On 18 Sept 2001, one week after the attack on the World Trade Center, a
report began to circulate on the Internet, usually titled "4,000 Israeli
Employees in WTC Absent the Day of the Attack". It was apparently first posted
at paknews.com:
http://paknews.com/flash.php?id=27&date1=2001-09-18
but attributed there to Al-Manar Television, Beirut, Lebanon, who themselves
sourced it to the Jordanian al-Watan newspaper. By 20 Sept this report had been
reposted hundreds of times:
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_q=watan&as_drrb=b&
But on the evening of 20 Sept, President Bush addressed a television audience
estimated at 82 million, and said:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html
"Nor will we forget the citizens of 80 other nations who died with our own:
dozens of
Pakistanis; more than 130 Israelis; more than 250 citizens of India..." Those
hundreds of Internet flamewars were immediately, effectively quenched. But
almost no one noticed, two days later, when the NY Times quietly published a
retraction of that 'more than 130' figure:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/22/nyregion/22NUMB.html or
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=c0c6feba.0109220447
"There were, in fact, only three Israelis who had been confirmed
as dead: two on the planes and another who had been visiting the towers on
business and who was identified and buried." So Bush's 'more than 130' was a
4500% exaggeration! (Oops!) And not only was this retraction buried so deeply
that it went virtually unnoticed, it's also wrapped in doubletalk about
duplicate reports and missing vs confirmed-dead, clearly intended to convey the
impression that this was an innocent error. But a review of the Jerusalem Post's
coverage of the tragedy makes the 'innocent error' claim highly implausible: By
the morning of 12 Sept, two Israeli airline passengers were being named, while
those reported missing numbered 4000 (probably the main source of the original
rumor):
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/12/News/News.34692.html
By that afternoon, one report claimed four missing:
www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/12/LatestNews/LatestNews.34702.html
dropping that night to three:
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/13/News/News.34747.html
The next morning (13th) there was a jump in the number still missing:
www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/13/LatestNews/LatestNews.34760.html
that mentions six who might have been in the immediate vicinity, and 40 in the
general
neighborhood. (These were obviously names that had been called in, that still
needed to be tracked down.) And that afternoon these numbers were lowered to
four and four:
www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/13/LatestNews/LatestNews.34823.html
On the 14th,
the number believed _in_ the WTC was upped to eight:
www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/14/LatestNews/LatestNews.34854.html
while the number of names to be traced jumped dramatically to 150. But then the
Post falls silent, as far as I can trace, until the 20th, when four names are
cited in an
article titled "Foreign Ministry hoping to hear from remaining Israelis":
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/jpost/main/results.html?QryTxt=shefi
(This article is not available for free, so I don't know what number it offers
for those
'remaining'.) The NY Times retraction of 22 Sept says: "Over the last several
days, the city's list of the missing became inflated by what officials said were
missing persons reports from consulates and embassies for countries including
India and Israel." So in the first two days, by the 13th, the consulate had
reduced a list of 4000 missing to three missing. Then 150 more names appeared on
the 14th, but surely these too must have been relentlessly investigated-- so one
does indeed wonder why the Jerusalem Post lost all interest in the progress of
the list for the next week. And then somehow around the 18th or 19th, as the
conspiracy rumor was taking off in a very dangerous way, this 'inflated' list--
which had mysteriously only shrunk from 150 to 130 in five days-- this list was
mistakenly delivered to the City of New York, where it was mysteriously mistaken
for a list of confirmed dead. And then, out of all the 80 countries that Bush
might have singled out for recognition, he happened to choose this 4500% error
to emphasize before all those 82 million television viewers... And then, of
course, the retraction was mysteriously buried. So what are we to make of this?
_Did_ the Israelis have advance warning? Two Post articles from 13 Sept give
contradictory reports of Israeli businesses in the WTC:
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/13/News/News.34747.html
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/13/News/News.34749.html
The first says there were none, the second says there had been two, one of which
had moved out just two weeks before, while the other was on the 47th floor, but
had only 4 or 5 employees present out of 18 total. So if Bush hadn't presented
that wildly
exaggerated claim, the rumors would have been much harder to quash. And this
seems especially sinister to me because of this wider context: - Israel would
love more US help in fighting its war against 'Islamic terrorism' - many US Jews
have a divided allegiance between Israel and the US - many powerful figures in
the media and government share this divided allegiance, but this is almost never
declared openly - the US media have a virtual blackout on explaining what the
Islamic grievances are (I understand CNN recently banned even the term
'settlements') - the US media never mention the staggering degree of bigotry in
orthodox Judaism (in a recent Post story, orthodox Jews were unwilling to ride
in a taxi _driven_ by a non-Jew without a rabbi's approval!?) So our current
situation is that we're quite possibly being dragged into World War III by
undeclared agents of a foreign government, in defense of a fundamentalist
religion we're not allowed to criticise (or even understand), for a nation that
scorns international law... and that now _appears_ to have taken advantage of
our national tragedy to advance their selfish agenda. Here's what I think the
American people deserve, at minimum: - a credible accounting for the mysterious
inflated list-- what was on it, why was it so long, how did it get misdelivered
- a public apology for the appearance of cynical opportunism - a credible
accounting of Israeli employees in the WTC and most importantly: - a national
teach-in on Judaism and on the middle east, giving all sides so that people can
make an informed decision --
http://www.robotwisdom.com/
"Relentlessly intelligent yet playful, polymathic in scope of interests,
minimalist but
user-friendly design." --Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel |
ŽEMYN
AMERIKA
VIRŠUN
Rašykite