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Interfaith Dialogue Requires a Level Playing Field


The 9/11 truth interfaith dialogue book I edited, 9/11 and American Empire: Christians, Jews and Muslims Speak Out, just came out in Arabic. I would love to visit the Arab world and promote it. The last time I lectured on 9/11 in an Arab country (Morocco, 2007) I found the audience extremely receptive…though the reaction I got, over and over, was “We already know 9/11 was an inside job, so please go back and inform your fellow Americans of this simple and obvious fact.”

Every single person I talked to about the subject in Morocco believed or suspected that 9/11 was primarily perpetrated by the Israeli Mossad and its American Zionist helpers, perhaps in conjunction with corrupt and/or treasonous forces in the US military-industrial-intelligence complex. This is, in fact, pretty much what the majority of the world’s Muslims, from expert Ph.D.s who have researched the subject in detail, to excitable cab drivers, seems to think.

Do I think that? Well, I do think the evidence for an Israeli-Zionist connection to 9/11 is overwhelming, and I also agree with Netanyahu that Israel was the biggest beneficiary of 9/11. While I strongly suspect that James Petras is right about the Zionist Power Configuration being the main force behind the 9/11 wars (and, I would add, the false-flag attack designed to launch them), there is so much evidence implicating Cheney, Rumsfeld, Meyers, and others in the US National Security complex itself that to view 9/11 exclusively as a Mossad/Zionist “outside job” seems…well, a little premature. It may have been more like the Liberty incident, where the treasonous LBJ and his enablers in the secret covert-ops executive committee of the National Security Council colluded with hardline forces in Israel to launch the 1967 war, then attempt to bring the U.S. into the war by attacking the U.S.S. Liberty and blaming it on Egypt (see Peter Hounem’s Operation Cyanide for details). That’s why when Admiral Mullen warned Israel against trying any future Liberty incidents to get the US into war with Iran, he may have been actually delivering a coded warning against another 9/11 style Zionist attack on the US homeland.

On the subject of interfaith dialogue…Brian Good, the 9/11 truth sex stalker, and his disinfo allies at truthassholes.org have accused me of “Jew-baiting” for pointing out that Bin Laden, an innocent and by all accounts a pious, truthful, deeply decent man falsely accused of a heinous crime, suggested that American Jews were responsible for 9/11. My point, of course, was that if one is allowed to say that Saudi Muslims were responsible for 9/11, why should it be taboo for anyone–least of all an innocent Muslim falsely accused of the crime–to say that American Jews were responsible? In both cases, one is blaming people of a certain nationality, religion, and ethnicity. Is it okay to blame people from certain nationalities, religions and ethnicities, but not others, regardless of the facts? If so, why is that?

We all know that when someone says “American Jews did 9/11” an emotional button is pushed, flooding us with feelings of shame and anxiety; whereas when someone says “Saudi Muslims did 9/11” we experience no such surge of negative emotions. Why is that, I wonder? (And if you experienced negative emotions upon reading my statement that Bin Laden was an innocent, pious, truthful, deeply decent man, even though you see through the big lie of 9/11, why was that?)

I think it has to do with “framing” — the way our experiences are unconsciously contextualized at an emotional, not factual, level. For example, defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (OCT) of 9/11 parrot George W. Bush’s assertion that any other interpretation of 9/11 is an “outrageous conspiracy theory.” Why? Because the word outrageous is an emotional word, conjuring up feelings of outrage: extreme anger at someone’s going beyond the bounds of what is approved by social consensus. The OCT defender’s thought process goes something like this: “Because we are told by our leaders that 19 Muslims did 9/11, all of the anger and horror we experience that day must be directed against anyone who disagrees.”

In reality, of course, the idea that after decades without any successful hijackings of U.S. aircraft, nineteen sex-and-drug-crazed pseudo-Muslims with box cutters would take down three skyscrapers with two planes, and hit the Pentagon almost ninety minutes after the hijackings began with no response whatsoever from U.S. air defenses, is “outrageous” in the sense of being so wildly improbable that we may safely consider it impossible even prior to investigation. Indeed, the idea that anti-Zionist anti-imperialist Muslims would even want to conduct a spectacular attack in the U.S., when such an attack would so obviously serve the interests of Zionism and imperialism, is ridiculous. Whereas the idea that Zionist-imperialist covert operators would have the means, motive and opportunity to launch a spectacular false-flag attack on the U.S., and thus should be considered the probable authors of any such attack even prior to investigation, is simple common sense.

