It's one thing to be ignorant and too lazy to do your homework. It's another thing to flaunt those regrettable qualities.
This was for a revision of my Loose Change Viewer guide, which I never finished. August, 2006.
I’m going to take a break from Loose Change’s narrative for a moment, to talk about 9/11 denial and anti-Semitism. The American Free Press (AFP), a far-right-wing biweekly anti-Israel conspiracy-promoting opinion paper, is one of the main sources for information in Loose Change. Here’s an excerpt from the AFP’s mission statement:
You can see the future clearly if America continues her mad race to oblivion. Thanks to the press, the life-denying values – often called "democratic values" – are in vogue. Kids can't pray in school even as the taxpayers offer huge sums to the theocratic state of Israel. The Boy Scouts are scheduled for the guillotine because they don't want perverts to be scoutmasters and want to restrict membership to normal boys. The family is officially defined now as something other than what it has been since humankind appeared on this globe. The ancient Hippocratic Oath for doctors is trashed to accommodate the profitable business of abortion. Cultural communism-which is called political correctness-dominates all media. Art is literal trash and music is cacophony. Morals and speech are sewage, history as fact is viciously attacked by the media, entertainment is ethical syphilis. One must be blind not to see the direction. Where can it end? Jumping from a cliff brings a light-hearted feeling and the descent is most enjoyable until the inevitable sudden stop. Reality is not fitted with a bungee rope.
Whether you wish to choose or not, you will choose. It's the Global Plantation and Death or Liberty and Life. You will have and your children will have either an international communistic society with the very rich at the top, the bureaucrats in the middle and the rest of mankind at the bottom, or a free and sovereign America. –The AFP
http://www.btpholdings.com/afp.html
It’s one thing to rely on crackpot sources, which, as you will see (if you haven’t already from the passage above), the AFP clearly is. But it’s another thing to rely on a crackpot source that’s run by
Willis Carto, the racist Holocaust denier whom the
Anti-Defamation League calls “one of the most influential American anti-Semitic propagandists of the past 50 years.” The AFP is published from the same office as Carto’s The Barnes Review, which ran a serious story titled “Adolf Hitler – An Overlooked Candidate for the Nobel Prize.” Willis Carto:
"If Satan himself, with all of his super-human genius and diabolical ingenuity at his command, had tried to create a permanent disintegration and force for the destruction of the nations, he could have done no better than to invent the Jews."
Thanks to reader
Ralph Hernandez for alerting me to this connection, which reminds me of a disturbing fact. There are several prominent anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers in the 9/11 conspiracy crowd. I don’t mean the people who believe the very common conspiracy theory that radical Zionists in Israel and/or in the US government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks to get the US to wage war against the foes of Israel. And it’s important not to automatically label as anti-Semitic, people who disagree with Israeli policy or with a Zionist political agenda. That said, I’m not aware of a single Holocaust denier or anti-Semite who’s prominent on the 9/11 myth-debunking side. But there are several people on the CT side who hold such views. These include:
–
Eric Hufschmid, author of the 9/11 conspiracy book “Painful Questions” and the video “Painful Deceptions,” is so proud of his Holocaust denial that he calls himself a “HoloHoax exposer.”
– The owners of the popular, and early, 9/11 conspiracy website
Serendipity.li, who publish articles such as “In Defense of Anti-Semitism” and “Jewish media myths leading us to World War III.”
– The host of the webcast “Wing TV,” who goes by the pseudonym “
Victor Thorn,” and who published a booklet titled “Christ Killers.”
–
Carol Valentine, who runs the conspiracy website Public-Action.com, where the current headline is “The American Coup d’Etat and the War for Jewish Supremacy,” and who writes, “Zionist Christians are traitors to America. Along with Jews, they scream loudest for Arab blood, even though all rational analysis shouts that Israel and Israeli agents in America were responsible for 9-11.”
– “Scholar for Truth”
Rick Rajter praises Iran’s president Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial and has a website that links to the neo-Nazi site Stormfront. More about him on the
Screw Loose Change blog.
– The writers and editors of the
American Free Press, whose work is cited several times in Loose Change. They formerly published The Spotlight, a harsher anti-Semitic paper, which was shut down when a lawsuit bankrupted Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby organization.
