Somebody Blew Up America

[W. Niederhut]

3 hours ago, Lance Payette said:

Don't cry now, big fella.  Blame Cory Santos and the others who recognized the anti-Semitic nature of your post.  They have inspired me, at least temporarily, that this place may not be as far gone as I had feared.  Perhaps you can explain what your 9/11 Truther nonsense is doing on a JFK Assassination Debate forum at all?

I will give you an ironclad "Adios" in at least one sense:  I will not be reading or responding to any more of your posts.  I have seen way more than enough for one lifetime.  Ditto for NiederNut (come on, folks, isn't that way more clever and apt than "Pay-Out," the meaning of which is still lost on me?).

Wait a minute, Pay-out.  Didn't you just say that you have, in fact, been "getting paid to do this stuff"-- I.e., to infiltrate and harass people on this forum?

I surmised as much the first time I ever read one of your lengthy, nonsensical posts here a few months ago.

You talk a good game, but any educated person can, most likely, see through your bugliosity.

No intellectually curious, reasonably well-informed person in 2019 believes the false narratives of the Warren Commission Report or Zelikow's 9/11 Omission Report.  Tell Sunstein to stop harassing scientists, historians, and true detectives.

[Guest]

24 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

Didn't you just say that you have, in fact, been "getting paid to do this stuff"-- I.e., to infiltrate and harass people on this forum?

Right.  "They" pay me big bucks to infiltrate obscure internet forums and spread "their" lies.  Slightly paranoid, are you?

I practiced law for 35 years.  People did indeed pay me moderate bucks to reduce self-important clowns to rubble.  As you can see, I'm pretty good at it.

Alas, I am completely retired, even to the extent of resigning from the bar so not even relatives can ask me to do free legal work anymore.  No one pays me to do anything these days.  I just stick my face in from time to time to stay mentally sharp and rattle a few cages that are just crying out to be rattled.

I'm sure you're a fine fellow who is a skilled psychiatrist and beloved by his many patients.  Well, I'm not sure of it, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.  But when it comes to this conspiracy stuff, you do seem to exemplify Lance's Axiom.  So do I, of course - I've been completely delusional about my golf skills for almost 60 years, although I have yet to resort to a conspiracy theory to explain why I'm not better than I am..

Edited August 10, 2019 by Guest

[Cliff Varnell]

Here's an interesting article on Baraka:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-path-cleared-by-amiri-baraka

<quote on>

In 2002, Baraka was singed by the controversy over his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” about the nearly three thousand Americans who died on September 11th. The poem was assailed as anti-Semitic for a stanza implying Israel had prior knowledge of the attack:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?

After the publication of the poem, Baraka gave interviews suggesting that he did genuinely believe that the Israeli and the American governments had had forewarning of the attacks. But the outrage over these lines obscured the meaning of the poem: it’s a conspiracist’s view of history, placing September 11th, and its victims, in the context of a lineage of inhumanities that includes colonialism, the Armenian genocide, Irish subjugation, apartheid, the Holocaust, class exploitation, and enough other cruelties to fill a syllabus on human-rights abuses. Lesser discussed were the lines

Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton,
Medgar Evers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney,
Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel
Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed

Who put a price on Lenin’s head

Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said “America First”
and ok’d the yellow stars

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured, assassinated, vanished

The broader point of the poem—that a vast diversity of people have been done in by the dark hand of malice—was overlooked in the ensuing controversy. The governor of New Jersey at the time, James McGreevey, demanded that Baraka apologize and resign from his position as the state’s Poet Laureate. Baraka refused, and later he gleefully noted that McGreevey ended up resigning before he did. (The state legislature eventually abolished the position entirely.)

Baraka was a controversial figure. He was also enigmatic, eccentric, brilliant, and possessed of a fount of indignation at the wrongs of the world as he understood them. To those who shared his reference points, he contained a black-brown diaspora of multitudes. In “In the Tradition,” Baraka writes, “Our fingerprints are everywhere on you, America, our fingerprints are everywhere.” In ways that were apparent to those who cared to recognize it, his were, too. </q>

[Paul Brancato]

1 hour ago, W. Niederhut said:

Wait a minute, Pay-out.  Didn't you just say that you have, in fact, been "getting paid to do this stuff"-- I.e., to infiltrate and harass people on this forum?

I surmised as much the first time I ever read one of your lengthy, nonsensical posts here a few months ago.

You talk a good game, but any educated person can, most likely, see through your bugliosity.

No intellectually curious, reasonably well-informed person in 2019 believes the false narratives of the Warren Commission Report or Zelikow's 9/11 Omission Report.  Tell Sunstein to stop harassing scientists, historians, and true detectives.

You and Robert have given Lance a chance to strut his stuff. He’s so full of himself, so certain about his theories regarding so called conspiracy theorists. I hate reading his stuff, because I hate the ego behind it. He’s only here to mock. 

