental environment with the plague of Islamophobia cannot be addressed through rational argument alone.
Said Barrett, “No amount of conscious deliberation and argumentation is ever going to change the overall body of consciousness of the people. There’s a kind of momentum that’s been built up by inculcating people with this official picture of 9/11. It is like a boulder rolling down the mountain that crushes rational arguments as it goes.” Barrett then backtracked to reconsider in a slightly more optimistic vein. He reflected, “If the psychologically shocking truth of these events does emerge, that could actually change things….. the whole country rising up, which is what we need. That’s precisely what would have happened if, instead of giving us this line of bullshit in November of 2001, Chomsky had pushed the whole Left towards just looking at Building 7 and drawing the obvious conclusions.”
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”.
The pro-Israel crowd love to trot out anti-Semitic memes to smear their opponents. One of them, used widely by Alan Dershowitz and the like is the term “blood libel.” Accuse Israelis of killing Palestinians indiscriminately and it’s a blood libel because, of course, a Jew shedding non-Jewish blood is the same as Jews murdering Christian babies to use their blood in making matzah for Passover. Got that?
Bibi Netanyahu’s latest outrage is this video in which he ever so innocently professes bafflement that Palestinians would oppose Israeli settlements. Why, he asks, if 2-million “Arabs” (the actual number is 1.8-million) live in Israel proper, can’t Jews live in Palestine?
There is a wee-small problem with this analogy: approximately 600,000 Israeli Jews live in settlements. But they have lived in them for at best a generation, while Palestinians have lived in Israel for centuries. The vast bulk of settlers moved to Palestine since 1967, while Palestinians have lived in Israel over a vastly longer span. Nor have Palestinians displaced anyone over this period. While Israeli settlers have literally stolen the land out from under the Palestinian natives.
Ethnic cleansing Israel-style: yet another Palestinian home bulldozed
Bibi’s general argument is not new. He and his supporters have advanced it for years. But he added a new and even more outrageous twist this time: Palestinian opposition to Israeli settlements was akin to ethnic cleansing because it meant no Palestinian would ever accept any Jew living anywhere on Palestinian land.
There are numerous outrageous elements to this charge worth parsing. The first, and most obvious is that it’s Israel, rather than Palestine, that’s engaged in ethnic cleansing. Israel has destroyed a record number of Palestinian homes over the past year, leaving their inhabitants homeless. It has enacted draconian definitions of Palestinian residency which render tens of thousands of Palestinians stateless if they live outside areas like East Jerusalem for any length of time. Israel also depopulates Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem through forcible eviction and theft of homes. Israel maintains a stranglehold over the West Bank economy so that stifles innovation, independence and development that might sustain the population. The final coup de grâce is the siege of Gaza, which has forced thousands of Gazans to flee their imprisonment by any means possible.
So which Israeli Jew has ever been ethnically cleansed from Palestine? None. Further, the claim that Palestinians will never accept Jews living in Palestine is a hoax perpetrated by none other than Netanyahu himself and his followers. In fact, those like Rabbi Menachem Froman, who lived in the Tekoah settlement before his untimely death, denounced the idea of Israeli national sovereignty in the West Bank. He argued that he would happily live under Palestinian jurisdiction. What was important to him was not which nation owned the land on which he lived. Rather, he believed God owned the land and his allegiance was to Him and not to any particular nation.
Such an approach offered a way for Jews to remain in Palestine after a peace agreement was signed. Undoubtedly, the lion’s share of settlers would return to Israel, rather than remain under Palestinian sovereignty. But to those who really sought to uphold the vision of Abraham and the Bible to live in this Holy land, they could live there as Palestinian (or Israeli) citizens.
The final hypocrisy of Bibi’s video is his refusal to reciprocate with Palestinians regarding Jewish settlers in Palestine. If you truly believe that Jews must live there, then it’s self-evident that Palestinians should be permitted to return to their homes in pre-48 Israel. Jewish settlers see their return to their ancestral homeland as a fulfillment of sacred Biblical texts and a divine promise. The Palestinian return to their homelands from which they were expelled by Israel in 1948 is no less compelling to them. It is, to them, reparation for the Original Sin committed against them by Ben Gurion in the establishment of the State.
So if Bibi wants to argue that Jews who returned to ancient sites like Hebron or Tekoah or Bethlehem must be permitted to remain there, I say fine: then let’s talk about the return of the original refugees expelled in the Nakba and their direct descendants.
The U.S. government was none to happy with Bibi’s incitement against Palestinians. The State Department, in its typical milquetoast fashion, called the comments “inappropriate and unhelpful.” This sort of language is akin to taking a pebble to a gunfight. It’s one thing when David faces off against Goliath with a slingshot. But this is like David blowing bubbles at his well-armed nemesis. Indeed, the motto for U.S. policy toward Israel should be an inversion of the famous military slogan: “always outnumbered, always outgunned.”
NOTE: I’ve just published a new piece at Mint Press News, Israel Ramps Up Its War on BDS. It exposes an official Israeli campaign of death threats and intimidation against Palestinian activists and NGOs.
