The 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks came earlier this month, and I published an article reviewing those historic events and analyzing the important evidence always ignored by our mainstream media.
This time I sought to place that story within the context of the rapidly-approaching first anniversary of the 10/7 Hamas raid, which had launched a new round of very bloody conflict involving Israel, the Palestinians, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and other major players in the region.
The September 11th attacks once loomed very large in American public life, prompting as they did a long series of our Middle Eastern wars that killed or displaced many millions of Muslims. But now after more than two decades they seem to have become little more than a fading memory and my article attracted less readership than I had hoped. Meanwhile, a large fraction of the lightly-moderated discussion was dominated by fanatic conspiracy-cranks, who claimed that no jetliners had ever struck the WTC towers or that the buildings had been destroyed by nuclear explosions or even that almost no New Yorkers had actually died that day, with thousands of imaginary victims having merely been invented by our dishonest media. These seem like exactly the sort of crackpots who tend to monopolize an issue once more sensible people have gradually lost interest and gone elsewhere.
Those 2001 events were certainly the largest and most dramatic terrorist attacks in the entire history of the world, perhaps even comparable in their magnitude to all previous terrorist attacks combined. But it is only natural that their memory and relevance would gradually fade away over the course of nearly a quarter-century, much as had previously happened with the great battles of the First World War or our country’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam.
However, just a few days later on September 17th, the world’s headlines were filled with a dramatic new story of a somewhat related type. Thousands of simple pagers all across Lebanon beeped their notice of an incoming message and then suddenly exploded a few seconds later, with many walkie-talkies and solar panels similarly detonating the following day. Although the death-toll was nothing like that on 9/11—only about three dozen were killed including a couple of children—some 2,800 individuals were injured, with many hundreds of them being blinded and Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon losing an eye in the attack.
Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group that is one of Lebanon’s largest political parties, had purchased those pagers earlier this year as a replacement for less secure cellphones and distributed them to its membership, so that nearly all the victims seemed to have some connection with that organization. Given the ongoing military conflict with Israel, that latter country was universally assumed to be responsible for the attack. Although no official credit was claimed, a dozen of Israel’s knowledgeable defense and intelligence officials boasted of this very successful Mossad operation and provided all its details to the New York Times, which published several major stories based upon that information. Pro-Israel pundits and activists loudly crowed at their major victory against Hezbollah, whose membership had suffered such grievous losses.
I discussed all of these developments in an article last week, which attracted considerable readership and debate.
In that piece, I noted that this sudden wave of thousands of simultaneous explosions across Lebanon, often striking civilians, was seen as Lebanon’s own 9/11, and it terrorized the entire population, which suddenly grew very fearful of all their electronic devices. Indeed, according to longstanding international law, this attack constituted an absolutely flagrant example of illegal terrorism, as was discussed by the experts interviewed by NPR and the Australia Broadcasting Corporation. Despite the lawyerly protestations of pro-Israel apologists, the international statutes seemed completely unequivocal.
A global treaty, which has been signed by more than 100 countries including Israel, bans “the use booby traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects that are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material”.
I further pointed out that if thousands of such electronic devices in Israel or America had been similarly booby-trapped by Hezbollah or any other hostile organization and then exploded in exactly that same way, no one in the West would regard this as anything but the most blatant case of massive international terrorism.
A huge wave of simultaneous explosions had taken place in a country not at war, resulting in thousands of injured or severely maimed victims, some of them civilians. Therefore, I argued that aside from the 9/11 Attacks, this might easily constitute the second worst example of international terrorism in world history, or at least that nothing else as large and serious came to my mind. But the facts were actually much more extreme than I realized when I wrote that piece.
I first learned that Hezbollah had shifted its military communications network to pagers in the many media stories describing the background to the successful Mossad operation, all of which were presumably based upon Israeli sources.
However, this information was apparently mistaken. Alastair Crooke had served as a senior MI6 officer and British diplomat, and his decades of experience in Lebanon and the rest of the Middle East gave him exceptionally strong expertise on these sorts of matters. The same day that I published my article, he was interviewed on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s YouTube channel, and he completely contradicted those media claims that I’d so readily accepted.
