Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  When the Q&A began, Alten rose from his seat. “I consider you a friend, and I’ve been on your [Internet radio] show many times,” he told Barrett. “But you start off with the idea that we shouldn’t use racial profiling against Muslims, which I agree with, as a Jew. And then you completely become a hypocrite, and blame the Jews. You put up a list of Jewish people in the media, and immediately label them Zionist, and [suggest] that they have motivations for covering up 9/11, without any shred of evidence, without ever having met any of those people . . . You’re actually hurting the 9/11 Truth movement by doing these things!” Then Alten sat down, to scattered applause.

  A few minutes later, as the audience dispersed for lunch, Barrett came over to make peace with Alten. But their conversation degenerated into another argument. As I listened in, alongside a few others, I found myself in the odd position of cheering on one conspiracy theorist in what seemed to me a principled attack on a bigoted counterpart. (At one especially surreal point, Barrett—whom I’d interviewed previously—actually ushered me into the conversation to adjudicate some tangential point or other about Middle Eastern history.)

  Later on, when I caught up with Alten, he told me that the whole episode symbolized what’s wrong with the 9/11 Truth movement—an opinion shared by others I interviewed at St. Mark’s. “I was shocked that they allowed Barrett to speak,” he told me. “He’s become so radical . . . I’ve basically cornered him into admitting his desire to see Israel wiped off the face of the map. Who would ever want to be associated with someone like that? He used to speak out about the facts of 9/11. But he now uses the 9/11 Truth podium to tie everything into the Jews.”

  Conspiracism’s Hateful Sidekick

  Not all conspiracy theorists are anti-Semitic. But all conspiracy movements—all of them—attract anti-Semites. Even UFO conspiracists manage, somehow, to project Jewish stereotypes on imagined visitors from other galaxies: A recurring theme in their literature is that outer-space visitors are divided into at least two categories—tall, virtuous, Aryan-seeming aliens (sometimes traced to the star Procyon, in the constellation Canis Minor); and malignant, gnomelike, big-nosed “Grays” (sometimes traced to the star Rigel, in the Orion constellation).

  The roots of this ancient bigotry extend to the very moment when Jesus died on the Cross. “Most Christians did not want to be enemies of the Roman Empire and they soon sought to play down the role of the Romans in the [Biblical] story,” Diarmaid MacCulloch explains in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. “So the Passion narratives shifted the blame on to the Jewish authorities”—a propaganda effort epitomized in the Gospel of Matthew, wherein the Jewish crowds are made to roar out “His blood be on us, and on our children!” (As MacCulloch archly notes, “It would have been better for the moral health of Christianity if the blame had stayed with Pilate.”) In the superstitious medieval anti-Semitic tradition that eventually emerged—as described earlier in this book—the Jew was a sort of wandering demon, poisoning drinking water and murdering Christian babies to satisfy his inborn bloodlust.

  Many centuries later—after the French Revolution and the wave of frenzied anti-Semitic conspiracism that accompanied it—the Jew became a symbol of the political, technological, and industrial forces threatening to overturn Europe’s sleepy pastoral monarchies. Capitalism, in particular, along with the wrenching creative destruction that inevitably accompanied it, was imagined to be the creation of rootless Jewish financiers—Luftmenschen, or “people of the air,” as German anti-Semites called them—who leeched their income off society’s farmers, laborers, and artisans. In French society, this attitude came into full bloom during the Dreyfus affair; and, before it, the 1890s-era scandal surrounding the collapse of the Panama Canal Company, which the Libre Parole newspaper described as “a flagrant instance of the Jewish peril,” and evidence that “all of Jewry, high and low” lay “congregated beneath the udder of this milch cow.”

  As discussed in Chapter 2, anti-Semitic conspiracists of this period played to the nostalgic, reactionary, backward-looking attitude that inevitably takes hold of insecure people in tumultuous times. Poisonous anti-Semitism penetrated all strata of European society in the decades leading up to World War II. But it found its most enthusiastic audience among romantic nationalists who fetishized their country’s fading pastoral identity and aristocratic traditions, which the “rootless” urban Jew was seen to be undermining. This made the doctrine useful to Russia’s czars, and Europe’s other besieged monarchs, who pushed the idea that political liberalism was a Jewish plot to destroy Europe’s Christian character.

