Some light shed on crazy 9/11 rumors

I’ve lost count of the stories I’ve heard as to how this story got started. Quinn’s idea is interesting but he may be giving OBL undue credit for diabolical ingenuity – not to say that OBL is lacking in that regard.

It seems likely that someone just latched onto a scrap of information which coincided with what he wanted to believe; for example:

“The story apparently has its roots in a statement by the Israeli embassy shortly after the attacks that it was trying to learn the status of some 4,000 Israeli citizens in the New York City area.”

Probably every embassy in the US was sending similar assurances to its government.

http://slate.msn.com/?id=116813

http://www.adl.org/terrorism_america/saying_092001.asp

> asserting an elite media
> conspiracy to suppress it.

Steyn didn’t say there was a conspiracy, he said there was a lack of interest in investigating further.

Steyn might be way off on this one, but Michael Moore is the one who peddles elite media conspiracies.

One serious concern I have always had about people’s inclination to even come close to considering those rumors legitimate is the idea that Jews live such a completely isolated life (not to mention one without any moral obligations) that they have no non-Jewish friends or family, nor would they have any civic obligations to worry about were they to obtain any information concerning such an event ahead of time. After all, only in such a scenario would it make sense for anyone to think that these informed Jews would, without blinking an eye, just quietly stay away from such a tragedy without alerting anyone outside of their supposed super-isolated circles. (News flash: social networks don’t work that way.) The idea that there could be people this naïve and clueless about the world is seriously disturbing.

There are. Unfortunately, they’re my co-religionists (nominally, at least) who write apocalyptic fiction in which all the people who aren’t godly members of X denomination get speared by divine fire or eaten alive by the plague.

Left Behind is the most famous of them, but another one is Pierced By A Sword which is in the Conservative Catholic Apocalyptic Moron genre and is like LB without the Rapture but with Marian Apparitions and the nuking of Europe, the total destruction of NYC, the massacre of the population of China and UN Blue Helmets driving tanks through the rubble of Chicago. If you don’t find my summary horrifying enough, read the glowing Amazon reader reviews.

I’ve had a better idea, “russkie”.

Why don’t you go and annoy someone else?

1. Sorry it’s become necessary to add a disclaimer, as you did with your footnote. Weirdness abounds.

2. Re the comment: “…Steyn didn’t say there was a conspiracy, he said there was a lack of interest in investigating further…” Hee. This a pure Michelle Malkinism.

3. I can’t claim to be as informed about events and theories as I’d like to be, but I’ve been hearing various forms of that rumor about how “no Jews were killed in 9-11” since shortly after the attack. I have no idea *where* I first read about it. I’m just sayin’…I’m not targeting this Steyn person for suppression. I don’t know anything about him except what I’ve just read in this thread.

The article’s theory is interesting, but didn’t I read somewhere that the cell used the codename “Porsche 911” for the operation? That would imply that the date had at least been set by then.

I think that waaay too much is being read into the conspiracy theory here. Al Qaeda seems to have been as dysfunctional as the Bush administration response.

Near as anyone can make out the big idea behind 9/11 was a way of getting all the disparate anti-US forces all behind Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri. Bin Laden’s goal all along has been to get the US to leave Saudi so that he can lead an armed revolt against the House of Saud.

The figures of thousands of Jihadis trained in Al Qaeda camps massively overstates his influence. Most of those were Pakistanis whose interest was iridentist struggle against India in Kashmir. The number who were personally loyal to Bin Laden was much smaller.

Al Zawahiri was exchanging testy notes with his subbordinates over the purchase of a fax machine. Does not sound like they were seeing much in the way of profits from the drug trade from their Taleban hosts.

9/11 was a desperation move. 20 men were probably a significant fraction of their numbers. Despite Bush having no interest in finding Bin Laden until Iraq went sour, Bin Laden’s own group has not been up to much since. The attacks in Bali and Spain were by loosely connected groups.

