An inconvenient truther …

El Farouk Khaki is a progressive gay muslim man. He is an immigration lawyer and community activist. Why the liberal and tory posters on this thread would prefer to talk about this instead of the economy or health care or countless other things is beyond me. Racism and anti-semiticism are terrible and must be called out but it is also easy to throw that mud. How much of these candidate resignations and firings come because of of the heat of the campaign as opposed to the light of truth. I hope for the ‘karma’ or ‘souls’ of those so quick to accuse that they are right in their assumptions and accurate in their information.

comment by Craig Hubley on Friday, September 26, 2008 at 3:12 pm:

It’s possible to read those comments as “Mossad was a very smart intelligence agency and warned Israeli nationals to get out of the way of a virtually-certain attack every aspect of which was easy to predict in advance.”

***

This is essentially how I read the comments. I think the idea is silly but not anti-jew. I would apologize to anyone who misinterpreted my comment, except that I don’t believe their indignation is honest or that they truly believe it is anti-semitism.

Ron;most people with “functional brains” don’t have to answer how the buildings collapsed because they can rewind the video and see clearly that hijacked commercial airplanes were flown right through the middle of them.

When you find video of federal agents or “jews” as the conspiracy goes, planting or detonating bombs that caused the collapse, please pass them along so us people with non-functioning brains can reconsider.

Huh. So this is what I get for ignoring local coverage of the election… This is practically in my backyard (used to live in the riding, even), and this is the first I’m hearing about it.

Anyhow, wanted to chime in on the “It wasn’t exactly what you’d call a close race last time” comment… In 2004, this riding wasn’t decided until a recount the morning after, with less than 250 votes separating the Conservatives and the Liberals, and before that, it had been held for years by the Liberals.

Of course, in 2004, I believe, they also changed the boundaries of the riding slightly, to include more of the Conservative suburbs… Also, the Riding is home to most of Winnipeg’s rather large Filipino community, and the Liberal who held the riding was a prominent member of the Filipino community (he didn’t run in 2004).

My gut says this is going to stay Conservative – Winnipeg’s housing market is booming, and this riding is benefiting from that, bringing in more Conservative-Friendly Suburban-types – but it borders some very NDP friendly ridings, so we’ll see…

“Official pancake theories requiring symmetric failings around a perimeter, shattering of over-engineered structural steel out of the fire zone by crumbled concrete platforms falling through the mostly hollow steel core grid, in such rapid descent, borders on the absurd.”

Sounds pretty plausible to me. Isn’t that how demolitions are conducted? The lower floors had the weight of all the upper floors falling on them one by one. Also, the buildings collapsed more or less at the interval at which the planes struck them. Besides, do you really think the secret of such a conspiracy could be kept? The “authorities destroyed evidence” is a bit of a stretch, no?

As to the antisemitic nature of alleging that the Israelis cleared out beforehand with prior knowledge, it basically suggests that Israel was willing to cooperate in allowing a terrible catastrophe to take place. Such an idea fits awfully neatly into the traditional “Jews are conspiring to undermine the world” thesis of antisemitic paranoia.

Just thought I’d rebut, however little effect it’s likely to have. You must admit that if the WTC conspiracy theory is untrue it’s pernicious and outrageous. If you have doubts about the truth, perhaps it’s better to suspend judgment until a scintilla of evidence emerges that you might be right.

T.Thwim – can’t dismiss it like that, the collapse didn’t happen concurrently with the plane collision, especially building 7 which had none. Tin foil references don’t impress as much as getting the most basic of facts right.
Jack – if all of us are holding a pancake, we need to let go at the same time or at least in a symmetric pattern for it to fall flat like a pancake. Yes this is what happens in a controlled demolition because evenly-distributed explosives are detonated in a systematic sequence, resembling the WTC collapses. So where is that building fire resemblance again? If a concrete floor detaches from the steel grid core that supports it and tumbles to a lower floor, why would the impact mostly on the structurally weak lower floor which then supposedly collapses in turn, imply the steel core grid which was engineered to be more than strong enough to hold the weight of all above floors and whose load has been lightened and who presents a much smaller surface area target for any falling debris than floor surface, be shattered? As for the article, it actually carts Israel as an ally who warned their American friends of an impending attack, then took steps to protect their own. Not that a reporting of a negative act by Israel would have been “anti-semitic”.