According to Crooke, Hezbollah’s military communications network has for many years relied upon optical fiber cables or personal messengers, so almost none of those exploding pagers would have been used by its fighters. Since Hezbollah functions as the local government in most of southern Lebanon, those devices had instead been distributed to the organization’s far more numerous civilian members, such as civil administrators, first responders, and hospital personnel, who probably constituted the overwhelming majority of the victims. This rendered the terroristic nature of the attack far more obvious and blatant, greatly strengthening the case that it might be considered the world’s worst terrorist incident other than 9/11.
Furthermore, many have also pointed out the terrible precedent set by use of those exploding pagers given that the technology of booby-trapping simple electronic devices is so easily available to other countries and non-state actors. The soft, vulnerable societies of America and most of the West may come to deeply rue the day when this deadly line was first crossed, endangering so many of us in the future. It is quite shocking that this huge terrorist attack was carried out by an American ally whose activities have been totally supported by our own government rather than by some notorious outlaw group sanctioned by the entire world, such as Al Qaeda, the alleged perpetrator of the 9/11 Attacks.
One of the extremely few examples of strong public criticism came in a CBS Sunday Morning interview of former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who emphasized the terrible dangers that our Western societies might now face.
Our mainstream media almost invariably describes Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, thereby seeming to legitimize all methods of attack against its members and affiliates. As an example of this narrative, Israel has justified its recent assassinations of some of the senior figures by describing those strikes as payback for Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of our own Beirut Marine barracks, which took the lives of more than 200 American servicemen. Given that the latter claim has been so frequently repeated, I’d come to accept its reality.
However, Col. Jacques Baud is a highly-regarded former Swiss military officer with extensive experience in the Middle East. When I watched his long and persuasive interview last week, I realized that I may have once again been deceived by the dishonest pro-Israel propagandists who dominate our media.
According to Baud, Hezbollah was only founded in 1985, so it didn’t even exist at the time of that Marine bombing attack and no one had ever associated its activists with that deadly operation until long afterward, when Israeli propagandists could take advantage of the fading memories of the chronology. Indeed, Casper Weinberger, who had been our defense secretary at the time, stated in a 2001 interview that no one was ever sure who had actually been responsible for killing our Marines in Lebanon. Baud also emphasized that Hezbollah’s military wing was only first designated as a terrorist group by the Europeans in 2013 after it was blamed for a 2012 bombing against Israelis in Bulgaria; but he claimed that attack had actually been the result of a dispute between rival Israeli crime syndicates, and Bulgaria later admitted that there was no evidence that Hezbollah had been involved.
With thousands of Lebanese civilians wounded or mained by Israel’s booby-trapped devices, Hezbollah publicly vowed to retaliate for that massive terrorist attack, and Israel then used that threat as an excuse to unleash one of the most intense aerial bombardments in modern history, destroying urban centers all across southern Lebanon and producing the deadliest one-day death-toll in decades, with a large majority of the casualties probably being civilians. This led to widespread fears that Israel planned to totally destroy that neighboring country, transforming it into another Gaza. Indeed, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, longtime chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, suggested in an interview that since Lebanon was an effective economic competitor to Israel, its destruction might represent a major goal of this operation.
A few days later, Israeli warplanes extended their operations by bombarding an area of south Beirut with some 80 bombs, many of them huge bunker-busters, in a successful attempt to kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. This attack on Lebanon’s capital totally destroyed an entire city block containing numerous large residential towers, producing images of utter devastation that Max Blumenthal noted closely resembled the ruins of the World Trade Center towers after 9/11. As far as I know, in recent decades no country other than Israel has ever employed or even contemplated the use of such extremely heavy ordinance against a densely-populated urban center, and I assume that the civilian death-toll will prove to have been enormous.
Although massive aerial bombardment of undefended cities in neighboring countries is not usually considered terrorism, it certainly constitutes an enormous war-crime, and killing such large numbers of civilians obviously serves to terrorize the entire surviving population. No other developed country in today’s world seems to demonstrate Israel’s total disregard for civilian human life, leveling an entire city block with bunker-buster bombs in hopes of assassinating a single enemy target.
Control of the media can easily transform black into white and up into down. The evidence that Hezbollah has had any substantial history of international terrorism seems very thin. But in sharp contrast, the state that recently launched that massive terrorist attack targeting Lebanese civilians associated with Hezbollah and transformed an entire city block of Beirut into 9/11-style ruins falls into a very different category. Israel and its Zionist predecessor organizations have a totally unrivaled record of assassinations and international terrorism, often undertaken as false-flag operations. As I wrote in early 2020:
Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.As far as I know, the early Zionists had a record of political terrorism almost unmatched in world history, and in 1974 Prime Minister Menachem Begin once even boasted to a television interviewer of having been the founding father of terrorism across the world.
