Those Who Forget the Past (11 page)

HAROLD EVANS

The View from Ground Zero

The Index Lecture

[
This
was initially a talk, given at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival in
September 2002, and represents one of the earliest comprehensive responses
in the U.K. to worldwide post–9/11 anti-Semitism.]

SEPTEMBER II HAS BEEN hard for us to explain to our children Isabel, ten, and George, fifteen, harder than anything in their lives, because we couldn't understand it ourselves.

Now we know. The Jews did it.

The day the two airliners hit the twin towers, 4,000 Jews who worked there did not show up or called in sick because they had been secretly tipped off by Israel's Mossad to stay away that day.

Israeli secret police advised Sharon not to travel to New York on September 11.

Actually, no passengers were in the planes that hit the towers. They were aircraft operated by remote control from a secret downtown Mossad office.

Five Israelis were caught filming the smoking rubble from their office building; but you never heard about this because it was hushed up by the FBI on orders from Washington. There were so many television and other pictures of the planes hitting the towers and the towers falling only because cameras had been pre-positioned round the site.

It was the same at the Pentagon. All Jews were absent that day when the plane struck.

The purpose of this vast and brilliant 9/11 Israeli conspiracy is clearer now than it was. It was a plot to vilify Muslims, to pave the way for a joint Israeli-U.S. military operation not just against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban but also Islamic militants in Palestine.

Could anybody believe this rubbish? Yes, millions and millions and millions did. And still do and we should hesitate to call them stupid. A Gallup Poll survey released in March this year questioned people in nine predominantly Islamic countries—Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia representing about half the world's Muslim population. Some 67 percent found the attacks morally unjustified, which is something—why not 100 percent?—but they were also asked whether they believed reports that groups of Arabs carried out the attacks. Only in West-aligned Turkey was the answer yes, but it was a close 46 to 43 percent. In all the other eight Islamic countries, the populations rejected the idea that Arabs or Al Qaeda were responsible. The majorities are overwhelming in Pakistan, Kuwait, Iran, and Indonesia—in Pakistan only 4 percent believe the hijack killers were Arabs. Repeat, that is a poll just a couple of months ago, after millions of words from reporters, and exultant videos from the Osama bin Laden show. Of course, some of you know those videos were produced by Rent-a-Mullah, Inc., a CIA shadow company operating out of Maryland. But please keep it to yourself. . . .

Who could be crazy/malign/misguided enough to disseminate this odious invention as the truth? you may ask; there has been no consistent effort to find out. The short answer is the millenarians, imams, editors, columnists, government ministers, in every one of the non-democratic countries of the Arab and Islamic world, and on the West Bank.

But it is not confined to those closed societies where there is no freedom of the press. Sheikh Muhammad Gemeaha lived on New York's Upper West Side when he was in the United States for the Cairo Center of Islamic Learning at al-Azhar University and he explained to us dummies that “only the Jews” were capable of toppling the World Trade Center. If the conspiracy became known to the American people, said Sheikh Gemeaha, “they would have done to Jews what Hitler did.” It is to be found too among Muslim groups in Paris and London, and among a tiny number of American youth. One of the most malevolent sources of activity is a body called the Associated Students of San Francisco State University allied with the General Union of Palestinian Students and the Muslim Student Association.

Pakistan's cooperation in the Afghanistan war was a little tricky for General Musharraf because the fact of the Israeli-American conspiracy to frame Arabs for 9/11 has been a running theme in most of the country's Urdu-language newspapers.
The
Nation,
the leading daily published in Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi, headlined a typically straight unqualified assertion:

MOSSAD BEHIND ATTACKS

The newspaper
Ad-Dustour
in moderate Jordan elaborated: The Twin Towers attack was “the act of the great Jewish Zionist mastermind that controls the world's economy, media and politics.”

This Mossad conspiracy is being endlessly recycled. Thomas Friedman, the
New York Times
columnist, reported this month that it was an article of faith in Indonesia, the pivotal Southeast Asia state with the world's largest Muslim population. The week I was asked to give this talk, Dr. Y. Alaridi opined in the English language
Syria Times:
“Has the CIA asked the Israeli Mossad if they had any idea about the September 11 tragedy before it happened? Sir, please forgive my rudeness, by the way, who does rule America?” There is no end to the paranoia. In an interview with Arab television only last week, a British spokesman was asked to prove that the 9/11 attacks were
not
carried out by the CIA.

