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Martin Varsavsky

Martin Varsavsky

Posted: October 4, 2010 07:05 AM
Read More: 9/11 , Muslim , Politics News

This morning I read that a great number of Muslims believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy created by the US government to justify the invasion of Iraq. This worried me. How could so many Muslims be so wrong?

But then I thought that the U.S. government and some EU countries did lie to invade Iraq. They lied about the weapons of mass destruction conspiracy and the connections between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

So if I were debating with any of those Muslims who believe that 9/11 was an excuse to invade Iraq, I would have to say "9/11 was not a US/Israeli conspiracy, there is tremendous irrefutable evidence that it was a terrorist attack perpetrated by Saudi terrorists and led by Osama bin Laden." And that part is true.

But then I would have to explain other painful truths. I would have to admit that we invaded Iraq despite knowing that neither the 9/11 terrorists nor the WMD where there. That in our countries we created the false impression that Saddam was behind 9/11 and that many believe this lie now. And this is one weak side of the debate.

If we can create conspiracies about WMD and "Muslim terrorism," as if all Muslims act together (Saddam=Osama=Ahmadinejad), attack and destroy the wrong country (Iraq), torture their citizens, post pictures of how we torture them in Abu Ghraib, take some to Guantanamo and approve their torture, share the blame in the killing of 25 times more innocent civilians than those who died in 9/11 and admit to using white phosphorous (chemical weapon) attacking Fallujah; if we can commit such atrocities, why is it so farfetched that most Muslims believe that 9/11 was perpetrated by US and Israel in order to invade Iraq and control the second largest oil reserve in the world?

Moreover, in this Wikipedia entry you will be surprised to find out that one third of Americans actually AGREE with the majority of Muslims. They also believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories even though 2% of Americans are Muslims.

Can our argument just be "yes, we do horrible things but not precisely the horrible things you believe we do"? My hope is that, during this decade, we will truly gain the high moral ground against terrorism and cooperate with moderate Muslims to eradicate Muslim extremism without violating human rights in the region. In the end, terrorism is an industry that feeds on angry young men. We have to make it much harder for Muslim terrorists to recruit. As we have been behaving over the last 10 years, it is not surprising that terrorism has greatly increased since 9/11.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post claimed a majority of Muslims believed 9/11 was a conspiracy. The source material linked to in this post does not substantiate that claim, and thus, that claim has been removed from the post.

 

Follow Martin Varsavsky on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martinvars

 
 
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09:25 AM on 10/07/2010
Talking of 9/11 conspiracy theorists what is the greatest one of them all up to these days? Nine years after the publication of his seminal book, 9/11: the Big Lie, Thierry Meyssan is reduced to defending Iran in a series of articles which accuse the Americans of posting disinformation about the country’s election on Twitter and of insisting that adulterous women in Iran are no longer put to death by stoning.
One possible cause is the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who have just sponsored Monsieur Meyssan to the tune of one million dollars to produce a book about the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafiq Hariri back in 2005. Meyssan claims his book will contain evidence that the state of Israel was behind the murder.
Hezbollah said a similar thing two months ago, producing aerial photographs it says shows Israel had been tracking Mr Hariri long before his assassination.
Hezbollah has been minding Meyssan from his new base in Beirut, in particular for his frequent forays, totalling six months, into Iran to write and research his book.
One feature which will remind those familiar with Meyssan style is that he will say the attack on the Lebanon prime minister as by a missile and not the car bomb which everyone else (excepting Hezbollah says). Mons Meyssan said that the Pentagon was hit by a missile and not by American Airlines 77 – this despite scores of witnesses to the crash.
02:08 PM on 10/06/2010
Many Muslims, Jews, Christians, and people of other faiths are waking up to the fact that the official 9/11 story cannot be true. As a matter of fact, the establishment's official 9/11 story is the real conspiracy theory. If one looks at the scientific evidence involving the destruction of the 3 skyscrapers on 9/11, one will quickly come to the conclusion that there were explosives involved.
03:01 PM on 10/05/2010
''there is tremendous irrefutable evidence that it was a terrorist attack perpetrated by Saudi terrorists and led by Osama bin Laden." And that part is true.'

How about this, whenever someone alludes to the existence of irrefutable evidence they are obliged to state what it is and why it is irrefutable. Like Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

"This worried me. How could so many Muslims be so wrong?"

Not so many Muslims. Just you.
02:07 AM on 10/05/2010
The details about the building collapses in NY or fascinating. Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth (notably Richard Gage) have done a stellar job of bringing these extremely strange anomalies to light. You can watch a 2 hour presentation of these details on their site. What is so frustrating is that the official investigating agencie steadfastly refuse to explain the near freefall collapses, the violation of conservation of momentum, the abundance of iron-rich microspheres in the WTC dust, the many credible reports of molten metal running "like lava" in the piles, the scientific analysis that revealed traces of nanothermite residue, etc. This stuff is utterly fascinating folks. Don't forget that the only 2 steel-framed buildings EVER to experience a total progressive collapse occurred on 911, and the only building EVER to collapse solely due to fire (WTC7) occurred on 911.