One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew.The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.
ORDER IT NOW
Years ago, when I’d first come across that boastful claim by the Israeli prime minister that he had been the “founding father” of world terrorism, I’d regarded it as probably exaggerated. But after carefully reading State of Terror, published in 2016 by Thomas Suarez, I decided that he may have had a reasonable point.
Suarez’s book focused on the activities of Zionist groups in Palestine during the years leading up to the 1948 creation of the State of Israel while also providing some coverage of the period that followed. Much of the author’s material was based upon declassified British government documents as well as the major newspapers of that era, and the sheer number and variety of Zionist terrorist attacks presented was absolutely enormous, almost staggering. For decades, our pro-Israel media has eagerly highlighted every incident of Palestinian terrorism, leading me to wonder whether the Zionists committed more such terror attacks in one year than the Palestinians did in the next fifty years that followed.
Besides pioneering the use of car-bombs, Zionist militants also did the same with deadly letter-bombs, which they ruthlessly laced with cyanide, employing these in their attempts to assassinate a very long list of their perceived enemies. Those targets included all of Britain’s senior political leaders and America’s president, although those latter efforts proved unsuccessful. The Zionists repeatedly sought to contaminate water supplies with deadly toxins or dangerous diseases, and their operatives traveled to Britain and other parts of Europe in order to launch major terrorist bombing campaigns in those countries.
Certain British policies provoked intense hostility. Zionists unsuccessfully demanded strict separation of postwar Jewish survivors so that they could more easily be funneled into Palestine. But in his correspondence with President Truman, Churchill argued that since the Nazi concentration camps had always treated Jews and Gentiles in very similar fashion, such segregation of the newly freed inmates was morally wrong.
Some of the stories that Suarez recounts were quite striking. In late 1946, a fiery Zionist rabbi from America denounced Britain’s “concentration camps” for Jews as being “even worse” than those of Nazi Germany, and he accused the British government of the ongoing “torture, suffering and murder of 6,000,000 Jewish men, women and children.” He organized a campaign of revenge the following year, preparing an aerial attack against London with high-explosive bombs, but was arrested just before his plane could take off.
ORDER IT NOW
A couple of years ago I’d read Memoirs of an Assassin, a short but dramatic 1959 account of the alleged activities of one such Zionist militant of that era, but I hadn’t been too sure how seriously I should take its numerous detailed claims. Among his other exploits, the author described how he’d successfully managed to smuggle a large quantity of explosives into Britain’s House of Commons and then only narrowly failed in his attempt to kill the entire British government. However, after digesting the massive documentation unearthed by Suarez, I now think that those stories seem much more likely to have been true.
Although Begin’s more right-wing Zionist faction was usually blamed for such terrorist operations, Suarez makes a strong case that the mainstream Zionist movement of David Ben-Gurion was equally involved, but successfully managed to shift the onus of such terrible crimes to its smaller rival, while at the very least always supporting those operations with a wink and a nod and ensuring that no one was ever seriously punished. For example, the assassins of UN Peace Negotiator Folke Bernadotte merely received a slap on the wrist and were soon lauded as Zionist heroes.
Although Suarez’s coverage mostly ended in the early 1950s, the Zionist leaders who had been so eagerly involved in those terrorist activities continued governing their country during the decades that followed, even into the 1990s. And in many respects, their eventual successors have been just as extreme if not more so. There seems very strong evidence that the Israelis played a central role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky revealed that Israeli leaders plotted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush, and Max Blumenthal flat-out stated that Barack Obama was very fearful that the Israelis would assassinate him.
Enraged last year by what he regarded as insufficient Russian support after the Hamas attack, a top Israeli political figure went on KremlinTV to declare that after Israel destroyed Hamas, it would then target Russia for severe retaliation, an astonishing threat to make against the country possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
Although Suarez’s book is long out of print and used copies on Amazon start at an outrageous $4,291, it is also available on Archive.org, including in PDF and ePub⬇ formats, and I think that those interested in the Middle East conflict would find it very enlightening.
Mossad’s exploding pagers on September 17th received massive media coverage and the commemoration of 9/11 attracted at least a little attention. But the anniversary a few days ago of a hugely important but somewhat different terrorist attack passed almost without any notice. Although that particular recent event may have world historic consequences, it has been largely ignored and forgotten in America, tossed down the memory-hole. So I think it is worth reviewing the story at considerable length.