I don’t think the Jewish conspiracy rumors were ever reported as fact in the mainstream press. By contrast, the Telegraph ran this Mark Steyn piece retailing an urban myth that Muslim schoolchildren had advance knowledge of S11, and asserting an elite media conspiracy to suppress it.

That was a funny story. The source of it was Jeffrey Scott Shapiro.
A Jew telling a conspiracy about the Muslims/Palestinians knowing about it in almost exact the same way as the Arab/Palestinian conspiracy that the Jews knew about it. The stories are dated too close together for me to say who holds the copyrights and who is the copycat, though i’m a bit inclined to give the credits to the Arab conspiracy. But then Shapiro seems to have a bit of a history as an investigative reporter, so I may be wrong.

The jewish variant:

…….
On Sept. 10, 2001, a sixth-grade student of Middle Eastern descent in Jersey City, N.J., said something that alarmed his teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. “Essentially, he warned her to stay away from lower Manhattan because something bad was going to happen,” said Sgt. Edgar Martinez, deputy director of police services for the Jersey City Police Department. Initially, the Jersey City rumor was met with some controversy. The New York Times called it an unsubstantiated rumor, and both the Daily News and the Jersey City Journal quoted a board-of-education official who denied that the boy had made any reference to the Sept. 11 attacks at all. Despite their reports, Martinez said the FBI-JTTF took over the matter for further investigation.

On Sept. 11, NYPD school-safety officers interrogated a Middle Eastern boy at Health Opportunities High School in the Bronx who had made similar comments that alarmed his teacher. Catie Marshall said the boy told his peers something as the school was being evacuated on Sept. 11.

“He warned them not to ride any city buses because he had been told at his mosque the week before to stay off all public transportation for a while,” said one NYPD officer from the investigating 40th Precinct. “He said it wouldn’t be safe.” The FBI-JTTF since has taken over the matter.

One New Utrecht official told me that of the 509 Arab-American students who attend the school, many have come forward with their own stories about having prior knowledge. “Kids are telling us that the attacks didn’t surprise them,” she told me. “This was a nicely protected little secret that circulated in the community around here. I guess they were talking about it among themselves, but they didn’t share it with us — at least not before the attacks.”

According to students, many of their Arab-American peers were seen taking photographs of the crumbling twin towers from New Utrecht on Sept. 11. “Don’t you think it’s strange so many of them happened to take their cameras to school that particular day?” one student asked me.

I was beginning to get the picture. Both Brooklyn and New Jersey historically have been associated with terrorism. According to an FBI indictment against bin-Laden, al-Qaeda members used to operate secretly out of the now-defunct Alkifah Refugee Center on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, an office surrounded by Islamic schools and mosques. Today, the former organization’s address has been stripped from the building and co-opted into a private business that sells Middle Eastern fragrances, incense and hardbound copies of the Koran. Those familiar with the center told me that New Jersey-based Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman was a frequent visitor to the secret al-Qaeda hideout.
…..

This looks entirely like fiction, but then it pops up in a story of Mark Steyn in the Telegraph. I doubt he believed a word of it, but it is easy writing when you need to vent some anger.

And that is the wonder of a conspiracy, there are always people propagating it for whatever reason they may have.

And the likelihood of wether the Jewish community could have kept it silent or wether the Arab community were openly warned in advance through their mosque(s) is entirely beside the issue.

Conspiracies have reasons of their own.

PS. Compare in the above story the photo element. In the Arab variant there were some Jews filming the collapse and “celebrating” it.
And then the celebrating refers back to the Jewish stories of Palestinians celebrating a terror attack against Jews. Like in all good conspiracies all things are related.

There were, IIRC some Israeli students around in New York on that day who were taking video film

That is one of the charms of these theories. Lots of little facts that are true, but twisted in such a way that they are part of the conspiracy.

Undoubtedly there were also Arab-Americans making photos.

The Rosh Hashanah story is also full of those ‘facts’. The end of the story of Kenneth M. Quinn is telling:

It may, of course, never be possible to determine whether Sept. 18 was the original date of the attack.

