5 dni temu
American Pravda: October 7th and September 11th • Ron Unz • September 9, 2024
The eleven month anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel passed two days ago and in two more days we will reach the twenty-third anniversary of the September 11th Attacks on America.
Both these events have become so infamous that they are now among the tiny handful that can easily be identified merely by the date on which they occurred, and they are both likely to be remembered for their world historic significance. The 2001 attacks unleashed a long series of devastating Middle Eastern wars, and last year’s Hamas attack now threatens to do the same, perhaps drawing in the United States. There are differences as well as some significant parallels, but taken together they may have combined consequences that are too controversial to be widely discussed.
From almost the first hours after the huge October raid by Gaza militants, Israeli officials and their media allies had declared that the attack was Israel’s own 9/11, and I believe that in many respects that analogy is a very apt one.
Back in 2001, the newly installed administration of President George W. Bush had paid little attention to foreign affairs and almost none to the Middle East, with its focus overwhelmingly upon domestic political projects. Bush had actively courted Muslim support during his 2000 campaign while promising Americans that he would pursue a “humble” foreign policy. All of these plans were transformed in a single day as tens of millions of Americans watched the towers of our World Trade Center collapse and the newscasters reported that the Pentagon had also been attacked and seriously damaged.
Not since the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941 had America suffered such an enemy assault on its own soil, and nearly 3,000 Americans were dead, so major military retaliation was inevitable. But with our top leaders reeling in dismay and confusion, uncertain exactly how to respond, a tight network of fervently pro-Israel Neocons situated in various sub-Cabinet positions quickly sprang into action. These individuals took advantage of the sudden, unexpected crisis to convince their superiors to undertake a long-planned agenda of regime change operations and wars across much of the Middle East and other portions of the Muslim world, a project largely intended to reshape that region for the benefit of Israel.
In the initial days and weeks after those terrorist attacks, America attracted huge sympathy from the entire world, but we would soon squander that important geostrategic asset by launching an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq, justifying that attack by blatant lies regarding Saddam Hussein’s WMDs. The cycle of resulting wars we set into motion would lead to the death or displacement of many millions of Muslim civilians, severely damaging our national reputation and upsetting the regional balance of power. Those wars mostly ended in shame and humiliation, while costing our country as much as eight trillion dollars. My old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who had run the NSA for Ronald Reagan, later described our Iraq War as “the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history,” and I entirely seconded his verdict.
The 9/11 Attacks themselves had inflicted relatively minor injury upon America. But the gigantic, ideologically-driven overreaction promoted by extremist elements of the Bush Administration severely damaged our national interests and global reputation, inflicting losses vastly greater than anything that a few hijacked jetliners could possibly have done.
The Hamas raid against Israel seemed to follow a remarkably similar trajectory. At the time it occurred, Israelis were entirely focused upon domestic issues, especially a very bitter ideological battle over judicial reform between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political opponents, with almost no one paying any attention to the simmering conflict with the Palestinians, least of all the ones in quiet Gaza. Just as the American people and its leaders had assumed that our country was protected from any significant foreign attack by two wide oceans, the Israelis had put their faith in the elaborate, high-tech defenses they had erected around the besieged Gaza enclave at the cost of a half-billion dollars, believing that these were completely impenetrable.
Thus, when the successful attack came, more than a hundred times larger than any previous Hamas incursion, it struck like a bolt out of the blue, and the Israeli government response was totally disorganized and completely ineffective, with panic-stricken, trigger-happy IDF troops accounting for a large fraction of all the resulting civilian deaths, as Apache attack helicopters were ordered to blast anything that moved. More Israelis died in that 24-hour period than had fallen in all the major military battles of the country’s previous half-century of wars, while well over 200 Israelis were captured and carried back to Gaza, with Hamas intending to trade them for the release of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners long held by Israel without charges or trials.
The crucial myth of Israeli military invincibility that had been constructed at enormous effort over three generations was shattered within hours, as was the even stronger myth of the brilliance of Israeli surveillance and intelligence capabilities. For more than seventy years, the powerful, well-equipped conventional armies of nearby Arab states had regularly been defeated by the Israeli military, but the latter had now been totally humiliated by a rag-tag force of lightly-armed Islamic militants.
In per capita terms, Israel’s human losses were some fifteen times greater than what America had suffered from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, so Israeli military retaliation was inevitable. But just as America’s massive, ideologically-driven overreaction after 2001 inflicted enormously greater damage on ourselves than the attacks had ever done, Israel’s own ideologically-driven response has been equally ruinous.
America committed huge, devastating blunders in the aftermath of 9/11. But as the world’s sole superpower, with a population of nearly 300 million and protected by two oceans, our national existence was obviously never at risk. By contrast, Israel is a small country of only seven million Jews living in a sea of much larger, hostile neighbors, so its margin for error is far smaller. I think that the disastrous, self-destructive actions of the Israeli government over the last eleven months have raised serious doubts about the near-term survival of the Jewish State less than eighty years after it was first established.
The reason for Israel’s massive overreaction seems obvious. At the time of the attack, Netanyahu was already reviled by half the Israeli population, including a large majority of its elites. The gigantic military disaster that occurred on his watch immediately dropped his approval rating to single digits even before evidence appeared that most of the unarmed civilian dead had apparently been killed by the IDF due to his own government’s incompetent response. So he recognized that once his retaliatory war ended and peace was reestablished, he would almost certainly be driven from office; and with numerous serious corruption charges hanging over his head, he would probably end his life in a prison cell.
I think that a classic line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth probably summed up Netanyahu’s dilemma and his resulting strategy:
I am in blood Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
Thus, his personal situation required him to enormously broaden and lengthen his new retaliatory war in hopes that an eventual sweeping victory, perhaps resulting in a greatly expanded Israel, might lead his citizens to forget or forgive his corruption, blunders, and initial military disaster.
Aside from occupation duties and long-term guerrilla conflicts, Israel’s actual wars since 1948 had been extremely brief ones, accommodating the needs of an army that largely consisted of reservists mobilized for short periods. At the time the IDF began its attack on Gaza, the widespread assumption had been that the punitive campaign against Hamas would only last a few weeks if even that. But the Hamas fighters were well-entrenched in an extensive network of tunnels and could not easily be dislodged, so Netanyahu took his project in an entirely different direction, converting it into a war against Gaza’s more than two million civilians.
