Among the Truthers

Last night, CNN host Piers Morgan invited Texas-based radio host Alex Jones on his show. The ostensible reason was to allow Jones to defend his petition to get Morgan thrown out of the United States as a treasonous “Redcoat.” But the thing quickly degenerated into a confused debate about gun rights — a subject that figures prominently in Jones’ libertarian conspiracy theories (most of which involve New World Order “globalists” descending from Washington or the United Nations to enslave or slaughter disarmed — and therefore defenseless — American patriots).

Monday’s performance was very much in keeping with Jones’ intellectual pedigree. He  suggested, for instance, that Barack Obama himself will lead the coming war against the American people: “The government buys 1.6 billion bullets, armoured vehicles, tanks, helicopters, predator drones, armed now in US skies, being used to arrest people in North Dakota.” Jones also declared that “1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!” and said that he owns about 50 weapons.

Since that broadcast, thousands of shocked viewers and pundits have taken to the internet, declaring that Jones has “lost his marbles” or “gone bananas.” But anyone who has followed Jones over the years knows that, to the extent he ever had any marbles, he lost them about two decades ago.

Three years ago, I interviewed Jones for a book I was writing about conspiracy theories. And he told me a little about where he got his paranoid (that’s my word) ideas about government.

Turns out, it all started with David Koresh and the Waco siege.

Jones grew up in the Dallas suburbs, just two hours’ drive from the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel. In 1993, when Jones was barely out of high school, a seven-week Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) siege ended in the incineration of 76 cult members. Jones remembers being transfixed by the congressional hearings into the fiasco, which were broadcast by C-SPAN. The episode turned Jones into a full-time crusader against the United States government. Continue reading →

Last month’s Sandy Hook school shootings spawned a debate about gun control among mainstream American politicians and pundits. Among American kooks, on the other hand, the killings spawned a bizarre-seeming set of conspiracy theories, which imagine that Adam Lanza’s slaughter of a classroom full of elementary school children in Connecticut was all part of some diabolical Obama-masterminded plan to take away Americans’ assault rifles. A YouTube video that sets out the conspiracy theory (in somewhat tedious detail) has been viewed more than 11 million times.

It’s lurid and it’s bizarre. Yet in two crucial respects, Sandy Hook conspiracism isn’t much different from all the other flavours of paranoia we’ve witnessed in recent years, including the Obama Birthers and the 9/11 Truthers.

First, all conspiracy theories purport to address the problem of evil in the world and, more specifically, the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people (the branch of thought known to theologians as theodicy).

In this sense, conspiracism acts as a secular replacement for supernatural devil figures, projecting responsibility for human suffering onto Jews, Freemasons, the New World Order or other more obscure villains. This aspect of conspiracism explains why conspiracy theories always proliferate in the shadow of mass human-suffering events or sociologically traumatic expressions of evil, such as the First World War, the Holocaust, the assassination of JFK — and modern mass shootings.

Second, all conspiracy theories reflect widespread distrust in powerful institutions — including not only national governments, but also NGOs, the United Nations, the mass media and the health-care industry. Many 9/11 conspiracy theorists I’ve interviewed, for instance, told me that the defining moment in their political evolution came when U.S. forces failed to find the promised weapons of mass destruction following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Obama conspiracy theorists, meanwhile, cite everything from Obamacare to the much-mythologized UN Agenda 21 as proof that the U.S. President is soon going to throw every American patriot into a FEMA concentration camp.

In the realm of public health, these two elements — distrust and the need to explain human suffering — have combined to produce stubbornly popular conspiracy theories that inhibit life-saving medical therapies: Ironically, an irrational fear of government schemes to engineer human suffering have caused many citizens to forsake therapies that have been engineered to save their lives. This month, for instance, Britain’s Guardian newspaper published a heart-rending tale of Pakistanis who refuse to eat salt containing iodine — a necessary chemical that helps prevent goiters, mental retardation, birth defects and other problems — because they believe the ingredient is part of a government conspiracy to render them infertile.

Here in the West, we like our iodine just fine. Yet many of us still give the time of day to other conspiracy theorists, such as anti-vaccine activists who falsely claim a linkage between the widely administered MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism spectrum disorder.

Much of the blame goes to celebrity laypersons such as former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy. Since 1998, when the vaccine/autism theory first was put forward in a study published in the Lancet medical journal (subsequently retracted in 2010), untold millions of parents across the Western world have avoided vaccinating their children, leaving them exposed to deadly, and entirely preventable, diseases such as measles, whooping cough and Hib influenza. Continue reading →

Last night, CNN host Piers Morgan invited Texas-based radio host Alex Jones on his show. The ostensible reason was to allow Jones to defend his petition to get Morgan thrown out of the United States as a treasonous “Redcoat.” But the thing quickly degenerated into a confused debate about gun rights — a subject that figures prominently in Jones’ libertarian conspiracy theories (most of which involve New World Order “globalists” descending from Washington or the United Nations to enslave or slaughter disarmed — and therefore defenseless — American patriots).

Monday’s performance was very much in keeping with Jones’ intellectual pedigree. He  suggested, for instance, that Barack Obama himself will lead the coming war against the American people: “The government buys 1.6 billion bullets, armoured vehicles, tanks, helicopters, predator drones, armed now in US skies, being used to arrest people in North Dakota.” Jones also declared that “1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!” and said that he owns about 50 weapons. Continue reading →

On Page 3 of today’s National Post, Tristan Hopper reports on the conspiracy theory, being promoted on Iran’s Press TV network, that Canadian “counterterrorism squads” are abducting First Nations children for sale to adoption agencies.

Like just about everything on Press TV, the story is garbage. But the name of the Press TV “Calgary correspondent,” Joshua Blakeney,” jumped out at me.

I’ve met Blakeney. And National Post readers might be surprised to know that his conspiracism is actually funded by the government of Alberta. Or at least it was as recently as two years ago.

Here is what I wrote about Blakeney in 2010:

As some readers may know, I’ve spent the last few years tracking the 9/11 Truth Movement — these being the conspiracy theorists who believe that the 9/11 terror attacks were staged by American neo-conservatives as a pretext to launch wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Truth movement is primarily an American phenomenon, but there are a few major Canadian “Truthers.” One of them is Anthony Hall, the founding coordinator or the Globalization Studies program at the University of Lethbridge.

As I can report from my personal encounters with Hall at 9/11 Truth events in Montreal and Walkerton, Ont., the man is very passionate about his Trutherdom. But as long as he keeps it out of the classroom, he’s free to believe in whatever conspiracy theories he likes.

Unfortunately, Hall seems to be using his post at Lethbridge as a training ground for 9/11 Trutherdom. His star pupil in this regard is British graduate student Joshua Blakeney, who can be seen in this 2009 video harassing a female CBC reporter with his dark theories about the CBC’s failure to investigate the 9/11 “cover-up.” Blakeney also wrote this charming article expressing delight that author Christopher Hitchens had been sickened with cancer.

On Wednesday afternoon, Hall proudly announced that the University of Lethbridge has awarded Blakeney a $7,714 Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship to pursue his research. (The scholarship is listed as being funded through the “ongoing financial commitment of the Province of Alberta.”) Blakeney’s first $3,857 cheque will be available for pick-up on Dec. 1.

And what will Blakeney be researching? His M.A. research proposal/letter of intent was posted on his website as of Thursday afternoon: “Professor Hall and I have devoted particular attention to debates and controversies concerning the originating events of the GWOT [Global War On Terrorism]. In developing these interests we have been influenced especially by the scholarship of a number of academics including professors David Ray Griffin, John McMurtry, Michel Chossudovsky, Graeme MacQueen. Michael Keefer, Peter Dale Scott, Stephen Jones, Niels Harritt, and Nafeez Ahmed. From a wide array of academic perspectives, each of these specialists has presented evidence to call into question various facets of what Professor MacQueen has recently labelled the “government version” of the events that gave rise to the GWOT. My objective is to evaluate the content, quality and veracity of the body of literature that both supports and criticizes the government version of history used to justify the invasions and domestic transformations that make up the GWOT.”

The names “David Ray Griffin, John McMurtry, Michel Chossudovsky, Graeme MacQueen. Michael Keefer, Peter Dale Scott, Stephen Jones, Niels Harritt, and Nafeez Ahmed” effectively constitute a who’s-who of the most influential Canadian, American and British 9/11 Truth conspiracy theorists. David Ray Griffin, in particular, is the author of The New Pearl Harbor, which more or less became the bible of the Truth movement when it came out in 2004.

In other words, the University of Lethbridge — and, through the province of Alberta’s funding arrangements, the taxpayers of Alberta — are paying a British graduate student $7,714 to pursue his conspiracy theory that the 9/11 attacks were staged by Washington.

Does anyone else see a problem with that?

The plot thickened in September, 2011, when I noticed that Blakeney was writing for an anti-Semitic web site called Veterans Today — which is presumably one of the credentials that makes him highly sought after by Press TV’s producers. Here’s an email I wrote about the incident to the University of Lethbridge:

Hi. I’m an editor at the National Post newspaper. I got the following message from one of your students:

> From: Josh Blakeney [josh.vivelarevolucion@gmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2011 1:36 AM
> Subject: U of L congratulates me on my work with with Veterans Today in their grad school newsletter
> http://lethbridgeschoolgraduatestudies.createsend1.com/t/ViewEmail/

When I click on the link, I get a link to a web site that provides the latest U of L School of Graduate Studies newsletter. And under the “congratulations” section, it reads:

“Josh Blakely was appointed as a staff writer at Veterans Today which is a quite popular media venue based in the US. He has also appeared on several media outlets in the U.S. and Canada discussing his research area. Congratulations Josh!”

I assume this is a misspelled reference to Joshua Blakeney, a graduate student of Anthony Hall in the Dept. of Globalization Studies. Like Prof. Hall, Mr. Blakeney is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who embraces a number of bizarre opinions. Those opinions may or may not concern you. But one thing you should know is that “Veterans Today,” while sounding like a respectable-sounding web site, is in fact infested with anti-semitism. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has determined, the site has become a major center for 9/11 conspiracism — with a strong focus on the sub-niche of 9/11 conspiracy theories that blame Israel (and specifically the Mossad) for the plot to blow up the World Trade Center. The Anti-Defamation League has investigated the anti-Semitism at Veterans Today, and their findings appear here: http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/911_conspiracy_theories_report.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_3

The site even verges into Holocaust denial. See, for instance, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/05/11/jb-campbell-behind-the-holocaust/. That article contains lines like this: “The holy gas chamber is a fake. Which makes the entire Holocaust story a fake. You can study it for a day or for a lifetime and your conclusion will be the same. There was never a plan for exterminating Jews and there was never an instrument. As Professor Robert Faurisson has asked for years, ‘Show me a gas chamber. Draw for me a gas chamber.’ It can’t be done because there was never such a thing.” The author also tells us that “the main purpose of keeping alive the Holocaust is to protect Jewish banking practices.”

So there you have it. I thought you would want to know that one of your students is now a staff writer at an anti-Semitic web site; and that you have (inadvertently, no doubt) “congratulated” him for it in your newsletter.

Khaled Mashal is known to the world as the leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. What is less well known is that Israel once saved the man’s life — after trying to kill him.

The two incidents occurred in 1997, when Mossad agents in Amman injected poison into the left ear of Mashal, who was then acting as Hamas’ Jordanian branch chief. It was a deadly dose, but the act was witnessed by Mashal’s chauffeur, who helped apprehend the would-be assassins. The incident became international news. And Mossad Chief Danny Yatom was compelled to travel to Jordan with the life-saving antidote. Mashal recovered, and has been a thorn in Israel’s side ever since.

The episode was a massive embarrassment for the Israelis. It hurt relations with both Jordan and Canada (under whose fake passports the Mossad agents were travelling), and provided a cautionary tale that served to squelch similar high-risk cloak-and-dagger spy operations. Yes, Israel still kills terrorists with missile strikes and even exploding cellphones. But poisonings have been out of fashion for some time.

This is just one of the reasons to doubt that there was any Israeli involvement in the November, 2004 death of Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat — whose body was exhumed on Tuesday, as part of a dubious and belated campaign to determine his cause of death.

Another reason to be doubtful is that by 2004, many Israelis simply didn’t care that much about Arafat — who had become fat, haggard, agitated, and increasingly irrelevant to Palestinian politics. He had gambled and lost in the second intifada, going all in behind a nihilistic campaign of terroristic violence that elicited a devastating Israeli counterstrike in 2002. For Israel to risk international censure and humiliation by killing this aging terrorist in his dotage would have been a stupid risk.

To this day, however, the circumstances of Arafat’s death in a French hospital are so murky that conspiracy theorists of all stripes have been able to gain traction with even the most far-fetched notions — most of them starring scheming Israelis.

Arafat’s symptoms first became apparent in late October, 2004, when he threw up during a meeting with Palestinian Authority colleagues. Shortly thereafter, he fell into a coma, and then died from what doctors described as “a massive haemorrhagic cerebrovascular accident” — in other words, a stroke — complicated by an unknown “digestive syndrome,” blood disease, jaundice and a neurological collapse. To this day, doctors aren’t sure what the overarching condition was, though various theorists have suggested AIDS, viral gastroenteritis, cirrhosis or acute food poisoning.

Those who accuse Israel of killing Arafat generally focus on the alleged use of radioactive elements such as thallium or Polonium-210. Indeed, the current effort to exhume and test Arafat’s body began when a Swiss lab determined that Arafat’s clothing — maintained in an allegedly untampered state by his eccentric widow, Suha — contained heightened traces of Po-210.

But the decay schedule on this isotope is problematic. Po-210 has a half-life of 138 days. The decay math decay suggests the radioactive dose inflicted on Arafat back in 2004 would have been about a million times the currently observed level. Yet Arafat never lost his hair, or exhibited symptoms similar to those exhibited by Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who likely died from Po-210 poisoning in 2006.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to say what the European forensic experts who examined Arafat’s body will conclude when they deliver their results in early 2013. From the beginning, the medical news surrounding this case has been weird. Suha Arafat herself, for instance, blocked her husband’s longtime personal physician (who has advanced the AIDS thesis) from visiting Arafat on his deathbed. She also intervened to prevent an autopsy back in 2004, when it might have provided definitive results. Senior Palestinian Authority officials have advanced their own oddball theories, and dropped dark hints about secret Arab agents hatching internecine plots (with or without Israeli help) involving Po-210 or otherwise.

Whatever the experts conclude, the sight of Arafat’s exhumation provides an apt symbol of the backward-looking obsessions that define the Palestinian condition. Arafat himself was a man who refused a state when it was offered to him by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak in 2000 — because he was simply incapable of giving up his role of romantic 1960s-era revolutionary in favour of the more modern, mundane business of state-building. In similar fashion, the Palestinian people he once led remain prisoners of their ancient suspicion and hatred of the Jewish state.

Rather than exhume the past in hopes of finding another crime to add to the long list of accusations they hurl at Israel, the Palestinians might better direct their energies toward building a better and more peaceful future.

National Post
jkay@nationalpost.com
— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @jonkay.

The 19th century phrenologist R. B. D. Wells is remembered by history primarily for his crackpot theories on the relationship between skull shape and personality. But he also had some interesting theories on electricity — and sleep. Specifically, Wells believed that sleeping in the same bed as your spouse was dangerous, because during the night your husband or wife might steal your precious electrical “vital forces,” leaving at least one party “fretful, peevish, fault-finding and discouraged.”

Wells wasn’t alone. Since the discovery of electricity, quacks have invented all sorts of similarly ridiculous theories. And many persist to this day, despite advances in our knowledge of electrical engineering. Electricity, after all, is both mysterious and powerful — two qualities that make it attractive to peddlers of folk medicine and conspiracy theories. Just walk into your local health food store and survey the impressive array of useless metal bracelets, pendants and necklaces, all of which promise vaguely to channel magical electrical force fields into the wearer. Or consider the activists who have convinced some Canadian schools — on no scientific evidence — to eliminate wi-fi technology, on the theory that the electrical fields are somehow corrupting students’ brains.

It is, of course, every citizen’s rights to believe whatever fairy tales he or she likes. If you can get enough signatures on a piece of paper, you may even drag a city council or school board along for the ride. But it is another thing for the propagation of such nonsense to become a matter of “human rights” in this country. And that is exactly what is happening in British Columbia.

Last month, it was announced that the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal had accepted a complaint from “Citizens for Safe Technology,” a group dedicated to “protect[ing] children and nature from unsafe wireless technologies.” The group’s primary campaign (in conjunction with something called the Coalition to Stop Smart Meters) is aimed at blocking BC Hydro from installing wireless smart meters in residents’ homes. Their human-rights complaint is based on the theory that the technology constitutes a form of discrimination against residents afflicted with certain medical conditions.

And what are those medical conditions? Just ask Citizens for Safe Technology founder Una St. Clair, who claims that her migraines, heart palpitations and insomnia all are due to the “microwave environments” caused by wireless technology. She describes her condition as “electro sensitivity,” and claims to represent about 100 other similarly afflicted B.C. residents.

“The last place that I [can] keep safe is my home,” she told The Province. “When you have a government agency forcing a health risk upon me … it’s unacceptable.”

It’s a shame that Ms. St. Clair is having medical problems. But the idea that they’re related to wi-fi technology is absurd. B.C.’s smart meters transmit data for about 1.4 second per day, at very low wattage. According to B.C. Hydro, “exposure to radio frequency during a 20-year life span of a smart meter is equivalent to the exposure during a single 30-minute cell phone call.”

Doubtless, all of this will be made plain in the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal proceedings that Ms. St. Clair has instigated — and her case will be thrown out. But why was her complaint accepted in the first place?

“Electro sensitivity,” as she (and gullible journalists) insist on calling it, is a made-up condition. In 2005, researchers at King’s College London performed an extensive meta-analysis of 31 experiments aimed at investigating the claims of 725 self-diagnosed “electromagnetically hypersensitive” individuals — people just like Ms. St. Clair. These experiments involved double-blind testing, in which the allegedly electo-sensitive individuals were subjected to an electromagnetic field, or a placebo condition, and were asked if they could tell the differences based on their own senses and medical symptoms. All but two of the 31 reports they examined found either “no evidence to support the existence of a biophysical hypersensitivity,” exhibited a failure to replicate the original findings, or contained statistical artifacts. (The other two studies, the authors concluded, gave “mutually incompatible results”). The authors’ conclusion: “Our metaanalyses found no evidence of an improved ability to detect EMF in ‘hypersensitive’ participants.”

If similar claims of “electro-sensitivity” were used as the basis for a civil suit, it would and should be laughed out of court — all at the expense of the lawyered-up plaintiffs who commenced the litigation. But B.C.’s human-rights apparatus doesn’t work like that: Plaintiffs don’t need to ante up, and the state does the heavy lifting in regards to litigation and investigation. This bogus “electro-sensitivity” case, for instance, may well drag on for years, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars — none of it coming out of Ms. Clair’s pocket.

For B.C. residents afflicted with nonsense-sensitivity, the willingness of the human rights bureaucracy to humour Ms. Clair’s claims no doubt will set off an epidemic of forehead-slapping and mild nausea. I dare say, the experience might even leave them “fretful, peevish, fault-finding and discouraged.”

National Post

jkay@nationalpost.com

Twitter @jonkay

It’s a long interview, covering a variety of Canadian themes — but if you wait it out to the last seven minutes, you get a discussion about why conspiracy theories are more popular in the United States than in Canada.

On Tuesday, French prosecutors announced that they had opened an inquiry into the 2004 death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Specifically, they will investigate the suspicions of Suha Arafat, Arafat’s widow, that her husband was murdered by a polonium-equipped Israeli assassin.

It’s tempting to think that the investigation finally will put to rest conspiracy theories about Israel’s involvement in Arafat’s death. But history counsels otherwise.

Consider the case of Diana, Princess of Wales. Since the assassination of JFK, there is perhaps no single death more intensely studied by hundreds of investigators on both sides of the English Channel than that of the lady née Diana Spencer.

In fact, the only investigation needed was a blood test on deceased driver Henri Paul, who was at three times the legal alcohol limit at the time he plowed Dodi Fayed’s Mercedes S280 into a column supporting Paris’ Pont de l’Alma tunnel.

Yet the plain truth didn’t stop Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al-Fayed, from spinning out all sorts of conspiracy theories primarily involving MI6. (He shut up about the subject a few years ago, but only for the sake of his family, he made clear.) The most popular and enduring variant of Diana conspiracism has it that she was pregnant at the time of the crash, and her murder was arranged in order to ensure that Muslim blood would not be permitted to pollute the Royal bloodline, even a dead-end stub of it. More esoteric versions involve Israel’s Mossad, on the theory that (as one conspiracist web site puts it) “Diana [might] have visited Palestine as a mother to a half-Arabic child and as a wife to an Arab man. Imagine the masses cheering Diana, embracing her as one of their’s.”

For students of conspiracy theories, two lessons jump out from the Diana case study. Continue reading →

Earlier this week, I debunked the story — spreading like wildfire on WorldNetDaily and other Internet sites — that Christians were being crucified by the Muslim Brotherhood in front of Egypt’s presidential palace. As I noted, the story was based on nothing more than a social-media rumor that had been posted for a few minutes on the Web site of Sky News Arabic, before an alert Sky editor deleted it. From that small seed of nonsense, it traveled far and wide, as such urban legends do in the Internet age.

In response to my debunking, WorldNetDaily published a new article purporting to “confirm” the original crucifixion story. But the only relevant new evidence WND provides is a link to a video that purports to show the deleted text from the Sky web site. Since I already reported the existence of the original, short-lived Sky article, I’m not sure what this is supposed to prove. (More generally, the article also supplies links to Arabic-media images of people who have been brutalized — allegedly at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. I have no reason to doubt that these photos are genuine. But as I made abundantly clear in my original article, I don’t dispute that Egypt’s hardcore Islamists are a nasty lot. My article was limited to debunking the crucifixion claim. And none of the photos provided show any hint of crucifixion.)

Over the last day or so, I have had an ongoing email correspondence with Michael Carl, the WND reporter who wrote the crucifixion article. He tells me he is sticking by his story. When I asked him if he has “any information from any of the tens of thousands of people who would have seen an actual ‘crucifixion’ if one really did take place in front of the presidential palace,” he told me that he had. Tantalized, I pressed him for details. Alas, he refused to divulge any of the evidence to me — or anyone else. If he did, he explained, the Muslim Brotherhood “would kill my sources.” And so ended our correspondence.

More enlightening than my emails with Father Carl (he describes himself as a priest, as well as a reporter), was a note I got from a reader pointing out that this is not the first time that Islamists in the region have been falsely accused of crucifixions.

As Nathan J. Brown pointed out in early 2009, on the web site of the Carnegie Endowment, an internet rumor circulated in late 2008 to the effect that Hamas was “celebrating” Christmas by crucifying Gaza’s non-Muslims. And amazingly, it wasn’t just the conspiracy theorists at WND who got sucked into this one. According to Brown, it was featured in blogs connected to such respectable publications as The New Republic, National Review and Commentary. Even the Simon Wiesenthal Center was pushing the story.

Here is the real story, as Brown describes it:

Some officials of the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Justice (answering to Hamas) have been drafting a new criminal code based on Islamic criminal law. They have not released its work (at least outside of Gaza), but they did hold a workshop to discuss a draft. A copy of this document fell into the hands of a reporter for the Arabic daily al-Hayat. While that newspaper is generally reliable enough, the reporter made a significant mistake: He thought the draft had been fully and finally passed by the parliament, not that it was the subject of a small group discussion. And he quoted from some passages in the law — including the title of a section dealing with categories of punishment that mentioned crucifixion (a legal category in Islamic criminal law). There was no evidence that the law went beyond using the term as a legal category. And since the reporter did quote some fairly strong provisions in other areas it seems unlikely that he would have missed the opportunity to mention any actual provisions for crucifixion. The small (and mistaken) article in al-Hayat was picked up by the Jerusalem Post (it also circulated in some Arabic media outlets) which — in perhaps the only glimmer of responsible journalism in this strange episode — added that it could not confirm the report. But that qualification got lost. So did the explanation from Hamas legal officials that no law had been passed. One Israeli activist working hard to circulate the charge (Itamar Marcus) actually went so far as to cover up his mistake by claiming that the Hamas denial (which was actually quite accurate) was simply a “lie” … And so columnists (generally on the right side of the political spectrum) began to claim that Hamas had legislated crucifixion — in the more lurid report — for any “unbelievers,” “enemies of Islam,” or even Christians. And few could resist mentioning that the timing coincided with Christmas.

The people reporting this false story were not deliberately lying. As I noted in my original post, they have simply become so wrapped up in the idea that we are fighting an existential war against militant Islam, that they are willing to believe any nonsense story they come across without checking it. If it sounds like it could be true, then it must be.

The first casualty of war, as always, is truth.

National Post
jkay@nationalpost.com
Twitter @jonkay

Have you heard the one about how Christians are being nailed up on crucifixes and left to die in front of the Egyptian presidential place?

It’s a story worth dissecting — not because it’s true (it isn’t), but because it is a textbook example of how the Internet, once thought to be the perfect medium of truth-seeking, has been co-opted by culture warriors as a weapon to fire up the naïve masses with lies and urban legends.

The Egyptian crucifixion story gained critical mass five days ago, when WorldNetDaily, a popular right-wing web site that promotes anti-gay and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories from an Evangelical perspective, published a story entitled “Arab Spring run amok: [Mulsim] Brotherhood starts crucifixions.”

“The Arab Spring takeover of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood has run amok, with reports from several different media agencies that the radical Muslims have begun crucifying opponents of newly installed President Mohammed Morsi,” author Michael Carl declared. “Middle East media confirm that during a recent rampage, Muslim Brotherhood operatives ‘crucified those opposing Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi naked on trees in front of the presidential palace while abusing others.’ ”

The article quickly went viral. It has been tweeted thousands of times, and has 14,000 Facebook “likes.” Education is apparently no defence against this sort of web-peddled nonsense: Some of the people who credulously sent me a link to the article in recent days included an Ivy League-educated U.S. lawyer, and a former Canadian Senator. Britain’s Daily Mail reported the story, as did thousands of blogs.

It is, of course, theoretically possible that Muslim radicals truly have “crucified” someone, somewhere, sometime, in Egypt. Islamist mobs have staged countless murderous attacks on Copt “infidels” in recent years — and a crucifixion would hardly be a more barbarous tactic than truck bombs and beheadings.

But the story doesn’t just allege that a crucifixion has taken place somewhere in Egypt: It alleges that multiple crucifixions have taken place in front of the presidential palace. That would be the equivalent of, say, mass lynchings taking place in front of the White House, or a giant gang rape taking place in front of Ottawa’s Centennial Flame fountain.

“If that happened, wouldn’t someone, you know, take a picture?” I asked one of the friends who emailed me the WorldNetDaily link. Maybe just a few shots with a cell phone camera from one of the tens of thousands of people who no doubt would have witnessed this Biblical horror in one of the most densely trafficked patches of real estate in the entire Arab world?

And yet, not one of the stories I saw had a photo — or even names or descriptions of any of the supposed crucifixion victims. So I decided to check out the “several different media agencies” that supposedly have reported the crucifixion story.

WorldNetDaily, and other sites that are reporting the story, all trace the claim of multiple Arabic sources to a Jewish web site called algemeiner, which has published its own highly-trafficked article on the subject, and to something called The Investigative Project on Terrorism. Like the cited Arabic sources, they in turn base their claims on reports from Sky News Arabic — a recently formed joint venture between BSkyB and Abu Dhabi Media Investment Corp. Sky is supposedly the original source on the story, everyone agrees. Yet neither algemeiner nor WND nor any of the other sources supply the original Sky reporting that purportedly outlines the facts.

That’s because there is no Sky report on the subject.

Yesterday I contacted the management of Sky News Arabic, and asked them about the crucifixions. According to Fares Ghneim, a Sky communications official, the crucifixion claim “began on social media. It started getting pick-up from there and eventually reached us.”

“Our reporters came across reports of the alleged crucifixions and a story very briefly appeared on the Sky News Arabia website,” he added. “The story — which was taken down within minutes — was based on third-party reports and I am not aware that any of our reporters said or confirmed anything along the lines of what is quoted in the article you sent … What’s unclear is where websites in North America got their Sky News Arabia bit from. As mentioned [previously], none of our correspondents confirmed this issue or commented on it. Clearly there is an intermediate source the websites got the info from, but as of yet we haven’t been able to identify it.”

Nevertheless, web surfers already had begun sourcing the story to Sky, at which point it went viral in portions of the Arabic media, and then on U.S. Christian web sites, and pro-Israel blogs. And thus was born an Internet urban legend. (Update: In response to my article, WND has posted a new article claiming they have confirmed the original Sky report — but the only new evidence produced is an obscure Youtube video produced by a third party, which purports to reproduce text from the Sky web site).

Enter the terms Brotherhood crucifying 2012 into Google and you get numerous hits, the most prominent being the articles I have discussed in this column. Every single one of them swallows this made-up story whole. Indeed, some are even more emphatic than the original WorldNetDaily story, such as a well-trafficked Free Republic headline that claims, plainly, “Muslim Brotherhood Are Crucifying People.”

Such sites also have carried other nonsense articles about the Muslim Brotherhood, such as that it plans to blow up the pyramids — which the New York Times thankfully took pains to debunk back in July. Yet till now, no one (that I can tell) has taken the time to investigate or debunk the crucifixion tale, even though it only took a few emails to Sky to show that it was bunk. (Ordinary Egyptians also could have helped debunk the story. Here’s how one Copt put it in an email to WorldNetDaily: “I am an Egyptian Coptic Orthodox, i.e. Egyptian Christian, my mother and members of my family live within a stone throw from the presidential palace. I talk to my mother every other day. If something like what you mentioned in your article took place, she [would] be the first one to know.”)

Why do so many people believe this made up story? For the same reason that people believe all urban legends — because they play to some deeply held narrative that resides in our deepest fears. In this case, the narrative is that the Arab Spring is part of an orchestrated Islamist plot to destroy Western civilization (beginning with Israel). Believers in this narrative (who are especially numerous in America’s right-wing Evangelical circles) are so hungry for news items that purport to offer confirmation that they ignore the credibility of the messengers. If they had checked out the credibility of WorldNetDaily, for instance, they would have found that the site’s past “scoops” have included the claim that drinking soy milk makes you gay, and that Barack Obama himself is gay (presumably from aforesaid soy milk).