Must have been handled by an editor at the WP who likes a good conspiracy theory.

Though I’m a bit baffled by Eszter who semi-seriously tries to discredit one, while linking, almost approvingly, to another.

Dsquared,

A couple of points…

1. I teach communications at the University of Paris (Sorbonne-Paris IV) and follow the media fairly closely. Coverage of the increased wave of anti-Semitic acts post Intifada and post 9/11 was very spotty at first and Le Monde was probably worst among the major papers. An indication of its question-begging editorial line can be gleaned from the very page to which you linked, though the author of these words, Dominique Vidal, an associate editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, is also author of “Le péché originel d’Israël”, and is well-known for his pro-Palestinian bias and his espousal of the Norman Finkelstein line on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: “Loin de semer la division et la haine, la mobilisation contre la guerre d’agression en Irak et contre l’offensive israélienne en Palestine entend rassembler tous les partisans d’une paix véritable…”

2. Notice, however, from the very same link, the following statistics: En un an, de 2001 à 2002, le nombre d’«actes racistes» a été multiplié par plus de quatre, et celui des «actes antisémites» par six – ces derniers en représentent désormais 62 % du total… Le nombre d’actes racistes est passé de 71 en 2001 à 313 en 2002, le nombre d’actes antisémites de 32 à 193 ; le nombre d’intimidations racistes de 350 à 992, le nombre d’intimidations antisémites de 184 à 731. I.e. (for those who don’t read French), the total number of racist “acts” went from 71 in 2001 to 313 in 2002, and of these the number of anti-Semitic “acts” increased from 32 to 193. The total number of racist “intimidations” increased from 350 in 2001 to 992 in 2002, and of these the numbers classified as anti-Semitic were, respectively, 184 (2001) and 731 (2002).

I trust you can draw the appropriate conclusions from these figures.

I trust you can draw the appropriate conclusions from these figures.

Depends what you mean by “appropriate”, Christophe G.

For a few people here that would be to repeat that France is not undergoing a wave of anti-semitism. That the real problem is Islamophobia. That anyone suggesting otherwise is, uh–to borrow a term from another thread–a “likudnik”.

Cristophe, out of sheer curiosity, in which way does the phrase about pacifists you quote from Le Monde’s editor reflect his views on the Holocaust and anti-semitism?

As for the claim that the French press seldom reported attacks on Jews for the first year after 9/11. I don’t know, I don’t have a professorship at La Sorbonne, but it still seems a big blanket statement to make. I tried Libération, which is clearly even more leftist than Le Monde, right? Well you can search their archives all the way back to 1984 and it’s packed with reference to episodes of antisemitism in France and the debate thereof. Googling aside, I distinctly remember the topic of a new surge of antisemitism across France and generally Europe was already a hot one before 9/11 (and before Durban).

So I’m just wondering what exactly you mean by “seldom reporting”?

Cristophe, thanks for the explanation. I just read Vidal’s review of Finkelstein, he sounds rather critical of the book and of Finkelstein’s theories. It doesn’t sound to me like an “espousal” of his views. He lumps him in with revisionists, conspiracy theories and polemicists and defends the need for historical memory and the uniqueness of the Holocaust. I don’t get the impression of a denial of antisemitism as you seemed to suggest.

As for the French media in general, Libération is one of the main papers, right? one of the “trendiest” as well? I do read French but I’m not as familiar with the French media, I just got this impression that what Libération write about is often discussed more at large in other publications too, even outside of France actually (they seem to be among the favourite sources for the Guardian, for instance). I didn’t get the idea the media were slow to pick up the phenomenon, but maybe it took a while because the phenomenon was slow to manifest itself as something new. There were some bad waves of antisemitic attacks across Europe even in the 80’s, if I don’t recall wrong.