He hoped that a massive, relentless bombardment aimed at destroying Gaza’s homes and civilian infrastructure combined with a starvation blockade would kill enough Palestinians that the remainder could be driven out into Egypt’s Sinai desert, probably then followed by a similar ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. The removal of all the Palestinians and the permanent annexation of their lands would result in the creation of a purely Jewish Greater Israel, and if Netanyahu achieved that century-old Zionist ambition, his place in Israeli history would be assured, along with his likely political survival.
But most of the Gazans were the descendants of refugees whom Zionist militants had expelled from Palestine during the previous ethnic cleansing of the 1948 Nakba. Therefore, despite the bombing and devastation they stubbornly refused to once again become homeless international exiles, thereby frustrating Netanyahu’s sweeping plans, while the Egyptians were just as opposed to suddenly receiving a couple of million destitute refugees expelled into their territory. As a consequence, Israel’s very one-sided war against Gaza’s civilian population has now dragged on for more than eleven months, with no obvious end in sight.
Such an exceptionally long war has naturally had very damaging effects upon Israel and its economy, severely impacted by the continuing mobilization of so many reservists. The lack of any clear military victory or signs of an approaching conclusion has also led 500,000 or more Israelis to flee overseas, a massive blow since so many of these individuals were the country’s best-educated and most productive citizens. For the last decade or two, Israel had proclaimed its successful high-tech industry as the engine of country’s economic future and boasted about the flood of investment capital for its startups, but wartime uncertainty has caused a huge outflow of such capital and personnel, with 46,000 businesses having closed by July. Proud Israelis had famously boasted that their Middle Eastern country was “a villa in the jungle,” but nearly a year of fruitless warfare was leading to the villa’s increasing decrepitude and partial abandonment.
Moreover, the continuing Gaza fighting and the very graphic images of Palestinian death and devastation distributed across the world on social media soon drew in the involvement of other regional powers, at least to a limited extent.
The fervent Zionists who were Netanyahu’s crucial political base had long coveted southern Lebanon as a God-given portion of their intended Greater Israel. The IDF had invaded and partially occupied that territory several times over the decades until finally being defeated and driven out by the newly formed Hezbollah Shiite militia, with that organization having now reportedly accumulated an arsenal of some 150,000 missiles and rockets as a very powerful deterrent. The terrible plight of the Gazans attracted Hezbollah’s strong sympathy, so it mobilized its forces on the border, threatening military intervention, while engaging the IDF with cross-border rocket and shelling attacks, suffering bombing strikes in return.
Over the years, Hezbollah had built up formidable ground forces and with much of the IDF military engaged in the Gaza fighting, these attacks and Hezbollah’s very visible presence terrified Israeli civilians living in the north, who feared the sort of sudden Hamas-type invasion that had killed many of their southern counterparts. This led some 60,000 of them to flee their homes, becoming internally displaced Israeli refugees, constantly demanding that their military attack Lebanon and drive Hezbollah away from the border. But although there has been endless talk of such a pending Israeli ground attack on Lebanon, Netanyahu and his military advisers were aware of the severe defeat they had suffered at Hezbollah’s hands during their previous 2006 invasion, so they took no action aside from various assassinations and other provocations aimed at goading Hezbollah into the sort of major attack that might draw in American forces.
Meanwhile, in a very unexpected development, the determined Houthi Islamic militia of distant Yemen declared their full support for the suffering Palestinians and imposed a blockade of Red Sea shipping, threatening to attack any vessels bound for Israel or having an Israeli connection until Israel lifted its own siege of Gaza and allowed the starving Palestinians to receive food and medical supplies. This successful Houthi operation soon eliminated nearly all seaborn traffic to Israel’s main port of Eilat, which was driven into bankruptcy, further damaging the Israeli economy. A powerful American task force was soon dispatched to attack the Houthis and reopen the Red Sea, but it failed miserably, with the headlines recently declaring that “The Houthis have defeated the US Navy.” This represented a huge embarrassment for our own carrier-based naval strategy.
Despite these serious setbacks, Netanyahu continued to double-down. The 10/7 attacks and the heavy Israeli civilian casualties had galvanized America’s pro-Israel billionaires into extraordinary support for the Jewish State, and with the presidential election approaching, their political influence was at its height. While the Biden-Harris administration shipped Israel enormous quantities of munitions and declared its unwavering support, Republican Donald Trump and independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were even more fulsome in their pro-Israel public statements. Israel’s political strength was further demonstrated a few weeks ago when Netanyahu was invited to address a joint session of Congress and received an unprecedented 58 standing ovations by the bipartisan audience, more than one each minute. Some observers not unreasonably suggested that this foreign leader now actually exercised greater control over the American political system than Biden, Harris, Trump, or anyone else.
So in a colossal roll of the dice, Netanyahu has sought to ignite a large regional war, using his political influence to draw in the American military and use it to destroy Iran, Hezbollah, and all his other most powerful regional rivals, thereby establishing effective Israeli hegemony throughout the Middle East. Almost immediately upon his return from DC, he assassinated a top Hezbollah leader in Beirut with a missile strike and also deeply humiliated Iran’s newly elected president by assassinating the political leader of Hamas as the latter attended the inauguration ceremony in Tehran. These killings were obviously intended to provoke the sort of major military retaliation that could be used to draw America into a war.
Netanyahu’s plan seemed exceptionally risky. Experienced military experts agree that the huge missile arsenals of both Iran and Hezbollah could easily saturate and overwhelm Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome defensive system, laying waste to the country’s cities, thereby destroying most of the Jewish State and perhaps triggering the flight of much of its surviving population. Although neither of those adversaries possess nuclear weapons, analysts have noted that their conventional warheads could destroy Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor complex, blanketing much of the country with deadly radioactive contamination, which would substantially achieve the same result. So even if American attacks destroyed Israel’s enemies, Israel itself would probably suffer a similar fate. These sorts of pragmatic considerations help explain why top former Israeli national security figures have declared that Netanyahu is leading Israel to its doom.
Although there are probably several rounds left to play in this conflict, Israel has already sustained enormous economic damage and risks suffering destruction in a wider war against Iran and Hezbollah even if it wins the conflict by using America to destroy its regional adversaries. Just a couple of weeks ago, a highly-regarded retired Israeli general predicted Israel’s collapse within a year.
But I think that an even greater risk to Israel’s survival comes when we properly consider the other consequences of Israel’s brutal ongoing war against Gaza’s Palestinians.