In early October 2022 I discussed the sudden destruction of the massive Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines.
Then on September 26th, this geopolitical landscape was upended as a series of large explosions severely damaged the huge Russian pipelines, putting them out of commission indefinitely, probably even permanently. With the pipelines no longer operational, Europe would have to make due with the limited supply of American gas that can be shipped by tanker, at a cost many times greater. The massive explosive attacks on the undersea pipelines—rather euphemistically characterized as “sabotage” in the media headlines—had occurred near the coastal waters of Denmark and Sweden, in an area of the Baltic heavily monitored and patrolled by NATO warships.Given these simple, undeniable facts, the likely suspects were rather obvious, but they still remained almost completely unmentionable in the Western media coverage. Instead, the Washington Post, hometown newspaper of the American government, ran an article with the headline “European leaders blame Russian ‘sabotage’ after Nord Stream explosions,” quoting a long list of anonymous government sources making that nonsensical claim, which was widely echoed across most Western media outlets. Our political elites apparently assumed that their tight media control will ensure that their ignorant citizenry could be made to believe—or at least pretend to believe—almost anything, even that the Russians had destroyed their own pipelines.
But public media statements do not necessarily reflect private beliefs. Prominent Neocon journalist Anne Applebaum had spent years on the Editorial Board of the Washington Post and her husband is Radek Sikorski, Poland’s former Foreign and Defense Minister and someone with the strongest possible ties to the America’s political and national security establishment. Twitter allows individuals to casually blurt out statements that they may later regret, and the day after the pipeline explosions he issued a series of Tweets celebrating the attacks, including one showing a photo of the resulting destruction with the telling caption “Thank You, USA.” That last Tweet soon went super-viral with some 13,500 Retweets and 44,200 Likes, leading him to quickly delete it.
Given the near-unanimous media drumbeat that the Russians had destroyed their own multi-billion-dollar pipelines, presumably because of their evil insanity, it’s quite possible that a majority, perhaps even a large majority of our citizens will blandly accept that story, just as they have so many other, equally ridiculous concoctions of the past. But I would think that nearly all our elites who are paying any attention to the issue strongly suspect or even flatly assume that elements of the American government played a central role in the attacks, though almost none of them would publicly admit such a thing.One of the tiny handful of brave exceptions to this enforced silence and perhaps the only such individual with a large media platform was Tucker Carlson, and a couple of days after the attack, he broadcast a segment on the topic to his audience of millions. He noted that although it might seem unimaginable that the American government would commit such an act of international terrorism as illegally destroying pipelines so important to Europe’s industrial economy, perhaps that might be what actually happened.
Among other things, Carlson showed clips of both President Joe Biden and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland explicitly threatening to eliminate the Nord Stream pipelines if a Russia-Ukraine broke out. Immediately following the attacks, Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that the bombing would greatly benefit American interests, offering our country “tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come.”
With means, motive, and opportunity all pointing so strongly towards American culpability I found it difficult to believe any rational, intelligent individuals could not see the obvious. Yet virtually no one in the major media was willing to raise that possibility, leading to the widespread popularity of a “See No Evil” Internet meme:
Let us step back and place this incident in its proper historical context, recognizing the astonishing recklessness. We are not currently at war with Russia let alone Germany, and a $20 billion energy project important to both those countries has been wrecked, with a potentially devastating impact upon the European economy. Not only is this probably the greatest peacetime military attack upon civilian infrastructure in world history, but if we exclude the 9/11 attacks—officially ascribed to a non-state terrorist organization—nothing even remotely comparable comes to mind.