The Guardian is no better at telling the truth about the nature of the 9/11 debate than about Syria, Ukraine or indeed anything. Its recent bid at being both social-media savvy and weirdly Orwellian, “Facebook Fact Check”, has this little snippet up atm:
The paper they are referring to is On the Physics of High Rise Building Collapses, which we have published here, and the “professor” who, according to them, “left Brigham Young University in disgrace” is of course physicist Steve Jones, who was the subject of a hostile media campaign after he and his BYU research team claimed to have discovered evidence of nanothermite in tiny “red gray chips” found in the dust from the WTC explosions.
For the record, Jones’ research work on the red gray chips has been challenged, but never debunked, and his experiments have been replicated successfully by independent researchers elsewhere in the world, such as Mark Bazile. Jones was suspended from his teaching duties and then offered “early retirement” by BYU in 2006 in the midst of the media campaign against him.
BYU’s reasons for this action were never publicly disclosed but the Guardian’s claim that Jones was “disgraced” is little more than a sleazy bit of innuendo, so gross it doesn’t even appear in the sourced WaPo article, which does at least try to be a tad objective. “Disgrace” is just the Graun’s own little bit of tabloidese. Because tabloid is all it seems to do now.
Jones’ three co-authors are described in this piece as “a retired professor and two longterm 9/11 truthers.” I guess the Graun didn’t want to admit two of them are structural engineers as well as being “truthers”?
When the (ironically named?) “fact-check” briefly discusses the physics of 9/11, it’s simply to offer yet more deception. The investigation by serious professionals of the still not fully explained and extraordinary triple collapses on 9/11 is listed along with claims we didn’t go to the Moon and some random nonsense about Hillary Clinton, presumably in some attempt to discredit by proximity. Instead of honestly addressing the very real areas of uncertainty which the scientists of NIST have quite openly admitted, the Graun does what many other agenda-driven “debunkers” do and tries to reframe the issue as being between “settled science” (to borrow a term) on one side and crazy, discredited or otherwise unreliable kooks on the other.
This, we need to clearly understand, is a purely propagandist ploy meant to convince only the under-informed “masses” (ie us), and not those on either side versed in the real issues. If you read their report and other commentaries, the experts of the National Institute of Standards and Technology are well aware that the explanation they have produced for the 9/11 building collapses is neither complete nor beyond rational question. They are well aware there is plenty of room for science-based interrogation and counter-hypothesis.
But for some reason it seems to be very important to the manufacturers of consent that we, the public, are not made aware of these continuing and probably understandable uncertainties. So, through outlets such as the Guardian (and many others) they disseminate simplistic statements, soundbites and frank lies, designed to convince people that what is uncertain, poorly explained and capable of interpretation is simple, settled, dusted and done.
The link the Guardian provides that is alleged to “disprove” all such “conspiracy theories” is to the 2005 Popular Mechanics article that did indeed claim to do this. The Guardian doesn’t mention that this article has itself been “debunked” and makes several provably false assertions.
If the fire-induced collapse explanation for the events of 9/11 is really beyond debate, why do outlets such as the Graun (and indeed Popular Mechanics) not make this self-evident by simply allowing both sides to place their evidence before the public on their pages, so that readers can make up their own minds? Outlets don’t need to take a side and defend it. In fact they work best when they try to avoid this and do their best to offer argument from all sides.
We aren’t claiming Jones and his co-authors are ultimately correct. We’re just pointing out that scientific truth doesn’t need to be defended by spin or censorship or grotesque ad hominem.
In the days after 9/11, while Ground Zero continued to smoulder, millions heard Dan Rather and various media outlets repeat vague and unconfirmed reports of arrests that took place that day. These rumors held that Middle Eastern men, presumably Arabs, were arrested in explosive-packed vans in various places around the city on September 11th, and that some had even been photographing and celebrating those events. What most do not realize is that those reports were not mere rumors, and we now have thousands of pages of FBI, CIA and DOJ reports documenting those arrests.
In an interview with Charlie Rose on the 10th of August 2016, CNN’s Middle East “super-correspondent”, Clarissa Ward, said that the Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group, Japhat Al-Nosra (now known as Japhat Fatah Al-Sham) were the only ” heroes” in the mislabeled Syrian Civil War. Ward told Charlie Rose, ” … even though some of these more extremist factions are not hugely popular with everyone living in rebel-held areas, they are also the people who have unfortunately, Charlie, emerged as the so-called heroes in this narrative because they are the ones who have stepped in to fill the void. So the reality is in rebel-held Syria, these Islamist factions have emerged as an important force. Now if the U.S. was to decide to join with Russia to take out those more extremist factions, that would certainly be extremely unpopular with the Syrian people that the U.S. would purportedly be trying to actually help.”