September 11 is the New Year of the Coptic Christians in Egypt. It’s also the day on which Egypt’s current constitution was adopted (September 11, 1971). Given the centrality of Egyptian Islamists to 9/11 and al Qaeda, it baffles me that these facts have obtained so little attention. Coptic Christians are a regular target of Egyptian Islamists. Coptic Christianity is the main living repository of Egypt’s pre-Islamic culture. And the UN Secretary-General at the start of the peace process, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was a Coptic Christian (and a foreign minister for Sadat).

Indeed, the peace process is sometimes considered to have begun with Rabin and Arafat’s handshake at the White House on September 13, 1993. Just a year later, on midnight September 11-12, 1994, came the first attempt to fly a plane at the White House. That was a month after the release of Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, whose ending is now regarded as an anticipation of September 11. That was also the period in which Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were setting up shop in the Philippines, where they eventually hatched 9/11 precursor scheme, Bojinka.

Now how is one to interpret this mass of coincidences? First, we have to note that the pilot in 1994 was someone unconnected to any known terrorist group, a guy called Frank Eugene Corder. So, one might suppose that Corder got the idea from Clancy, and KSM got the idea from Corder (this event was reported in the international media), and that’s it. In this picture, one discounts the “Egyptian” and the “Oslo” connections.

Alternatively, one might suppose that the 1994 event was al Qaeda’s first suicide-hijacking, timed for the anniversary of the Rabin-Arafat declaration, but it was covered up. If it could also be shown that there was a secular Egyptian influence in the timing of the 1993 Rabin-Arafat meeting, aiming for proximity to the symbolic date of September 11, that would tie everything together nicely.

A sinister footnote: There is a joke (its origin unknown to me) that the 1994 Cessna episode was CIA director James Woolsey, trying to reach President Clinton. Woolsey resigned a few months later, late in December 1994; Ramzi Yousef was discovered in Manila, and Bojinka exposed, early in January 1995. Shortly after that, CIA agent Bob Baer went to Iraqi Kurdistan and tried to start an uprising with the help of the INC’s Chalabi. (For detailed but contradictory accounts of that event, see Baer’s autobiography, See No Evil, and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession, by Andrew and Patrick Cockburn.) Woolsey, of course, went on to become Laurie Mylroie’s highest-profile supporter, arguing for a link between Iraq and al Qaeda. I don’t know what to make of that conjunction of events…

The fact that September 18 was the Jewish New Year I find very interesting, because that is when the first round of anthrax letters was mailed, the ones that went to media organizations – the first of which was American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer, located in Palm Beach County, Florida. That county was at the center of the 2000 election controversy, and the 9/11 hijackers turned it into a base of operations after the election.

Now, get this:

“Osama bin Laden has allegedly denied any involvement in the US terror attacks and pointed the finger at Jews.

“His reasoning is that Florida’s Jewish community has not forgiven President Bush for his controversial state victory in the US election, an Urdu language newspaper reports.”

Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistani intelligence, said similar things.

It’s also been reported that the first anthrax letter contained a Star of David. Again, this was the letter to American Media, the case most embarrassing to the theory that the anthrax came from a domestic terrorist. Recall that there are just a few degrees of separation between the hijackers and the first anthrax victim, that one of them (Alhaznawi) had symptoms reminiscent of cutaneous anthrax, that Atta was interested in cropdusters (as if a biological or chemical attack was considered), etc.

Good point guys! You can search for more information at http://www.giveramp.com
as it’s better then Google for this type of topic.

Just to boil it down to something very simple:

September 11, 2001 – Christian New Year in Egypt – the suicide hijackings.

September 18, 2001 – Jewish New Year in Israel – the anthrax letters.

Some of the other stuff may just be noise. But I have a hard time believing that the coincidence above results from chance alone.

Cristophe, it’s interesting how you went from arguing that the French media were supposedly silent on antisemitism up to last year to arguing about Vidal’s positions and then about one article only, now this is probably going off topic by now, but I don’t think my French is that bad that I missed the part where Vidal “espouses” – complete agreement and identification – Finkelstein’s theories (apologies for ‘derailing’ this further off topic – and for the rough translation):

Ambiguities – The art of the pamphlet is an ungrateful one. When writing in such a short form, one risks superficiality. Polemical verve leads to taking wrong turns with words. And, when you plunge into the logic of a diatribe, you can get derailed and reach the lowest level. The small ambiguous book by Norman Finkelstein, alas, doesn’t escape these flaws (characteristics).