For nearly a year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has probably been the world’s top news story, possibly receiving more media coverage during the last eleven months than it had during the previous seventy-five years combined. Many billions have now learned much about an issue that had previously been almost unknown to them. Netanyahu’s ruthless plan of bombing Gaza into rubble as a means of permanently expelling its Palestinian inhabitants has produced countless gripping videos showing death and devastation inflicted upon a helpless civilian population, and these have been distributed worldwide on social media, thereby bypassing the traditional pro-Israel gatekeepers of the mainstream media. Curious individuals have now discovered important facts long concealed by that media.
As I discussed in a lengthy article late last year, the simple history of the Israel-Palestine conflict is really quite shocking to anyone who encounters it for the first time. Large numbers of organized, well-armed Zionist militants, nearly all of them recent arrivals in Palestine, launched a planned campaign of massacre, murder, and rape to ethnically-cleanse and expel some 700,000 Palestinians from the lands in which they had peacefully lived for more than two thousand years.
Although a large majority of those Zionist militants were Marxian atheists, their primary public justification for the conquest and seizure of that territory was that the Hebrew God had pledged that land to their distant ancestors thousands of years earlier. Adding to the enormous irony, the top Zionist leaders had previously acknowledged that the Palestinians themselves were the actual direct descendants of the ancient Judeans who had supposedly received that holy covenant, while the conquering Zionists were at least half-European, with most of them probably having little if any Judean ancestry.
This outrageous campaign of conquest and expulsion constituted one of the worst ethnic cleansings in modern world history, and most remarkably of all, it took place just after the proclamation of the United Nations Charter had supposedly forever prohibited exactly this sort of military aggression.
Thus, the political legitimacy of the State of Israel immediately dissolves upon any careful investigation, and the events of the last year have likely prompted large numbers of thoughtful people all across the world to discover those important facts for the first time.
- American Pravda: The Nakba and the Holocaust
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 11, 2023 • 14,600 Words - American Pravda: The True Origin of the Jews as Khazars, Israelites, or Canaanites
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 27, 2024 • 12,900 Words
An even more important development has been an indirect consequence of the events of the last eleven months. Since its creation, one of Israel’s greatest strategic assets has been the enormously strong pro-Israel bias of the heavily Jewish mainstream media, which has often been willing to transform black into white or hide from public scrutiny any facts deemed less than flattering to the Jewish State.
But Netanyahu’s unprecedented ongoing slaughter of more than two million helpless Palestinian civilians and the unspeakable war crimes regularly committed by so many of his troops have finally begun to breach those media dikes, especially since the graphic evidence is so easily available in videos distributed on social media. It is worth recapitulating some of the grisly material I discussed last month:
According to American physicians interviewed by Politico Magazine and CBS News Sunday Morning, Israeli military snipers have regularly been executing Palestinian toddlers with precisely aimed shots to the head and the heart; indeed, for many years Israelis have proudly marketed tee-shirts boasting of their success in killing pregnant women and children. An article in the New York Times also reported that IDF forces have seized and tortured to death leading Palestinian surgeons and other medical doctors, with some of the survivors describing the horrific torments they endured at the hands of their brutal Israeli captors.
All of these barbaric atrocities have been justified and encouraged by the sweeping public statements of top Israeli leaders. For example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly identified the Palestinians with the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew god commanded must be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Just a few days ago, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that it would be “just and moral” for Israel to totally exterminate all two million Palestinians in Gaza, but he emphasized that world public opinion was currently preventing his government from taking that important step.
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Although this officially-stated Israeli goal of eradicating all Palestinian men, women, and children has not yet been achieved, more than ten months of bombs, bullets, and famine have made significant progress in that direction. The Lancet is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals and a few weeks ago it published a short piece conservatively estimating that relentless Israeli attacks and the complete destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure may be responsible for nearly 200,000 civilian deaths, a figure many times larger than any previous total mentioned in the media.
The massive, ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians together with these widespread, explicit public statements by top Israeli leaders led the esteemed jurists of the International Court of Justice to issue a series of near-unanimous rulings that Israel appeared to be undertaking a campaign of genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians. By late July even the notoriously pro-Israel editors of the English-language Wikipedia had finally endorsed the same conclusion.
In addition to these ongoing massacres, many thousands of Palestinian civilian captives have been seized, none of whom have ever been tried or convicted of anything. But with Israeli prison space overflowing, National Security Minister Itomar Ben-Gvir proposed summarily executing all of them by shooting each one in the head, thereby freeing up their prison space for new waves of captives.
Although the militaries of many countries have occasionally committed massacres or atrocities during wartime, sometimes even with the silent approval of their political leadership, it seems quite unusual to have the latter publicly endorse and advocate such policies, and no similar examples from recent centuries come to mind. I don’t doubt that if television journalists had interviewed Genghis Khan while he was ravaging all of Eurasia with his Mongol hordes, he might have casually made such statements, but I’d always assumed that standards of acceptable international behavior had considerably changed over the last thousand years.
When top leaders regularly issue such wholesale sanguinary declarations, some of their more enthusiastic subordinates may naturally decide to partly implement those same goals on a retail basis. These horrible recent Israeli atrocities merely continued the pattern from earlier this year, which had often been documented on social media by Israelis themselves, eager to emphasize the terrible punishment they were successfully inflicting upon their hated Palestinian foes. As I wrote a few months ago:
Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.
Anglin’s description of the Israeli behavior as being “cartoonishly evil” seemed a very apt phrase to me, and I used it in the title of my own article on the subject.
- The State of Israel as “Cartoonishly Evil”?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 5, 2024 • 5,500 Words - American Pravda: Hamas, Nazis, and the Right to Rape
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 12, 2024 • 7,300 Words
All these examples are absolutely horrific, yet only a sliver of them have gotten any significant coverage in our elite or broadcast media, and then only after nine or ten months of their regular occurrence. Israel has spent the last year committing the greatest televised massacre of helpless civilians in the history of the world, but I wonder whether most readers of the New York Times would have ever gotten that impression. Among those Americans who rely upon the mainstream media as their primary source of information, I doubt that even five in one hundred would have become aware of almost any of these horrors.