This is not the first time a major Western broadcaster has publicly backed the terrorist group. Since Syria was invaded by foreign mercenaries in 2011, backed by U.S./NATO/Israel, with the objective of breaking up the country according to NATO’s geopolitical interests, the terrorist group are systematically described by the Western corporate press as ‘moderate rebels’. When asked if the Japhat Fatah al-Sham, have really severed their ties with Al-Qaeda, Ward states that it is unlikely as they praised Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri in their recent videos. But she still advocates US support for the terrorist group by describing the Lebanon’s Hezbollah who are supporting Assad as “terrorists”. According to that logic, if Assad is using “terrorists”, so should the U.S! Now, as the battle for Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, heats up, the terrorists are again being marketed by their puppet-masters as ” heroes”.Hezbollah was formed in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of that country after 1982. The organisation participates fully in the electoral, democratic process and respects the political rights of all Lebanese citizens. To therefore suggest that two law-abiding nation states and a mass democratic organisation of legitimate resistance to colonial rule, are the equivalent to head-choppers, rapists, marauders and mass murderers in the pay of the retrograde regimes such as Saudi Arabia, is another cogent reminder of the moral bankruptcy of the Western military alliance and its media disinformation agencies.
The United States who created Al-Qaeda – a fact admitted by Hillary Clinton – are the puppet-masters of the death squads who have overrun Syria since March 2011. It is claimed that a ‘spontaneous uprising’ against an ‘undemocratic’ regime was met by brutal violence from the security forces. That was the big lie which launched the war on the country. The Syrian government did not repress peaceful protests. I visited Syria two weeks after the violence broke out in 2011. I had the opportunity of witnessing some protests in Karfanbel outside Damascus. The Syrian security forces behaved in an extremely professional and orderly manner. On March 15th in the town of Daraa in the South of the country, snipers opened fire killing several police and protesters. The snipers were in the pay of the Muslim Brotherhood- a terrorist organisation linked to the United States and Israel, Turkey and the Gulf dictatorships. The Western press made no effort to investigate the origin of the violence in Syria. The Syrian government was blamed for repressing ‘peaceful protesters’. Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and subsequently White Helmets, played a key role in the lies and disinformation which the terrorists used as cover for their slaughter of the innocents in Syria.
Only the willingly blind and ignorant could view the U.S./NATO/Israeli role in the destruction of Syria uncritically. Since the arrival of IS (Islamic State, formerly ISIS/ISIL) on the Syrian war theatre in 2014, the intensity of the conflict has escalated. IS – another creation of the United States – was used by NATO as a pretext for a bombing campaign against Syria, when the lies and propaganda campaign against the country failed to provide the Western military alliance with the opportunity to launch a carpet bombing campaign against the Syrian state.
The Western public are being told by corporate media giants like CNN et al, that their freedoms have to be curtailed in order to win the war on Islamist terrorists while the very same terrorists are being openly and unashamedly described as “heroes” when they commit atrocities in Syria. On September 11th every year the same news agencies will remind you about the “threat” of Al-Qaeda and the “heroes” fighting them. They will never tell you who those real heroes are; they are the men and women of Syria who are defending their country against the foreign invaders. They peacefully congregate en masse in public squares to wave the flag of the Syrian Arab Republic and the leader they believe to be an incorruptibly loyal patriot, Dr. Bashar al-Assad. Heroes are motivated by love, not hate. To understand why there is a catastrophic war in Syria, you just need to listen to what hateful people like Clarissa Ward say. And Clarissa Ward has told you that the Syrian rebels are terrorists and that terrorists become heroes when they serve U.S. interests.
I came across the phrase in the title, and followed a link to a recent journal article which for once was available on open access. Entitled ‘Science and the Public: Debate, Denial, and Skepticism’, it looked interesting. You can read it here. The four authors come from different fields, and propose to outline ‘the distinction between true scepticism and denial’. They also offer some guidelines to help researchers, and interested members of the public, decide how to deal with enquiries, on the one hand, and problems which people see in published science, on the other.
The reader is brought into the area of ‘climate change’ at once. The controversy surrounding climate change is just one example of a polarized public debate that seems remote and detached from the actual state of science: Within the scientific community, there is a pervasive consensus that the Earth is warming from greenhouse gas emissions (Anderegg, Prall, Harold, & Schneider, 2010; Cook et al., 2013; Doran & Zimmerman, 2009; Oreskes, 2004; Shwed & Bearman, 2010), but outside science there is entrenched denial of this fact in some sectors of society (e.g., Dunlap, 2013; Lewandowsky, Gignac, & Oberauer, 2013). [my emphasis]
Whoops! Substantively, ‘climate change’ is not simply whether the planet has warmed through greenhouse gas emissions. More important and related questions include, for example, by how much has it warmed, what else has been at work besides greenhouse gases, is the warming unprecedented or not, does it matter anyway (isn’t warming better than cooling?), and many others. Pedantically, there is no need for a consensus to be graced with the adjective pervasive. If it is a consensus then it is by definition pervasive, meaning ‘permeated’, ‘diffused through’, etc.
Then interested readers might wonder where to find the entrenched denial of the supposed fact that the Earth is warming from greenhouse gas emissions. The sceptical community for the most part, I think, accepts that greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to the warming that has occurred over the past century or so (which is not quite the same thing). There are a few dragon-slayers who don’t agree. But entrenched denial? I’m not aware of it. The links don’t help, since Dunlap 2013 is a study of 108 climate change denial books with most of the interest being in their supposed links to business groups. The Lewandowsky link is even less helpful, as well as being an intellectually dreadful paper. I don’t know quite what I would expect to find as an example of entrenched denial in opposition to pervasive consensus, but there’s no evidence for it here. To continue:
Media reports occasionally even proclaim that warming has stopped (Ridley, 2014) or that we are headed for global cooling (e.g., Rose, 2013). These propositions have no scientific support …
Well, Matt Ridley’s op. ed. in the Wall Street Journal may not be top-of-the-line science, though he refers to the science, but the UK Met Office did indeed agree that there was a hiatus in warming, and that it would continue until 2017. The scientists who propose the possibility of cooling are solar physicists, for the most part, and their views may be wrong. But the ‘cooling’ view does have some scientific support (see, for example, here).
These introductory remarks are a little jarring, in the context of the pure bromide that is to come. Public debate and scepticism are essential to a functioning democracy. Indeed scepticism has been shown to enable people to differentiate more accurately between truth and falsehood. How could we disagree? So how do we tell when what we are getting is scientific fact or denial? Ah, you see, there are three factors that are always present when denialists are involved. First, they make stuff up. Second, denial commonly invokes notions of conspiracies. (I think Dunlap 2013, mentioned above, is an excellent example of the way in which conspiracies can be invoked, but I don’t think the authors had him in mind.). Third, denialists engineer personal and professional attacks on scientists both in public and behind the scenes, and issue prolific complaints to scientists’ host institutions with allegations of research conduct. Two of the authors of this article claim to have experienced such behaviour.
The authors claim, on the basis of what they call recent evidence, is that up to US$1billion flows into foundations and think tanks in the U.S. every year that are dedicated to political lobbying for various issues. One of the principal objectives of this network is to support a climate “counter movement” that seeks to reframe public discourse surrounding climate change from one of overwhelming scientific consensus to one of doubt, debate, and uncertainty (Brulle, 2014; Plehwe, 2014). To illustrate, more than 90% of recent books that dismiss environmental problems have been linked to conservative think tanks (Jacques, Dunlap, & Freeman, 2008), and such books typically never undergo peer review (Dunlap & Jacques, 2013). This does look like conspiracy stuff to me, on first reading, but again, I doubt the authors had this in mind either.
Now comes more bromide: In a democracy, calls for genuine debate are to be welcomed and must be taken seriously. Given that scientific issues can have far-reaching political, technological, or environmental consequences, greater involvement of the public can only be welcome and made led to better policy outcome. Who could disagree? We are given a small example of how this has worked in practice (it is not in climate change). Notwithstanding the public’s entitlement to be involved in issues that are scientifically informed, scientific debates must still be conducted according to the rules of science. Arguments must be evidence-based and they are subject to peer review before they become provisionally accepted. Hang on there! If arguments have to be evidence-based, and the evidence doesn’t support them, what then? Do we really have to wait for good policy until the peer-review process (something that applies almost solely to academic work) has considered the matter? In the climate science arena even well-credentialled sceptical scientists have found it hard to get critical papers accepted for publication.
In the matter of disagreement, the two first-named authors acknowledge the uncertainty in climate projections, but note that contrary to popular intuition, any uncertainty provides even greater impetus for climate mitigation. I’ve come across this line of argument before, and have to go along with ‘popular intuition’ here. If there is uncertainty about whether something needs to be done, because the evidence is weak or equivocal, it would seem strange indeed to say ‘Hah! That’s even more reason to go down my chosen path!’ I am open to persuasion, but not to this kind of assertion.
What I think is happening in this strange, muddled and evidence-free paper is a kind of explicit argument that peer review is the only way to go, if only because the blogospherical world (which the authors denounce) has very little in the way of support for the supposed consensus. By now the title of the paper has been forgotten by the authors, and we get this: People who deny scientific facts that they find challenging or unacceptable, by contrast, are by and large not skeptics. On the contrary, they demonstrably shy away from scientific debate by avoiding the submission of their ideas to peer review. One has to say, again, that peer review is for academics and is not the gold standard for science. Bad data, bad argument and self-interest are usually quickly discovered, and any proposition that results from them is usually dismissed, or at least put aside. What distinguishes ‘climate change’ is that policies like the carbon tax came before the science was properly in (it still isn’t), and for political reasons the policies remained current, despite the lack of continually corroborative scientific evidence.
Oh well, another blinkered, dodgy, peer-reviewed paper. Who let this through? Oh, I forgot to mention the Guidelines. The first, ‘Proposed Guidelines for Critical Scientific Engagement by Members of the Public’ begins with this little preamble: If your goal is to contribute to a scientific conversation, then you need to follow certain rules. One of those rules is that scientific arguments are conducted in the scientific peer-reviewed literature. If you are unwilling to do so, these guidelines are of little value. Indeed so. Good luck, would-be contributor!