The same day that my original article ran, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University mentioned similar arguments to his shocked hosts during an interview on Bloomberg TV, explaining that leading mainstream journalists had privately told him that everyone believed America had been responsible but that neither they nor their editors would ever publicly mention such a scenario. As a result of his candor, his interview was cut short and he was quickly yanked off the air, but that short clip went viral on Twitter, with the Tweets viewed some five million times.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs [Columbia] on Bloomberg causing chaos saying US was most likely involved in Nordstream leaks according to data & other experts 😂😂😂 “even reporters tell me …. privately of course …” and that we are on a pretty dangerous path to a nuclear conflict pic.twitter.com/U6FsC2tdp6
— Detty (@0ddette) October 3, 2022
A few months later, this widespread assumption of American guilt crystallized into near-certainty as investigative journalist Seymour Hersh drew upon his unrivaled intelligence sources to provide the exact details of what had happened:
With a Pulitzer Prize and five George Polk awards, Hersh certainly ranks as one of the most renowned reporters of the last half-century, known for breaking the stories of the My Lai Massacre, the Abu Ghraib prison, and other landmarks of investigative journalism.A few days ago, he dropped a bombshell perhaps as big as anything in his career, reporting the inside story of how the American government had destroyed the Nord Stream energy pipelines, conduits absolutely vital to the European economy. Not only were the attacks an act of war against Germany, one of our closest NATO allies, but the explosions probably produced the greatest peacetime destruction of civilian infrastructure in the history of the world, with the value of the $30 billion pipelines being far larger than the losses inflicted by the 9/11 attacks.
- How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
Seymour Hersh • Substack • February 8, 2023 • 5,200 Words
Yet one of our greatest journalists was forced to break that enormous story with sweeping international implications on his own Substack platform rather than in the headlines of a top newspaper or magazine. After five decades, the arc of Hersh’s career has retraced its steps, and he has returned to his roots as the fiercely independent journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize covering the Vietnam War.
Although Hersh’s story was totally boycotted by the mainstream press, within 24 hours over a million people had read it worldwide on Substack. His subsequent interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! was viewed over two million times on YouTube, with various other interviews adding many hundreds of thousands of additional views.
All of this attention prompted the UN Security Council to hold public hearings on the accusations that the Biden Administration had illegally destroyed Europe’s $30 billion Nord Stream pipelines, an obvious act of war against Germany, our close NATO ally. These developments then forced the Washington Post to grudgingly mention Hersh’s blockbuster weeks after it had first been published, finally breaking the mainstream media blockade he had endured.
With the ripples of Hersh’s reporting now beginning to spread, the German government and its Chancellor Olaf Scholz faced a very difficult predicament. During late 2021, Scholz had been standing next to President Joseph Biden at a press conference when the latter publicly threatened to eliminate the pipelines, so German voters might reasonably suspect their own leader’s complicity after that threat was carried out. Attention had to be diverted in a different direction.
Therefore, Scholz took a sudden, unscheduled trip to privately meet with Biden in DC, and a couple of days later stories suddenly appeared in both the New York Times and Germany’s Die Zeit weekly blaming the pipeline attacks upon an unspecified group of pro-Ukraine activists. The articles cited anonymous government sources, with most of the details being both vague and risible.
Deploying a ton of powerful military explosives in deep water was obviously a very challenging covert operation, requiring highly-specialized diving equipment, large decompression tanks, and skilled demolition experts, but according to German sources it had been carried out by a handful of unknown activists on a rented sailboat, a total absurdity. The Times account was more vague if hardly more persuasive, pointing to mysterious Ukrainian activists as the culprits, while only acknowledging the very detailed expose of its former star reporter Hersh in the 26th paragraph. The German claims of a sailboat-based attack were soon discussed in the Wall Street Journal, though the skeptical reporters emphasized how extremely difficult it would have been to carry out such a major undersea operation in such limited circumstances.
The hosts of the Grayzone podcast showed photos of the sailboat allegedly used in the massive military attack and ridiculed the absurd cover-story that our government had concocted.
Indeed, when Hersh was informed what his former newspaper had published, he was stunned, saying that he couldn’t believe that they would have ever written anything so stupid.
UPDATE – U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh says, “they can’t be that stupid” in reaction to NYT’s article claiming a “pro-Ukrainian group” carried out the Nord Stream attacks. pic.twitter.com/SB2RK9Xekk
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) March 8, 2023
A few days later, Hersh was interviewed on Chinese television, and he explained his personal sources of information. A half-century earlier many of the young GIs serving in Vietnam had been deeply impressed by his honest war reporting, and during the decades that followed some had risen very high within our military and intelligence establishments. These individuals swore an oath to the American Constitution rather than to any particular American president, and many of them were appalled at the idiocy of the Biden Administration’s decision to destroy Europe’s energy pipelines, deciding to provide Hersh with the detailed account that he published.
Let us take stock of these facts. Not a single individual had been injured or killed in the Nord Stream pipeline attacks, and indeed the massive explosions had occurred so deep underwater that almost no one would have become aware of them if they hadn’t been reported by the media. But the economic impact of that act of industrial terrorism was enormous.