Indeed, most of our media has instead spent this last year promoting an entirely contrary and totally artificial reality, loudly condemning a series of absolutely ridiculous atrocity-hoaxes, each of which has been quietly abandoned after it had successfully embedded itself in the minds of our gullible, low-information citizens, some of whom are important elected officials. This began with the hoax of 40 beheaded babies, and continued on from there. As I wrote last month:
As I’ve pointed out in various articles, all these atrocity stories are almost certainly false, with both personal testimony and other strong evidence providing a very different version of events:
I’d previously mentioned the short interview of an Israeli woman with two young children who emphasized that the Hamas militants who occupied her home for a couple of hours had been quite respectful to her family. I had also reported the eyewitness testimony of a survivor from a Kibbutz near Gaza who explained that the civilians had been killed when the Israeli military attacked the Hamas fighters holding them.
Furthermore, the official list of dead Israelis indicates that nearly all of the victims were non-elderly adults, with a large fraction being soldiers or security personnel, hardly suggesting a policy of indiscriminate slaughter.
The latest wave of very doubtful claims has focused upon second-hand stories of Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations. These accounts only came to light two months after the events in question and lacked any supportive forensic evidence, with many of the claims coming from the same individuals behind the beheaded babies hoax, suggesting that they are equally desperate propaganda ploys. Journalists Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, and others have discussed the extreme credulity of the Times and other media outlets in promoting these blatantly fraudulent stories. Many of these points are summarized in a brief video discussion:
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Meanwhile, consider the very strong evidence from silence. According to news reports, small GoPro cameras were worn by the attacking Hamas militants, which recorded all their activities, and the Israelis recovered many of these from their bodies and began carefully examining hundreds of hours of this extensive video footage. They surely would have soon released a video compilation providing any incriminating evidence that they found, yet I’m not aware of a single public clip that shows any such brutal atrocities or mass killings, strongly suggesting that very little of that occurred. Indeed, the Gray Zone discovered that the main photograph provided of an allegedly raped and murdered Israeli woman actually turned out to be that of a female Kurdish fighter from years earlier that had been plucked off the Internet, demonstrating the apparent desperation and dishonesty of the pro-Israel propagandists promoting these stories.
Over the last couple of months it has gradually been admitted that perhaps half or more of all the 1,100-odd Israelis killed on October 7th probably died at the hands of their own panicked and trigger-happy military forces, in some cases being deliberately targeted due to Israel’s controversial “Hannibal Directive,” and those victims of friendly-fire were overwhelmingly civilians. Therefore, it seems quite possible that as few as 100 to 200 unarmed Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas militants, in many cases accidentally. This underscores the extreme disproportionality of perhaps as many as 200,000 Palestinian civilian dead.
- Pro-Israel Propaganda-Lies vs. Reality
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 30, 2023 • 4,300 Words - American Pravda: War Crimes and Atrocity-Hoaxes in the Israel/Gaza Conflict
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 6, 2023 • 6,400 Words
But I think that an even greater danger to Israel comes as a result of the massive media campaign to retain America’s vital support despite eleven months of genocidal rampage in Gaza.
That support still holds on the political level as demonstrated by Netanyahu’s 58 standing ovations in Congress, but the use of such media propaganda has been pushed to its limit, perhaps severely overtaxing that vital tool. Many tens of millions of Americans, especially younger ones, have become fully aware of the total disconnect between the mainstream media portrayal of events in Gaza and what they have been seeing with their own eyes on TikTok, Twitter, and other relatively uncensored social media platforms. The resulting collapse in media credibility may permanently cripple the powerful pro-Israel media framework that has dominated American society for the last half-century or longer, perhaps with very fateful consequences.
I think that media can best be understood as a potent means of mind-control that causes individuals to behave in ways very different from how they otherwise might. This applies both to ordinary citizens and also to important political leaders, and I suspect that a large majority of those who participated in Netanyahu’s standing ovations did so primarily as a result of such media mind-control, rather than due to the influence of money or blackmail, although those were likely also factors.
But such mind-control loses much of its effectiveness once its role has become understood and an automatic suspension of disbelief has been lost. As a result of this total disconnect between media coverage and reality, most intelligent observers have now quietly recognized that our media has been totally dishonest and unreliable on any matters sensitive to the Jewish State, and once they begin to consider that this may also have been equally true in the past, the implications are enormous. Important, controversial events of our history that might have previously been disregarded or ignored are now suddenly reconsidered in a very different light.
Consider, for example, the notorious case of the U.S.S. Liberty, our most advanced intelligence-gathering ship, which was suddenly and deliberately attacked by Israel in 1967 while sailing in international waters, with more than 200 American servicemen killed or wounded. This incident constituted our greatest naval loss of life since World War II.
A few years earlier, an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin had been deploying sabotage teams against the North Vietnamese coast when it mistakenly reported that it had been counter-attacked by torpedo boats. That hostile action never occurred, so obviously not a single American was injured, but the resulting political outrage prompted our involvement in the Vietnam War, in which we killed perhaps as many as three million Vietnamese.
So under this American standard of response, we might have expected that the vastly more serious—and actually real—attack upon that other vessel off Egypt’s coast to have produced far more forceful military retaliation, possibly including the total destruction of the small Middle Eastern nation responsible.
But our president at the time was the fervently pro-Israel Lyndon Johnson and Jews of similar sentiments then controlled all three American television networks, our two most influential national newspapers, and nearly all the Hollywood studios.
Thus, with all these central organs of government and media mind-control almost entirely in staunchly pro-Israel hands, this major military attack completely vanished from reality, and even when the facts finally came out a dozen years later, they were almost totally ignored, eliminating any possibility of significant public outrage. So instead of any harsh retaliation, our political and financial support for the country that had attacked us without provocation steadily escalated over time, now eventually reaching almost absurd proportions.
For decades, most Americans have been unwilling to believe that our media could have simply ignored such a blatant and deliberate attack against our military, and therefore assumed the incident must have been the result of mistaken identity or the fog of war or some other such fully mitigating factor. But once trust in the media has vanished, those excuses evaporate. I reviewed the U.S.S. Liberty story in considerable detail several years ago, and our country’s total non-reaction to the deliberate killing of so many of its own military servicemen was really quite remarkable.
- American Pravda: Remembering the Liberty
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 18, 2021 • 11,400 Words
The deadly 1967 Israeli attack upon our naval vessel involved the remarkable treachery of President Johnson, who kept the facts concealed and placed Israel’s national interests above his own duty to the lives of American servicemen. But LBJ only occupied the White House due to the 1963 assassination of his predecessor President John F. Kennedy, one of the most famous events of the twentieth century.