Jack – how secrets are kept is a much bigger subject but compartmentalization is part of it. Evidence was destroyed – that is a fact that can be googled like every other argument. It requires a little bit of research, objective logic, and the humility to recognize we are all emotional beings reluctant to give up strongly-held beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Thanks to all for the civil debate.

Sean – just google “anti-semitism and “the left”” and you’ll get plenty of references.”

Isn’t science great?

Anti-Israel and Anti-Semetic are not the same thing. One can oppose the government of Israel, its actions and the actions of its agents without hating the Jewish people. People oppose the actions of any number of governments all the time, it isn’t hate it is debate and politics. It is very telling how many commenters are using the words “Jew” and “Israel” interchangably here when they ARE NOT synonyms!
Were her comments foolish? Probably. Should she have been trufed? Perhaps. Was her suggestion that one government (which happens to be the government of a Jewish nation) did something underhanded anti-semetic? Absolutely not. The funniest thing about this, and all the other instances where criticism of Israel is equated with anti-semitism is that in Israel itself the press and the citizens are far more critical of their governments than the people being chastized for the same thing elsewhere.

Jarrid – I find self-described “conservatives” to be among the biggest censors of all, for all the “free speech” rhetoric. I remember a local Gazette reporter’s article on GMO agri-business censored by CanWest management because the subject of the interview, a scientist and hero for Indian farmers, author of “Stolen Harvest”, “lacked credibility” according to the CanWest goon, resulting in the reporter’s resignation. (Conrad Black, where are you?)
Just an example (though I have many) of censorship on the 911 issue is when a 5-year member of the Free Republic website kicked out a guy who found fault in the official explanation of the 911 collapses, and I remember the remaining members expressing amazement that a “mole” had escaped detection for 5 years!
And now I seen to have been censored on Taylor’s site (unless it was a computer glitch) in a post pointing out that, unlike her snickering critics, Hughes actually provided credible sources for her article (Michael Ruppert,author of “Crossing the Rubicon”).

Brian – so who decides the appropriate usage of the words “Israel” and “jew”? The CJC? If anything, Hughes is the one being ridiculed for her minority viewpoints, except they are not faith-based. On quiet reflection, I guess it may have been a strategic move, as others have said, since she wasn’t the front-runner. Cynical.

RyanD:

Settle down, nobody is calling you a racist or a bigot. However, defending the position that Israel (and not just jews) planned and executed the murder of 3000 innocents is not “contributing to open dialogue”, its absurd.

Whether or not, in this case, you draw correlations between Israel the nation state or jewish people is completely irrelevant. This comes down to Mrs. Hughes statements which are rooted deeply in both anti-americanism and hateful anti-semitism. Whether you call them jews or israelis is besides the point: you’re suggesting that they conspired to 1) murder 3000 of their own people to 2) start an international war against terrorism (i.e. muslims)

You can criticize Israel all you want. Calling them murderers without one iota of evidence to support some radical consipiracy theory of yours is not “criticism”, its anti-intellectual. When you take those comments to their logical conclusion -they are no different than the conspiracy theorists and/or racists who deny the holocaust.

Ryan: “If we find that, like Mr. Ahmadinejad she has a track record of denying the holocaust etc…then we can safely assume she, like far to many others (who support and oppose Israel)is using “Jew” and “Israel” as synonyms.”

So, a person can believe that Israeli operatives were responsible for 9-11 and not be antisemetic – but disbelief in the Holocaust is another matter? If you think Ms. Hugh’s delusions are just a woman attempting to speak truth to power, why not extend the same courteousy to the wack jobs who happen to think the Holocaust was a Zionist conspiracy?

Sorry, I don’t buy it. Hughes is one of a long line of hatemongers eager to use an imaginary cabal of scarey Jews as her personal scapegoats. Antisemite fits the bill perfectly.