  As the influence of the Protocols swept west, Germany, afflicted with a particularly feverish strain of nationalism, showed itself to be especially vulnerable. “When [German anti-Semites of the völkisch variety] looked to the past, to the ideal state which they supposed to have preceded the modern age, they looked far beyond throne and altar, back to an infinitely remote and almost entirely mythical world,” wrote Norman Cohn in Warrant for Genocide. “For them, ‘the Jew’ was not only, or mainly, the destroyer of kings and the enemy of the Church—he was above all the age-old antagonist of the Germanic peasant, he was the force which for two thousand years had been undermining the true, original German way of life.”

  Adolf Hitler put a pseudoscientific gloss on such dark superstitions by tethering them to the germ theory of medicine and associated notions of “racial hygiene.” As early as 1919, when Hitler was still employed as an education officer with the German Army in Munich, he described Jewry as “the racial tuberculosis of the peoples.” With the newly available tools of industrial slaughter, the Jew now could be scientifically eradicated in the same way that a hospital room could be sterilized. In pursuing this project, Hitler created a genocide so horribly systematic that it has become the standard of evil against which all other crimes against humanity have been measured ever since.

  Hitler destroyed six million Jews. But he also destroyed anti-Semitism as a semirespectable Western creed: In the shadow of the Holocaust, theories about Jews that had circulated for centuries suddenly seemed sinister and even lunatic. The presence of journalists among Europe’s liberators (including Edward R. Murrow, whose April, 1945, report from Buchenwald concentration camp was one of the most memorable of his career) ensured that the effect on popular attitudes would be permanently etched in photographs and film—a reminder for future generations that could be summoned up whenever the language of murderous anti-Semitism fills the mouths of dictators (as, in fact, is now the case in Iran).

  Soft anti-Semitism would stagger on for decades in Europe and North America—the sort that kept Jews out of certain country clubs and law firms till the 1970s and 1980s. But it would never again be permissible in the mainstream West to speak of Jews disparagingly as a race, or even to begin a dinner-party monologue with the words “The Jew.” Overt anti-Semitism became dispersed to the fringes of intellectual life—the militant black ghetto and the Nation of Islam; neo-Nazi- and skinhead groups (which are largely extinct in North America, but still occasionally assert themselves in chants emanating from the cheap seats at European soccer games); and—as discussed at greater length in this chapter—militant, left-wing anti-Israeli obsessives, such as Kevin Barrett, who have made common cause with hatemongers in the Muslim Middle East.

  Even most “mainstream” (if that word can be used) conspiracy theorists, I was surprised to discover, now go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the taint of Jew hatred. This is especially apparent among right-wing New World Order types, such as Alex Jones—despite the fact that their central narrative, the existence of a moneyed cabal of all-controlling globalists who oppress ordinary hard-working Americans, is precisely congruent with old-school anti-Semitism in just about every other aspect. Michael Ruppert, perhaps the most influential 9/11 Truther there was in the movement’s early years, began his epic conspiracist tome Crossing the Rubicon with “special thanks” to “all of the American Jews who took to this book and my
work in full recognition that we all worship the same God.” Robert Bowman—the one-time head of the Star Wars missile defense program under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, now a peace activist and 9/11 Truther—defends himself against allegations of consorting with Holocaust deniers by averring, “My father was an ethnic Jew.” Even Barrett felt compelled to start up an odd organization called “Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth” to give ecumenical cover for his conspiracy theories.

  Perhaps my favorite example in the but-some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jewish conspiracist niche is Victor Fletcher, the editor and publisher of the Toronto Street News, a bizarre fortnightly newspaper sold for two dollars a copy by homeless people. While the publication was conceived as a way to provide dignity to beggars who otherwise would simply be asking passersby for a handout, its crackpot contents have instead reinforced the worst stereotype of homeless people as paranoid, hate-addled lunatics. One 2010 edition, for instance, contained an article titled “The Kaballah: The NWO’s Satanic Bible,” claiming that “the ‘god’ of the Kabbalah is not god at all. It is Lucifer. Freemasonry is based on the Kabbalah. Illuminati Jews and their Freemasonic allies are stealthily erecting a New World Order dedicated to Lucifer. That’s why the ubiquitous logo of the City of Ottawa, where I am currently visiting, is an O with three tails. 666.” Yet on the newspaper’s masthead page, Fletcher—who once was forced to apologize for running an article calling for the murder of “Jew bankers”—proudly declares the Street News to be a “Jewish Newspaper, 60% written by Jews.”

  Of course, some conspiracy theorists do cross the line into out-and-out unapologetic anti-Semitism (and its inevitable cousin, Holocaust denial). But when that happens, they typically become radioactive to less radicalized conspiracists such as Jones, Alten, and most of the other leading conspiracy theorists whom I have profiled in this book. At this point, the typical pattern is for the anti-Semite to schism publicly from the movement—a melodramatic blog posting is now the usual medium for this maneuver—and set out down his own hateful, idiosyncratic path, adding his erstwhile conspiracists-in-arms to the long tally of Jewish and semitophilic conspirators he keeps tacked to the virtual bulletin board at the back of his mind.

  The process can take years. By all appearances, Kevin Barrett is well on his way.

  A New Home on the Left

  Since the French Revolution, anti-Semitism typically had been a creature of the Right, in the European sense of the word—which is to say, the reactionary defenders of the established social, religious, and economic order: As already noted, the Jew was a stand-in for capitalism, mobility (physical and otherwise), new ideologies, and the marginalization of the sturdy gentile rural folk who plowed the fields, threshed the grain, and embodied the romantic pastoral core of the nation’s collective identity.

  This began to change in 1948, when the creation of the state of Israel, simultaneous with the extinction in the West of traditional anti-Semitism. Gradually, Jews would be spoken of less as social pollutants or passive victims within larger Western societies—and more as protagonists in the geopolitics of a once-obscure corner of the British Empire. After the Jews established their own state, it became impossible to typecast them as mere parasites contaminating foreign hosts. The Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel scored a crushing military victory against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, furthered this transformation. Writing in that same year, one scholarly expert on the Protocols declared: “Today, the story is already almost forgotten—so much so that it is quite rare, at least in Europe, to meet anyone under the age of 40 who has even heard of these strange ideas.”

  Yet at the same time that an old breed of Jewish-focused conspiracism was dying, a new one was blooming on Israeli soil. As Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi wrote in The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, the Jews who arrived in Israel from Europe were mostly white, well educated, and politically sophisticated—alien beings amongst the largely rural, uneducated, and illiterate Arabs who populated the area. Far from the likes of David Ben Gurion, the Palestinian leaders of the British Mandate period were fez-wearing grandees held over from another age—feuding, risk-averse patriarchs who were far more concerned with preserving their traditional status than agitating for Arab rights, much less organizing a modern state. And so when civil war broke out between the two sides in 1947, the result was decisive.

  Seen from North American shores, the Jews’ transformation of Israel from an Ottoman backwater into a thriving, powerful Western nation continues to inspire: Here was an ancient people returning to their homeland following two millennia of statelessness and a European dictator’s effort at extermination. But to the Arab peasants whose sleepy, agrarian society was being transformed into an alien landscape by immigrants speaking another language and embracing another religion, the Jews looked as much like colonialists as the British officials they replaced.

  In the 1960s, Yasser Arafat would popularize this colonial narrative in the West by presenting himself as a sort of Arab Che Guevara. Equally influential was Palestinian American scholar Edward Said, whose books helped convince the Western intelligentsia that every corner of Western society—from the novels of Jane Austen to U.S. foreign policy—was soaked in bigotry and exploitation; and that the Western media, in particular, was poisonously disposed toward Eastern cultures. From the Palestinian point of view, the genius of this approach was that it cut through the complex history of Jews and Arabs, casting the Palestinian struggle as a simple microcosm of the Orient’s larger battle against imperialism.

  In the emerging propaganda against the Jewish state—which, in the West, now takes its most common form on websites and campus posters announcing Israel Apartheid Week and other anti-Zionist events—the old anti-Semitic stereotypes have been revamped. In the centuries leading up to the Holocaust, the Jew often was seen as rich, but also physically flaccid, diseased, and somewhat wretched. Fagin, from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, for instance, was described as “disgusting.” In Ivanhoe, the Jew Isaac is introduced as “a tall thin old man, who . . . had lost by the habit of stooping much of his actual height.” By the 1970s, this stereotype was thrown into reverse: In the emerging propaganda, the Jew now was shown in the cockpit of a helicopter or fighter jet—an omnipotent, teched-up superman murdering defenseless Palestinian children from the sky. As in the Nazi era, the Jew isn’t fully human—but now he’s an all-powerful Nazgûl instead of a pitiful Gollum.

