9/11: Turns Out It Wasn't The Freemasons After All

Barry Zwicker is a media critic long beloved by certain sections of the Canadian left. He's routinely billed as Canada's answer to Michael Moore. If you want the whole story about what really happened on September 11, 2001, Zwicker can follow the thread for you all the way back to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The upshot: Guy Fawkes was a patsy.

It wasn’t a surprise attack by Islamist fanatics at all. It was really a cunning fabrication, a deception, a fiction, and a plot, all orchestrated by the White House.

The same White House plot, says Zwicker, was involved in the March 11, 2004 bomb blasts on commuter trains in Madrid that resulted in the murder of 192 people. The murder of 52 people in the July 7, 2005, suicide-bomb attacks in London was part of the same conspiracy. This month’s British foiling of a terror plot to blow up several passenger airliners on 10 transatlantic flights out of London is part of it, too.

It’s all “a gigantic terror fraud,” Zwicker told me during a long conversation the other day. It’s all about establishing a climate of fear to justify the curtailment of civil liberties and the expenditure of billions of dollars on weapons and on war.

And to what end?

“It is a war against Islam,” Zwicker told me. “It is a war against millions of people who happen to share the same faith.”

That's from my column today, which was cut a bit. The column I filed was exactly 911 words. A mere coincidence, you think?

In the same edition of the same newspaper you can read a tortured apologia for Hezbollah, amply illustrating the squalor of certain left-wing neighbourhoods that I described here and elaborated upon here and here. For my sins, my editors give Rafeh Hulays even more space than my offending column occupied, in order to respond to what I wrote.

As it turns out, the fact that Hassan Nasrallah is a foul antisemite has escaped Hulays' notice all this time. The evidence is "not characteristic of the man, and I am in the process of determining its veracity," Hulays pledges. Good for you, Rafeh. Get right on it. You can start here, or here or here.

Mainly, Hulays uses the opportunity to vent yet more bile upon Israel. Big surprise.

Also, in the same edition, the Muslim Canadian Congress, no longer burdened by the intellectual weight and moral clarity of Tarek Fatah, is afforded space to demand an apology from Michael Ignatieff for a statement that everybody knew was taken out of context pretty well the minute it first appeared. I would have thought the Congress might actually have thanked Ignatieff for having been first out of the block in articulating what ended up being the basis of the deal that ended Israel's bombing of Lebanon. But no.

In letters today, Michel Facon instructs me in my errors, explaining that to be a "fascist" you have to be a Christian "family values" type. Gordon Murray and Les Priest drop their quarters in the Outraged-By-Zionism letter generator and get what you would expect (Murray doesn't mention it but he's with the ISM, "the peace group that embraces violence"). And Robin Matthews suggests the punishment for my doctrinal errors should be exile to the Middle East.

Okay, Robin. I pick Jaffa.

Louise Zizka thinks I'm a mensch anyway. Thanks, Louise. And Howard M. Karby properly observes that we don’t have to and should not view the political left as having become a single monolithic group of people who hate Israel no matter what she does, and was pleased that my column served as a reminder that one can be progressive without joining the camp of the Israel haters. That's for noticing, Howie.

Simon, a comrade, weighs in. He gets it, perfectly:

I won’t claim to be surprised by the stubborn persistence with which StopWar’s leadership insist on referring to themselves as “peace activists” and “the antiwar movement” in response to Terry Glavin’s timely and much-appreciated piece on their organization [Letters, August 10-17].

Apparently guided by a perverse misreading of anti-imperialist ideals, these cynical leaders of a bankrupt pseudo-left have functionally allied themselves with some of the most noxious and regressive ultraconservative, fascist, and theocratic elements to be found anywhere. This is their right as citizens of an open democracy.

What is not acceptable, however, is their continued abuse of the peace movement’s good name to mask a completely partisan, anti-Israel, Hezbollah-sympathizing agenda that condemns the violence of one party while remaining overwhelmingly silent (at best) on the Islamic terrorism, save the most impotent of bland, pro forma small print.

Good on ye, Simon.

Long live Israel. Long live Palestine.