– 9/11 conspiracy promoter “
Killtown,” who presents the idea that fewer than 300,000 Jews may have died at the hands of the Nazis, and who believes that Israel was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and therefore may be lying about the Holocaust.
***
March, 2003:
A.K. Dewdney publishes his "cell phones can't work in airliners" paper in an online journal dedicated to Holocaust denial:
http://www.vho.org/tr/2003/3/Dewdney248-271.html
***
Is Dylan Avery an anti-Semite? I don’t know. He denies that he is. Some people, like the administrator of the website littlegreenfootballs.com, insist that he’s the same Dylan Avery who posted anti-Semitic rants on that site in 2003. Indeed, there are remarkable similarities between the two besides the name, as I point out on page 50 of
Loose Change Creators Speak.(PDF) But I’d need more evidence before making an accusation of anti-Semitism against Avery. Loose Change mostly stays away from the “Zionist plot” claims made by other conspiracists.
However, in their public lives Avery & co. have repeatedly thrown their hats in with these paranoid, far-right “Christian patriot” hatemongers. In addition to promoting the laughably bad “research” that’s printed in The AFP, they have done interviews with people like Victor Thorn, John Stadtmiller, Jack Blood, and Eric Hufschmid. This strikes me as very strange behavior for people who claim to be sensitive to murder victims.
In an interview with “HoloHoax exposer” Hufschmid, Avery responds to Hufschmid’s criticism that Loose Change doesn’t place enough blame on the Jews by saying,
“Take our word for it: we're well aware of the Illuminati and the New World Order, and we're well aware that there are people who want an all-Jewish state. We realize that all these things exist, but that's not what we're about. Your video, and Alex Jones's video, cover these things beautifully, and there's no need for us to cover these same topics. …I just hope you can support us.”
Jason Bermas tells Hufschmid, “This not just about Cheney and Rumsfeld and those guys. But by piercing them, we're hoping to get to the bottom of this [Zionist] criminal network that you talk about.”
***
William Rodriguez's association with anti-Semites and Holocaust Deniers
“The Mindset of the Malaysian people has been changed forever on the 9/11 events after seeing the latest evidence.” –Malaysia's National News Service
Rodriguez travels with crackpots and Holocaust deniers to tell the world that 9/11 was an inside job. Citing this information, Muslim clerics march on a U.S. embassy. Venezuela's National Assembly calls for a new investigation to include the possibility of U.S. complicity in the attacks. Rodriguez is proud of these achievements. Back in the U.S., Rodriguez speaks at a neo-Nazi conference and, not surprisingly, gets a speaking invitation from the world's top anti-Semites. In December, 2006 he announces his conversion to Islam and says that the aim of American media is to criminalize Muslims.December, 2007: Rodriguez won't denounce Kevin Barrett's anti-Semitism or agree not to associate with Barrett. (December 11 email on that page includes a list of Barrett's hateful statements.)
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Screw Loose Change has numerous posts about 9/11 and Holocaust deniers, including an account of the Phoenix 9/11 Truth conference in Feb., 2007, which was organized by a Holocaust denier. Here's SLC's search results for "Holocaust"
http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/search?q=Holocaust
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More about Carol Valentine and Eric Hufschmid at ref's site:
http://911guide.googlepages.com/history
***
Excerpt from an email from me to Kevin Barrett, January, 2007:
9) Why did you say that it's a "Zionist Big Lie" that the "Germans hated the Jews for no reason."
10) Why did you say "the Holocaust as it is taught in the US is a hideously destructive myth"?
11) Why did you name one of the most egregious white-supremicist neo-Nazis, Ernst Zundel, as someone whose work deserves consideration? In case you've forgotten about Zundel's work, here's a quote by him:
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The ADL published an overview of anti-Semitic 9/11 conspiracies here: http://tinyurl.com/rhvkd
Of course, much of the anti-Semitism practiced in the U.S. is mild compared to that in the Middle East. This 2002 paper examines the resurgence of anti-Semitic myths there:
http://tinyurl.com/lfj3y
This film takes a critical look at the Arab and Iranian reaction to 9/11, five years later:
http://www.memrifilms.org/
