My old pal and radio guest Jonathan Kay is upset about Tuesday's interview with Alan Hart, which has gone viral during the past 48 hours.
In a piece headlined The Canadian Charger Magazine honours another 9/11 conspiracy theorist, Kay offers a perfect example of the debating technique of pro-Zionists and anti-truthers: (1) call your opponents names, and (2) lie shamelessly.
Kay begins his piece by labeling Hart a "9/11 conspiracy theorist." In fact, anyone who thinks 9/11 was planned and carried out by more than one person must offer a theory about what is by definition a conspiracy. Therefore anyone who discusses responsibility for 9/11 is literally a conspiracy theorist. Unfortunately, this universal and thus completely empty term is often employed as an ad-hominem insult by those who have no rational or empirical arguments to back up their own conspiracy theory that 19 Arabs with box cutters and a guy in a cave on dialysis did 9/11. (Note: Even Alex "Oswald killed JFK" Cockburn is sick of this kind of anti-conspiracy-theory tripe.)
Kay also uses the ad hominem technique in labeling me a "truther." While I might accurately be called a member of the 9/11 truth movement, I doubt that Kay would label another Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist professor with a different opinion on this issue an "anti-truther" or "official story apologist." He is picking and choosing labels he thinks will be prejudicial--a classic use of the ad hominem fallacy.
After quoting my blog entry on the Alan Hart interview, Kay finishes his piece:
"Can someone please tell me why our human rights mandarins, who seem to have time to launch an investigation every time a Christian preacher writes a letter to the editor about homosexuality, give a free pass to Muslims and Marxists who blame the 'Zionists' for all the crimes known to humanity?"
Kay suggests that Hart (who is neither a Muslim nor a Marxist) and I (a non-Marxist Muslim) blame Zionists for all the crimes known to humanity. This is, of course, an outrageous lie. Neither Hart nor I have ever blamed Zionists for the U.S. slaughter of millions of Vietnamese, Pol Pot's atrocities in Cambodia, the CIA's torture-murder of a million Indonesians in the mid-1960s, the genocide of the Native Americans, the African slave trade holocaust...the list could go on until it included the vast majority of "crimes known to humanity" or at least to Hart and me.
Since Kay's statement follows his quote from my blog entry about the Hart interview, he is implying that the evidence that Hart and I blame Zionists for all the crimes known to humanity is to be found in that quote. The specific crimes mentioned in that quote are, in order of appearance:
1) The Israeli massacre of U.S.S. Liberty crewmen in 1967.
2) 9/11
3) The "loose nukes" attempt to steal nuclear weapons from Minot Air Force Base in August, 2007.
4) The ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
All historians agree that Zionists -- meaning those actively attempting to create and maintain a Jewish state in Palestine -- are responsible for crimes 1 and 4. As for crimes 2 and 3, there is very strong evidence for heavy Zionist involvement in crime 2, and enough circumstantial evidence to make the Cheney-Zionist cabal that did 9/11 prime suspects in crime 3.
Whether or not you agree with me about crimes 2 and 3, you must admit that neither Hart nor I have done anything remotely like "blaming 'Zionists' for all the crimes known to humanity." Kay's statement is a lie. A lie, used deliberately or recklessly in an attempt to denigrate a person, is called libel.
Kay's piece also seems Islamophobic. By pejoratively calling the Canadian Charger "the folks who brought you the Canadian Islamic Congress" Kay seems to be suggesting that there is something wrong with being "Islamic." If a journalist for a major North American newspaper implied that the word "Jewish" is pejorative, by scorning "the folks who brought you the Canadian Jewish Congress," would that not suggest anti-Semitism? So why are the rules different for things Islamic?
Kay's fallacious, mendacious, seemingly-racist* piece ducks the real issue: Actual evidence for and against the proposition that 9/11 was a false-flag operation with heavy Zionist involvement. Most of the world's Muslims think it was (as do a great many non-Muslim experts). Most of the world's Jews, and those who get their information from Jewish-dominated media, disagree.
The way to settle this debate is by airing and arguing the facts -- not by lying, spinning, waxing racist, and using ad hominem attacks.
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*While Islam is a religion of all races, in North America, Islamophobia is a form of racism, because Muslims are viewed as brown-skinned foreigners.