About a dozen years ago I finally became aware that the true facts of the JFK Assassination greatly differed from the official narrative of a crazed lone gunman that I had always casually absorbed from our media, and after a great deal of careful investigation, I concluded that the Israeli Mossad had probably played a central role in the death of our own president, acting to replace him with someone far more closely aligned with Israeli interests.
JFK had been exerting enormous pressure on Israel to halt its nuclear weapons development program and had also sought to severely curtail the growing influence of the Israel Lobby by forcing the organization that later became AIPAC to register as a foreign agent, thereby breaking its political power. But once Kennedy had been eliminated, his pro-Israel successor immediately reversed both these policies, thereby allowing Israel to acquire its large nuclear weapons arsenal and permitting AIPAC to grow into the colossal force that has now reduced most members of our Congress to trained seals, who gave an arrogant foreign leader those endless standing ovations.
Israel’s likely responsibility for the JFK Assassination was strongly supported by the long track-record of such bold Zionist political killings, both before and after the creation of its national state, as I noted in early 2020:
Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.
As far as I know, the early Zionists had a record of political terrorism almost unmatched in world history, and in 1974 Prime Minister Menachem Begin once even boasted to a television interviewer of having been the founding father of terrorism across the world.
A great deal of additional supporting evidence can be found by carefully reading between the lines of Ronan Bergman’s authoritative 2018 history of Mossad assassinations. During this last year of the Gaza conflict, the frequency and daring of Israel’s high-profile political assassinations has reached new heights.
Once we strip away and disregard the obfuscating layer of mainstream media narrative regarding the assassinations of JFK and his brother Robert, the evidence of Mossad culpability becomes very strong, perhaps even overwhelming.
- American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
“Final Judgment” on the JFK Assassination
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 27, 2020 • 27,300 Words
All these important facts should be kept in mind as we begin considering the true circumstances of the attacks of September 11, 2001, whose 23rd anniversary is now approaching. Those terrorist strikes against our country were not only the largest in human history, but perhaps even greater in magnitude that all the previous ones combined, and they forever changed our society and our world. Yet the distorting impact of media omission and deception has prevented most of us from ever discovering what actually happened, as I have discussed in my articles.
Around the time of the twentieth anniversary in 2021, I analyzed some of the evidence at considerable length:
One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew.
The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.
Of these famous incidents, Bergman only includes mention of the King David Hotel bombing. But much later in his narrative, he describes the huge wave of false-flag terrorist attacks unleashed in 1981 by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who recruited a former high-ranking Mossad official to manage the project.
Under Israeli direction, large car bombs began exploding in the Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities, killing or injuring enormous numbers of civilians. A single attack in October inflicted nearly 400 casualties, and by December, there were eighteen bombings per month, with their effectiveness greatly enhanced by the use of innovative new Israeli drone technology. Official responsibility for all the attacks was claimed by a previously unknown Lebanese organization, but the intent was to provoke the PLO into military retaliation against Israel, thereby justifying Sharon’s planned invasion of the neighboring country.
Since the PLO stubbornly refused to take the bait, plans were put into motion for the huge bombing of an entire Beirut sports stadium using tons of explosives during a January 1st political ceremony, with the death and destruction expected to be “of unprecedented proportions, even in terms of Lebanon.” But Sharon’s political enemies learned of the plot and emphasized that many foreign diplomats including the Soviet ambassador were expected to be present and probably would be killed, so after a bitter debate, Prime Minister Begin ordered the attack aborted. A future Mossad chief mentions the major headaches they then faced in removing the large quantity of explosives that they had already planted within the structure.
I think that this thoroughly documented history of major Israeli false-flag terrorist attacks, including those against American and other Western targets, should be carefully kept in mind when we consider the 9/11 attacks, whose aftermath has massively transformed our society and cost us so many trillions of dollars.
I explained that for many years after 9/11, I had fully accepted the official story and paid little attention to the details of the terrorist attacks, being instead focused upon the Iraq War that had soon followed. I only gradually grew suspicious over time as various elements came to my attention.
Admittedly, I’d occasionally heard of some considerable oddities regarding the 9/11 attacks here and there, and these certainly raised some suspicions. Most days I would glance at the Antiwar.com front page, and it seemed that some Israeli Mossad agents had been caught while filming the plane attacks in NYC, while a much larger Mossad “art student” spy operation around the country had also been broken up around the same time. Apparently, FoxNews had even broadcast a multi-part series on the latter topic before that expose was scuttled and “disappeared” under ADL pressure.
Although I wasn’t entirely sure about the credibility of those claims, it did seem plausible that Mossad had known of the attacks in advance and allowed them to proceed, recognizing the huge benefits that Israel would derive from the anti-Arab backlash. I think I was vaguely aware that Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo had published The Terror Enigma, a short book about some of those strange facts, bearing the provocative subtitle “9/11 and the Israeli Connection,” but I never considered reading it. In 2007, Counterpunch itself published a fascinating follow-up story about the arrest of that group of Israeli Mossad agents in NYC, who were caught filming and apparently celebrating the plane attacks on that fateful day, and the Mossad activity seemed to be far larger than I had previously realized…
Moreover, around that same time I’d stumbled across an astonishing detail of the 9/11 attacks that demonstrated the remarkable depths of my own ignorance. In a Counterpunch article, I’d discovered that immediately following the attacks, the supposed terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden had publicly denied any involvement, even declaring that no good Muslim would have committed such deeds.
Once I checked around a little and fully confirmed that fact, I was flabbergasted. 9/11 was not only the most successful terrorist attack in the history of the world, but may have been greater in its physical magnitude than all past terrorist operations combined. The entire purpose of terrorism is to allow a small organization to show the world that it can inflict serious losses upon a powerful state, and I had never previously heard of any terrorist leader denying his role in a successful operation, let alone the greatest in history. Something seemed extremely wrong in the media-generated narrative that I had previously accepted. I began to wonder if I had been as deluded as the tens of millions of Americans in 2003 and 2004 who naively believed that Saddam had been the mastermind behind the September 11th attacks. We live in a world of illusions generated by our media, and I suddenly felt that I had noticed a tear in the paper-mache mountains displayed in the background of a Hollywood sound-stage. If Osama was probably not the author of 9/11, what other huge falsehoods had I blindly accepted?
A couple of years later, I came across a very interesting column by Eric Margolis, a prominent Canadian foreign policy journalist purged from the broadcast media for his strong opposition to the Iraq War. He had long published a weekly column in the Toronto Sun and when that tenure ended, he used his closing appearance to run a double-length piece expressing his very strong doubts about the official 9/11 story, even noting that the former director of Pakistani Intelligence insisted that Israel had been behind the attacks.