When we hear the ridiculous assertions blaming Saudi Muslims for 9/11, we should experience feelings of outrage — because these assertions are so clearly false and malicious, and because they have triggered the murder of more than one million Muslims because they are Muslims worldwide. When we hear far less improbable assertions like Bin Laden’s blaming American Jews, we have no actual reason to feel outraged, given the evidence, both hard and circumstantial, against such names as Silverstein, Zakheim, Perle, Wolfowitz, Netanyahu, and given the fact that Israel (so beloved of 80-90% of American Jews) was by far the biggest beneficiary of 9/11. Yet because the world we inhabit is not reality, but a matrix of emotionally-programmed frames, we are apt to react in the opposite way.

I am a strong advocate of interfaith dialogue, but only if there is a level playing field. The common (in the US) taboo against blaming Jews for anything, alongside the mandatory blaming of Muslims for everything, must be eliminated before any real dialogue can begin.

To get a genuinely level playing field, we need to change the frames that govern our emotional reactions to interfaith issues. Since those frames are largely created by the media, we need to ensure that (anti-Zionist) Muslims are represented in media decision-making positions, in proportion to their presence in the population, in equal proportion to (pro-Zionist) Jews in relation to their presence in the population. Currently, it appears that pro-Zionist Jews are wildly over-represented in media decision-making positions in the US. I think it is time for Muslims and other patriotic, justice-seeking Americans to demand that Muslims be brought into U.S. media decision-making positions, and Jews moved out, until the proportions of both are roughly equal, as their roughly equal presence in the U.S. population mandates. While it is unlikely that this demand will be met any time soon, simply putting it forward in a highly visible way would shine a light on the deep, structural reason that US Americans inhabit a matrix-world of Zionist-instigated Islamophobia.

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EXTRA! EXTRA! 9/11 SEX STALKER ALERT!

The comment on this post by “Snug Bug” is the work of Brian Good, the 9/11 truth sex stalker, who stalks and sexually harasses prominent female activists, and cyber-stalks ME (yuck), tirelessly trolling the internet in search of anything I might post, and subjecting it to his tiresome, incoherent ad-hominem attacks. He also stalks William Rodriguez, Craig Ranke, and others. Brian, get a life! Go away before I call the cyber-police. And take off that ridiculous raincoat. Uh, on second thought, better put it back on.

8 Thoughts to “Interfaith Dialogue Requires a Level Playing Field”

  1. If Muslims think 9/11 was an inside job, why don't they say so, make a movie about the living hijackers, write more books about 9/11? Why did Dr. Griffin have to write the book about WTC7? Why not some engineer in Brunei? Why don't the sheiks bankroll the truth movement? Why don't they bankroll you so you can sell your book for $4? Why don't they flock to MUJCA so it can be effective instead of just a screen you hide behind while you rant about Jews?

    Your "Jews Run the World" conspiracy theory is political death for the Truth movement, for Muslims, for MUJCA, for Palestinians, the people who endorse you, your family, and yourself. Your selfish self-destruction is harming the causes you claim to support.

    What if you were invited to a convivial faculty cocktail party at UW (as if!) and you said "The Jews did it! I know because Osama said so!" Can't you see how you look? How you make us look? If you were promoting gay marriage in Lone Rock I bet you'd sashay around the bars in a wedding dress.

    Osama can say what he wants and it doesn't hurt the Truth movement. YOU are doing the damage, saying American Jews did 9/11. If you can't see why that's offensive then MUJCA has taught you nothing in five years, and my suspicion in 2006 that it was a sham organization was justified.

    It offends Americans when you accuse your countrymen of treason. It would offend us if someone accused American Muslims of doing 9/11. When you identify the attackers as Jews instead of as individuals or neocons you're implicitly condemning all 3 million American Jews. Most of us have Jewish friends that we know had nothing to do with 9/11.

    It's less offensive to accuse Saudi Muslims of 9/11 because few are Americans, few would want to be, few of us have Saudi friends, because the Saudis hate us (as shown by the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing and their demand that we remove our troops), and because our tolerance of Israel's crimes gives them good reason to hate us.

    Do you deny that Muslims did the Beiruit truck bombing, the 1993 WTC bombing, Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, and the African embassy bombings? Do you deny that al Qaeda did most of those? Do you deny that Osama was CIA?