The second set is for scientists who might be approached by a member of the public seeking critical engagement. The Guidelines tell you to be careful — you might be approached by someone who is not in good faith, and wants to find errors in your work. Don’t help them!
And when you’ve finished both guidelines, you still don’t know what the authors think a ‘true sceptic’ is, or how he or she is to be distinguished from a ‘denialist’. Yet that is embodied in the title of the article.
Finally, the authors. The first two names will be familiar to readers of this website, and indeed to anyone interested in the ‘climate change’ issue: Stephan Lewandowsky, Michael E. Mann, Nicholas J. L. Brown and Harris Friedman. You will learn about the third and fourth by reading the article. They seem somewhat more sensible than the first two. Oh, there are 96 references, of which 22 are self-referenced articles, 16 of them by Lewandowsky alone. I may be wrong, but I could find just three references that were critical of the authors’ standpoint. Not exactly a review paper, for all its pretension.
And I find myself saying, yet again, this awful, poorly argued, self-seeking paper has passed peer review? What have we come to in the journal world?
“Containing the United States” is, of course, a ridiculous and self-contradictory idea in the U.S. and Western ideological and propaganda system. We all know that the United States had to “contain” the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1991, and since then has had the task of containing Russia and China. Only they threaten, bully, aggress and worry countries like Poland and Vietnam. Obama has had to reassure them both of our steadfast stand against Russian and Chinese military attacks. NATO has, of course, expanded greatly over the past several decades, despite the deaths of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, but only to contain the renewed Russian — and Iranian, Libyan, Syrian and other — military threats; and we have “pivoted” to Asia, supported Japanese rearmament, bolstered our own forces in that area and jousted with the Chinese in their coastal waters solely to contain China. Earlier we had been obliged to contain North Vietnam, or was it the Soviet Union in Vietnam? Or China? Or “communism”? Or maybe all of them? Or none of them, but just needing an excuse to enlarge power?1
The parallel propaganda has taken many forms. One is accepting as a premise that the United States only acts defensively and has no internal forces and interests that drive it to enlarge its sphere of control. I noted in an earlier article how Paul Krugman claims that internal Russian problems may well be the explanation of Russian “aggression,” but how at the same time it never occurs to him that the huge U.S. transnational corporate interests and “defense” establishment, and the pro-Israel lobby’s activities, might possibly make for an expansionist dynamic here.2 This reflects the standard establishment perspective that we are good and only react to evil. This was the view sustaining and justifying the invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003. That attack was taken here as not evil but a response to evil, even if involving lies and mistakes, hence not describable as “aggression.”
This framing has a long historical record. A classic and enlightening case was the organization and support by the United States of a mercenary army in Somoza’s Nicaragua that, with U.S. help, invaded Guatemala in 1954, overthrew its elected social democratic government and replaced it with a durable, murderous (and U.S.-protected) military dictatorship. This was done based on the lies that the overthrown government was “communist” and that its very existence constituted Soviet “aggression”! The New York Times and its mainstream associates swallowed these lies.
Another key element of establishment propaganda that is always mobilized to make U.S. actions appear properly defensive is the demonization of targeted country leaders, whose villainy shows that they needed containing. We had Saddam Hussein in 2003, Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala) in 1954, and Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam) in 1964 and earlier, with Soviet and Chinese demons hovering behind the last two. In the present decade we have had Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, and standing behind these but also a major menace on his own, Vladimir Putin. He is a useful demon, but if he did not exist we would find somebody else to serve the function he performs.
The longstanding and incessant demonization of Putin and verbal and policy assaults on Russia (including the shaping of the sports doping scandal) long ago reached comic levels and shows the corruption of both the mainstream media and political system. Russian “aggression” is, of course, a favorite, resting largely on the zero-casualty reincorporation of Crimea into Russia, following a U.S. sponsored coup in Ukraine. In contrast, the million-plus-casualty Iraq invasion of choice by this country is never described as an “aggression” in the Free Press, just as the March 2014 coup in Kiev is never called a coup here. John Kerry and Paul Krugman also express regret and indignation that Putin’s Russia fails to adhere to “international law,” notably in Crimea but also in supporting the indigenous rebels in Eastern Ukraine (regularly referred to as “Russian-backed,” whereas the rebel-attacking Kiev government is never called “U.S.-backed” —but after all U.S. backing to the legal government is perfectly acceptable, although Russian backing of the legal Syrian government is not.
There is also the steady attempt to pin the July 2014 shootdown of Malaysian airliner MH-17 over Ukraine on Russian villainy. Immediately after the shootdown John Kerry declared that we had clear proof that the pro-Russian rebels shot down the plane. But he has never yet supplied proof of this claim, and his alleged evidence failed to show up in the inconclusive preliminary Dutch report on the event. Investigative reporter Robert Parry cites a U.S. intelligence report which failed to find that the Ukraine rebels had an anti-aircraft battery capable of reaching the height of MH-17, but the Kiev forces do have such capability.3 Still, based on Kerry’s and other official claims, the guilt of the “Russian-supported rebels” (and demon Putin) has been swallowed by the mainstream media. The shoot-down has been a propaganda windfall for the Kiev and U.S. governments, so the factor of ”who benefits” adds to the substantive case that we have here another serviceable “lie that wasn’t shot down.”
