Duck! and Gather

Given Parts 1 and 2 of this posting series, I suppose it goes without saying that I lean toward believing that certain Israels had highly accurate advance knowledge of the 9/11 events. Further, I suspect that these Israelis did not warn America to the degree that would have enabled a dumb, sleepy, virginal America to prevent the attacks — specifically so that America would “smarten up”, wake up, and shed its virginity concerning Muslim terrorism.

I could spend time now explaining the bases for these two beliefs of mine. But what’s the point? This “story” is almost six years old. And after six years of silence, speaking about this story is, in the best case, a philosophical act of a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear. In the worst case, it’s, I know, I know, anti-Semitism, neo-nazi sympathizing, Lindbergh/Poppa Kennedy worshipping, blah, blah, blah.

I suppose the reason I’m even blogging about it now is that I stumbled upon Amy Goodman’s interview of Ketcham, Perelman, and Cockburn from earlier this year. That got my attention.

It got my attention not because I hadn’t heard the story before (I had already read reams about it last year).

Not because I hadn’t seen Big Media video footage on the story before (I had already seen Carl Cameron’s pieces on Fox dating back to late 2001).

No, the sole reason that the Goodman interview caught my attention is that Goodman is a Jew, whereas the vast majority of reporting and commentary on this story over the past six years seems to have come from non-Jews.

It saddens me a bit to realize that in 2007, it doesn’t matter how many words Ketcham writes, nor how many retired corporate lawyers like Gerald Shea pick through the data on the story, nor how often Paul Thompsen updates his 9/11 Timeline concerning this story. None of that matters because none of them are Jews. Neither am I. And neither certainly are the hordes of “anti-Semites” who delight in telling and re-telling this story.

I believe that if this story is be told in America in such as way that all Americans can and will hear, it will be told by Jews, or by no one at all.

So, as of Summer 2007, I have read/watched the reporting/analysis of three different Jews on this story:

• Amy Goodman
• Marc Perelman
• the ADL (pdf)

Watching and reading the above suggests to me that there is certainly something “newsworthy” about this story.

Note that the above three links appeared in the list (and following paragraph) at the tail end of Part 2 of this posting series. But there, I gave some context around the content that is being linked to. Here, the only data that matters is the identity of the author. And here what we have are the only Jewish authors from that list.

This is what saddens me. It doesn’t matter how thoroughly the data was collected, nor how accurately the analysis was performed, nor how clearly the story was told. What matters first and foremost is the ethnicity of the author. This is a little bubble of anti-Americanism still surviving in this nation as of 2007.

Why is this bubble still surviving? Let’s ask some Jews.

There is a website called “Judaism Online“. The website doesn’t say who is behind it. However, the purpose of the site seems to be “marketing” of the Jewish people.

For example, the home page points out that while Jews represent less than 0.25% of world population, that group is responsible for a disproportionate percentage of positive effects on world history. In short, the site seems to serve nicely as data supporting the notion of Jews as a “chosen people”.

I had read similar thoughts in a wonderfully written book called “The Gifts of the Jews” by Thomas Cahill. Indeed, it is these sorts of thoughts that were behind my statement in a podcast last year to the effect that if I had to pick a group to belong to, the Jews would be #1 on my list (fat mp3). How can a group do any better than a track record of stellar success going back thousands of years?

Of course, I don’t count myself as a charter member of any group at all, with the possible exception of America — where “America” to me means “a great void” = “freedom” (fat mp3). Instead, I see myself as a decaying sack of bones that will one day be re-cycled back into the void of nature from which I came. Further, I see treating my group memberships as part of my identity as a mindset rooted in fear — ie. “the group will protect me”.

So that’s why I preface my preference for Judaism with “if I had to belong to a group” — because I would never count myself a card-carrying member of any group that would have me.

Anyway, long introduction to say that Judaism Online has a page entitled “Jews in the American Media”. When I first came across that page, I looked hard around the site for any signs of neo-nazi sympathies. This is because that page looks pretty much like other such pages you find around the web on childish neo-nazi sites that insist evil Jews run the world.

But unless someone disabuses me, I’ll say that that page seems to be about certain Jews explaining that, well, the Jews pretty much own the American Media. Well, I look dimly upon charged phrases like that. How about: That page shows that certain Jews have achieved the highest positions of leadership throughout the top of American media — including film, television, and newspaper.

Now, I find it hard to believe that this page “explains” why this troubling story about Israeli foreknowledge of 9/11 has been constipated for six years. But you know, try on the following argument on for size:

Try doing a search for “amy goodman self hating jew” and see what you find. The risk that any of the Jews on that “Jews in the American Media” list face if they push forward this troubling story is that they will be met with a howling accusation from the reactionary side of Judaism: “Self hating Jew!”

I suspect that prospect might be chilling to the people on that list — people, most of whom are presumably leaders of the Jewish American community. Who wants to be branded a traitor to your own people?