How could people be so susceptible to misinformation? Well, conspiracy theories simplify a complex world. They have the advantage that the absence of evidence is itself proof of plot: missing records at Pearl Harbor, missing bullets in Dallas, missing bodies in Jenin. Preconceptions are outfitted in fantasy. Contradiction by authority is mere affirmation of the vastness of the plot: so he's in it, too. Conspiracy and rumor bloom especially where the flow of news and opinion is restricted and especially where illiteracy is high, as it is in Pakistan where the
madrassa
s (schools) devote all their attention to religious indoctrination—the only developing country, I think, where literacy rates are falling. Syed Talat Hussain, the prominent Pakistani journalist, was frank about it: “In a country where there is a void of information, newspapers resort to rumours. In addition, there is an abiding tradition in the Pakistani print media deliberately to prove that whatever goes wrong is the work of the Jews and the Hindus.” But there is another explanation for the potency of the poison today. It is the aura of authenticity provided by technology, by the Internet. John Daniszewski of the
Los Angeles Times
asked an editor of
The Nation
in Islamabad, Ayesha Haroon, why they blamed Israel. “It is quite possible that there was deliberate malice in printing it,” she admitted, but she went on: “I also think it has to do with the Internet. Somebody in Canada, the United States, or the UK is sitting there and makes up something and sends it to us. And when you see something on a computer, you tend to believe it is true.” Here in the new magic is a source of much of our misery. An Indonesian just back from visiting the Islamic fundamentalist stronghold of Jogjakarta told Friedman how alarmed he was by the tide running for Jihad against Christians and Jews. What is frightening, he said, is an insidious digital divide. “Internet users are only 5 per cent of the population—but these 5 per cent spread rumours to everyone else. They say, ‘He got it from the Internet.' They think it's the Bible.”

But what about these 4,000 Jews? The figure of 4,000 got into circulation because some years ago somebody guessed that's how many Israelis there were in the city. The fact is Jews and Israelis did what everybody did on September 11: they showed up for work and died along with Muslims and Christians and Buddhists. The four children of Deborah Kaplan, engineer, know too well that nobody tipped off their mother. Allan Schwartzstein, equities trader, and father of two, died wearing the watch he had received for his bar mitzvah fifteen years before. He was named after an uncle killed in Israel in 1948. The uncle's body was never found and neither was Allan's. His high-level connections in Israel did not help Hagay Shefi, the technologist son of the Israeli brigadier general Dov Shefi. He was speaking at the Risk Waters conference and never had a chance on the 106th floor.

The smear that defiles the dead, that millions perceive as reality, owes its original currency, astonishingly, to one website. The story got legs because it fitted the story line of Jewish masterminds and because very few people in media regarded it seriously enough to take note of, still less, eviscerate. One dotcom reporter who did investigate, Bryan Curtis of Slate, first discovered the fiction surfacing on a site called Information Times on September 12. It began tentatively saying the “terrorist government of Israel could not be ruled out as the suspect” and then supposition congealed. At 6:26 A.M. on September 17 it substantiated the plot with the headline that 4,000 Jews were spared execution by their compatriots. And the source for this devastating charge seems to be Al-Manar Television in Lebanon, which exists “to stage an effective psychological warfare with the Zionist enemy” and gives frequent airtime to the terrorist group Hezbollah. So I thought I would call Information Times in Washington to ask whether they had the slightest qualms about making such a play of an unchecked story from such a source. They were hard to find. Directory assistance had no entry for Information Times, Info Times, or the editor listed on its website, a Wizard of Oz by the name of Syed Adeeb. Mr. Curtis also tried. The Press Club told him it had no such tenant; email messages were bounced back. When I spoke to Curtis this week, he told me he had been bombarded by anti-Semitic responses. He also got a threatening legal letter but when Slate's lawyers tried to reply, the evanescent litigants were on the lam again. But Information Times is still peddling its wares on the web and you will get the flavor if I read you a few of the thirty-one stories I found at the top of their list on May 16:

1306: Expose Lobbyists who Support Israeli Terrorism 1307: Powell cunningly encourages Genocide of Arabs 1309: Thomas Friedman is a violent extremist 1310: US REP Says Bush Junta behind 9/11 attacks 1313: Dumb Foxy Blonde Utters Israeli Propaganda 1316: Hindu Terrorists Raped and Burned Women 1322: Bush Imposes Criminal Dictator on Pakistan 1325: Bush Changes Our Name to US of Israel 1334: Israelis with bomb material arrested in Washington

Once upon a time Mr. Adeeb, and his shy sponsors, would be sending out smudged cyclostyled sheets that would never see the light of day. But now the mysterious Mr. Adeeb and others like him have a megaphone to the world, with this spurious authenticity of electronic delivery. Mr. Cordell Hull in the thirties of print and radio complained that a lie went halfway round the world before truth had time to put its trousers on; nowadays it has been to Mars and back before anyone is half awake. It is extraordinary how seductive it is. After 9/11, I heard that Palestinians had been filmed dancing joyously in the street, but that AP had for some reason not circulated the video.

Then I came across “the truth” on the Web. Here is what I read, capitalization as in the text:

All around the world we are subjected to 3 or 4 huge news distributors and one of them is CNN. One set of images showed Palestinians celebrating the bombing out on the streets, eating some cake and making funny faces for the camera. Well THOSE IMAGES WERE SHOT BACK IN 1991. THOSE ARE IMAGES OF PALESTINIANS CELEBRATING THE INVASION OF KUWAIT! It is simply unacceptable that a super power of communications as CNN uses images which do not correspond to reality. This is a crime against public opinion. The truth is that the U.S. has shown no respect for other countries in the last decades.

Sounds right. One recalls Yasser Arafat led the Palestinians in support of Saddam in the Gulf War so perhaps the film in 2001 was indeed of 1990 celebrations of his invasion of Kuwait, or perhaps they erupted on the street when he launched Scud missiles against the hated Israelis.

What was CNN doing airing a decades-old film? Didn't it realize it would make Americans angry with the Palestinians?

Well, they weren't doing anything of the kind.

The web site exposé was itself a fraud. The film was not archive footage misapplied to a current event. It was shot on Black Tuesday, September 11, by a Reuters TV crew in East Jerusalem and supplied to CNN in the normal way—as testified both by Reuters and CNN. The internal evidence supports CNN's rebuttal: the video included comments from a Palestinian praising Osama Bin Laden, unknown on the Jerusalem street in 1990, and in the background were automobiles made after 1991.

So how did the lie get round the world? A student named Marcio A.V. Carvalho, at Universidad Estatal de Campinas-Brasil (Unicamp), was told by someone that a professor at another university had the CNN tape and could prove it false. Carvalho plugged the news into the email list of a discussion group he joined on the web. When members of the group got excited for more details, he went back to his contact and to the professor—who denied having the tape. Carvalho told his email list he had no more details. Later, following the CNN rebuttal, both the university announced regrets that one of its students had promulgated a falsehood, but by this time it had assumed an inflated life of its own. Carvalho disowned his Frankensteins; a hacker, he said, attacked his email domain and sent out distorted articles under his name.

I have reported this fragment in a little detail to show what we are up against today. We could be in this tent the rest of the week if we tried to find our way through the labyrinth of cognitive dissonance to assess the potential repercussions. On those who ingested the fraud alleging fraud, on those who caught up with it, on the different interpretations likely to be made by a viewer in America, in Europe, in the Middle East. But one thing is certain: whatever else they do, allegations of misreporting like this aggravate the dangers for journalists and TV crews—like Christiane Amanpour, who is with us tonight—bravely venturing into areas of tension, risking arrest by the authorities, a stray bullet, or violence from the street, the asylum of ignorance. I have lost three colleagues and friends this way. At the end of the line of incendiary lies, there is the life of a reporter, just trying to do his job, like Danny Pearl tortured and butchered because he was a Jew and a reporter, led into a trap by a graduate of a British university.