I said a while ago I was taking umbrage because rather than engage with me about the facts you claim regarding Israeli citizens, Mossad etc you prefer to fire back at Lance. You’re still doing it, and I’m really shocked. 

Simply - provide a link to the Israeli Foreign Ministry saying what you, Robert, claim they did. W - tell me how you interpret your Mossad stuff? Was Israel behind the attacks? Or just privy to the coming event? 

[Paul Brancato]

19 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Here's an interesting article on Baraka:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-path-cleared-by-amiri-baraka

<quote on>

In 2002, Baraka was singed by the controversy over his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” about the nearly three thousand Americans who died on September 11th. The poem was assailed as anti-Semitic for a stanza implying Israel had prior knowledge of the attack:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?

After the publication of the poem, Baraka gave interviews suggesting that he did genuinely believe that the Israeli and the American governments had had forewarning of the attacks. But the outrage over these lines obscured the meaning of the poem: it’s a conspiracist’s view of history, placing September 11th, and its victims, in the context of a lineage of inhumanities that includes colonialism, the Armenian genocide, Irish subjugation, apartheid, the Holocaust, class exploitation, and enough other cruelties to fill a syllabus on human-rights abuses. Lesser discussed were the lines

Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton,
Medgar Evers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney,
Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel
Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed

Who put a price on Lenin’s head

Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said “America First”
and ok’d the yellow stars

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured, assassinated, vanished

The broader point of the poem—that a vast diversity of people have been done in by the dark hand of malice—was overlooked in the ensuing controversy. The governor of New Jersey at the time, James McGreevey, demanded that Baraka apologize and resign from his position as the state’s Poet Laureate. Baraka refused, and later he gleefully noted that McGreevey ended up resigning before he did. (The state legislature eventually abolished the position entirely.)

Baraka was a controversial figure. He was also enigmatic, eccentric, brilliant, and possessed of a fount of indignation at the wrongs of the world as he understood them. To those who shared his reference points, he contained a black-brown diaspora of multitudes. In “In the Tradition,” Baraka writes, “Our fingerprints are everywhere on you, America, our fingerprints are everywhere.” In ways that were apparent to those who cared to recognize it, his were, too. </q>

Thanks Cliff. We needed this. 

Edited August 10, 2019 by Paul Brancato

[W. Niederhut]

Paul,

      Here are two references on the subjects of 1) Odigo, and 2) the Al Franken quote.

      I'm very familiar with journalist Christopher Bollyn's work.   (Notice the video of Netanyahu confirming the miraculously few Israeli casualties at the WTC on 9/11.)  The other link quotes an excerpt from Franken's own book.  He was, apparently, warned by Ed Koch to stay away from the WTC on 9/11.

 

1)   The Odigo Warnings & the 4,000 Israelis Saved on 9-11

http://www.bollyn.com/9-11-archive-2015-2/#article_15231

 

2)  Sen. Al Franken Admits Being Warned About 9-11 Beforehand

https://www.meetup.com/StLouis9-11Questions/messages/77776097/

October 15, 2015

"TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH, I GOT THE JEW CALL."

In his book, Lies and the Lying XXXXX Who Tell Them, Sen. Al Franken admits to having been warned not to go to work at the World Trade Center on 9-11. Why have the government and "free press" in the United States not investigated this report?

Senator Al Franken admits in his book, Lies and the Lying XXXXX Who Tell Them (2003), that he received a call from the former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, warning him not to go to his office in the World Trade Center on 9-11, using the Hebrew calendar as a reference for the date, which was September 11, 2001. 

Franken refers to this warning call as the "Jew call."

"Al", he told me, "don't go to work on the twenty-third day of Elul."

Al Franken may have been a comedian who went to Washington, but this is not funny. Being forewarned about 9-11 is a criminal matter. 

Calls to Sen. Al Franken's office in Washington at (202)[masked],  were not answered, although they were made during working hours. Furthermore, Franken's press secretary, Michael Dale Stein at (202)[masked], did not answer either his office phone or his mobile phone during business hours. Stein's mobile phone said the mail box was empty so messages could not even be left.

[Paul Brancato]

12 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Paul,

      Here are two references on the subjects of 1) Odigo, and 2) the Al Franken quote.

      I'm very familiar with journalist Christopher Bollyn's work.   (Notice the video of Netanyahu confirming the miraculously few Israeli casualties at the WTC on 9/11.)  The other link quotes an excerpt from Franken's own book.  He was, apparently, warned by Ed Koch to stay away from the WTC on 9/11.

 

1)   The Odigo Warnings & the 4,000 Israelis Saved on 9-11

http://www.bollyn.com/9-11-archive-2015-2/#article_15231

 

2)  Sen. Al Franken Admits Being Warned About 9-11 Beforehand

https://www.meetup.com/StLouis9-11Questions/messages/77776097/

October 15, 2015

"TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH, I GOT THE JEW CALL."