Roughly $30 billion had been spent to build those huge natural gas pipelines, which supplied much of Europe’s energy needs, and according to the German government the corrosive effect of the seawater that quickly filled the damaged structures left them unrepairable. If so, then reopening the energy conduit would require completely reconstructing the underwater segments at a cost that might approach $20 billion. Otherwise, the permanent loss of cheap energy to Europe would force the consumers and industries of that continent to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in higher costs.
The 9/11 Attacks obviously loomed far greater in world history. But the entire insurance payment provided to leaseholder Larry Silverstein for the destroyed World Trade Center towers only totaled $4.55 billion. So despite no loss of life, it seems clear that that the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines probably represented history’s worst act of industrial terrorism, and easily rivaled the 9/11 Attacks in its historic magnitude.
From the very beginning, there was overwhelming circumstantial evidence implicating the American government and its close allies in the attacks, such that nearly all sensible people must have quietly assumed that guilt. This presumption became near-certainty when our most renowned investigative journalist drew upon his longtime intelligence sources to provide the exact details of the American operation.
Once this happened, the desperate American government and its even more desperate German vassal regime responded by concocting an absurd tale that the attack—the greatest act of industrial terrorism in the history of the world—had been carried out by a shadowy group of Ukrainian activists operating from a rented sailboat, a fairy tale that drew widespread derision.
All of this is well-known, yet very few have been willing to publicly consider the broader implications of this story.
In his interview with Chinese television, Hersh understandably ridiculed the absurd claims that a shadowy group of Ukrainian activists on a sailboat could have carried out any operation as obviously massive and difficult as the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. His Chinese interlocutor objected that there was a clear historical precedent, which seemed to puzzle the renowned journalist until she explained she was referring to the 9/11 Attacks, officially blamed upon a small band of Islamic fanatics. Based upon his memoirs, Hersh seems a deeply conventional thinker on all such controversial topics and living within the propaganda-bubble of the Western mainstream media, he may never have questioned the official 9/11 narrative or considered that obvious analogy with the pipeline attacks. But the attitude of his interviewer demonstrated that deep suspicions about 9/11 are probably widespread across China and most of the non-Western world.
Whereas the Nord Stream pipeline attacks merely required an experienced military diving team equipped with powerful explosives and large decompression chambers, the 9/11 Attacks were vastly more complex and difficult to implement. So if nearly all sensible people around the world discounted the official cover-story claiming that the former were carried out by a tiny handful of random Ukrainian activists lacking the sponsorship of a major state, it is far more absurd for them to credulously accept the very similar cover-story blaming nineteen random Arabs for the latter. This is especially true given the enormous quantity of hard contrary evidence that the 9/11 Truth movement has accumulated over the last couple of decades. As I’ve written on a number of occasion:
With so many gaping holes in the official story of the events of seventeen years ago, each of us is free to choose to focus on those we personally consider most persuasive, and I have several of my own. Danish Chemistry professor Niels Harrit was one of the scientists who analyzed the debris of the destroyed buildings and detected the residual presence of nano-thermite, a military-grade explosive compound, and I found him quite credible during his hour-long interview on Red Ice Radio. The notion that an undamaged hijacker passport was found on an NYC street after the massive, fiery destruction of the skyscrapers is totally absurd, as was the claim that the top hijacker conveniently lost his luggage at one of the airports and it was found to contain a large mass of incriminating information. The testimonies of the dozens of firefighters who heard explosions just before the collapse of the buildings seems totally inexplicable under the official account. The sudden total collapse of Building Seven, never hit by any jetliners is also extremely implausible.
I would argue that the only important aspect of such technical issues is whether the overall evidence is sufficiently strong to establish the falsehood of the official 9/11 narrative and also demonstrate that the attacks must have been the work of a highly sophisticated organization with access to advanced military technology rather than a rag-tag band of 19 Arabs armed with box-cutters. Beyond that, none of those details matter.In that regard, I believe that the volume of factual material collected by determined researchers over the last seventeen years has easily met that requirement, perhaps even ten or twenty times over. For example, even agreeing upon a single particular item such as the clear presence of nano-thermite, a military-grade explosive compound, would immediately satisfy those two criteria. So I see little point in endless debates over whether nano-thermite was used, or nano-thermite plus something else, or just something else entirely. And such complex technical debates may serve to obscure the larger picture, while confusing and intimidating any casually-interested onlookers, thereby being quite counter-productive to the overall goals of the 9/11 Truth movement.