Alas, because the anger of this defender of the Palestinian cause is legitimate: he wants to denounce the instrumentalisation of the Shoah, which, after being used as shield for the State of Israel, is used by the main Jewish American associations to get billions of dollars from swiss banks, big german companies and governments of central Europe, money of which only a part is given back to the victims of genocide.

This extortion enterprise has been devised and managed in the United States – it has been condemned, as is recalled by Rony Brauman in an embarassed postface, by the board of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutionsin France – Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF). Hence a first question, more to the French publisher than to the author: knowing the big difference between the American and French realities, is it responsible to translate a work of this kind as is, without even a solid explanation in a preface? Let’s take one example: lobbies are part of the ordinary social and political structure in the United States, so the expression ‘Jewish lobby’ may seem objective on the other side of the Atlantic, but here, it recalls the language of the far right speaking about an inexistant “Jewish lobby”.

No doubt it would also have been necessary to explain the oppressive climate in which radical American intellectuals have to fight. Maybe this explains the unmoderated propension Finkelstein shows for “conspiracitis”. According to him, Jewish American organisations knowingly organised the silence on the Shoah during the cold war (during which Federal Germany was allied with America) to only start reconstructing its memory starting with the six day war (which inaugurated Israel’s alliance with Washington).

So many claims, so many errors. The privileged relations between Israel and the United States go back to long before 1967. The same goes for the first attempt to have the large public confronted with the nazi genocide: the trial of Adolf Eichmann dates to 1961. No doubt David Ben Gourion had the perpetrator of the « solution finale » appraised and judged for motives relating to foreign and domestic policy (voir l’article de Tom Segev). But it was first of all necessary to revive a memory that had really been suppressed, as amazing as that may seem today.

The reason is simply that, in Israel as in France and in other countries, most of the survivors from the concentration camps, on their return home, didn’t want to speak about the horror. It was not possible: taken in the joy about the end of the war and the celebration of the heroes of the resistance, the world could not hear those who were accused of having “gone to the slaughter like lambs”. It’s rather to their children that the survivors, a lot later, started telling their stories…

Reducing the awareness of the specificity of the genocide of Jews to the machinations of an American lobby poses an ultimate and serious question. There is no living memory of a genocide that is not universelle and not clan-like: so that the tragedy of victims allows warning the whole of humanity against the crime of crimes! From this point of view, Finkelstein is absolutely right in fighting the “uniqueness” in the name of which some refuse to inscribe the Shoah in a long chain of genocides. But he is also indisputably wrong to ignore that what happened to Jews – as the German historian Eberhard Jäckel wrote – was “something unique, because never before had a state decided and announced, under the authority of their supreme leader, that a certain group of people had to be exterminated, if possible in their totality (…) and then followed that decision and applied that with all the means at their disposal”.

Many researchers, especially in Germany, strive, by consulting archives, to go deeper and with new approaches into the study of the nazi genocide. Their works are nearly unknown in France. That they are equally ignored by Norman Finkelstein is suprising. Because to the fraud of manipulators as well as negationists [*], there is only one ultimate answer: history.

[*] The appreciation and praise lavished by Finkelstein on David Irving, who has recently been condemned for his negationism, is outrageous.

Cristophe – I’m _not_ saying I subscribe to all the arguments there, or that I think they’re particularly convincing, but I _don’t see an espousal_ of outrageous conspiracy or revisionist or negationist or antisemitic theories, or anything that would _account for_ a voluntary and knowing omission about antisemitic attacks in his own paper, OR in the French media at large.