As the establishment’s devil-of-the-decade it was inevitable that Putin would be brought into the U.S. electoral contest of 2016 and tied in to the domestic devil-du-jour Donald Trump. WikiLeaks was the recipient and immediate source of a massive trove of documents taken from the files of the Democratic National Committee that revealed the extent to which the members of that committee worked to undermine the Bernie Sanders challenge to Hillary Clinton. The leading media, like the NYT, instead of featuring the evidence of bias and dirty tricks of the DNC insiders, focused on the source of the leak to WikiLeaks. The Clinton camp, Obama officials and media quickly claimed that the hacking and leaks came from “Russian intelligence,” aiming at discrediting Mrs. Clinton and damaging her electoral chances. So the dirty tricks could be virtually ignored and Putin once more shown to be an evil force.
The evidence for Russian, let alone Putin, involvement in this case was problematic. Would Russian intelligence use internet vehicles that could be easily traced by U.S. government-affiliated internet searchers? Could the source be Russians unaffiliated with the Russian government?4 Would the Russian government be so stupid as to risk exposure with a tactic that was extremely unlikely to influence any U.S. electoral outcome? It is reminiscent of the alleged Soviet attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, which would surely have had negative effects on Soviet interests if successful. This plot was non-existent, but was a wonderful propaganda coup for the U.S. war party, with the (once again) cooperation of the NYT and its associates.
A potentially severe problem for Mrs. Clinton is that her foreign policy record is abysmal, that she is an established hawk whose electoral victory will almost surely lead to a quick escalation of war in Syria and confrontation with Russia.5 The Neocons who helped engineer the Iraq war and supported George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are firmly in her corner. She is fortunate that the mainstream media have given her a free pass on these crucial matters. In one kindly headline the NYT says “Clinton Calls for ‘More Love’; Trump Sees ‘an Attack on Our Country ” (July 9, 2016). Despite his many repellent statements and proposals, whereas Mrs. Clinton has called Putin “another Hitler” and shows not the slightest interest in a new detente, Trump has expressed admiration for Putin, suggested that he could do business with him, and called for a reduced U.S. presence abroad and a greater focus on U.S.internal needs.
This altered priority system would actually fit more closely the public interest revealed in polls, but not the desires of the massive war party, including the Neocons, nor the drift of the real Hillary Clinton program. This may contribute to the mainstream fury at Trump and fondness for Mrs. Clinton as well as to the media’s refusal to allow a debate on these important foreign policy issues.
Instead the media have chosen to feature Trump as an admirer and agent of Putin, an alleged Manchurian Candidate, and Putin allegedly interfering in the U.S. election by trying to discredit Mrs. Clinton and pushing for a victory for his ally Donald Trump. The foolish Trump not only actually swallowed the claim that the Russians were guilty of producing the WikiLeaks hacked documents, he urged Putin publicly to do more of the same! This has allowed the mainstream liberals to denounce Trump as a traitor6 And Trump has allegedly allied himself with a “dictator” and “strongman,” and a man “who doesn’t worry about international law”.7 Gee, Paul, if Putin doesn’t worry about international law could he be taking Hillary, Obama, Bush, etc. as models? Your irony here is comical.
Does the United States intervene in foreign elections? It did so massively in getting Yeltsin reelected in Russia in 1996 and it has done this with great regularity. I even coined the phrase “demonstration elections” to describe the numerous cases where it organized elections to show the U.S. public that U.S. interventions were well received and honest (they weren’t).8
With Hillary Clinton about to be elected and some advanced cadres of the war party preparing to take charge, who is going to contain the United States? The U.S. political system has failed its populace and the world and has imposed no brakes on the war machine. The UN and EU are still too much under the U.S. thumb. Russia and China are too weak and with too flimsy an alliance system to threaten U.S. hegemony and do more than make direct U.S. aggression against themselves very costly. We can only hope that compelling internal problems and the rising costs of enlarging and even preserving imperial power will cause even leaders of the war party to follow that segment of the Trump program that calls for turning to internal problems.
On Vietnam, but with wider applicability, see Gareth Porter, The Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, University of California Press, 2005.
Krugman, “Why We Fight Wars,” NYT, August 17, 2014; Herman, “Krugman, Putin and the New York Times,” Z Magazine, October 2014.
Parry, “MH-17’s Unnecessary Mystery,” Consortium News, January 15, 2016.
This is the theme of Madhav Nalapat’s “2014 Ukrainian coup behind anti-Hillary DNC email hack,” Sunday Guardian Live, July 31, 2016.
See Gareth Porter, “Hillary and Her Hawks,” Consortium News, July 30, 2016.
Among them, Kali Holloway, “Donald Trump: Traitor, Liar, Danger to the World,” Alternet, July 31, 2016.