Once we have concluded that the culprits were part of a highly sophisticated organization, we can then focus on the Who and the Why, which surely would be of greater importance than the particular details of the How. Yet currently all the endless debate over the How tends to crowd out the Who and the Why…
And when we consider this much more important issue of who was probably responsible for the 9/11 Attacks, a single very obvious suspect presents itself. Just a couple of weeks ago, Israel and its Mossad successfully carried out one of the boldest and largest terrorist attacks in world history, simultaneously detonating thousands of explosive devices in Lebanon. Soon afterward, they transformed an entire city block in Lebanon’s capital into a post-9/11 moonscape, just as they had spent the last twelve months doing to all of Gaza, demonstrating that no other country in the world had such little regard for innocent human life.
Thus, Israel and its Mossad would be the natural suspect in the even bolder and larger attacks against our own country in 2001, especially given their very long history of false-flag terrorist attacks against America and other Western countries. And just as means, motive, and opportunity for the Nord Stream pipeline attacks all pointed towards America, those same factors clearly suggested that Israel played the central role in 9/11, the boldest and largest such terrorist operation in world history.
Moreover, although totally ignored by our fervently pro-Israel media, a vast quantity of accumulated evidence has implicated Israel and its domestic American collaborators in the 9/11 Attacks, as summarized in various major articles we have published, both recently and years ago:
- Israel Did 9/11
Wyatt Peterson • The Unz Review • September 12, 2024 • 13,300 Words
- 9/11 Was an Israeli Job
How America was neoconned into World War IV
Laurent Guyénot • The Unz Review • September 10, 2018 • 8,500 Words
In early 2023, I was interviewed on various controversial topics by Iranian television, and the series was aired on one of their major broadcast networks, reaching a potential audience of ten million. Two of these half-hour segments presented my analysis of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and these may be worth watching as a useful summary of my views:
Consider this situation. Two weeks ago the Jews of Israel committed the most brazen act of deadly international terrorism in decades, yet scarcely a single prominent American public figure has condemned them for doing so, let alone suggested that they suffer any penalty. Indeed, those who heavily rely upon our mainstream media for their information would scarcely even be aware that any such heinous and momentous act had even occurred.
Days later they annihilated an entire block of Lebanon’s capital city after having spent the previous twelve months doing the same to nearly all of Gaza, and the American president enthusiastically endorsed Israel’s action.
There also seems strong, even overwhelming evidence that the same Jewish State and its Mossad had previously been responsible for the 9/11 Attacks against our own country more than two decades ago, the greatest act of terrorism in world history. Thousands of Americans died and the resulting Middle Eastern wars cost the lives of additional thousands of American servicemen and many trillions of dollars, while killing or displacing millions of innocent Muslim civilians as we destroyed most of Israel’s strongest regional rivals. Our heavily Jewish media has successfully concealed all these 9/11 facts for nearly a full generation so that today only a sliver of Americans are aware of what probably happened.
As some writers have pointed out, the nation of Belarus was recently banned from various international bodies merely for its passive support of Russia’s military campaign in Europe, while Israel’s continuing genocidal rampage in Gaza, which the Lancet suggests may have led to some 200,000 civilian deaths, has incurred absolutely no such penalty. No other nation in the world could possibly enjoy such total political impunity as it bombs and attacks so many of its neighbors, while also claiming the right to assassinate anyone, anywhere in the world that it considers an enemy, and this situation has now lasted for decades. In 1967, the Israelis attacked the U.S.S. Liberty in international waters, killing or wounding more than 200 American servicemen, and the only consequence was that the financial payments the American government provided to Israel soon greatly increased.
The overwhelming factor behind such total Israeli impunity is the legacy of the Jewish Holocaust of World War II, today almost universally regarded by Americans and other Westerners as probably the most horrific crime in all of human history. In a very real sense, Israel and Jews everywhere have been able to regularly draw their political capital and legitimacy from that seemingly bottomless source, a moral bank account with an infinite balance. No matter how many tens of thousands of women and children Israel brutally slaughters, our opinion-leaders always recognize that the Holocaust was far worse. Its reality justifies and wipes clean all these horrific Israeli deeds, whether past, present, or future.
