Israel, 9/11 and Jonathan Kay

by Joshua Blakeney

Graduate Student, University of Lethbridge

What’s worse than a Liberal candidate who compares Stephen Harper to Hitler? How about a Liberal candidate who believes 9/11 was an inside job. [sic][i]

Jonathan Kay, The National Post, September 25, 2008.

I have never bothered schooling myself in the minutiae of 911-ology — the microscopic examination of photos and videos, the comparison of melting points and mechanical properties of this or that construction material, the second-by-second timetable of U.S. Air Force activity on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. I have never done so because it is tedious and time-consuming.[ii]

Jonathan Kay, The National Post, October 27, 2008.

Following the [9/11] attacks, supporters of Israel spoke of a silver lining: The war against militant Islam suddenly was a global one.[iii]

Jonathan Kay, Among The Truthers, 2011.

A Canadian Volunteer: Jonathan Kay Idolizes the Israeli Mossad And Defends the Sacred Myth of 9/11

In these You Tube videos I draw attention to and critique the journalistic and rhetorical contributions of Jonathan Kay.

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PART 2: Waging The Battle for Reality: Joshua Blakeney Confronts Jonathan Kay’s 9/11 Relativism (part 2)

PART 3: Waging the Battle for Reality: Joshua Blakeney Confronts Jonathan Kay’s 9/11 Relativism (part 3)

Kay is the Comments Pages Editor of one of Canada’s most influential national broadsheet newspapers The National Post and is a fellow at the neoconservative think-tank the ‘Foundation For the Defense of Democracies’ which has been characterized by journalist Jeffrey Blankfort as “[o]ne of the most influential and powerful of the Zionist lobbies which changed its name and sprung into action immediately after 9/11.”[iv] The ‘Foundation For the Defense of Democracies’ is an offshoot of the now defunct Project for a New American Century which ominously called for a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ in September 2000.[v]

Kay’s bosses have included media moguls Conrad Black and Israel Asper, the latter of whom according to The Jewish Virtual Library “was an outspokenly partisan supporter of Israel.”[vi] Having won his spurs under the auspices of Black and Asper it is hardly surprising that Kay spends much of his time promoting Likudnik right-wing foreign policies and attacking moderates who defend international humanitarian law as it pertains to the plight of the Palestinian people.

Kay has written two books thus far in his highly partisan journalistic career. Kay’s first book, which was co-authored with ex-Mossad officer Michael Ross, is entitled The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad (2007).[vii] In The Volunteer Jonathan and his ex-Israeli agent co-author explain support for the 9/11 Wars among non-Israelis as follows: “The worldwide awakening of militant Islam [. . .] explains the intense devotion exhibited by many Westerners [. . .] to Israel’s cause: they instinctively see in the state a microcosm of the civilized world’s struggle against a murderous ideology and the men who embrace it [. . . such] nihilistic killers struck the United States on 9/11.”[viii]

In advancing this explanation for compliance with the Tel Aviv hatched “war on terror” Kay and Ross, like the preponderance of mainstream pundits fail to a) prove that “militant Islam” did indeed strike the United States on September 11, 2001 – this is presupposed and b) explain why citizens in countries far away from the Middle East “instinctively” perceived a “worldwide awakening of militant Islam” leading them to have an “intense devotion” to “Israel’s cause”. It is true that many British, Canadian, Australian and U.S. citizens consented to the unlawful and unnecessary 9/11 Wars. The more pressing question however is: why did such members of the pubic come to view the world through Israel’s spectacles?

Addressing this epistemological conundrum would have required Jonathan Kay to have conceded in 2007, when The Volunteer was published, what he has now admitted in his second book Among The Truthers (2011). In Among The Truthers Kay writes: “I bend the rules of logic in the service of ideology or partisanship. . .mainstream journalists often…[are] distorting the truth or pushing an ideological agenda.” (Among The Truthers, 323). In other words Kay and others like him “bend the rules of logic” and distort the truth to foster a public perception of the world consistent with how ideologically they would like the world to be.

With the rampant criminality of the Rupert Murdoch empire coming to the fore in Britain in recent weeks, Among the Truthers which was published by HarperCollins, a Rupert Murdoch affiliated publisher, becomes all the more interesting as a case study of the kind of sophistic disinformation produced by the military-industrial-academic complex. One can only hope that British law enforcement agencies will not stop at Rupert Murdoch’s unlawfulness and will extend their criminal investigations to scrutinize all the other media venues which promote illegal wars of aggression and censor evidence pertaining to the massacre of nearly 3000 human beings on 9/11.