Paul Krugman, “The Siberian Connection,” NYT, July 22, 2016.
See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, South End Press, 1984; Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, Chapter 3).…
Edward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media.
The official story of 9/11 is a lie. But Eberhart’s story is a lie within that lie, designed to absolve himself and other members of the US military charged with defending American airspace that morning from the most catastrophic failure in that mission in their history. And not only did Eberhart survive with his career intact, he was praised as a “9/11 hero” and moved into the private sector after leaving NORAD in 2004, as chairman and board member of a number of companies that directly benefited from the post-9/11 police state and the post-9/11 war on terror.
Once again a plan for democratic transition in Syria has been drawn up by a coalition of opposition groups meeting in London, supported by the usual suspects in the shape of Turkey, the EU, US, and Gulf States. It is described as a detailed plan committing Syria to democratic and religious pluralism. Predictably, and the reason why it is a non-starter, it contains the pre-condition of Bashar al-Assad’s removal from power.
The coalition behind this ludicrous scheme goes by the name of the Higher Negotiating Committee (HNC), and is said to comprise thirty different ‘moderate’ political and military groups united in the objective of removing Assad as the country’s president. Who exactly these people represent in Syria itself, nobody knows. What we do know is that Assad retains the support of the vast majority of his people, who will not accept any colonial arrangement to depose their president.
The gall of those who demand the removal of a government that has played an indispensable role in the country’s survival over 5 long years of unremittingly brutal conflict against the forces of hell, unleashed as a direct result of the destabilization of the region by the US and its allies starting with the war in Iraq back in 2003, is simply staggering. London, the scene of the colonial and imperialist crime of Sykes-Picot in 1916 – plotted, prepared, and organized to deprive the Arabs of their right to self-determination and sovereignty – is one hundred years later the scene of a crime to deprive the Syrian people their sovereignty and dignity under the guise of a plan for democratic transition.
There is no greater example of democracy than an army supported by a people refusing to bow in the face of unrelenting barbarism. As British journalist and Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk revealed earlier this year, 60,000 Syrian officers and men have perished in the most brutal and merciless conflict the region has witnessed since the Iran-Iraq war between 1980-88. Not only has the Syrian Arab Army – made up of Christians, Alawites, Sunnis, Shia, and Druze soldiers – faced along with its Lebanese and Iranian allies an enemy so barbaric and murderous it bears comparison with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s, it has done so knowing that their fellow soldiers and civilians have been slaughtered by forces supported by neighbouring states such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, etc., along with their Western backers.
And these are the countries and governments the Syrians are expected to trust with their future?
The Syrian government’s crime in the eyes of the West is not the lack of democracy – how could it possibly be given the longstanding alliance between Western governments and Saudi Arabia, run by a clutch of medieval potentates? – but rather the fact that Syria under Assad has long refused to bend the knee to US and Western hegemony, especially with regard to the country’s support for the Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah, and its friendship and alliance with Iran. Together they make up an axis of resistance which Washington and its regional allies have long been intent on breaking.
Despite the courage and tenacity of the Syrian Arab Army and people, there is little doubt they would have succeeded in this endeavour without Russia’s intervention in the conflict, beginning at the end of September 2015. When Vladimir Putin addressed the 70th General Assembly of the United Nations days prior to Russian aircraft flying their first sorties against ant-government forces in Syria, he effectively announced the birth of the multipolar world demanded by Russia’s recovery from the lost decade of the 1990s, caused by Washington and its European allies’ attempt to impose a Carthaginian peace on the country in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, along with China’s ferocious economic growth and global footprint.
Russia’s military intervention was and continues to be a remarkable achievement of logistics, planning, and organization, necessary in the successful projection of hard power thousands of miles beyond its own borders. It has allowed it to showcase some of the most advanced aircraft, missile systems, and technologically advanced weaponry in the world today, beating Washington at its own game in the process. This, to be sure, is the real reason for the demonization of Putin that has been a mainstay of Western media coverage over the past year and more.
Vladimir Putin and Russia has staked too much in the outcome of the conflict in Syria to allow Assad to be thrown under the bus in service to a contrived and transparent attempt to depose him under the guise of a peace plan. This is not to claim that Assad should lead Syria in perpetuity. It is, however, to claim that the government of Syria is a matter for the Syrian people and that at this point Assad’s survival is coterminous with Syria’s survival as a non-sectarian, secular state.
But let’s not delude ourselves that the timing of the unveiling of this latest effort to depose Assad has anything to do with alleviating the biblical suffering of Syria and its people. It is not. Instead it comes as evidence of the desperation of those who are losing the war.
The objective of those who have suffered and sacrificed so much is victory not transition.
John Wightis the author of a politically incorrect and irreverent Hollywood memoir –Dreams That Die – published by Zero Books. He’s also written five novels, which are available as Kindle eBooks. You can follow him on Twitter at @JohnWight1
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Twelfth part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question” – Read the Eleventh part here
Jonathan Kay’s designation of “conspiracists” as victims of an “incurable disease” marks a dramatic low point in the history of North American journalism. This abuse of language and people with the aim of stoking up fear and hatred is on a par with Kay’s malicious characterization of 9/11 as a crime of Islam (p. 167). As discussed below, Kay made this astonishing slur of a major world religion and all its two billion adherents in the context of his condemnation of Muslim academic Kevin Barrett.