It is every American citizen's duty to question highly suspicious events such as this, especially since so much death and destruction have resulted from 911. Our country was founded on the principle of mistrust of power. Don't ever forget what it means to be an American.
07:46 PM on 10/04/2010
Operation Northwoods was a March, 13th 1962 US government proposal for a false flag attack to be orchestrated against the US by the CIA and was to be blamed on Cuba in order to justify a US invasion of Cuba. Part of this plan involved CIA operatives posing as US college students boarding a plane and then switching the plane with a remote-controlled drone aircraft at Eglin Air Force base and then blowing up the drone near Cuban air space. See the link below for the George Washington University National Security Archive for the declassified documents for this once top secret plan.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/doc1.pdf

"Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will begin transmitting on the international distress frequency a "MAY DAY" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal."
06:11 PM on 10/04/2010
"9/11 was not a US/Israeli conspiracy, there is tremendous irrefutable evidence that it was a terrorist attack perpetrated by Saudi terrorists and led by Osama bin Laden."

I'm a peace-loving activist, but considering what you wrote above, if it was the Saudis that attacked us, then why are we not at war with them?

Either way, you don't know the first thing about 9/11 if you have bought into the government's official conspiracy theory about it.
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06:01 PM on 10/04/2010
When you looks closely at the events of 9/11 the explanation that 19 hijackers sent by OBL were able to pull of such a sophisticated operation which just happened to coincide with the US military's exercise / drill about a series of hijackings which were going to crash into the WTC, you realize at the very least that our government lied to us, covered up some inconvenient truths and it was not being caught a sleep.

If these hijackers did it, they had some serious help or they were monitored and were going to take the hit for the real conspirators. We just don't know, but we know we were lied to and W was a liar and so he lied about 9/11. He wouldn't testify alone or under oath and did everything possible to NOT have a serious investigation including packing the commission. Martin, you are terribly naive and should study false flag operations - Gulf of Tonkin, Sinking the Main, USS Liberty and you will realize that things are not what you believe them to be.

Considering all the lies of gov, of intel and the fact that intel works in the dark, there's a good chance they were in on it. Let's take another look.
06:00 PM on 10/04/2010
9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: "It is a national scandal"; "This investigation is now compromised"; and "One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up"

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/09/anniversary-of-911.html
05:53 PM on 10/04/2010
Chairman of the 9/11 Commission Thomas H. Kean: "FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue... We, to this day, don't know why NORAD told us what they told us... It was just so far from the truth."

Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission Lee Hamilton: "We got started late; We had a very short time frame... We did not have enough money... We had a lot of people strongly opposed to what we did. We had a lot of trouble getting access to documents and to people... So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail."
05:46 PM on 10/04/2010
Honest question: What is the "tremendous irrefutable evidence" that Muslims did 9/11? The only thing the government has shown us is videotapes of bin Laden that no one can prove are really bin Laden and on top of all the known lies ("Saddam sought uranium in Africa" in the State of the Union), excuse me if I don't just take the government's word. What else is there? "Confessions" from people who were waterboarded hundreds of times and beaten. We've never seen airport security videos or flight manifests or the security videos around the Pentagon. We were told at about 10:30 in the morning that it was Islamic extremists and Osama bin Laden and that was that. No evidence necessary.
05:44 PM on 10/04/2010
The following 4 short video presentations by physicist David Chandler of the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers provide conclusive and irrefutable evidence that the twin towers were brought down by controlled demolitions. These presentations include the detailed analysis of obvious explosive squibs, secondary explosions of laterally ejected debris and cutter charge explosions during the demolitions of the twin towers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSApOavkHg8

http://www.911docs.net/cutter_charges_wtc.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DChR1XcYhlw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnR4A4zb8B0&feature=related
05:25 PM on 10/04/2010
If we scale back on some of the smaller lies, maybe the really big ones will fly a little longer.
That's brilliant, let's try it.

What have we got to lose ?
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Martin Varsavsky
Restless tech entrepreneur
03:13 PM on 10/04/2010
A 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that significant majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey — all among the most moderate nations in the Islamic world — said they did not believe Arabs carried out the attacks.

this phrase is taken from this article http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101002/ap_on_re_eu/eu_attacks_the_theories
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HeevenSteven
20 Minutes into the future.
10:05 PM on 10/04/2010
It seems conspiracy theories manifest in populations that feel politically alienated. I used to think it was just clueless people prone to fantasy and unable to perform an inference to the best explanation; but Mark Fenster's thesis "Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture" convinced me that there's a bigger dynamic involved, and that these "theories" provide a useful balm in some populations.

As long as we have secret, or opaque, or closeted systems that either do the bidding of the powerful, or serve to cover up their frequent follies, we'll have plenty of conspiracy theories to write about.
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HeevenSteven
20 Minutes into the future.
01:13 PM on 10/04/2010
The atrocities we've perpetrated left fingerprints, bodies, eye-witnesses, and other evidence for all to see. The 9-11 conspiracies have no evidence but the fantasies of the believers. There's a huge gulf in between these two scenarios, and conflating them as similar does a disservice to the truth.
12:24 AM on 10/05/2010
There is a great deal of evidence. Why do people keep saying that there is none?

Please view the David Chandler videos posted above and educate yourself.
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HeevenSteven
20 Minutes into the future.
07:16 AM on 10/05/2010
"..educate yourself"..

Lol! Good advice!
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Vlady
Better Late
12:35 PM on 10/04/2010
>>if we can commit such atrocities, why is it so farfetched that most Muslims believe that 9/11 was perpetrated by US and Israel

It just demonstrate how some western intellectuals indeed perpetrate and proliferate this rubbish to advance their ideological standing.