Criminal investigators in Britain, Canada and elsewhere should consider whether certain journalists are in fact unregistered agents of foreign governments promoting political and ideological agendas which go against the interests of ordinary citizens.

For example, Robert Maxwell, who like Rupert Murdoch purchased a number of British media venues, most notably the Daily Mirror in 1984, was proven, as the book Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy by Martin Dillon and Gordon Thomas shows, to be a Mossad agent.[ix] Maxwell, a millionaire fraudster and one-time Labour MP, masqueraded as a supporter of the working class whilst spreading lie after lie against the courageous coal miners who struck in the mid-1980s to oppose Margaret Thatcher’s and her financiers’ assault on Britain’s indigenous energy industry.

Maxwell said of Britain’s first female prime minister “Without her, I wouldn’t be where I am.” Thatcher described Maxwell as “one of us.” Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Miners (NUM) was smeared by Maxwell who accused the greatest ever Briton of “taking money from Libya to pay off his mortgage” and of “bringing bloody revolution to the streets of Britain.”[x] Maxwell, whilst working for the Israeli government, had great sway over politicians who did a great deal of harm to the working class of Britain.[xi] “What really set Maxwell apart was that he controlled the only mass-circulation papers which supported the Labour Party…This is what gave the Mirror’s campaign its special force,” writes Seumas Milne, Comments Editor of the Guardian.

[youtube KHVWoxNy1tg Arthur Scargill commemorates the 25th Anniversary of the Heroic 1984/85 Miners’ strike.]

Maxwell “admired Thatcher enormously and he used the Labour Party really to promote himself and his own business interests” writes John Pilger. As Seymour Hersh argues in his book The Samson Option Maxwell helped Mossad kidnap Mordechai Vanunu, the dissent Israeli nuclear scientist who passed information about Israel’s nuclear program at Dimona to the media in 1986.

According to former Mossad agent Ari Ben-Menasche it is indisputable that Maxwell “maintained a close relationship with Mossad.” Former editor of the Mirror Roy Greenslade opines “To describe Maxwell as a spy for Israel was the equivalent of naming Margaret Thatcher as a spy for Britain.”[xii]

In his recently published book Rogue in Power: Why Stephen Harper is Remaking Canada by Stealth Professor Christian Nadeau speaks of “Canada being seen as one of the main allies of the Zionist cause.”[xiii] Why exactly does the Harper government in Canada side with Israel so one-sidedly? Do we have Mossad agents working in the Canadian media attempting to depict Israel’s priorities and imperatives as being synonymous with those of ordinary Canadians and their elected officials? In the case of Michael Ross, Jonathan Kay’s accomplice, he seems to have carte blanche to publish Israeli propaganda in the National Post such as his statistically ignorant March 2008 article “Canadian Jews should worry less about neo-Nazis and more about Islamic fundamentalism.”[xiv]

Were Islamists Involved in the 9/11 Atrocities?

There is little documentary evidence supporting a) the contention that there is a “worldwide awakening of militant Islam” – in fact statistically you’re more likely to die from lightening or in the bath than from terrorism or b) that 9/11 was orchestrated by Islamists.

There is in fact no evidence that the alleged hijackers boarded the planes on 9/11 or that they were orthodox Muslims. Some of the alleged hijackers were seen taking drugs, attending strip clubs and drinking alcohol prior to 9/11.

Wayne Madsen, a former U.S. government NSA employee and journalist who has contributed to ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, MS-NBC and Russia Today claims to have received British intelligence documents dated February 2002 informing the British government that “the Israeli Mossad ran the Arab hijacker cells that were later blamed by the U.S. government’s 9/11 Commission for carrying out the aerial attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.”[xv]

In his tenth 9/11 related book Cognitive Infiltration Professor David Ray Griffin writes: “Besides not being devout Muslims, the “hijackers” were evidently not even on the airliners [. . .] if the alleged hijackers had purchased tickets and boarded the flights, as the official story has it, their names would have been on the manifests.”[xvi]

Furthermore, the alleged pilot of the alleged plane that allegedly hit the Pentagon, Hani Hanjour, according to FBI documents,[xvii] after repeatedly failing his automobile and pilot’s license exams was miraculously authorized for a pilot’s license by Eddie Shalev, a former Israeli Defense Force paratrooper.[xviii]

The New Jersey Record of September 12, 2001 reported that five Israelis driving a van belonging to Urban Moving Systems were arrested in New York on 9/11 “carrying maps linking them to the blasts.” The men came under suspicion when they were seen celebrating the controlled demolitions of the World Trade Centre skyscrapers. ABC-TV’s 20-20 reported that one of the men, Sylvan Kurzberg, told police “We are Israelis. We are not your problem.”