“A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on,” James Callaghan once said. He was British PM back in the 1970s, decades before the Internet expedited the process. These days, the truth doesn’t even bother rousing itself from bed. It just turns over its sleep, and puts a pillow over its exposed ear to drown out the nonsense from the world’s web-enabled conspiracists. Continue reading →

Well, so much for the conspiracy theory that the Arab Spring is one big Obama-enabled plot to set the Islamist hounds upon Israel.

This week, Egypt’s government — now led by a Muslim Brotherhood president, no less — closed its border with Gaza, including the smuggling tunnels that Israel has been trying to shut down for seven years. Best of all, from Israel’s perspective, the move to isolate the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave is entirely an Egyptian initiative: So we will not hear tiresome bleating from the Boat-to-Gaza types, who complain that the Hamas statelet’s isolation is a Zionist crime against humanity.

Of course, Egypt’s move is hardly motivated by a desire for improved neighbourly relations with Israel. (Indeed, the tenor of recent domestic political debates inside Egypt suggests that Israel is, for the first time in generations, just about the last thing on most Egyptians’ minds.) Rather, it is the result of a spectacular terrorist attack that claimed the lives of 16 Egyptian border guards in northeastern Sinai on Sunday.

The Islamist presence in Sinai has been building for several years now, as political chaos in Cairo has dominated the army’s attention. Like Libya, Sinai is largely a barren wasteland, with scattered population centres clustered on or near the Mediterranean coast. The Sunday slaughter took place near one of those clusters — the village of Tourma, which is now the focus of an Egyptian military campaign that includes missile strikes (the first such strikes the peninsula has witnessed since the Yom Kippur war).

The terrorist infestation in Sinai is fueled by local Islamist agitation, but if features a co-mingling of personnel and armaments from nearby Gaza. There is also a common anti-Israel agenda binding Islamists in the two theatres: After staging their massacre on Sunday, the Sinai terrorists rode captured armoured cars into Israel — a short-lived joyride that reportedly ended with their immediate dispatch to “martyrdom” by the Israeli military.

The attack might rank as one of the most unsuccessful terrorist attacks in recent memory, as its only evident result, apart from 16 dead Egyptian soldiers, was the tightening of security ties between Egypt and Israel against a common enemy, and the further isolation of Gaza. This week, prices reportedly skyrocketed in the territory, as Gazans were unable to buy the goods that till now have streamed in through a network of tunnels, which, as noted, the Egyptians now have closed.

Whatever the short-term tactical benefit for Israel, the episode illustrates the fundamentally unpredictable nature of the Arab Spring. There is no straight line that can be drawn from Tahrir Square to any identifiable future for the Arab world — be it Islamist, democratic, or neo-Nasserite. The truth is that the entire region is in the midst of a long, chaotic period that will feature abundant miniature power struggles of this type, in which the forces of reaction and counter-reaction will play out chaotically in a way that no one in Arab capitals — let alone Washington or Tel Aviv — can even hope to fully control.

Among other things, this observation serves to counsel modesty in regard to Western involvement in larger-stakes Arab civil battles, such as Syria, where al-Qaeda’s role within the rebel ranks becomes more pronounced by the week. What will Syria look like in five years? There is not a single foreign-policy expert anywhere who has any definite idea.

Or take the Muslim Brotherhood itself. Back in the 1980s, Israel regarded the movement as a potentially useful counterbalance to the then-secular/Marxist PLO. But as its Hamas offshoot became a full-fledged terror organization, that attitude reversed itself. If a (partly) MB-led Egypt becomes a partner in suppressing terrorism in Sinai and Gaza, that attitude might once again be reversed.

More than any other place on earth, the Middle East is a birthplace for grand conspiracy theories of one kind or another. But in this age especially, it’s all either side can do to simply keep up with the chaotic tides of history on a tactical, day-by-day basis, and not get sucked under the bloody surf.

National Post
jkay@nationalpost.com

— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

A very good essay about conspiracism from Roger Berkowitz on The American Interest web site:

The most recent conspiracy theory making the rounds has now attracted the support of Michelle Bachmann and four other members of Congress. You may have heard that these Representatives in June sent letters to multiple federal agencies asking for an investigation of the increasing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on U.S. policy. The letter named names and called out the U.S. Army as well as Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  In a July radio interview, Michelle Bachmann, elaborated: “It appears that there has been deep penetration in the halls of our United States government by the Muslim Brotherhood. . . . It appears that there are individuals who are associated with the Muslim Brotherhood who have positions, very sensitive positions, in our Department of Justice, our Department of Homeland Security, potentially even in the National Intelligence Agency.”

To most, these conspiratorial fantasies were something to laugh at or to use for political points.  But that misses the bipartisan and widespread embrace of conspiratorial thinking across the country. In a recent essay in the Daily Beast, Jonathan Kay locates the source of the latest conspiracy in the person of one Frank Gaffney, the Founder and President of the American Center for Security Policy. Gaffney is a former cold warrior and was deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear forces and arms control policy under Ronald Reagan. Since 9/11, he has replaced his Cold War instincts with a new obsession. In Kay’s words, Gaffney is on “the hunt for Muslim fifth columnists in Washington’s halls of power.”

In a twist too ironic to be believed, it turns out Gaffney’s conspiratorial antennae were first aroused by the romantic habits of his former roommate, Grover Norquist. It seems that around the time Norquist and Gaffney were bunking together in DC, the future president of Americans for Tax Reform married Samah Alrayyes, a muslim woman who was then working for USAID. For Gaffney this betrayal was too much, and he apparently has become convinced that Norquist is a closet Muslim who is, intentionally or not, betraying the United States to its Muslim foes.

Read the rest here.

In the wake of the recent mass shootings in Aurora, Col. and Milwaukee, I’ve been getting a lot of email from conspiracy theorists pointing me to sites like this one, run by a certain Jon Rappoport:

Media outlets are now reporting that Wade Michael Page, the accused Sikh Temple shooter, received a less-than-honorable discharge from the US Army in 1998, after his last posting in a psychological operations unit at Fort Bragg. Prior to that, Page worked as a missile system repairman. Immediately, questions are raised. Under what circumstances does a missile repair man suddenly switch to a psyops unit? In preparation for later use as a patsy? … The [government's goal in staging such shootings] is: outlawing guns; tighter surveillance throughout the land (if that’s even possible, given what we already have); “come home to the government, we will protect you”; individuals who stand outside the collective are crazy and dangerous; remain passive and wait for our leaders to take action; report all suspicious activity. Fascism Central.

This blogger, likewise sees the Milwaukee shooting as a “false flag” operation that is part of “the dark chronicles of psychological operations throughout history.” And this guy — reporting for Alex Jones’ conspiracist Infowars.com web site — claims the Milwaukee shooting was done by a “4-man team.” A separate article on Infowars claims that the Milwaukee shooting shows “The US government is not only coming after the 2nd Amendment, but [is] now framing US Army veterans in a false flag operation where extremists are the new threat.” Similar articles, alleging the same plot to impose gun control on American citizens, circulated after the Aurora shootings.

Of course, all great tragedies bring out conspiracy theorists — since, at root, conspiracy theories are theories of human evil and illegitimate power. But this one seems particularly illogical for one clear reason that even the conspiracy theorists themselves can’t argue with: No major politician of any national importance has used either the Colorado or Milwaukee killings as a pretext to advance major gun-control legislation. And polls show that Americans’ attitudes to gun control remain unchanged.

If there’s a conspiracy afoot here, it is a remarkably ineffective one.

It’s a bizarre story. But the fact that he’s prepared to cite it as a basis for American immigration reform supplies some useful context for what happened two weeks later, when Gohmert joined four other Republican members of Congress, including Michele Bachmann, in asking the Department of Defense, the State Department, and other departments to investigate whether the U.S. government is being infiltrated by Muslim extremists.

In particular, the five Republicans singled out Huma Abedin, a long-time aide to Hillary Clinton, in their letter to the State Department. Abedin, the letter noted, “has three family members—her late father, her mother, and her brother—connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations. Her position provides her with routine access to the Secretary and to policy-making.”

To make the flavour taste truly authentic, I think it would have to be made by Jewish freemasons — from pieces of JFK’s brain.

There’s a very good piece on the Think Progress web site about the Drudge Report’s role in sending tens of millions of web surfers to two right-wing conspiracy sites, Alex Jones’ libertarian-conspiracist Prison Planet, and Joseph Farah’s apocalypse-watching WorldNetDaily. Here’s an excerpt:

The final count [of 30-million visitors sent to these two sites from Drudge in the last year] does not include Drudge’s 7 permanent links to WND columnists and 2 permanent links to Infowars. Here are brief summaries of just 5 of the stories Drudge linked to directly on conspiracy websites over the past year. An excerpt, detailing some of the stories that Drudge has promoted:

1. Obama secretly worked for the CIA in Pakistan. “Database reports from the National Student Clearinghouse have contradicted President Obama’s claim he attended Columbia University for two years…Swirling amid the black hole of information are a host of theories about Obama’s whereabouts – particularly during the 1981-1982 school year – including speculation he was working for the CIA in Pakistan.” [WND, 7/8/12]

2. Andrew Breitbart assassinated to prevent release of damaging information about Obama. “In a stunning coincidence, It appears Andrew Breitbart suffered his untimely death just hours before he was set to release damning video footage that could have sunk Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.” [InfoWars, 3/2/12; WND 3/1/12]

3. Conservative journalists will be ‘hunted down like dogs’ in an Obama second term. “World Net Daily editor and prominent Obama administration critic Joseph Farah revealed how his secluded property was buzzed by a spy drone – part of what Farah fears is a ‘war’ being waged by the administration against its political adversaries…’ Look – this is the first term – if he’s re-elected it’s going to be war – they will be at war – we will be hunted down like dogs, keep that in mind, that’s what the stakes are,’ said Farah.” [InfoWars, 7/6/12]

4. Angelina Jolie should be arrested for war crimes. “The United Nations’ history of war crimes and massacres is legendary, and just as Joseph Goebbels operated as a propaganda minister for the Nazis, Jolie, who is officially employed by the UN, is their mouthpiece.” [InfoWars, 3/11/12]

5. Bill Ayers’ family paid for Obama to attend school as a foriegn student. “Did former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers help finance Barack Obama’s Harvard education? Did Ayers’ mother believe Obama was a foreign student?” [WND, 3/19/12]

Read the rest here.