I eventually discovered that in 2003 former German Cabinet Minister Andreas von Bülow had published a best-selling book strongly suggesting that the CIA rather than Bin Laden was behind the attacks, while in 2007 former Italian President Francesco Cossiga had similarly argued that the CIA and the Israeli Mossad had been responsible, claiming that fact was well known among Western intelligence agencies.
When utterly astonishing claims of an extremely controversial nature are made over a period of many years by numerous seemingly reputable academics and other experts, and they are entirely ignored or suppressed but never effectively rebutted, reasonable conclusions seem to point in an obvious direction. Based on my very recent readings in this topic, the total number of huge flaws in the official 9/11 story has now grown extremely long, probably numbering in the many dozens. Most of these individual items seem reasonably likely and if we decide that even just two or three of them are correct, we must totally reject the official narrative that so many of us have believed for so long.
Now I am merely just an amateur in the complex intelligence craft of extracting nuggets of truth from a mountain of manufactured falsehood. Although the arguments of the 9/11 Truth Movement seem quite persuasive to me, I would obviously have felt much more comfortable if they were seconded by an experienced professional, such as a top CIA analyst. A few years ago, I was shocked to discover that was indeed the case.
William Christison had spent 29 years at the CIA, rising to become one of its senior figures as Director of its Office of Regional and Political Analysis, with 200 research analysts serving under him. In August 2006, he published a remarkable 2,700 word article explaining why he no longer believed the official 9/11 story and felt sure that the 9/11 Commission Report constituted a cover-up, with the truth being quite different. The following year, he provided a forceful endorsement to one of Griffin’s books, writing that “[There’s] a strong body of evidence showing the official U.S. Government story of what happened on September 11, 2001 to be almost certainly a monstrous series of lies.” And Christison’s extreme 9/11 skepticism was seconded by that of many other highly regarded former US intelligence professionals.
We might expect that if a former CIA intelligence officer of Christison’s rank were to denounce the official 9/11 report as a fraud and a cover-up, such a story would constitute front-page news. But it was never reported anywhere in our mainstream media, and I only stumbled upon it a decade later.
Even our supposed “alternative” media outlets were nearly as silent. Throughout the 2000s, Christison and his wife Kathleen, also a former CIA analyst, had been regular contributors to Counterpunch, publishing many dozens of articles there and certainly being its most highly credentialed writers on intelligence and national security matters. But editor Alexander Cockburn refused to publish any of their 9/11 skepticism, so it never came to my attention at the time. Indeed, when I mentioned Christison’s views to current Counterpunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair a couple of years ago, he was stunned to discover that the friend he had regarded so very highly had actually become a “9/11 Truther.” When media organs serve as ideological gatekeepers, a condition of widespread ignorance becomes unavoidable.
With so many gaping holes in the official story of the events of seventeen years ago, each of us is free to choose to focus on those we personally consider most persuasive, and I have several of my own. Danish Chemistry professor Niels Harrit was one of the scientists who analyzed the debris of the destroyed buildings and detected the residual presence of nano-thermite, a military-grade explosive compound, and I found him quite credible during his hour-long interview on Red Ice Radio. The notion that an undamaged hijacker passport was found on an NYC street after the massive, fiery destruction of the skyscrapers is totally absurd, as was the claim that the top hijacker conveniently lost his luggage at one of the airports and it was found to contain a large mass of incriminating information. The testimonies of the dozens of firefighters who heard explosions just before the collapse of the buildings seems totally inexplicable under the official account. The sudden total collapse of Building Seven, never hit by any jetliners is also extremely implausible.
Having concluded that the official story of the 9/11 Attacks was probably false, I began considering other possibilities.
Let us now suppose that the overwhelming weight of evidence is correct, and concur with high-ranking former CIA intelligence analysts, distinguished academics, and experienced professionals that the 9/11 attacks were not what they appeared to be. We recognize the extreme implausibility that three huge skyscrapers in New York City suddenly collapsed at free-fall velocity into their own footprints after just two of them were hit by airplanes, and also that a large civilian jetliner probably did not strike the Pentagon leaving behind absolutely no wreckage and only a small hole. What actually did happen, and more importantly, who was responsible?
When pointing to the likely guilty parties, the more mainstream 9/11 Truth movement overwhelmingly denounced the terrorist attacks as an “inside job” orchestrated by the top leadership of the Bush administration. But this seemed completely ridiculous to me and merely represented an additional layer of deception, one aimed at appealing to the highly-partisan Democrats who constituted so much of that movement. Instead, a careful analysis pointed to very different culprits, whose likely identity was protected by both the mainstream and nearly all of the alternative media.
Let’s step back a bit. In the entire history of the world, I can think of no documented case in which the top political leadership of a country has launched a major false-flag attack upon its own centers of power and finance and tried to kill large numbers of its own people. The America of 2001 was a peaceful and prosperous country run by relatively bland political leaders focused upon the traditional Republican goals of enacting tax-cuts for the rich and reducing environmental regulations. Too many Truther activists have apparently drawn their understanding of the world from the caricatures of leftist comic-books in which corporate Republicans are all diabolical Dr. Evils, seeking to kill Americans out of sheer malevolence, and Alexander Cockburn was absolutely correct to ridicule them at least on that particular score.
So where do we now stand? It seems very likely that the 9/11 attacks were the work of an organization far more powerful and professionally-skilled than a rag-tag band of nineteen random Arabs armed with box-cutters, but also that the attacks were very unlikely to have been the work of the American government itself. So who actually attacked our country on that fateful day seventeen years ago, killing thousands of our fellow citizens?
Effective intelligence operations are concealed in a hall of mirrors, often extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate, and false-flag terrorist attacks certainly fall into this category. But if we apply a different metaphor, the complexities of such events may be seen as a Gordian Knot, almost impossible to disentangle, but vulnerable to the sword-stroke of asking the simple question “Who benefited?”
America and most of the world certainly did not, and the disastrous legacies of that fateful day have transformed our own society and wrecked many other countries. The endless American wars soon unleashed have already cost us many trillions of dollars and set our nation on the road to bankruptcy while killing or displacing many millions of innocent Middle Easterners. Most recently, that resulting flood of desperate refugees has begun engulfing Europe, and the peace and prosperity of that ancient continent is now under severe threat.