  In the common usage of child victims to communicate the extent of the Jew’s evil, the anti-Israeli propaganda of today is similar to the posters and textbooks of the Nazi era, which often showed shadowy Hebrews menacing German families. But the Nazis took care to personalize the Jew as a craggy, hook-nosed ghoul—an image meant to further the idea that Jews were so genetically inferior as to be literally inhuman. Aside from editorial cartoonists in the Arab world (many of whom continue to faithfully copy Nazi-era stereotypes to this day), anti-Semitic propagandists of our own age typically omit the Jew’s features in favour of a faceless, Star-of-Zion-emblazoned machine of war. During the second Intifada, for instance, a photo genre much favored by newspapers was the image of a small boy throwing a rock at a monstrous chunk of moving steel—an Israeli tank or bulldozer.

  In keeping with our society’s obsession with victimhood, the propaganda strategy against Israel now is entirely passive-aggressive. While the Nazis dwelled on the virility and superhuman indomitability of Aryans, the Jews’ enemies now are represented in propaganda by five-year-olds carrying teddy bears. In 2009, for instance, the worldwide organizers of Israel Apartheid Week circulated a slick sixty-second promotional movie on apartheidweek.org, in which they depicted a cartoon mock-up of Gaza’s population containing no men of military age, just a group of sorrowful children, mothers, and grandparents. The complex moral dimension of the conflict has been replaced by a sentimental Marxist-inspired tale of the virtuous oppressed rising up against an evil oppressor. Slogans of racial purity hav
e been replaced with the mantras of “social justice.”

  As a result, anti-Israel activism has drawn in the whole hodgepodge of leftist activists—and even world leaders—who know little about the Middle East, but who identify in a broad sense with the Marxist-inspired struggle of worker against capitalist, black against white, colonized against colonizer. During the 2008–2009 Gaza War, for instance, Hugo Chavez’s “bolivarian” government in Venezuela declared its “unrestricted solidarity with the heroic Palestinian people” and denounced Israel’s “criminal atrocities.” A few months later, Chavez’s deposed Honduran ally, Manuel Zelaya, told the world he was under siege from “Israeli mercenaries” armed with what a Miami Herald interviewer described as “high-frequency radiation” and “toxic gases” that “alter [Zelaya’s] physical and mental state.”

  Back in North America, this merging of shrill anti-Zionism and traditional left-wing activism has produced bizarre juxtapositions—such as lesbian feminists who defend the niqab as a form of resistance against Western capitalism, and “peace activists” marching alongside kafiyeh-clad protesters who chant for Jewish blood in Arabic. Perhaps the most bizarre example I have witnessed is Toronto’s annual Gay Pride parade, a popular tourist-friendly spectacle whose out-and-proud homoeroticism would constitute a death sentence for participants were the event held in the Arab world. Yet these parades have contained a contingent of “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” who shout slogans against one of the most gay-friendly nations in the entire world. (Gays serve openly in the Israeli army, and there are gay pride parades in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.)

  What makes such poisonous attacks on Israel especially notable is the fact that community activists in Toronto’s gay community otherwise have shown themselves obsessively committed to the principles of nondiscrimination. The mission statement of the Pride committee, for instance, is a lengthy catalog of pledges to “value diversity” in regard to every imaginable sexual subniche. Yet, like many other left-wing activists, they often exhibit a single-minded hatred of Israel no less obsessive than the hateful campaigns once commonly launched by reactionary xenophobes. The same is true of the ultraliberal United Church of Canada, whose activists rarely raise a peep when Christians are slaughtered in Pakistan or Iraq, but militate for sanctions against one of the only nations in the Middle East where Christians can worship without fear. Then there is Adbusters, an ultra-bien-pensant Vancouver-based anticorporate magazine whose parent foundation earnestly describes itself as “a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators, and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age.” In late 2010, Adbusters ran a photo spread (Truthbombs on Israeli TV) comparing the situation in Gaza to that of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War—a feature so vile that Canada’s largest drug-store chain pulled all copies of it off its shelves. Equally offensive was a 2004 Adbusters feature—“Why won’t anyone say they are Jewish?”—ticking off all the powerful Jews who had pushed for the invasion of Iraq. After decades of political correctness, it has become clear that the hypertolerant mantras of modern leftism supply no defense against the mind-warping effects of conspiracism: They simply deflect the conspiracist impulse to more fashionable targets such as Israel and the Jews that support it.