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.

* * *

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.