Our traditional civil liberties and constitutional protections have been drastically eroded, with our society having taken long steps toward becoming an outright police state. American citizens now passively accept unimaginable infringements on their personal freedoms, all originally begun under the guise of preventing terrorism.
I find it difficult to think of any country in the world that clearly gained as a result of the 9/11 attacks and America’s military reaction, with one single, solitary exception.
During 2000 and most of 2001, America was a peaceful prosperous country, but a certain small Middle Eastern nation had found itself in an increasingly desperate situation. Israel then seemed to be fighting for its life against the massive waves of domestic terrorism that constituted the Second Palestinian Intifada.
Ariel Sharon was widely believed to have deliberately provoked that uprising in September 2000 by marching to the Temple Mount backed by a thousand armed police, and the resulting violence and polarization of Israeli society had successfully installed him as Prime Minister in early 2001. But once in office, his brutal measures failed to end the wave of continuing attacks, which increasingly took the form of suicide-bombings against civilian targets. Many believed that the violence might soon trigger a huge outflow of Israeli citizens, perhaps producing a death-spiral for the Jewish state. Iraq, Iran, Libya, and other major Muslim powers were supporting the Palestinians with money, rhetoric, and sometimes weaponry, and Israeli society seemed close to crumbling. I remember hearing from some of my DC friends that numerous Israeli policy experts were suddenly seeking berths at Neocon thinktanks so that they could relocate to America.
Sharon was a notoriously bloody and reckless leader, with a long history of undertaking strategic gambles of astonishing boldness, sometimes betting everything on a single roll of the dice. He had spent decades seeking the Prime Ministership, but having finally obtained it, he now had his back to the wall, with no obvious source of rescue in sight.
The 9/11 attacks changed everything. Suddenly the world’s sole superpower was fully mobilized against Arab and Muslim terrorist movements, especially those connected with the Middle East. Sharon’s close Neocon political allies in America used the unexpected crisis as an opportunity to seize control of America’s foreign policy and national security apparatus, with an NSA staffer later reporting that Israeli generals freely roamed the halls of the Pentagon without any security controls. Meanwhile, the excuse of preventing domestic terrorism was used to implement newly centralized American police controls that were soon employed to harass or even shut down various anti-Zionist political organizations. One of the Israeli Mossad agents arrested by the police in New York City as he and his fellows were celebrating the 9/11 attacks and producing a souvenir film of the burning World Trade Center towers told the officers that “We are Israelis…Your problems are our problems.” And so they immediately became.
General Wesley Clark reported that soon after the 9/11 attacks he was informed that a secret military plan had somehow come into being under which America would attack and destroy seven major Muslim countries over the next few years, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya, which coincidentally were all of Israel’s strongest regional adversaries and the leading supporters of the Palestinians. As America began to expend enormous oceans of blood and treasure attacking all of Israel’s enemies after 9/11, Israel itself no longer needed to do so. Partly as a consequence, almost no other nation in the world has so enormously improved its strategic and economic situation during the last seventeen years, even while a large fraction of the American population has become completely impoverished during that same period and our national debt has grown to insurmountable levels. A parasite can often grow fat even as its host suffers and declines.
I have emphasized that for many years after the 9/11 attacks I paid little attention to the details and had only the vaguest notion that there even existed an organized 9/11 Truth movement. But if someone had ever convinced me that the terrorist attacks had been false-flag operations and someone other than Osama had been responsible, my immediate guess would have been Israel and its Mossad.
Certainly no other nation in the world can remotely match Israel’s track-record of remarkably bold high-level assassinations and false-flag attacks, terrorist and otherwise, against other countries, even including America and its military. Furthermore, the enormous dominance of Jewish and pro-Israel elements in the American establishment media and increasingly that of many other major countries in the West has long ensured that even when the solid evidence of such attacks was discovered, very few ordinary Americans would ever hear those facts.
Once we accept that the 9/11 attacks were probably a false-flag operation, a central clue to the likely perpetrators has been their extraordinary success in ensuring that such a wealth of enormously suspicious evidence has been totally ignored by virtually the entire American media, whether liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing.
In the particular case at hand, the considerable number of zealously pro-Israel Neocons situated just beneath the public surface of the Bush Administration in 2001 could have greatly facilitated both the successful organization of the attacks and their effective cover-up and concealment, with Libby, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Richard Perle being merely the most obvious names. Whether such individuals were knowing conspirators or merely had personal ties allowing them to be exploited in furthering the plot is entirely unclear.
Most of this information must surely have long been apparent to knowledgeable observers, and I strongly suspect that many individuals who had paid much greater attention than myself to the details of the 9/11 attacks may have quickly formed a tentative conclusion along these same lines. But for obvious social and political reasons, there is a great reluctance to publicly point the finger of blame towards Israel on a matter of such enormous magnitude. Hence, except for a few fringe activists here and there, such dark suspicions remained private.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the 9/11 Truth movement probably feared they would be destroyed by media accusations of deranged anti-Semitism if they had ever expressed even a hint of such ideas. This political strategy may have been necessary, but by failing to name any plausible culprit, they created a vacuum that was soon filled by “useful idiots” who shouted “inside job!” while pointing an accusing finger toward Cheney and Rumsfeld, and thereby did so much to discredit the entire 9/11 Truth movement.
This unfortunate conspiracy of silence finally ended in 2009 when Dr. Alan Sabrosky, former Director of Studies at the US Army War College, stepped forward and publicly declared that the Israeli Mossad had very likely been responsible for the 9/11 attacks, writing a series of columns on the subject, and eventually presenting his views in a number of media interviews, along with additional analyses.
Obviously, such explosive charges never reached the pages of my morning Times, but they did receive considerable if transitory coverage in portions of the alternative media, and I remember seeing the links very prominently featured at Antiwar.com and widely discussed elsewhere. I had never previously heard of Sabrosky, so I consulted my archiving system and immediately discovered that he had a perfectly respectable record of publication on military affairs in mainstream foreign policy periodicals and had also held a series of academic appointments at prestigious institutions. Reading one or two of his articles on 9/11, I felt he made a rather persuasive case for Mossad involvement, with some of his information already known to me but much of it not.
Since I was very busy with my software work and had never spent any time investigating 9/11 or reading any of the books on the topic, my belief in his claims back then was obviously quite tentative. But now that I have finally looked into the subject in much greater detail and done a great deal of reading, I think it seems quite likely that his 2009 analysis was entirely correct.