Though it’s amazing to imagine now, there was a time in Spring, 2011 — just a little more than a year ago — when Donald Trump was the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination. Trump’s whole appeal essentially rested on his willingness to cater to the right-wing sub-cult that embraces the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, and is therefore constitutionally ineligible to inhabit the White House. In particular, Trump dispatched “investigators” to Hawaii to find out the details of Obama’s birth, and to see whether the president was in fact an illegal alien from Indonesia or Kenya.

As readers of this blog will know, I became fascinated with the psychology of conspiracy theorists a few years back — and devoted a chapter to Birthers in my 2011 book on the subject, Among The Truthers. In my interviews with Birthers, I discovered that just about all of them see Obama’s birthplace “deception” as part of a wider ideological campaign against America. In particular, some see Obama as an agent of some sort of menacing doctrine such as communism or afrro-centrism. But a more common variant is that Obama is secretly a Muslim, and that his main goal is to force America to submit to totalitarian Islamism (and, of course, destroy Israel), in concert with the Muslim Brotherhood and/or the Iranian regime. Many such conspiracy theories traffic on WorldNetDaily, a hawkish, militantly pro-Israel, End Times/Evangelical web site that has turned itself into the main hub for Birtherism.

And so it was surprising to see WND promoting Donald Trump’s latest conspiracy theory: that Barack Obama will attack Iran as a tail-wags-dog move to secure his re-election in November: “Yes, I believe that we will end up in a war with Iran because I think Obama views that as politically good for him. … I have said for a year and a half that in the end, somewhere before the election we will end up in a form of war with Iran, and I think he’s doing it for political reasons.”

Well, which is it? Obama as Kenyan-born, anti-Zionist secret agent of the Muslim world seeking to Islamify America by stealth jihad … or Obama the cynical election-year hawk willing to bomb Muslims, destroy Iran’s nuke program (and thereby defend Israel) for partisan political purposes? Inquiring (non-Birther) minds want to know.

“ERP” stands for “Enterprise Resource Planning” — an increasingly popular buzz-phrase that describes complex multi-platform software systems which allow companies to track inventory, sales, human resources, prices etc in real time. It’s thanks to ERP-type software, for instance, that tellers in chain stores can tell customers what other locations might have any given item available for sale, and how many units they have in inventory. But that’s not how this guy sees it.

ERP instead of its original meaning (Enterprise Resource Planning), it is really a antonym for, Extensive Regime Plan! Now hear me out… this complex plan that started from about 30 to 40 years ago with the infiltration of business into the government system. Starting with American oil companies, near after WWII when Roosevelt sold half of our government to business leaders and Bankers (GLOBALIST) they came up with meany obcorble plans and objectives to take over the world into one Globalist dictatorship run by a hand full of people, ERP is one of there plans. ERP allows business leaders (not in the Globalist marketing gadder) to be told what good investments with there money would be, and of coerce they are having them put it into the world leaders pockets so as to gain more control over the public, businesses, and the world. This imbligitory ERP idea has already made it’s way into some of the worlds most powerful contrary including; Europe, America, Crazlicula, China and Canada. once the businesses they have infiltrated with this plan have spent all there money in investments to the Globalist they will fail and close down, like what happened to Crimwell company, after the business falls the workers will be notified that they can still work for the company as a military outpost, so the company is now under the control of the military, sounds a lot like communism. so to the public it seems like the indiscreet or company never had clasped or had gone bank robed, but it has really just been taken over by military funding, and all profits go to where? Some goes to the workers ,but the rest goes to military or bankers. and that’s whats really behind this ERP.

Here’s my take on the psychiatric analysis of Anders Breivik, the progression of his bizarre theories and murder plot, and the generally humane treatment he’s received by Norwegian legal officials:

On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik set off a bomb outside a government building in Oslo, killing eight people. Hours later, he murdered 69 innocent activists and volunteers, most of them teenagers, at an island political retreat. It was the worst peace-time mass murder in Norwegian history. Though the court’s verdict in his criminal trial won’t be announced until next month, he is certain to become an icon of evil for generations.

But another aspect of Breivik’s crimes also deserves to be remembered: the humane and intelligent response they elicited among Norwegian authorities. Even in the most civilized of societies, our instinctive response to senseless slaughter is vilification and revenge. Instead, the court sent teams of neutral psychiatrists to interview Breivik, and find out how his mind works. Thanks to their findings, the prosecution has been arguing that Breivik is insane — and that he belongs in a (well-guarded) mental institution, not a prison.

Norwegian psychiatrists are split on Breivik’s precise diagnosis. In 2011, two experts interviewed him more than a dozen times, and produced a lengthy report concluding that he is a paranoid schizophrenic. Other experts rejected the schizoid diagnosis, and testified that Breivik merely has narcissistic personality disorder, autism-spectrum disorder, Tourette’s syndrome and (possibly) a form of paranoid psychosis.

There is no conclusive way to settle this argument because there is no laboratory test for any of these conditions. One thing seems certain though: Breivik was, in layman’s terms, nuts. And the story of his descent into madness makes for fascinating, if extremely dark, reading.

Breivik was born in 1979, into a family that would break up soon after his birth. Until young adulthood — a time in life when many mental illnesses first emerge — he was, by most accounts, relatively normal. He delivered newspapers, and had friends. When he got into trouble, it was for normal adolescent indiscretions, such as graffiti. At one point, his mother got sick and depressed. Anders Breivik bought her a puppy to cheer her up.

But by 2006, when Breivik was 27, things were going downhill. At the time, he was living with his mother. Her description of their four years of adult co-habitation — contained in Section 4.1 of the original psychiatric report on Breivik — is the clearest window we have into her son’s diseased mind.

At first, Breivik’s mental-health issues expressed themselves as mere anti-social behaviour: He would lock himself in his room for days a time, doing nothing but playing the sword-and-sorcery-themed online computer game World of Warcraft. But then his behaviour got more bizarre. Howard Hughes-like, he became germopohic, and began to wear a face mask, fixate on spiders, and avoid any contact with his mother. He believed he was being followed and spied on. Eventually, he embraced the delusion that he’d been deputized by a mysterious secret society to lead the forces of Christendom in a war being waged for the future of humankind. He even made a homemade military uniform that reflected his “commander” status in this secret society.

When Breivik paraded this outfit in front of his mother, she was horrified. But she still did not understand what had happened to her son’s mind. Had she pursued institutional treatment for Anders at that point, the massacre might have been prevented. Schizophrenia cannot be cured. But it can be medicated.

Read the rest here.

Please visit James Cole’s Stuff and Nonsense blog, and read this fascinating entry detailing his email exchange with a Daily Mail reporter who recently gave sympathetic coverage to an Italian court judgment that gives credence to the debunked link between measles vaccine and autism.

In particular, the reporter seem to totally misunderstand the evolution of measles epidemiology. I also find it disturbing that the reporter suggests that the experience of first-hand observation of the tragedy of autism in adult victims somehow allows a lay-person an insight into the medical causes of the condition in small children.

Apparently, there were several successful, fully detonated nuclear-bomb terrorist attacks against the United States earlier this month.

But no one noticed.

—— Forwarded Message
From: US Patriot Network <markmark1@gmx.com>
Reply-To: <markmark1@gmx.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2012 23:46:20 -0500
To: “Kay, Jonathan (National Post)” <jkay@nationalpost.com>
Conversation: USA Hit Again With Terror Attacks!
Subject: USA Hit Again With Terror Attacks!

It has now been revealed that the massive explosion that occured in Michigan on June 6, 2012 was a terrorist attack that involved the use of a nuclear weapon. The widely felt explosion on the Michigan Indiana border caused extremely high radiation readings in many different locations. The explosion was an underground nuclear attack against the New Madrid Fault. It has also been revealed that the many smaller explosions reported on and around the 6th and 7th, were attacks with scaler weapons. Scaler weapons use electromagnetic waves to induce earthquakes. Tectonic plate weapons have been around for awhile and they have been highly perfected by the Soviets. Continue reading →

Last Saturday night I appeared as a panelist at the “Message of Peace: Countering Islamophobia” conference, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Muslim Students’ Association and ICNA Canada. Because the format was Q&A, I wasn’t able to deliver a lengthy speech. But here were the talking points I’d prepared on the subject:

• Contrary to what some pundits argue, I do believe Islamophobia is a real phenomenon. Which is to say: I do believe there are some Canadians out there who have an irrational fear of Islam. For these purposes, I define “irrational fear” as a fear that goes beyond (a) the very real, legitimate and widely shared fear of Islamist terrorism; and (b) the very real, legitimate and widely shared concern about retrograde Islamist attitudes toward women being imported into Canadian society.
• Outside of outright bigots (of which all Western nations have a few), Islamophobia in Canada largely is confined to a small cadre of hyper-conservative culture warriors (Perhaps a few of them will out themselves in the comment section below). In fact, overall, I think Canada likely ranks as one of the least Islamophobic nations in the Western world (just as it is one of the least anti-Semitic nations in the Western world). This is not because Canadians are particularly wonderful people — but, rather, because we happen to have a generally well-educated and well-integrated Muslim minority population. Unlike many of the nations of Europe, there is no Canadian equivalent of the impoverished, ghetto-like Muslim cités on the outskirts of Paris, or the no-go (for non-Muslim) areas in central England. There are a few radical mosques in Canada with some bad apples, but they are well-penetrated by intelligence agents and informants.
• The comparison between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, widely touted by some Muslim activists, is inexact. That is because most real hard-boiled anti-Semites — the Nazi-style ones, at least — see Jews as flawed on a biological level. Which is to say, they see Jews as a filth or a bacillus, infecting an otherwise healthy larger society. But in my experience, that is generally not true of post-9/11 Western “Islamphobes,” whose concern with Islam is focused almost entirely on its status as a hegemonic ideology and force for world conquest. Unlike anti-Semites, they have no interest in the biological aspects of Muslims. Indeed, my experience at hard-right American political events (such as an “anti-Shariah conference” I attended in Tennessee in 2011) is that Muslims who convert to other faiths or who are willing to bad-mouth Islam are perfectly welcome among culturally conservative Islamophobes.
  Continue reading →

The guy really packed the kitchen sink into this one (it’s the Bilderberg Group at the center). Follow the link for an embiggen-able version.

Yes — that Ed Asner. The boss from Mary Tyler Moore.

Asner comes on at the 20:30 mark of the video, praises Richard Gage’s campaign for a new 9/11 investigation, and then speaks more generally about America’s flaws — calling the country a “democratic dictatorship,” and calling non-Truthers bobble-headed “sheeple.”

Your faithful Among The Truthers correspondent comes in for a brief interview at the 1:30 and 2:30 marks.

Update: A German-speaking viewer emailed me to say that the narrator confused me at one point with mega-truther Alex Jones. If so, that is officially hilarious.

I recently spent the day in the town of Mount Albert, Ont., about 45 minutes from downtown Toronto (when there’s no traffic). Nice place. Friendly people. And as this photo shows, they have a Masonic lodge — right next to the laundromat. I met the guy tending the place. Polite fellow who drives a dated Caprice Classic. I gotta say that he really, really did not look like he was engaged in any global conspiracies.

This is something I think about whenever I see a Masonic lodge — which is usually when I come to places like Mount Albert. The movement is struggling, in the same way that many male civil-society groups are struggling in an era when men are expected to balance work and family, and don’t have much time for weekly or monthly lodge meetings. Yet during the course of researching Among The Truthers, I still met plenty of people who still cling to 19th-century Masonic conspiracy theories.

Now, I can kind of understand these sorts of theories when they’re applied to, say, the Illuminati or the Knights Templar, which haven’t existed for centuries. In the case of such groups, conspiracy theorists can imagine them in any shadowy way they want. But the Masons do exist. You can go check out their lodges in places like Mount Albert. And when you do — as this photo reveals — you really don’t get the impression of people running a global-domination command center.

Bilderberg-theemed conspiracy theories are going mainstream these days. Even the folks at WorldNetDaily have taken a break from their fervid efforts to find Barack Obama’s “real” birth certificate so they can deliver a paranoid report on the subject (name-dropping Alex Jones, of course). With this in mind, and with the Bilderbergers’ 2012 meeting in Virginia wrapping up today, I am posting this primer on the origins of Bilderberger conspiracy theories, adapted from my book Among The Truthers.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the conspiracy theories that followed it had been little more than elaborately extrapolated folk tales and urban legends. But during the Cold War era, conspiracy theories became more complex and technocratic — mirroring the modern society they sought to explain. Byzantine, acronym-littered organizational diagrams setting out the imagined hierarchy of society’s all-powerful overlords increasingly became a staple of the era’s conspiracist literature, a genre that might be referred to as “flowchart conspiracism.”

I cannot do justice to the bewildering range of flowchart conspiracy theories that trafficked through the nether regions of American political culture in the postwar period. But it is worth taking up at least one example from this genre as a case study — especially since its name tends to pop up often in conversations with 9/11 Truthers: Daniel Estulin’s breathless bestseller, “The True Story of the Bilderberg Group.”

Even most educated readers probably will have never heard of the Bilderberg Group. But in modern conspiracist lore, the organization ranks as nothing less than a modern-day Illuminati. And no one has done more to peddle Bilderbergian conspiracism than Estulin, a 44-year-old Russian-born Canadian who’s spent the last two decades following the group’s organizers, hanging around outside their meetings, and delivering dubious reports on the proceedings, based on tidbits provided by “informants.”

The Bilderberg Group is named after a Dutch hotel where a group of 50 European and 11 American worthies, including David Rockefeller and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, met in the Spring of 1954 with the goal of strengthening trans-Atlantic understanding. By all available accounts, the event was a success, and follow-up meetings were organized. Over time, something called the “Bilderberg Group” evolved into a once-a-year, off-the-record talk shop for a rotating cast drawn from the world’s foremost politicians, corporate leaders and intellectuals — Davos without the cameras, essentially.

To no one’s surprise, I have never received an invitation. But my National Post colleague Conrad Black has attended more than 20 Bilderberg conferences, and even sat on the group’s Steering Committee for the better part of two decades. Through him, I’ve been able to form a fairly detailed picture of the annual proceedings. “In my time, starting at the end of the 70′s, it had become a Western Alliance meeting place — with a few others, i.e. Swedes, Finns, Irish, Austrians, Swiss, and an Icelander — where attendees discussed how to deal with the Soviets, how to organize and manage western economies,” he reported to me. “Beyond that, it was a meeting place for up and coming people from each of the countries, along with the venerable grandees who were among the founders and were then on the Advisory Council. There were also a bunch of wealthy Americans who did not participate too much in the discussions, but paid a lot and did socialize vigorously, such as Henry Kravis, Hank Greenberg, Dwayne Andreas, and Jack Heinz, and Evelyn de Rothschild from the UK. Rupert Murdoch came a few times … The atmosphere was very courteous, bonhomous, and open, and the social conversations were often very interesting, and the debates the best I have participated in, apart from the [British] House of Lords at its best. Some business arrangements were made there, including the beginning of my acquisition of [Britain's] Daily Telegraph [newspaper], but there was absolutely no continuous linkage or organizing principle. It was an atmosphere of earnest hauts fonctionnaires, altruistic businessmen, and self-important people, sufficient in what they fancied to be their influence and right-mindedness.”

All lies, says Estulin. In fact, he claims, the Bilderbergers are the top cell in a centrally co-ordinated global conspiracy involving the Council on Foreign Relations, CIA, Mossad, Trilateral Commission, Aspen Institute, Freemasons, MI6, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Tavistock Institute for Behavioural Analysis, Brookings Institution, Institute for Policy Studies, RAND Corporation, European Union, United Nations, Gorbachev Foundation, Bill Gates Foundation, Club of Rome, the European monarchy, UNESCO, and (unnamed) drug-running aristocrats. “What today is called the Bilderberg Group already existed over 800 years ago,” he says. “Back then, they were called the Venetian Black Nobility. In fact, Bilderberg is the creation of the Synarchist Movement of Empire, who are the plenipotentiary founders and financiers of Hitler — and Synarchist International, they in turn were founded by [the] Freemason Secret Society back in the 1770s as a sort of counterattack on the principles on which the United States was built.”

The Bilderbergers’ true goal in orchestrating this ne plus ultra of flowchart conspiracies, Estulin argues, is to control the world money supply, create a single global currency, establish a “world army,” use “mind control” to “direct all humanity to obey [Bilderbergian] wishes,” eliminate economic growth, suppress “all scientific development,” and create a “New World Order” in which obedient slaves will be rewarded and non-conformists targeted for extermination.”

Estulin sees himself as just such a “non-conformist,” and spends much of his book reciting schoolboy fantasies about Bilderberg agents trying to assassinate him in downtown Toronto (“In front of me, a chilling spectacle… an empty elevator shaft with certain death awaiting me 800 feet below”), or draw him into a deadly firefight on the streets of Rome (“I know my guns, and it wasn’t difficult to see by the non-metallic polymer frame that I was staring at a Glock semiautomatic pistol.”) His efforts to discover the truth about the Bilderberg plot, he writes in one particularly purple passage, have sent him hurtling into a “parallel world … a cesspool of duplicity and lies and double-speak and innuendo and blackmail and bribery. It is a surreal world of double and triple agents, of changing loyalties, of professional psychotic assassins, brainwashed black ops agents, soldiers of fortunes and mercenaries… I converted into one of them, a spook, a spectre, a shade … dancing between raindrops and disappearing at the first sign of danger: a shadow dancer. In America, they simply called me ‘the Highlander.’ ”

It’s easy to laugh off Estulin’s pulp-fiction style and multiply mixed metaphors. (One cringes, in particular, at the notion of Estulin “dancing between raindrops” spilling forth from the aforementioned “cesspool of duplicity.”) Yet his book has become something of a sensation. The publisher claims it’s been translated into 48 different languages and sold in 67 countries. And in the best tradition of Dan Brown, it may soon be coming to the big screen: In 2009, rights to the book were purchased by the Los Angeles-based Halcyon Company, which also owns the Terminator franchise.

As for the basic thrust of Estulin’s conspiracy theory, it is a straight (and unwitting) rip-off of the Protocols: He has simply taken the basic Czarist-era theme of world conquest, and replaced “Jew” with “Bilderberger.” Yet despite its otherwise formulaic nature, Estulin’s theory does betray an interesting political shift on display in the conspiracist literature of the last two decades: Though he rails against the CIA, the RAND Corporation, the military-industrial complex and all the traditional bugbears of post-JFK left-wing conspiracists, Estulin is — like Alex Jones, who was out in Virginia with his bullhorn over the weekend — very much a hard-core libertarian conservative. And the dystopia he sketches out looks a lot like the USSR of his youth — not to mention the “Super-Government Administration” detailed in the Protocols.

On the Jerusalem Post web site, Doni Kandel has a long manifesto about me, claiming I’m a bad Zionist because I try to strike a middle ground between Israel-haters and uncritical one-note Netanyahu groupies. My reply, which is also in the comment thread, is as follows:

First, thanks for the kind words about Among The Truthers. I’m glad you liked it. I enjoyed writing it, too. And the experience of writing it changed me: It made me more sensitive to the existence of dogmas and radicalized systems of thought — including dogmas and radicalized systems of thought surrounding the Middle East, as described in the book’s second to last chapter.

On this score, what I tried to get at in my interview with Renee Ghret-Zand is that discussion of Israel in Canada is increasingly divided between two camps: (1) Hard-left boat-for-Gaza campus leftists who see Israel as an “Apartheid state,” and (2) AIPAC-style 100% pro-Israel attitudes, which tend to be far more uncritically pro-Israeli than mainstream Israeli sentiment itself (this is the view that prevails in the Canadian government itself). What I told Ms. Ghret-Zand is that I don’t see this as healthy.

In terms of my own attitudes, I’m more sympathetic to camp #2 than camp #1. I’m a Zionist, after all — and have written numerous articles defending Israel (including this one, this week, which I think you will like: http://natpo.st/L1nKdT). But I dont think either is helpful in the current climate. In particular, the fact that Netanyahu knows he will be treated like a rock star by US congressmen, no matter what he does or says, is one of the factors that has driven him to essentially ignore the Palestinian file — even though he still gives lip service to a two-state solution.

I think more journalists, especially Zionists — and, yes, Jews — should be pointing all this out. And I’m not ashamed to be one of them.

This just landed in my (physical) mailbox:

After my last post on Dice, I got this in the mailbag:

I saw you mention Mark Dice is going to be protesting the Bilderbergers. Dice has been around for awhile in the conspiracy theory crowd; he used to call himself John Connor (after the leader of the resistance in the Terminator movies). Dice/Connor first came to our attention when he did a couple of YouTube videos where he jaywalked across a busy street or interrupted a college classroom while shouting “9-11 was an inside job!” Apparently, this was some obscure violation of the Patriot Act, not that the government ever paid any attention to it. But it did play an early role in Rosie O’Donnell coming out as a Truther. See, O’Donnell was interviewing Broadway actress/singer Christine Ebersole, who mentioned that she had become addicted to YouTube and particularly these videos featuring John Connor. So Rosie goes, “Oh, yeah, he’s this gorgeous guy who runs around with a bullhorn saying, 9-11 was an inside job,” and they both drool over how gorgeous he is. You can see the video clip here.

What’s especially amusing about this is that Connor/Dice is a fundamentalist Christian who also went around denouncing Hollywood and homosexuals. In fact, he made something of a splash (pun intended) when he denounced Starbucks’ new logo a few years back because the mermaid supposedly had her “legs” spread wide:

The Starbucks logo has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute, explains Mark Dice, founder of the group. Need I say more? It’s extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves, Slutbucks.

Dice changed his internet name after the View mention probably because he realized he couldn’t capitalize on his new fame with a pseudonym. Dice is not his real name but he uses it supposedly because his real name is unpronounceable.

Dice also had a YouTube dressing down by former child reality TV star Danny Bonaduce at a cafe in LA. That one especially went viral, doing wonders for both Dice and Bonaduce. However, I suspect that it was a setup, because a later video had them palling around, with Bonaduce mentioning that he thought that the video would work out well for both of them.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about an otherwise mainstream newspaper — the Coeur D’Alene Press in Idaho — giving space to a chemtrails conspiracy theorist. Last week, the Pacific Northwest Inlander called out the Coeur D’Alene Press for doing this, with this article by Daniel Walters. A good example of rival newspaper keeping one another honest on the conspiracy beat:

As a kid, you may have marveled at the white trails airplanes leave across the blue sky. They’re “contrails,” your dad may have explained — the result of hot engine exhaust mixing with the cold air of the sky.

But if you ask Cliff Harris, columnist for the Coeur d’Alene Press, you may hear a different answer. He’s spent 2,900 words across three straight Press columns alleging that “chemtrails” are streaks from government planes intentionally spraying toxic metals like aluminum. He condemns scientists for “PLAYING GOD” (his emphasis), foretelling scores of trees dying, others “exploding like Roman candles” in forest fires, of chemtrails contaminating soil and water, wreaking havoc with the climate, possibly causing dementia, autism, strokes and Alzheimer’s,

Yes, it’s a conspiracy theory, and an old one. The Air Force, NASA scientists, the EPA and scores of other experts call such claims a “hoax,” “nuts,” or even “evil.” (Harris says these groups are lying.) Long-lasting contrails aren’t sinister, scientists say, they’re just caused by specific atmospheric conditions.

Harris’s claims spawned a salvo of letters to the Press.

One guest editorial, by chemical engineer John Huckabay, savaged Harris’s science, explaining that metallic aluminum is not a heavy metal, does not have a half-life, is not soluble in water, has no link to Alzheimer’s, and would not make trees explode.

“I recognize that the Press has a disclaimer but this article should never have been published,” Huckabay writes.

That’s the underlying question: Should newspapers run conspiracy theories?

Read the rest of the article here.

A fellow named Mark Dice apparently will be protesting the 2012 Bilderberg meetings, which begin later later this month in Virginia. If he goes through with it, he will be taking up in the tradition of Daniel Estulin and Alex Jones, both of whom made names for themselves by stalking previous Bilderberg conferences with bullhorns and such. (Estulin, of course, has written a whole book on the subject — which I describe extensively in Among The Truthers. And Jones once even checked into the hotel where the Bilderbergers were meeting, and filed this unintentionally hilarious report about his experience.)

Here is Dice’s press release:

PRESS RELEASE

Secretive and elite Bilderberg meeting to be confronted by protesters

Chantilly, VA – A secret meeting of approximately 120 elite politicians, financiers, industrialists, known as the Bilderberg Group, is taking place in Chantilly, Virginia, May 31 – June 3rd at the Marriot Washington Dulles Hotel.  The group has met at luxury resorts around the world annually since 1954, taking its name after the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland where they first met to “hatch their plan for world domination,” according to conspiracy theorists.

The Bilderberg Group, once written off as the figment of the imagination of conspiracy theorists, is a real meeting, although little media attention has been given to the organization.  Bilderbergers claim their meeting is a nothing more than a private discussion group, while others see them as secretly dividing up the world and coordinating global policy, something that should be done by Congress out in the open for public scrutiny.

Mark Dice will be leading a protest out front of the hotel and is expecting hundreds of people to join him in order to raise awareness of this little-known meeting.  For decades the American mainstream media has largely ignored the conference, but in recent years the blackout is lifting, largely due to pressure from Dice and his supporters, “flooding  newsrooms with tips” about the organization, urging news outlets to cover it.

Last year the Drudge Report posted several links to European newspapers covering the event when it took place in Saint Moritz, Switzerland, but coverage on the mainstream television networks, newspapers, and newsmagazines in the United States has been astonishingly nonexistent, and Dice intends to change that this year.

“Each year the G20 and G8 forums take place, it’s top news around the world, but every single year, the Bilderberg group meets and there is barley a mention.  Obviously there is an agreement between the Bilderberg group and the mainstream media in America to maintain a near complete blackout,” insists Mark Dice, who wants major news outlets to report on the event.

“When you look at the independent journalists and bloggers who have photographed and videotaped the attendees at the Bilderberg group, it’s quite shocking that the major news networks have never even touched the issue.”

“How could this not be news?  How is it that year after year, 120 of the world’s most powerful men meet in secret for three days, and yet there isn’t a word of it mentioned in the American media?” asks Dice.  “Obviously there is an agreement between the editors of the major print and broadcast media outlets not to mention the meeting and to just pretend they don’t exist.”

“Imagine the power it takes for this private group of individuals to persuade nearly every major media outlet in America to maintain a blackout year after year.”

Dice recently obtained some of the group’s tax records which include lists of donors who help fund the meetings and pay for the hotel and security.  They operate under the business entity “American Friends of Bilderberg” as a 5013c3 tax exempt foundation. The documents show that in 2008 they received $645,000 in contributions, with money coming from Goldman Sachs, the Washington Post, Microsoft, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and others.  Dice has published the records from 2007 to 2010 on his website.

Mark Dice is a conservative libertarian and the author of several books on conspiracies and secret societies, including the Illuminati: Facts and Fiction which analyzes the various conspiracy theories surrounding elite secret societies and private organizations such as the Bilderberg Group, the Federal Reserve, and Bohemian Grove.  He has been featured in various conspiracy television shows, documentary films, and is a frequent guest on conspiracy talk radio shows.

Mark is available for phone or video Skype interviews regarding this topic and may be contacted at Mark@MarkDice.com.  His Facebook page is Facebook.com/MarkDice.  He will be outside the Marriot Washington Dulles Hotel with hundreds of others at noon on Thursday May 31st and Saturday morning at 10:00AM June 2nd and at other random times throughout the weekend.

Found this posted on a group called New Mexicans for Science and Reason …

You can read the details here.

Richard Gage, whom I’ve profiled here, is a mild-mannered guy — the farthest thing from an anti-Semite in my experience. Rather, this is an example of how conspiracism causes cranks to make bedfellows with haters from all sides of the fringe universe: As long as two cranks share some overlapping obsession (in this case, 9/11 conspiracy theories) they don’t ask too many questions about what other nonsense they’re into (e.g., Jews).

And on the subject of strange bedfellows, apparently the Nation of Islam itself is flirting with Scientology …

Wilfrid Laurier University history professor Michael Sibalis has published a fascinating synopsis and analysis of conspiracy theories relating to the death of Napoleon — a subject not covered at all in Among The Truthers, or any other source I have looked at in my research. The original, fully formatted version of Mr. Silablis’ article appears here. But he has kindly permitted me to publish the following version on AmongTheTruthers.com:

Conspiracy on St. Helena? (Mis)remembering Napoleon’s Exile

By Michael Sibalis

Napoleon lived in exile at Longwood House on St. Helena under close British guard for sixty-eight months from October 1815.  He died there, probably from stomach cancer, on 5 May 1821. Nineteen years later the French Government repatriated his body, which now rests under the dome of the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris.  This is the accepted narrative.  In the last few decades, however, a number of books in English and French have tried to refute this historical orthodoxy and proffered instead a series of sensational revelations: Napoleon escaped from St. Helena, leaving a double in his place; he died on St. Helena not from natural causes but at the hands of a poisoner; his ashes reside in the basement of Westminster Abbey because the perfidious British Government turned over someone else’s body to the French in 1840.

This aim of this paper is not to disprove these conspiracy theories point by point, but rather to understand the thoughts, motives and methods of historical analysis that underlie them.  Whether or not these theories are true has little, if any, real historical significance because they do not involve vitally important events (Napoleon having ceased to be a political force in 1815) nor are the people who propagate them motivated by extremist and controversial ideological views.  The “St. Helena Conspiracies” therefore do not arouse the same emotions as conspiracy theories that (for example) purport to raise disturbing questions about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, or even the birthplace of Barack Obama in 1961.  But whatever their nature, all conspiracy theories-whether trivial or potentially explosive-thrive and proliferate in the same general cultural environment. Continue reading →

WorldNetDaily, best known for its continuing promotion of Barack Obama Birther conspiracy theories, has been writing up various stories about the death of Andrew Breitbart — in large part, apparently, on the the theory that his death may have something to do with suppressing some (unknown) bombshell he has in regard to Barack Obama.

The latest story in this vein is here, in which WND reporter Jerome Corsi exhaustively details the eyewitness testimony of one Christopher Lasseter — including this gem:

Lasseter said he did not initially notice anything unusual about how Breitbart looked. He noted Breitbart was wearing a dress shirt, khaki pants and a pair of Jack Purcell Converse shoes that Lasseter described as “preppy.”

Note: a few days back, WND made a huge deal about how Lasseter had apparently “disappeared.”

The Coeur d’Alene Press in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho is promoting an aluminum sub-variant of the “chemtrail” conspiracy theory. They are even running an online poll off the newspaper’s front page that asks readers whether they are “concerned” with the issue. (As of this writing, 43% of respondents answered “yes.”)

Chemtrail conspiracy theories have been around since the mid-1990s in various forms. All involve the idea that the government (or some super-governmental organization) is seeding the atmosphere with dangerous chemicals through the exhaust of commercial airliners. As proof, they point to the normally appearing contrails (white puffy cloud-like emissions that appear in the sky following aircraft) that, in fact, generally are composed of harmless water droplets. According to the various conspiracy theories that circulate, these “chemtrails” (as they are dubbed) contain mind-control agents, or chemical reagents that will channel the power of some super HAARP weapon. The aluminum variant being promoted by the Coeur d’Alene Press suggests that the government is inserting toxic aluminum particles into airliner exhaust as a means to reflect the sun’s rays, and thereby abate global warming.

The problem with all of these theories is (a) such a conspiracy would necessarily involve thousands of chemists, technicians and front-line airliner-refueling personnel working for dozens of different airlines, airports, government regulators, and airline-service corporations. It doesn’t make sense that any secret plot wouldn’t be leaked to the public; and (b) the high-temperature combustion process inside aircraft engines would destroy almost all chemical compounds destined for a “chemtrail” (though, of course, elemental aluminum would survive, in highly dispersed and oxidized form, as an ultimate emission product).

The interesting element in this case is that the Coeur d’Alene Press is an apparently (otherwise) respectable newspaper. Indeed, the reason I heard about the case was because a surprised journalist from another northwestern newspaper called me about it.

Incidentally, the author of the chemtrails article, Cliff Harris, (described as a “climatologist and CDA weather reporter”) seems to be a sort of human catalog of every sort of weather-related fringe theory imaginable. (“I have been writing articles for various newspapers and newsletters for more than 40 years on the subject of ‘WEATHER WARFARE,’ environmental modification (EnMod) weaponry programs,” he tells readers.) Interested web surfers may see his full catalog of articles here — including several that propose exotic explanations for global warming.

One of the most interesting phenomena I discovered while researching Among The Truthers is the manner by which radical leftists and radical right-wingers have come to embrace the very same conspiracy theories. In the case of the 9/11 Truth movement, for instance, one often finds right-wing Ron Paul/Alex Jones-style libertarians making common cause with hard-left America haters. Both groups think 9/11 was an inside job hatched by an evil oligarchy. The only difference is that the right-wing conspiracy theorists think the evil oligarchy is headed by Al Gore, the UN and the New World Order — while the left-wing conspiracy theorists think the evil oligarchy is headed by Dick Cheney, the oil companies, the Mossad, and the military-industrial complex.

Another interesting phenomenon: lifelong conspiracists who become so immersed in conspiracism that they break out of their narrow ideological niches and embrace completely separate conspiracist sub-cults on the other side of the spectrum. A good example is Jerome Corsi, a researcher and World Net Daily writer whom I interviewed in New York City for Among The Truthers. In recent years, he has become one of the top hard-right Obama Birther conspiracy theorists in the United States — in large part through his 2011 book Where’s The Birth Certificate? He also has embraced other right-wing conspiracist memes, such as North American Unionism.

But the target of his new conspiracist tome is very different: the oil industry, that traditional bugbear of the left. Or to be more precise, to quote his title: The Great Oil Conspiracy: How the U.S. Government Hid the Nazi Discovery of Abiotic Oil from the American People, which is described thusly by his publisher, World Net Daily:

A shocking investigation revealing why greedy oil companies are lying to the American people.

At the end of World War II, U.S. intelligence agents confiscated thousands of Nazi documents on what was known as the “Fischer-Tropsch Process”—a series of equations developed by German chemists unlocking the secrets of how oil is formed. When the Nazis took power, Germany had resolved to develop enough synthetic oil to wage war successfully, even without abundant national oil reserves. For decades, these confiscated German documents remained largely ignored in a United States where petro-geologists and petro-chemists were convinced that oil was a “fossil fuel” created by ancient decaying biological debris.

Clearly, big U.S. oil companies had no financial interest in explaining to the American people that oil was a natural product made on a continual basis deep within the earth. If there were only so many fossils in geological time, there could only be so much oil. Big oil could then charge more for a finite, rapidly disappearing resource than for a natural, renewable, and probably inexhaustible one.

The Great Oil Conspiracy explains how Stalin at the end of World War II demanded his petro-geologists “dig deeper” when petro-scientists in the United States had determined that the Soviet Union, like Germany, lacked national oil reserves. Russia today has challenged Saudi Arabia for the lead in oil production and exportation. Once oil is understood as an abundantly available resource, there is no reason hydro-carbon fuels cannot indefinitely propel the development and production of cheap energy reserves the United States needs to maintain its dominant position in the emerging global economy.

From the point of view of a student of conspiracism, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here — not just Corsi’s quantum leap from right-wing Birtherism to left-wing oil-company demagoguery. There also is the re-appearance of the conspiracists’ continual fascination with Nazis and their mythologized secret technologies. On top of that lies the age-old conspiracist/crackpot belief in flying cars that run on water, cold fusion, perpetual notion — and other theories stemming from the notion that the powers that be are “hiding” some secret, utopian power technology from us.

Too bad the conspiracists aren’t right about that. I would love some of that free Nazi oil. We all would.

C-SPAN has just broadcast my April 2 debate against mega-Truther Webster Tarpley at the Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. Click here for the full 1:41:34 video.

The Daily Mail has a fascinating piece on the destruction of David Icke’s marriage to Pamela Leigh Richards. (Richards knew things were going downhill when Icke began suspecting that she was showing lizard-like properties — never a good sign in a relationship). I spoke with Richards by phone about all this in November, but I never wrote anything about it because I couldn’t figure out a way to make it interesting for a Canadian audience. For what it’s worth, everything in the article is entirely consistent with what she told me in our extended interview. That doesn’t prove that she is telling the truth, but it does suggest her narrative is consistent.

Here’s the Canadian cover …

9/11, False Flags, and Black Ops: An Evening of Debate with David Frum, Jonathan Kay, and Webster Tarpley

Washington D.C. Spy Museum, 800 F Street NW, Monday, April 2, 6:30pm

This guy has read his Barkun …

In a small, dark room, a mysterious, shadowy elite gathers to decide the fate of the world. This elite has been plotting for centuries and has had membership in all of the world’s most powerful organizations, such as the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, Opus Dei, the Bilderberg Group, the Council of Foreign Relations, the World Trade Organization, and even the United Nations. They have caused wars, revolutions, diseases, general social upheaval, and even natural disasters, all for the purpose of creating a New World Order. This New World Order will have a single world government, a single currency, horde all of the world’s wealth and resources, stamp out constitutional rights and individual freedoms, and keep us all as brainwashed slaves on a dark, depressing prison planet. At least that’s what a conspiracy theorist would have you believe.

This lurid description captures the underlying beliefs of most conspiracy theorists. The names and organizations might change, but the goal — total world domination — and those plotting it — an evil shadowy elite — always remain the same. National Post editor and columnist Jonathan Kay identifies five key elements of conspiracy theories in his excellent survey of the contemporary conspiracist underground, Among the Truthers. These elements are 1) singularity, a single power that controls the events of history; 2) boundless evil; 3) incumbency; 4) greed; and 5) hypercompetence, the ability to manipulate people and events at will. Kay’s book mostly focuses on the 9/11 Truther movement, but also shows how these five elements continually show up in speculations about US president Barack Obama’s country of birth, the JFK assassination, and even alternative medicinal practices.

Conspiracy theories have a long history, tracing their way back to the French Revolution. In 1803, Abbe Barruel’s Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism blamed the Illuminati, an organization founded in 1776 by Bavarian law professor Adam Weishaupt, for starting the revolution. Since then, many of the world’s great wars and disasters have been laid at their feet. However, the actual history of the Illuminati is much quieter. The Illuminati was a social libertarian organization dedicated to freeing its members from political and religious oppression. The organization was eventually dissolved in 1787. However, it keeps on being resurrected and blamed for the world’s problems. Even Dan Brown couldn’t resist including them in his terrible novel, Angels and Demons.

Read the rest of Alex Ross’ review here.

Conservative media dot-com magnate Andrew Breitbart died from natural causes on Thursday at the age of 43. Already, his death has spawned theories that he was assassinated by allies of Barack Obama, on the notion that he was about to release bombshell information that would discredit the president. According to one of my friends who surfs the right-wing message boards often, “On Free Republic yesterday, the debate was about (i) *how exactly* Obama’s minions  murdered him (spiking his food with something that would cause a heart attack), (ii) whether it was related to yesterday’s press conference by Sheriff Joe Arpaio about Obama’s long-form birth certificate being a forgery (because Breitbart would have reported on it), and (iii) whether the “suspicious package” that arrived at Rush Limbaugh’s house yesterday (and which the police investigated) was also part of the same plot to silence conservative voices.”

The irony is that — as I argued here — Breitbart himself had little time for conspiracy theories: When I met him at the 2010 National Tea Party convention in Nashville, TN, in fact, he was furious that so much podium time was being given over to Barack Obama Birther types, who he thought discredited the Tea Party cause.

Readers can find my reflections on Breitbart’s contributions to the world of U.S. politics here.

Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay quotes Joseph Bottum on cranks: “There are three infallible signs of the crank. … The first is that he has  theory about the Jews. The second is that he has a theory about money. And the third is that he has a theory about Shakespeare.”

Mr. Kay, who works for the National Post, engaged in an anthropological survey of American cranks, publishing his findings in Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiratist Underground(HarperCollins, 340 pages, $27.99). His main subject is the Truthers, the collection of schismatic sects that believe that the September 11, 2011, attacks were a “false-flag” action by the United States government, a government in thrall to various sinister and secretive forces.

Though the Truthers may have received less attention from the mainstream media than the more recent phenomenon of the Birthers (the cranks who think that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen, to whom Mr Kay gives disappointingly slight attention), these 9/11fantasists have been busy churning out innumerable books and Web posts for years.

The Truthers, the Birthers, the anti-vaccination crackpots, and the other fauna Mr. Kay encounters display “disturbing habits of mind”: “a nihilistic trust in government, total alienation from conventional politics, a need to reduce the world’s complexity to good-versus-evil fables, the melding of secular politics with apocalyptic End-Is-Nigh religiosity, and a rejection of the basic tools of logic and discourse.”

Read the rest here.