Interestingly, this situation finds its parallel with the relationship between moderate Muslim leaders threatened with being branded a “heretic” for expressing their moderate views. Of course, on that side, this sort of branding is made by extremists who seem eager to resort to violence.

Note that if Amy Goodman was Muslim, and she was expressing liberal Muslim views, I don’t know if any of us would be surprised to learn of her assassination. But instead, she is Jewish, and so she merely needs to recycle the Jewish hate mail that she receives.

At bottom, this posting says that if this troubling story is to go anywhere, it will be carried forward by a terribly courageous person on that “Jews in the American Media” list.

And when that Jewish person takes that courageous step, he or she can take his/her rightful place in Cahill’s future new edition of “Gifts of the Jews”.

This is a map from a memo dated September 14, 2004, authored by a retired corporate lawyer named Gerald Shea. Shea sent the memo, entitled “Memorandum to the National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (pdf)“, to the three bodies mentioned in the title.

Click on the map to zoom it up to full size so that you can read the labels on the map. Reading this map is useful because the whole troubling story boils down to this single map.

The map purports to indicate 15 different towns and cities across America in which resided, from mid-2000 to August 2001, both:

1. the 9/11 Muslim extremist hijackers and/or their supporters (the red half moons on the map), and
2. certain Israelis that the map refers to as the “DEA Groups” and the “New Jersey Group” (the green half moons).

Shea’s memo suggests that this shared taste in residence of the Muslim “terrorists” and certain Israelis was no coincidence. Instead, the memo suggests that these Israelis were Mossad agents, and that among these agents were some who were hot on the heels of the ultimate hijackers. As such, the memo suggests that Israel’s advance knowledge of the 9/11 events was at least as clear as that of the Muslim extremists who perpetrated the main events.

The DEA Groups comprised about 125 Israelis spread across America in these towns and cities, who claimed to be art students from Israeli universities. These Israelis targeted employees of the DEA — at their offices and their homes — purporting to be trying to sell them art. This DEA-targeted activity attracted the attention and concern of the DEA, resulting in a 60-page internal DEA memo that described this Israeli “art student” activity (pdf) (Shea included this DEA memo as an appendix to his own memo).

As the DEA memo notes, a little digging into these Israeli “art students” pointed toward the DEA’s on-going investigation of the Israeli-mafia-domination of the American market for the drug Ecstasy.

Shea’s memo points out that a number of the Israelis named in the DEA memo had been or were Mossad agents with expertise in electronic interception (ie. tapping of cell phone calls and land line calls).

It has been theorized that the “art student” phenomena was a three-layer deception. At the surface layer, the Israelis claimed to be art students interested in selling art (to DEA employees). This first layer was easily punctured to lead to the second layer which pointed to criminal activities related to Ecstasy.

The third, deepest, and secret layer is what this troubling story is about. This deepest layer concerns certain among the 125 DEA Israelis who seem to have been using the “art student/Ecstasy agent” posture as cover for trailing the 9/11 hijackers and their supporters.

Related to this “art student” story is the story of the so-called “dancing Israelis” (Shea’s memo refers to them as the “New Jersey Group”). In the aftermath of the first plane hitting the North Tower of the WTC on the morning of 9/11, certain Israelis were witnessed watching the spectacle from across the Hudson river in New Jersey. Witnesses say that these Israelis were “celebrating” — specifically, “high-fiving” and waving lighters as if they were at a rock concert.

These men were arrested in a white van later in the afternoon of 9/11. The driver is reported to have said to the arresting officer: “We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem”. After being held in jail for more than two months, they were deported to Israel.

The map depicted above appears on page 166 of Shea’s 166-page memorandum. In one page, this map eloquently tells this troubling story. Perhaps Shea would have been better served putting this self-explanatory map on the cover page of his memo to liven up its dull, uninformative title.

Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered how or what Shea did with this memo because it would have been buried in any case. It appears that neither the 9/11 Commission, the Senate, or the House did anything at all with this information.

The silence Shea received from the American Government parallels the silence that journalist Christopher Ketcham has received from the American Media these past years. Ketcham has been trying to tell the same story as Shea did, albeit from a journalist’s perspective.

Ketcham did manage to get his first version of this story published in the Salon online magazine of 2002. However, by the time Ketcham had prepared his more thoroughly researched 11,000-word memo that fleshes out the story, he could not find an interested publisher. That is, until Counterpunch magazine published Ketcham’s story on March 7, 2007.

If you’re interested in learning about this story, you can:

1. Read the 2004 Gordon Shea memo (pdf)
2. Read Marc Perelman’s March 2, 2003 piece on the story in the Jewish magazine Forward
3. Watch the November 2001 report from Carl Cameron on Fox that addresses this story, and Israeli espionage more generally (try this link if that one fails)
4. Pay Counterpunch to read Ketcham’s most recent story
5. Read Ketcham’s 2002 initial Salon story
6. Read the 9/11 Timeline’s page on “Israel”
7. Watch the Amy Goodman February 8, 2007, interview of Ketcham, Counterpunch editor Andrew Cockburn, and Perelman

Of course, you could also read about or watch this story in many other venues, ranging from the thinly veiled neo-nazi perspective, to an “anti-Semitic” drumbeat, and just when you’re about to puke, you can swing all the way to the other extreme, and read the paranoid Jew-as-ubiquitous-victim perspective (pdf).