According to ABC one of the Israelis had $4700 cash in his sock.[xix] The UK’s Channel 4 interviewed Juval Aviv, a former Mossad agent now working as a “counter-terrorism advisor” for the US Congress. He admitted that Urban Moving Systems “was a front company for Israeli intelligence and that some of its workers were spying illegally in the US.”[xx]

Salon.com reported that some Israeli spies who were arrested were “living down the street from Mohammed Atta’s house.” Moreover, Mohamed Atta according to his former girlfriend was competent in Hebrew and according to a report in The Guardian turned up alive post-9/11.[xxi]

These circumstantial pieces of evidence support the findings of the British intelligence documents cited by Madsen that the alleged hijackers might have been Mossad controlled proxies or patsies.

The evidence suggesting that the alleged hijackers were involved with the Israeli Mossad, which I’ve cited only a small fraction of, helps bring into question Kay’s and Ross’s contention that the “nihilistic killers [who] struck the United States on 9/11” were fueled by militant Islamist revivalism.

Exploiting Historic Jewish Suffering to Perpetuate the Suffering of the Ummah
In Among The Truthers Kay draws comparisons between the structure of “conspiracy theories” pertaining to 9/11 and the structure of the fraudulent and false Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Kay dedicates a full chapter to discussing The Protocols (and anti-Semitism in general) making several references to Israeli matters in the process. In doing so, Kay inadvertently draws attention to the reality that 9/11 and Israel are not two separate subjects but rather are closely interwoven.

While it is not within the purview of this article to elaborate comprehensively on this submission I think it is uncontroversial – when considering the evidence – to allege that Israel’s fingerprints are all over 9/11. It is also fair to say that Israel was a prime beneficiary of 9/11. This reality should influence how we view the role played by partisan journalists such as Jonathan Kay in North America, or David Aarronowitch, author of Voodoo Histories, in Britain who labour tirelessly to make non-Israelis view the world from an Israelcentric perspective.

Kay in Among the Truthers writes “The Jew was the perfect anti-Islamist, whose zeal and reliability in the war on terrorism was hard-wired into his political DNA thanks to six decades of Israeli warfare against Islamic terrorists in the Middle East” [Kay’s emphasis] (Among The Truthers, 301). In using the phrase “the Jew” Kay implicates all of the world’s Jewish population in the illegal and misanthropic policies of the Israeli government even though more than half of the world’s Jews live outside Israel and probably have never experienced Islamic terrorism.

By including a discussion of anti-Semitic theories, Jewish cultural issues and imperatives of the government of Israel in a book ostensibly about the “Truthers” (i.e. those who disbelieve the official story of 9/11) Kay forces skeptics who hadn’t associated 9/11 with Israel previously to begin to reconsider their positions.

As Professor Bill Willers writes in his excellent book review of Among The Truthers: “[Kay’s] book comes as ever more observers are, in fact, seeing connections between 9/11 and Israel’s Mossad, including former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who stated flatly in 2007 that Western intelligence services know ‘the attack has been planned and realized from the CIA American and Mossad’ (‘attentato e stato pianificato e realizzato dalla Cia americana e dal Mossad’).”[xxii]

9/11 Truth Seeking Versus 9/11 Relativism

At a theoretical level Kay has some profound misconceptions. Kay believes that academics can get away with propagating what in his view are nonsensical “conspiracy theories” due to the advent of postmodernism. Kay for example disapproves of those who have “argued that no single set of truths about the world could be said even to exist for all peoples” [Kay’s emphasis] (Among The Truthers, 266). He decries “radical identity politics” (Among the Truthers, 283) and “deconstructionism” (Among the Truthers, 265). Kay opines “deconstructionism dovetailed with a separate intellectual trend that had been underway since the 1960s: modern identity politics…The question of objective “truth” as most people would understand the term, was, of course, secondary.” (Among the Truthers, 265-66).

Making these remarks about the implications of relativism and overzealous subjectivism in post-1968 intellectual life, much of which he is correct about, one would then expect Kay in his argumentation to address empirical evidence and the arguments individuals espouse as opposed to the subjective traits of those with whom he disagrees with. Alas no. Kay, like most journalists who apologize for entrenched economic and imperial systems, benefits greatly from the epochal intellectual emphasis on subjectivity and identity politics as this allows the objective truth to be avoided, obfuscated and mystified.

Almost everything Kay writes is inflected with postmodern subjectivism and epistemic relativism. For example, when Jennifer Peto published an MA thesis[xxiii] which Jonathan Kay disagreed with, rather than addressing the substance of her arguments Kay penned an article entitled “Jonathan Kay on Jennifer Peto and the new breed of self-hating Jews.”[xxiv] Imagine, for the sake of argument, Peto is a self-hating Jew (whatever that means). What does that have to do with the veracity or falsity of her arguments?

When Kay discovered that I, Joshua Blakeney (a self-hating Briton?), had been awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship to subsidize my graduate research (which is about 9/11) he chose not to address why 9/11 Studies is or is not a legitimate subject for study in universities preferring to emphasize the fact that I was born in Britain. It was perhaps incipient on his part to raise issues of loyalty to Canada in light of his close ties to a Mossad agent and his cheerleading for sending Canadian troops to fight the U.S. and Israel’s real and imagined enemies abroad.[xxv]

Among The Truthers, like Kay’s journalism, is replete with the exact kind of subjectivist, psychoanalyses that Kay professes distain for on pages 261-283. For example, rather than address the evidence-based arguments contained in Professor David Ray Griffin’s ten 9/11-related books, Kay dismisses Griffin’s work as that of a “crank” (Among The Truthers, 193). When writing of Richard Gage who runs the group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth Kay resorts the very kind of identity politics he claims to distain. Kay refers to Gage’s “[post-9/11] newly created identity.” He continues: “like all forms of mid-life crisis, this sudden lurch into conspiracism offers middle-aged men a sense of revitalization and adventure” (Among The Truthers, 159).

Of course Kay’s ad hominem attacks provide him with a win-win situation. Even if he loses he wins. Even if those who Kay psychoanalyses prove, for example, they’re not going through mid-life crises or they’re not ‘self-hating Jews’ Kay has still won because he has shifted the debate away from the external empirically-verifiable evidence such individuals cite.

Professor Anthony J. Hall, who has written a thorough and important critique of Among the Truthers sums up Kay’s prerogative appositely: “Kay’s book is one part of a series of initiatives aimed during the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001 at pointing audiences away from the reality that many conscientious professionals have already demonstrated at risk to themselves and their careers that the evidence does not support the sacred myth of 9/11.”[xxvi]

From 9/11 to An Israeli Subempire in the Middle East

Jonathan Kay’s baseless rhetoric and 9/11 relativism looks all the more dubious when one situates the 9/11 incident within the proper context. The Israeli inspired reordering of the Middle East is the broader context within which to view Jonathan Kay’s diatribe against those of us who are proving that Muslims are not culpable for the 9/11 atrocities.

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Just as the U.S. ‘founding fathers’ seceded from the global British empire so the land-speculator faction of the bourgeoisie could dictate the terms of westward expansion into the vast lands held by the indigenous inhabitants of North America, so the Israeli subempire, or imperium in imperio, is being asserted by the Zionist faction of the global bourgeoisie so that Tel Aviv rather than Washington can dictate the terms of imperial relationships with the non-settler majority in the region.

The U.S. government, because it is running a global empire, has to balance multiple vested interests of which the Zionist faction of the ruling class is but one. Thus, in the infamous Clean Break document authored in 1996 by many of the orchestrators of the “war on terror” including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser we see the following piece of advice: “Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values by stressing that Israel is self-reliant, does not need U.S. troops in any capacity to defend it, including on the Golan Heights, and can manage its own affairs. Such self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure used against it in the past”[xxvii] (emphases original).

Stephen Sniegoski’s book The Transparent Cabal brings forth voluminous empirical evidence demonstrating that the neoconservative movement represented a faction of “Israel firsters” who, utilizing the political tactic of entryism, managed to burrow their way into the Republican Party and guide U.S. foreign policy in a direction that they felt was consistent with Israel’s interests as they conceived of them. Sneigoski writes “the neoconservative position on the Middle East was the polar opposite of what had been the traditional United States foreign policy, set by what might be called the foreign policy establishment. The goal of traditional policy was to promote stability in the Middle East in order to maintain the flow of oil. In contrast to the traditional goal of stability, the neocons called for destabilizing existing regimes.”[xxviii]

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Joseph Cirincione, whilst director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote “They [the neocons] offer a textbook case of how a small, organized group can determine policy in a large nation, even when the majority of officials and experts originally scorned their views.”[xxix]

Philanthropist George Soros stated that the “neocons form an influential group within the executive branch and their influence greatly increased after September 11.”[xxx]

In Nation magazine, Middle East expert Patrick Seale submitted that: “The neocons – a powerful group at the heart of the Bush administration – wanted war against Iraq and pressed for it with great determination, overriding and intimidating all those who expressed doubts, advised caution, urged the need for allies and for UN legitimacy, or recommended sticking with the well-tried cold war instruments of containment and deterrence…Right wing Jewish neocons – and most prominent neocons are right-wing Jews – tend to be pro-Israel zealots who believe that American and Israeli interests are inseparable (much to the alarm of liberal, pro-peace Jews, whether in America, Europe or Israel itself). Friends of Ariel Sharon’s Likud, they tend to loathe Arabs and Muslims. For them, the cause of liberating Iraq had little to do with the well-being of Iraqis…what they wished for was an improvement in Israel’s military and strategic environment.”[xxxi]

Harvard’s John Walt and U of Chicago’s Stephen Meashimer wrote “Given the neo-conservatives’ devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn’t surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests.”[xxxii]

In an article entitled “Beware of the Likud Doctrine” in the Guardian, Naomi Klein wrote “Common wisdom has it that after 9/11 a new era of geopolitics was ushered in, defined by what is usually called the Bush doctrine: pre-emptive wars, attacks on terrorist infrastructure (read: entire countries), an insistence that all the enemy understands is force. In fact, it would be more accurate to call this rigid worldview the Likud doctrine. What happened on September 11, 2001, is that the Likud doctrine, previously targeted against Palestinians, was picked up by the most powerful nation on earth and applied on a global scale. Call it the Likudisation of the world: the real legacy of 9/11.”[xxxiii]

Eric Alterman, formerly of MSNBC now of the Nation commented “the war was planned by neoconservatives, many of whom worked directly with their counterparts in the Israeli government, who helped perpetuate the deception.”[xxxiv]

Jim Lobe of the Interpress Service News Agency who is an expert on the rise of the neoconservative movement wrote “neoconservatives put Israel at the absolute centre of their worldview.” Pundit Robert Novak has referred to the attack on Iraq as “Sharon’s war.” This has been echoed by Bethlehem-based writer Jonathan Cook who in his exceptional text Israel and The Clash of Civilizations writes:

“Israel persuaded the US neocons that their respective goals (Israeli regional dominance and US control of oil) were related and compatible ends…Israel’s military establishment started developing an ambitious vision of Israel as a small empire in the Middle East more than two decades ago. It sought a sponsor in Washington to help it realise its vision, and found one in the neocons. The Jewish neocons, many of them already with strong emotional ties to Israel, may have been the most ready to listen to the message coming from Tel Aviv…Israel’s ideas about how to achieve these goals had a long heritage in Zionism…The Israeli security establishment argued that Israel’s own regional dominance and US control of oil could be assured in the same way through the provocation of a catastrophe in the Middle East in the form of social breakdown, a series of civil wars and the partition of self-defeating US policy, the neocons and Israel regarded as a positive outcome.”[xxxv]

Philip Zelikow, formerly a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and key fabricator of the 9/11 Commission Report opined on September 10, 2002 during a speech at the University of Virginia: “Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990- it’s the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically because it isn’t a popular sell.”[xxxvi]

The 9/11 Wars can be seen as Israel’s attempt to orient the U.S. empire away from its traditional interests of stability for oil markets and towards an Israeli policy of balkanizing, or rather ‘Ottomizing’ the Middle East. Israel wants not only the bantustanization of the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.

Ultimately the Israeli government and its wealthy sponsors hope to transform the whole Middle East ensemble into ethnic Bantustans, based on the millet system of the Ottoman empire, with the Israeli empire retaining hegemony via this historically successful divide and rule policy. Just as the Indian killers who pioneered the U.S. empire such as Andrew Jackson promoted the herding of Native Americans onto Bantustans, and using ethnic and religious factionalism to divide and rule, so the Zionists seek to exploit the many ethnic and religious divisions in the Middle East.

Those of us not living in the Middle East must play an active role in exposing the intellectual apologists for the rise of Israeli empire. The likes of Jonathan Kay are not the custodians of the memory of the events of WWII and we must not shy away from criticizing the emerging Israeli empire out of a fear that we might be accused of anti-Semitism. In fact, Kay and others like him demean all victims of genocide by promoting the genocidal 9/11 Wars. Israel is pursing a policy of Lebensraum, collective punishment and ethnic-nationalist supremacism. This is very similar to the Nazi policies in Europe. The Nazis targeted Slavs and other minorities, just as the Zionists target Arabs and Muslims, millions of whom lie dead as a direct result of the fraudulent events of 9/11.

The Pro-Palestinian movement must recognize that 9/11 Truth and the Israel-Palestine conflict are not two separate subjects. Likewise, the 9/11 Truth Movement must not shy away from the evidence implicating the Israeli government in the events of 9/11. This way we can create broader coalitions of activists to fight imperialism, racism and injustice; the duty of anyone who situates themselves, as I do, in the Marxist tradition.