In his book, Lies and the Lying XXXXX Who Tell Them, Sen. Al Franken admits to having been warned not to go to work at the World Trade Center on 9-11. Why have the government and "free press" in the United States not investigated this report?

Senator Al Franken admits in his book, Lies and the Lying XXXXX Who Tell Them (2003), that he received a call from the former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, warning him not to go to his office in the World Trade Center on 9-11, using the Hebrew calendar as a reference for the date, which was September 11, 2001. 

Franken refers to this warning call as the "Jew call."

"Al", he told me, "don't go to work on the twenty-third day of Elul."

Al Franken may have been a comedian who went to Washington, but this is not funny. Being forewarned about 9-11 is a criminal matter. 

Calls to Sen. Al Franken's office in Washington at (202)[masked],  were not answered, although they were made during working hours. Furthermore, Franken's press secretary, Michael Dale Stein at (202)[masked], did not answer either his office phone or his mobile phone during business hours. Stein's mobile phone said the mail box was empty so messages could not even be left.

The Franken material has already been successfully rebutted here. My initial response to you was to tell you it came from his book. Others have pointed out it is political satire, and that can be seen by putting the actual quote from the book in context. Honestly, do you really think that this was covered up, that Franken was simply allowed to print this and then never questioned?

The other link doesn’t work, but surely it is not to the Israeli foreign ministry. I will look at it though. 

[W. Niederhut]

37 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

The Franken material has already been successfully rebutted here. My initial response to you was to tell you it came from his book. Others have pointed out it is political satire, and that can be seen by putting the actual quote from the book in context. Honestly, do you really think that this was covered up, that Franken was simply allowed to print this and then never questioned?

The other link doesn’t work, but surely it is not to the Israeli foreign ministry. I will look at it though. 

 

Paul,

I agree that Al Franken's comments about getting the "Jew call" from Ed Koch on 9/11 were intended as political satire.  I was merely referencing the source his actual quote-- which, in the context of the Odigo fore warnings, isn't very funny, is it?

As for Christopher Bollyn, he's a lone investigative journalist who has carefully documented the censored history of 9/11 for the past 18 long years.

He originally became interested in the suppressed history of 9/11 after reading about the "Dancing" Israeli Mossad agents arrested by the Holland Tunnel on 9/11, and the fact that the story was completely blacked out of the mainstream media after 9/11

Under the circumstances, it's not surprising that you, and others, have never heard of Bollyn or the documented facts about the five "Dancing Israelis."

Try this link.

http://www.bollyn.com/

[Robert Harper]

14 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

The broader point of the poem—that a vast diversity of people have been done in by the dark hand of malice—was overlooked in the ensuing controversy.

I had assumed that most readers familiar with modern poetry would have had this impression; it was the reason I compared it to Pound's Cantos or Peter Dale  Scott's Minding the Darkness.  Reading some of the posts here - as disconcerting as it was - at least illuminated the thought processes of the NJ Governor and the State's Legislative members.

This "discussion" reminded me of a Wall Street Journal essay a year or so ago by the Dean of Drexel who is an English professor. She refers to two plays I've mentioned in previous threads. Pertinent portions of her essay:

 

The great works of literature, history and philosophy that used to be at the center of a college education have been shunted to the sidelines or discarded entirely over the past two decades or more…….

Few people seem to be able to reconcile two overlapping truths—that someone can have a valid grievance in one context and be guilty of some version of the same thing in another. I see this as a failure of education…..

The assumption these days is that people are monolithic—either completely good or completely bad. The best way to repudiate that assumption is to study the humanities, which illuminate human life in all its complexity. How can you think about crime or misconduct in such an unimaginative way if you’ve read great literature: adultery after “Anna Karenina,” bad parenting after “Death of a Salesman,” political extremism and even murder after “Julius Caesar”?

The greatness of these works is that they don’t excuse the conduct in question, but they do help explain it as a function of human frailty and misguided motives, sometimes of the most high-minded sort. They expose the back story that otherwise would be hidden from us so that we can, if not sympathize, at least go some way toward understanding what happened. They humanize what would otherwise look like simple stupidity or evil….

The emphasis on STEM fields in higher education reflects the need for expertise in a high-tech world. But this has tended to make the “soft” fields of the humanities seem weak and easy. Science, engineering and finance may be hard, but literature, history and philosophy are complex—impossible to resolve with a yes-or-no, right-or-wrong answer. This is precisely what constitutes their importance as a tool for living. Metaphysics takes its name from the idea that it goes beyond “hard” science into the realm of moral and intellectual speculation, where no empirical proof is possible.

The humanities teach understanding, but they also teach humility: that we may be wrong and our enemies may be right, that the past can be criticized without our necessarily feeling superior to it, that people’s professed motives are not the whole story, and that the division of the world into oppressors and victims is a simplistic fairy tale.
We speak about the decline of the humanities without fully recognizing how it has hurt our society. If we want our nation to heal and thrive, we must put the study of literature, history and philosophy back at the center of our curricula and require that students study complex works—not just difficult ones.