However, I recommend the earlier listed sources given their sober, methodical treatment with no sign of vitriol, sarcasm, excitement, defensiveness, or ad hominem attacks.

So my wife says to me a couple of days ago: “You’re thinking about this stuff again? Why?”

Good question. I suppose the answer is that early last week, I was looking through my site stats, and noticed that some folks were clicking on some of my 9/11 postings from last September. I looked at those postings again, and that got me surfing about 9/11 stuff again.

After listening to Jim Fetzer “interview” Steven Jones (mp3) (Fetzer seems to serve as the belligerent/won’t-shut-up Michael “Savage” Weiner of the “9/11 conspiracy” crowd), then watching a sober presentation by Gordon Ross on the collapse of the towers (a presentation that I found fairly compelling), I stumbled upon a video of Amy Goodman interviewing Christopher Ketcham, Andrew Cockburn, and Marc Perelman for a segment entitled “Cheering Movers and Art Student Spies: Was Israel Tracking the Hijackers Before the 9/11 Attacks?”.

That last one really got my attention for reasons I’ll explain in detail in later postings of this series. But for now, let me just say that reading and watching this stuff made me pensive and troubled. I was troubled for two opposite reasons: (1) because of the dynamics that have kept the story from emerging in the popular media nearly six years after 9/11; but (2) because of what might happen in America when the story does inevitably come out. On concern #2, it strikes me that the longer this story is buried by the popular media, the worse the reaction of the American people will be when it finally does come out.

It’s as if America is suffering from six years of bowel constipation. Imagine the stink when this stuff finally does come out.

Anyway, before launching into the details of this American constipated story, I figured I’d start with some definitions. Notice that I have entitled this series “9/11 and Reactionary Judaism”. I am using the word “reactionary” in the sense of Wikipedia’s definition:

Reactionary (or reactionist) is a political epithet, generally used as a pejorative, originally applied in the context of the French Revolution … . Later on in the early 20th century, [the word] also came to describe … the diverse groups and individuals criticizing certain aspects of ideologies like liberalism, democratic socialism, secularism, and other leftist ideologies.

I am using the word “Judaism” in the sense of the sense of “Jews collectively; Jewry“. Then I am using the word “Jew” according to Wikipedia’s definition:

A Jew … is a member of the Jewish people, an ethnic group originating in the Israelites of the ancient Middle East and others who converted to Judaism throughout the millennia.

Accordingly, the phrase “Reactionary Judaism” means “certain people, who identify themselves as Jews, who see the Jewish people as universally persecuted and in mortal danger, and who justify almost any nature of action that can described as an act of ‘self defense'”. I’m sure there’s a better phrase somewhere out there. But hopefully, this one will serve for now.

Notice that in this definition of mine, “reactionary Judaism” does not include all Jews, nor does it include all of Israel. Rather, it includes certain Israeli Jews, and certain non-Israeli (mostly American) Jews (i.e. certain members of the Jewish Diaspora).

So when these postings receive the inevitable comment accusing me of “anti-Semitism”, I can point to this first posting in the series. But, of course, that will make no difference to the people who make such accusations.

Anyway, on with the story.

This Donaghy NBA reffing scandal (see previous posting) is a perfect allegory for the blind spot of not only America, but the entire 1000-year-and-running Western Culture (that included the British and Spanish empires before the present American one). Still, America’s blind spot seems even stronger.

This blind spot is about America’s inability to understand seemingly isolated problems as symptoms of a wider systemic problem. Examples include, to name a few:

• the Donaghy NBA reffing point-shaving scandal
• a group of cancerous cells
• a school shooter
• a serial murderer
• 9/11
• obesity of a person
• high price of gasoline

In each case, there is a “local” “isolated” problem, with narrow, targeted solutions. But also, in each case, these problems are merely symptoms of larger, systemic, dynamics. They are symptoms of a diseased system.

But in America, most people seem unwilling or incapable of envisioning systemic dynamics. Or to the extent they do look to systems, Americans stop at systemic solutions involving money, usually spent on technology.

Watching this Donaghy case unfold is a wonderful allegory for this American blind spot. For sporting people to wake up to the systemic disease for which this case is a mere symptom will require even more explosive developments. And this case might yet produce them.

When these developments come, the sporting public will be “shocked! shocked!” to their core. Just as the cancer patient is shocked when the chemotherapy fails, or when we all read about the next school shooter, or when our latest fad diet fails and we’re fatter than ever, or when …