In a perfect illustration of this situation, a clip recently circulated of the remarks of Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, one of our leading Holocaust scholars. She currently holds ambassadorial rank in the American government as its Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, and speaking before the Israeli-American Council, she jokingly referred to the effectiveness of Mossad’s exploding pagers in demonstrating the power of the Jewish State to smite its enemies, thereby seeming to condone and even glorify that enormous act of international terrorism.
Lipstadt is a high-profile academic and over the years I’ve read most of her books, which I found very illuminating. She is best known for having successfully destroyed the illustrious scholarly career of British historian David Irving in a 1999 libel trial. In that judicial proceeding, she had raised some $13 million from wealthy Jewish donors to hire an army of 40 researchers, who carefully scrutinized every single word that eminent scholar had ever written. By locating a small handful of very minor errors, they enabled the skilled Jewish divorce lawyer who captained her legal team to successfully win a judgment against Irving, resulting in his personal bankruptcy. But as I’ve pointed out, that celebrated trial actually demonstrated that some 99.9% of Irving’s massive corpus of controversial historical research was completely accurate.
Lipstadt’s books on the Holocaust are also quite enlightening if closely and carefully read. One of her most important works harshly condemned the New York Times and the rest of our mainstream media for their apparent skepticism of the reality of the Holocaust as it was taking place during World War II. Those publications indicated their disbelief by usually running such stories buried deep inside the paper rather than giving them the front-page coverage they obviously warranted. Among those under-emphasized items was the shocking 1944 disclosure that the Nazis had killed at least 1.5 million Jews by individually injecting each of them in the heart with a deadly poison, an article that only ran on page 5 of the Los Angeles Times rather than being promoted with a large banner headline. Yet since everyone today recognizes that story was totally false, a ridiculous example of war-time Jewish propaganda, her argument seemed a very strange one.
Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that anyone who merely confined his investigation of the Holocaust to a critical reading of books by some of its leading scholars such as Lipstadt, Lucy S. Dawidowiz, and Peter Novick would soon become very skeptical of its reality. And if the content of their works was then compared with that of leading Holocaust Deniers such as Arthur Butz, Nicholas Kollerstrom, and Germar Rudolf, the inescapable, overwhelming conclusion would be that the Holocaust is largely perhaps almost entirely a hoax.
For decades, Jewish financier Bernie Madoff successfully maintained his gigantic Ponzi scheme, convincing almost everyone that he controlled many tens of billions in investment capital that did not actually exist, thereby establishing himself as one of the most powerful market-makers on Wall Street.
Similarly, for nearly three generations Jewish and Zionist groups have maintained their gigantic ideological Ponzi scheme, successfully indoctrinating nearly all Westerners with enormous guilt over the six million murdered Jewish civilians, mostly killed in Nazi gas chambers, a historical event that almost certainly never happened. And by regularly drawing upon that nearly bottomless moral bank account, the Israelis have been empowered to commit some of the worst crimes in modern world history, perhaps now even bringing all of human civilization to the brink of nuclear annihilation in a Third World War.
Gigantic Ponzi schemes, whether financial or ideological, do eventually collapse, so the crucial question is whether the collapse of the Holocaust Hoax will come quickly enough to avoid taking much of the world down with it.
That deeply-rooted historical belief has gradually been elevated into becoming the widespread secular religion of “Holocaustianity,” so challenging that dogma is a difficult and psychologically-painful undertaking. But that doctrine constitutes the central power source behind Israel’s total impunity, thereby enabling that country’s regular campaigns of mass-murder. So regardless of any of their other activities, those critics of Israel who nervously shy away from directly confronting the Holocaust Hoax are effectively allowing that country to continue the massacres they so loudly condemn.
I’ve discussed these issues of the Holocaust at considerable length over last half-dozen years, as well as the broader history of World War II that encompassed it.
- American Pravda: Holocaust Denial
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 27, 2018 • 17,600 Words - Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 12, 2023 • 12,600 Words - American Pravda: Understanding World War II
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 23, 2019 • 20,500 Words - More Falsehoods of World War II
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 19, 2023 • 7,500 Words - Hitler, Churchill, the Holocaust, and the War in Ukraine
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 17, 2023 • 9,700 Words - American Pravda: Secrets of Military Intelligence
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 10, 2019 • 12,500 Words
Much of my analysis was also provided in a couple of half-hour interview segments I did a year or two ago on Iranian broadcast television
For those interested in a much deeper exploration of some of these same issues, I’d strongly recommend this four hour documentary that was produced about 15 years ago:
Related Reading:
