Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (42 page)

As if to personify the ideological melange occurring at the conference, one of the two Polish representatives was another MP, Mateusz Piskorski, elected for Stettin in the 2005 parliamentary elections on the ticket of the Self-Defense (Samoobrona) Party. Samoobrona is an unusual amalgam of populist left-wing economics and xenophobia, but Piskorski, still in his twenties, had, as revealed in the mainstream Polish newspaper
Gazeta Wyborcza
, a previous history of far-right activism, including the translation and publishing of neo-Nazi material, including “skinzines” for the movement’s more physically militant elements. Now, Piskorski, sitting on the platform next to the onetime antifascist Meyssan, was applauded for expressing his shame that Poland had committed troops to the occupation of Iraq.

The exemplar of the politics of the event may have been the French comedian Dieudonné Mbala Mbala, who contributed to one of the panel sessions of the Axis for Peace, arguing for the need for new political movements to replace those that had, he claimed, “given in to the Zionist lobby.” A formidable stand-up comedian, the half-Cameroonian Dieudonné had received a UN special award for antiracism in 2000. By 2004, however, his main targets appeared to be not the racist right in France but Israel, Zionism, and Jews. Interviewed in
Le Journal du Dimanche
that February, he accused all Jews of being “slave-traders who have turned to banking or show business and, today, to terrorist action to show their support for Ariel Sharon’s policies.”
³³
When challenged about this assertion in a subsequent interview for the
Ha’aretz
newspaper of Israel, Dieudonné elaborated: in the fifteenth century, much wealth was earned from trading in slaves, and every person who became wealthy exploited slavery in some way or another. “History tells us that many Jews earned their fortune during that period,” said Dieudonné. “Do you think it’s logical that businessmen throughout the world got rich out of this and Jews had nothing to do with this?”
³⁴
The comedian was careful to differentiate between being an anti-Zionist, which he admitted to, and being anti-Semitic, which he denied. His interviewer, Raney Cohen, had found it hard to appreciate the distinction when attending a Dieudonné show in 2004:

Dieudonné said—with a serious expression on his face—that he had decided to apologize to “the Chosen People.” When he finished his request for forgiveness, he was quiet for a moment, then glanced all around suspiciously and explained in a whisper that “When the cowardly Zionists attack someone, it’s always from behind.” Then he smiled mischievously to the audience and concluded with a crude gesture and shouts, “You can shove my apology up your ass, Chosen People!” as the crowd went wild.
³⁵

A British journalist, John Lichfield, witnessed a similar Dieudonné skit.

He is greeted with roars and whoops by a packed, multiracial audience, which is young, trendy, intellectual, and Left-wing. Many of them have come straight from the latest demo against the government’s new jobs law for the young . . . However, something else intrudes, something darker and more sinister. Dieudonné is obsessed with Jews. All races, including his own mixed black and white origins, get a gentle mickey-taking in his show. When Jews are mentioned—and they are mentioned often—the tone becomes more aggressive, even violent. In one skit, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the Jewish-French philosopher, haggles with a street potato seller. Dieudonné/ Lévy says: “How can you ask me to pay so much when six million of us died in the Holocaust? ” Roars of delight from the audience.
³⁶

Dieudonné’s trajectory and his embracing of diverse themes previously thought to be contradictory is emblematic of the Axis for Peace and of a certain kind of radical politics that forms the ideological spine of the 9/11 Truth movement. This politics is a loose coalescence of impulses: antiglobalization, broadly antimodernist and anti-imperialist—with imperialism being inevitably and solely associated with American power. These impulses are easily felt both by the far left and the far right, and the consequence has been an unofficial and almost, but not quite, unconscious alliance. What binds this alliance even tighter is its anti-Israeli bent. In February 2005, three members of the administration council of the Voltaire Network resigned precisely because of what they called the organization’s “redbrown” (far-left/far-right) orientation. “The pretext of resisting American Imperialism, [plus] lenience toward Chinese and Russian imperialisms and closeness with Islamists,” they protested, “is symptomatic of a latent anti-Semitic drift among the leadership.”
³⁷

The Missing Four Thousand

In David Ray Griffin’s
The New Pearl Harbor
, the work of “independent researcher” Eric Hufschmid is frequently cited: his book
Painful Questions
is described as “most valuable,” and his notion of the Twin Towers collapsing at “free fall” speed is accepted uncritically. But Hufschmid believes, “Most wars and terrorist attacks of the past century were instigated by Zionists. They pretend to be Americans, Communists, Russians, Liberals, Republicans, Greens, Christians, Muslims, and 9/11 researchers. They infiltrate, bribe, and blackmail our governments, militaries, news agencies, and police.”
³⁸

As the 9/11 Truth movement gathered momentum, Hufschmid began to worry that the Zionists were somehow arranging for the truth about their involvement in the attacks to be obscured by other theories, which concentrated on the culpability of the Bush administration. One example, according to Hufschmid, might be the inexplicable popularity of Avery’s
Loose Change
video over his own effort,
Painful Deceptions
. As a consequence of this belief, Hufschmid recorded an hour-long telephone conversation in April 2006 between himself and Dylan Avery, who was accompanied by his sidekicks Korey Rowe and Jason Bermas.

As Hufschmid pressed his notion of crypto-Jewish conspiracies at work in the anti-conspiracy movement, the response from the
Loose Change
men became ever more agonized, like children whose favorite uncle has begun to behave strangely. They were, said Avery, “well aware of the Illuminati, we’re aware of the New World Order, and we’re well aware that there are people who want an all-Jewish state, but that’s not what we’re about . . . If you’re going to say crypto-Jew, you have to have something to back it up. Until you get a Kabbalah or a Torah or a yarmulkah, how can you say that?” Bermas conceded that maybe Mossad was behind the bringing down of the Twin Towers. “It’s not that [the theory is] not legitimate, I just haven’t seen enough information to say that this Zionist cabal that everybody’s talking about is responsible.”
³⁹

Since September 12, 2001, there have been theories linking Israelis/ Jews/Zionists (the names always indicating the same people) to the worst terrorist incident in history. Christopher Bollyn, last seen in this chapter joining Thierry Meyssan at his anti-imperialist colloquium in Brussels, was one of the leading American protagonists of this strand, along with his
American Free Press
colleague Michael Collins-Piper. To Bollyn, there was “a preponderance of evidence pointing to Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, being involved in the terror attacks.”
⁴⁰
Some of this evidence was circumstantial but, to a certain cast of mind, suggestive, such as the case of the five young Israelis picked up by the FBI after they were seen watching the attack on the Twin Towers from the George Washington Bridge and supposedly “speaking in a foreign language and hugging each other.”

But the story that provided the initial impetus for the claims of a Zionist plot was the urban myth, repeated by Bollyn, that four thousand Jews or Israelis (the description varies) mysteriously stayed at home on the day of the attacks, clearly forewarned about what was to happen. On September 15, the Syrian newspaper
Al-Thawra
stated that “four thousand Jews were absent from their work on the day of the explosions.” Al-Manar television in Lebanon, linked to the militant Hezbollah organization, also referred to Israelis who “remarkably did not show up in their jobs the day the incident took place.” If these were the first instances of the charges, they certainly weren’t the last: in January 2007, an Internet search on Google turned up over 33,000 references to “4,000 Jews” and the WTC attacks.

The origin of the figure is probably the September 12 Internet edition of the
Jerusalem Post
, which stated, “the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attacks.” This story, almost certainly based on panicky inquiries about relatives visiting or living in the Washington and New York areas, was given the utterly misleading headline “Hundreds of Israelis Missing in WTC Attack.” Later, when four thousand Israelis did not turn up dead in the WTC, this permitted those who wanted to, such as Bollyn, to note a nonexistent discrepancy.

In fact, 2,071 workers in and visitors to the World Trade Center were killed on 9/11, and as far as can be ascertained, between 10 and 14 percent were Jewish, roughly correlating to the percentage of Jews in the population of the New York area. This should have surprised nobody except perhaps an anti-Semite or a Syrian newspaper. From Bollyn, who belongs to the section of the openly racist far right that also believes the Holocaust to be a hoax or an exaggeration, such an argument might be considered run-of-the-mill. Far more extraordinary was that he kept company with, among others, a German Social Democrat and a black American Marxist poet.

Andreas von Bülow, the German former government minister who had also attended the Brussels conference, was asked about the Israeli connection by a journalist from
Der Spiegel
. There were, said von Bülow, “a number of indications . . . point[ing] to some connection between the Mossad and the act and perpetrators of 9/11,” including the fact that there was “only one Israeli victim on 9/11.” There then followed this slightly surreal exchange:

VON BÜLOW:
They [the Israelis] didn’t know about it, [but] they had an idea.

Q:
And why isn’t any of them talking today?

VON BÜLOW:
That has happened. They say a little Pakistani boy said, “The towers will no longer be standing tomorrow.”
⁴¹

At the time of 9/11, the official poet laureate of New Jersey was the sixty-six-year-old black left-wing writer Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones). In 2002 he published a poem titled “Somebody Blew Up America,” the essence of which was to contrast the demonization of militant Islam with the lack of attention paid to other, worse criminals, such as those who became rich from slavery. The technique Baraka used was to ask who was responsible for each of the other historical offenses against humanity. So the poem included, according to one supporter of Baraka’s, a “provocatively poetic inquiry about who knew beforehand” about the WTC attacks:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed?

Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers

To stay home that day?

Why did Sharon stay away?

It seemed 9/11 had drawn together a lifelong foe of racism and a foot soldier in the ranks of the modern neo-fascists. They could agree (or provocatively inquire, poetically) that the Jews were somehow to blame. Or if not the Jews, as such, the evil manipulators of the Jews, the Zionists, themselves an almost invincible form of super-Jew.

Mind the Gap

The growth in belief in conspiracies about 9/11 owed as much to what occurred after the attack as to what happened before it. In October 2001 coalition forces went into Afghanistan, removed the Islamist Taliban government, and chased Osama bin Laden out of his bases. Then in March 2003, American and British forces invaded Iraq in what was to prove the most controversial and divisive foreign-policy decision for both countries of the post-Cold War era. There were huge protests, followed by a widespread belief that somehow the American and British people had been lied to. Many books have covered and will cover that territory, but one consequence was a flood of conspiracy theories discussing almost every aspect of Western (here defined as American, British, Israeli, and, if you have less parochial tastes, Australian) foreign and counterterrorist policy.

Within a day of the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, it was being suggested that the United States might have planted the devices to “consolidate broader social support for coming imperial wars, restrictions of civil liberties, and general social paranoia, phenomena from which Spain had been relatively exempt until today.”
⁴²
The following month, the capture and filmed beheading in Iraq of an American contractor, Nicholas Berg, led to widespread speculation that the event had been staged to make the Iraqi insurgency look bad. His captors didn’t wear their headgear the way real Arabs would; a doctor said there wasn’t enough blood, and so on. In the same week that Berg was kidnapped, the doyenne of the antiglobalization movement, Naomi Klein, wrote from Baghdad that the burgeoning civil war might be being deliberately fomented by the American administration, “creating the chaos it needs” to avoid having to hand over power to the Iraqis.
⁴³