I would particularly recommend his long 2011 interview on Iranian Press TV, which I first watched just a couple of days ago. He came across as highly credible and forthright in his claims:
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/tpYjyFbJzPZh/ Video Link
He also provided a pugnacious conclusion in a much longer 2010 radio interview:
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/BigWEQyw6Cb7/ Video Link
Sabrosky focused much of his attention upon a particular segment of a Dutch documentary film on the 9/11 attacks produced several years earlier. In that fascinating interview, a professional demolition expert named Danny Jowenko who was largely ignorant of the 9/11 attacks immediately identified the filmed collapse of WTC Building 7 as a controlled-demolition, and the remarkable clip was broadcast worldwide on Press TV and widely discussed across the Internet.
And by a very strange coincidence, just three days after Jowenko’s broadcast video interview had received such heavy attention, he had the misfortune to die in a frontal collision with a tree in Holland. I’d suspect that the community of professional demolition experts is a small one, and Jowenko’s surviving industry colleagues may have quickly concluded that serious misfortune might visit those who rendered controversial expert opinions on the collapse of the three World Trade Center towers.
Meanwhile, the ADL soon mounted a huge and largely successful effort to have Press TV banned in the West for promoting “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” even persuading YouTube to entirely eliminate the huge video archive of those past shows, notably including Sabrosky’s long interview.
Most recently, Sabrosky provided an hour-long presentation at this June’s Deep Truth video panel conference, during which he expressed considerable pessimism about America’s political predicament, and suggested that the Zionist control over our politics and media had grown even stronger over the last decade.
His discussion was soon rebroadcast by Guns & Butter, a prominent progressive radio program, which as a consequence was soon purged from its home station after seventeen years of great national popularity and strong listener support.
The late Alan Hart, a very distinguished British broadcast journalist and foreign correspondent, also broke his silence in 2010 and similarly pointed to the Israelis as the likely culprits behind the 9/11 attacks. Those interested may wish to listen to his extended interview.
Journalist Christopher Bollyn was one of the first writers to explore the possible Israeli links to the 9/11 attacks, and the details contained in his long series of newspaper articles are often quoted by other researchers. In 2012, he gathered together this material and published it in the form of a book entitled Solving 9-11, thereby making his information on the possible role of the Israeli Mossad available to a much wider audience, with a version being available online. Unfortunately his printed volume severely suffers from the typical lack of resources available to the writers on the political fringe, with poor organization and frequent repetition of the same points due to its origins in a set of individual articles, and this may diminish its credibility among some readers. So those who purchase it should be forewarned about these serious stylistic weaknesses.
Probably a much better compendium of the very extensive evidence pointing to the Israeli hand behind the 9/11 attacks has been more recently provided by French writer Laurent Guyénot, both in his 2017 book JFK-9/11: 50 Years of the Deep State and also his 8,500 word article “9/11 was an Israeli Job”, published concurrently with this one and providing a far greater wealth of detail than is contained here. While I would not necessarily endorse all of his claims and arguments, his overall analysis seems fully consistent with my own.
These writers have provided a great deal of material in support of the Israeli Mossad Hypothesis, but I would focus attention on just one important point. We would normally expect that terrorist attacks resulting in the complete destruction of three gigantic office buildings in New York City and an aerial assault on the Pentagon would be an operation of enormous size and scale, involving very considerable organizational infrastructure and manpower. In the aftermath of the attacks, the US government undertook great efforts to locate and arrest the surviving Islamic conspirators, but scarcely managed to find a single one. Apparently, they had all died in the attacks themselves or otherwise simply vanished into thin air.
But without making much effort at all, the American government did quickly round up and arrest some 200 Israeli Mossad agents, many of whom had been based in exactly the same geographical locations as the purported 19 Arab hijackers. Furthermore, NYC police arrested some of these agents while they were publicly celebrating the 9/11 attacks, and others were caught driving vans in the New York area containing explosives or their residual traces. Most of these Mossad agents refused to answer any questions, and many of those who did failed polygraph tests, but under massive political pressure all were eventually released and deported back to Israel. A couple of years ago, much of this information was very effectively presented in a short video available on YouTube.
There is another fascinating tidbit that I have very rarely seen mentioned. Just a month after the 9/11 attacks, two Israelis were caught sneaking weapons and explosives into the Mexican Parliament building, a story that naturally produced several banner-headlines in leading Mexican newspapers at the time but which was greeted by total silence in the American media. Eventually, under massive political pressure, all charges were dropped and the Israeli agents were deported back home. This remarkable incident was only reported on a small Hispanic-activist website, and discussed in a few other places. Some years ago I easily found the scanned front pages of the Mexican newspapers reporting those dramatic events on the Internet, but I can no longer easily locate them. The details are obviously somewhat fragmentary and possibly garbled, but certainly quite intriguing.
One might speculate that if supposed Islamic terrorists had followed up their 9/11 attacks by attacking and destroying the Mexican parliament building a month later, Latin American support for America’s military invasions in the Middle East would have been greatly magnified. Furthermore, any scenes of such massive destruction in the Mexican capital by Arab terrorists would surely have been broadcast non-stop on Univision, America’s dominant Spanish-language network, fully solidifying Hispanic support for President Bush’s military endeavors.
- American Pravda: Seeking 9/11 Truth After Twenty Years
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 7, 2021 • 7,800 Words
I’d also strongly recommend this long 2018 article by French analyst Laurent Guyénot that provides a wealth of detailed information on this same hypothesis.
- 9/11 Was an Israeli Job
How America was neoconned into World War IV
Laurent Guyénot • The Unz Review • September 10, 2018 • 8,500 Words
In 1988 John Carpenter released They Live, a moderately successful and relatively low-budget science fiction film that has become a cult classic over the decades, especially popular in dissident and conspiratorial circles.
Set in an impoverished and disintegrating America, a drifter discovers a pair of special sunglasses that reveal a hidden world all around him, one in which alien beings seem to have seized control and imposed their malevolent will upon our society. Their presence among us is concealed by a layer of illusion that is successfully penetrated by those sunglasses, which allow individuals to see our true reality and take corrective action.
I believe that during the last eleven months since October 7th, Israeli operations in Gaza have provided all willing individuals with exactly such a pair of special sunglasses, allowing them to pierce the decades of illusion and distortion produced by our mainstream media. Using those powerful tools, they can finally begin to unravel the true facts of the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the JFK Assassination, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So each of them must decide whether to use those special sunglasses or instead fearfully cast them aside.
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