Who says 9/11 skeptics are anti-Semitic?

Jan. 9, 2008. Several corrections have been made to this post, including correction of columnist Roger Cohen's first name.

A much-peddled internet theme: Vocal skeptics of the official 9/11 account are a menace to society who traffic in anti-Semitism.

And, the concept that Israeli intelligence could have been involved is taken as a broad-brush attack on "Israel and the Jews," according to a number of commentators, despite the fact that quite a few 9/11 skeptics are Jewish.

Attacks on 9/11 "conspiracy theorists" stepped up after a Scripps-Howard poll found that 36 percent of Americans suspected the U.S. government had a covert hand in the events of 9/11.

Among organizations accepting the official 9/11 story and tending to associate criticism with anti-Semitism are the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Weisenthal Center, and Commentary magazine, the voice of the neoconservative movement.

And a major source of ridicule of 9/11 skeptics is Fox News and the Murdoch media, which have a record of aggressively pushing the neoconservative agenda of putting Israel's presumed best interest first in most areas of policy.

Commentary denounced Tikkun magazine, a voice for liberal Judaism, for publishing an abbreviated piece by David Ray Griffin, the theologian who drew attention to the holes in the official 9/11 story and who suspects a neoconservative conspiracy to trigger a war by the staging of the attacks. Commentary, long powered by Norman Podhoretz, who favors a U.S. air war against Iran, charged that Tikkun editor Michael Lerner was abetting anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

Commentary did not grant the possibility that Israeli militarists may have had something to gain and that intelligence agencies are not known for "playing fair."

The Anti-Defamation League, under the vigorous direction of Abraham Foxman, has a report on conspiracy theories that tells of various anti-Semitic or supposedly anti-Semitic smears coming from 9/11 conspiracy theorists. The league gives no room to the possibility that either U.S. or Israeli government agents could have been involved, nor pays any heed to evidence that the official story is far from accurate.

In September 2006, Foxman charged that a "broad array of voices on both the extreme left and extreme right embraced 9/11 conspiracy theories in an effort to promote a worldview with anti-Semitism at its core." No mention is made of the many Jewish conspiracy theorists, some of whom suspect neoconservative manipulations.

An ADL report says that "soon after the attacks a number of conspiracy theorists blamed the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad or the Israeli government for the attacks" and that "five years later these theories are even more widespread and some have taken their anti-Semitic allegations even farther by claiming that it was specifically Jewish members of the Bush administration who directed the government in planning the attacks for the benefit of Israel."

In other words, in the eyes of the ADL, the idea that an intelligence agency or government clique might have orchestrated 9/11 is equivalent to Jew-hating. Maybe the CIA has sometimes played dirty but it's simply impossible that Mossad might have done so. Also, the ADL comment fails to mention that the majority of neocons in the Bush administration are Jewish.

Foxman is the author of The Deadliest Lies: the Israel lobby and the myth of Jewish control which is a rebuttal to the work of Harvard Professor Stephen M. Walt and University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer on the influence of what they dub the Israel lobby centered around the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. A number of Jews, such as the Washington Post's Roger Cohen, have agreed that such a powerful lobby exists (though Cohen doesn't like the tenor of the professors' account).

Another attack on 9/11 critics came from Mark Weitzman, director of the Task Force Against Hate and Terrorism at the Simon Weisenthal Center. In invited testimony before Rep. Jane Harman's homeland security committee, Weitzman pushed the idea that those who use the internet to promote 9/11 conspiracy theories were sowing discontent that could flare up as terrorism and anti-Semitism. He recommended that governments find the "political will" to curb internet dissent.

Weitzman presented a slide show that lumped the web site Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth with jihadist sites. The architect who founded that organization says that the laws of physics are violated by the official description of the fall of the twin towers on 9/11.

Several years ago Dana Milbank of the Washington Post ran a column ridiculing 9/11 skeptics as anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists and such articles appear regularly in the mainline and conservative (one-sided on Israel) Jewish press. A telling example comes from Richard Greenberg, whose article, Jews and 9/11: the lie that won't die that appeared in the New Jersey Jewish Herald and other Jewish media.

Greenberg wrote that the attacks "spawned a host of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that implicated the Jews and Israel in the bloodshed." Instead of a particular political clique, a number of whom are Jewish, being implicated by some critics, we have "the Jews" being victimized.

Greenberg continues, "The purveyors are an eclectic aggregate that spans the political spectrum. They include neo-Nazis and other white supremacists in the United States and elsewhere; anti-government zealots; young anti-war activists; Holocaust deniers; Lyndon LaRouche supporters; propagandists and journalists within the Arab and Muslim world; and assorted devotees of the early 20th century forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Because he doesn't even consider the possibility that the government account is seriously flawed, Greenberg leaves the impression that anyone who doubts the official 9/11 account is either a raving anti-Semite or some kind of dupe of anti-Semites.

People like former FBI director Louis Freeh, who condemned the 9/11 commission report as a whitewash, don't figure into the writings of people like Greenberg, Weitzman and Foxman.

It should be noted that the far-left Trotskyists, a group that encourages Jewish membership but that is known for its criticism of both Israel and the United States, publishes reports asserting that the 9/11 commission report whitewashed U.S. government involvement in the attacks. Generally, the Trotskyists are careful with the facts they use in their reports (though the facts don't necessarily substantiate their political ideas).

A notable exception to the ADL-style of attack is the position taken by Daniel Pipes, a militant zionist, who said after the Scripps-Howard poll was published that most doubters were "assassinologists" who liked a good mystery. (Pipes, however, said the poll showed that Americans were really dumb.)