Even Libération is overtly pro-Palestinian. So? Was your implication that that position would lead a media entity to ignore news about antisemitic attacks in France? That all the media in France are on the same line with Libération and Le Monde, and so pro-Palestinian that they would purposefully ignore racist, antisemitic attacks within France because… reporting about them might produce a pro-Israel reaction?? It doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t seem the case.

It is certainly true, though, that the trend in France was not picked up outside of France, and especially in the US, until a year after 9/11, when it started gathering a lot more international attention, but even there, I wouldn’t resort to political assumptions about there being a voluntary omission before. It just seems the attacks first escalated into a visible trend, which was then picked up in significant terms by international media, thinkers, intellectuals, politicians, etc.

I engaged in a correspondence with you, Momo, in good faith, but now see that your tactics were more akin to the Swift Boat propagandists than to any honest desire to understand Dominique Vidal’s paradoxical positions. It was Dsquared who originally linked to Vidal; I merely tried to explain who he was. To simply: Vidal shares Finkelstein’s view that accusations of anti-Semitism play into the hands of Zionists.

I can see now that for someone so wilfully purblind as yourself, this would definitely be “something that escapes me“.

On that weary note, this exchange is closed.

Oh gosh. I’ve been promoted to Swift Veteran now. Where’s my medal?

Christophe, the article is there, in plain(ish) English, I think we can both read that. Did I translate wrongly? I can perfectly see what Vidal is sharing with Finkelstein is what he puts as the “the anger of a defender of the Palestinian cause” and the criticism of what he calls the “manipulation” of the memory of the Holocaust for money by those organisations he refers to. It’s clear he has his own strong position on that.

But I _honestly_ don’t quite see the bit where he “shares Finkelstein’s view that accusations of anti-Semitism play into the hands of Zionists“, that’s quite a leap, also because the review is talking only about what they call the financial “industry of the Holocaust”, not the episodes of antisemitic violence in France.

I asked you a simple question about how you could justify a blanket statement about the French media keeping silent on antisemitism until last year. You were the one to focus on that article by Vidal, indeed, as some sort of proof for your assertion about all the French media. I simply don’t think your responses are providing much basis for that claim, let alone the specific claim that Vidal is espousing Finkelstein’s views on the Holocaust. If this is “bad faith” on my part, then, I don’t know… I guess I should have simply said, “ok if you say so I’ll take it as true”. Right?

Sorry to be such a pedant, but when somebody makes that kind of blanket statements I usually get curious to hear more substantial arguments, that’s all.

A Swift Boat propagandist. No less. No really, the irony is killing me.

A correction – you said “accusations of antisemitism”, but the point is the episodes of antisemitism that you claim were under-reported were real, not accusations in intellectual debates on the drawing line between anti-Israel political ideas and antisemitism.

Even if Vidal was the editor of all French media, and even if his pro-Palestinian position was the most biased there is, I can honestly hardly picture a voluntary conspiracy to block out news of real incidents of antisemitism for “fear” they may “play into the hands of Zionist”.

If anything, people with different ideas on Israeli policies and the Palestinians will still explain that wave of antisemitism in different ways, you must know that.

Well, I didn’t liked Christophe’s contribution.

Fist, he tried to be serious. In a thread about silly conpiracy theories that’s is not exactly rewarding.

Second his first contribution displayed some “dislike” of Muslims.

seldom reported any attacks on Jews — even though they were far more numerous than any attacks on Muslims —

A clever, but too obvious attempt to drag in the Muslim issue. What have those attacks on Muslims
got to do with it?

A recent article in Libération tabulated the anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish incidents over the past three years and found that there were nearly twice as many of the latter, and that not a single anti-Muslim incident could be attributed to Jews.

Comparing Jews and Muslims is a dangerous topic. But in this context Liberation and Christophe are simply wrong. There’s an incident with Betar in april 2002. And the JDL in France hasn’t got a spotless reputation either.

And then the discussion disappeared in a predictable direction. If that deserves a Swift Boat Award at least momo should share it with Christophe.

And I want one too :-)