    Your Mossad-did-it theory is silly. Discovery of the plot might be fatal to Israel, so the risk far outweighed any benefit. 9/11 was obviously conceived–and botched–by lunatics who overrated their own smarts. The Mossad is not lunatics and they know exactly how smart they are.

    BTW, the Pentagon was hit 83 minutes after the hijackings, not almost two hours. Your scholarship sucks.

    I agree with you on Islamophobia. Once at a high school talent show in a small town in Vermont I saw a student with a sense of humor like yours tell a joke about killing Arabs. I was never prouder of my country when that joke was met with icy silence. I object to all bigotry except bigotry against bigots.

    You're suggesting that half of US Jews are pro-Zionist and all the Jews in the US media are pro-Zionist. Few of the Jews I know are pro-Zionist, and some are the bitterest critics of Israel I know. Since Muslims are latecomers to the USA and Jews have been here many generations, Jews are more established socially. Wikipedia says that in the last 20 years the Muslim population here doubled, while the Jewish population decreased by 1/3. Do you have statistics on the relative educational attainments of the two groups?

    Here's something you can do immediately to get more Muslims in the media. It's a win, win, win solution. Turn your radio programs over to Nafeez Ahmed–a thoughtful and credible scholar who writes heavyweight books. He can represent the Truth movement and Muslims without discrediting them as you do, and without hurting the cause of the Palestinian people. You would be making an enormous contribution to do that, Kevin. Then you could get started on those 10,000 pages about WTF is wrong with you. Hint–it's not the Jews' fault. That way lies madness, Kevin, and you're already half way there.

  2. Kevin I don't remember sexually harassing and stalking anyone. Nobody ever told me I did. If you think I did perhaps we should discuss it privately: You may recall that I warned you several months ago when you refused to discuss your shortcoming with me in a high level email group that if you tried to hide behind a woman's skirts you would be very, very sorry.

    Well you look very, very, sorry to me. You're a pitiful liar. You will never get a teaching job anywhere. You're a Dr. Strangelove who just can't keep his Hitler salute down.

    It's amusing that you accuse me of the ad hominem, because the "sex stalker" legend is the only defense you offer to my criticism of your dumbasshole statements and your practice of alienating people such as journalists, leftists, and the American People. While certainly I offer certain comments of your character at times, it's only in a discussion of the issues. Thus my observations are not ad hom.

    Your attack is classic ad hom in that you substitute the attack for a reasoned argument. You're off your rocker, doc.

    Are you ready for our "wee chat" at the sfgooglegroup, "Senor Cojones Gigante"? Or are you going to be a gutless wonder forever?

  3. congrats on the translation!

  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

  5. Thanks. I wish the mistaken singular in the adjective was deliberate. I'll suppose it was instead an unconscious allusion to the doctrine "Testis Unus, Testis Nullus" that I raised in another thread, which applies splendidly to the singular subject of someone who claims "Cojones Grandes" but whose refusal to debate his longstanding and willfull dumbassholery shows him to be a gutless wonder with no cojones at all.

    Kevin and Willie both used to like to talk about male gonads–it seems it was an interest they shared in common.

    I'm not surprised that Willie's seeing ghosts when he looks over his shoulder. If I robbed graves for my glory I'd see them too. I've had some email exchanges with Craig Ranke to discuss my review of his DVD and to try to get answers from him on some questions. And Kevin must be hallucinating 'cause I don't own a raincoat. Telling lies disguised as humor is a favorite neocon technique–I've noticed that truthers in certain circles share many attributes of neocon culture.

    When can we have our little chat, Kevin, about the tremendously destructive things you have done and continue to do that damage the truth movement's credibility? Or did not having a leg to stand on leave you testis nullus?

  6. "Do you deny that Muslims did the Beiruit truck bombing, the 1993 WTC bombing, Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, and the African embassy bombings? Do you deny that al Qaeda did most of those? Do you deny that Osama was CIA?"

    YES.

    OBL, nee Tim Osman, is DEAD – has been since December of 2001. Your "Weekend At Osama's" trick isn't working, bedbug.

  7. Kevin…this is some goddamned fool who thinks he can unnerve you. He's someone's useful idiot of the moment; but like Mike Ruppert, he'll blow his load one day, and the checks will cease.

    And we all know that there's nothing more pathetic or useless that an old, used-up whore.

  8. Adolph666, I wasn't asking you, I was asking Dr. Barrett.

    fIST, friends like you make my case about Barrett better than I ever could.

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