Obviously the crimes of 9/11 were not the crimes of any religion. They were crimes committed by many individuals whose actions were well orchestrated by a powerful directing hand. The intention was to achieve a complex array of immediate and long-term objectives. The immensely complex and sophisticated 9/11 operation could not have been achieved without the involvement of state, military and corporate protagonists.
Certainly the elaborate 9/11 crime could not be the work of a small band of Muslim extremists acting independently to cut through the most formidable national defense apparatus ever assembled with the quixotic hope of creating a worldwide Islamic caliphate. That interpretation is as absurd as it is insulting to the intelligence of rational human beings still capable of independent thought.
The peddling of this concocted myth of Islamic culpability for the crimes of 9/11 represents a monumental case study in the systematic defrauding of the public. Those like Jonathan Kay who advance and defend the religious fable of 9/11 as a crime of Islam are deeply implicated in the work of a ruthless criminal cabal whose top priority seems to be to advance the imperialist agenda of Greater Israel, Eretz Israel. The great mass of evidence points to the engineering of the 9/11 crimes by partisans of Likudnik Israel. Since 2001, they seem to have succeeded in significantly expanding Zionist influence over the course of global geopolitics by manufacturing a new transnational enemy for the military-industrial complex of the post-Soviet West.
In my view there is no other logical way of viewing the 9/11 event in terms of the forensic evidence of whose fingerprints are most evident all over the 9/11crime scene. This 9/11 crime scene is ultimately global in extent, even as its antecedents stretch far back into history, but particularly the history of Israel’s current ruling party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The roots of Netanyahu’s Likud Party lie in Revisionist Zionism, the faction of Israel’s founders most intent on expanding Israel’s boundaries eastward to the Euphrates River. This plan of territorial expansion to create Greater Israel, Eretz Israel, remains integral to the aspirations of Israel’s current ruling coalition.
Through Irgun and the Stern Gang, the proponents of a Greater Israel mounted very calculated acts of heavily publicized terrorism, including at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. The Jewish terrorists’ immediate goal was to push the British government to withdraw from its mandate to govern Palestine. Once the playing of the terrorism card proved successful in forcing the British out of Palestine, the way was opened for the creation of the Jewish State of Israel in 1947 and 1948. Drawing on the ideas of his father as one of the originators of Revisionist Zionism, Benjamin Netanyahu himself has been a major theorist on the subject of how to play the terrorism card in global geopolitics. Netanyahu’s basic approach is readily apparent from the title of his oft republished book, Terrorism: How the West Can Win. The book’s genesis goes back to the hosting by the Netanyahu family of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism in 1979.
If the true culprits of 9/11 are ever to be brought to trial, Jonathan Kay’s overzealous promotion of the 9/11 religious fable, like Netanyahu’s published work on terrorism, offers valuable evidence for the prosecution. So too can Chomsky’s interventions on 9/11 be pictured in a similar light.
Kay in particular violates all tenets of civil debate with his rhetorical extremes. Especially reprehensible are his equation of 9/11 skepticism with mental illness and his characterization of the horrific event as a crime of Islam. By invoking the specter of disease to smear those seeking to break through the massive deceptions embedded in the 9/11 cover up, Kay conspicuously violates the rationalist principles of the Enlightenment tradition, a tradition he demeans even as he claims to defend it (p. 315).
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”.
US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has warned that the Israeli regime cannot trust her Republican rival Donald Trump, who has “no reason to his comments about Israel.”
“He has said that we should be neutral on Israel on Monday. Then on Tuesday he has said that, oh he’s really supportive of Israel. Wednesday he might say Israel should pay back the defense aid it’s received over the years,” Clinton said in an interview with the Israeli Channel 2 aired on Thursday.
The former first lady said that Trump has floated the idea of using nuclear weapons against the Daesh terrorist group in Syria, right next to Israel.
“Using nukes against ISIS, not knowing the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas. How does that in any way help Israel,” she asked.
The former secretary of state contended that there is a “compelling case” that Daesh is “rooting for Donald Trump’s victory.”
“His understanding of the broader dangers in the region should alarm any Israeli no matter where that person is on the political spectrum,” Clinton said.
“The best I can tell, his only experience is marching in the Fifth Avenue Israel Day parade,” she quipped.
The Democratic candidate said that if elected president she would work closely with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to safeguard Israel’s strategic military edge.
“Shortly after being inaugurated I would invite the prime minister to Washington for meetings, I would send my joint chiefs and intelligence experts to Israel to meet with their counterparts,” she stated.
Washington and Tel Aviv have been negotiating the terms of a new 10-year military aid deal to replace the current one, which expires in 2018 and costs American taxpayers some $3.1 billion a year.
Netanyahu demands the US increase the annual aid to Israel.
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
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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.
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