Kees van der Pijl: Academic Corruption, the Israel Lobby, and 9/11

Academic Corruption, the Israel Lobby, and 9/11

or, Why I have resigned from my emeritus status at the University of Sussex

by Kees van der Pijl

March 2019

On 3 November 2018, in reply to a Twitter message summing up a series of crimes

ascribed to ‘Saudis’, beginning with their alleged responsibility for bringing down the

Twin Towers, I posted, ‘Not Saudis, Israelis brought down the Twin Towers with help

from Zionists in US Govt’. This was picked up by self-professed Jewish and pro-Israel

organizations denouncing it as ‘anti-Semitic’. The accusation was accompanied by the

identical demand of practically all complainants to strip me of my status as professor

emeritus of the University of Sussex. The comments were duly reported in the Daily

Mail, the Independent, and Russian Sputnik, and possibly others. No mention was

made of the many supporting reactions, often accompanied by new documentary

evidence and by the important enjoinder that the university should investigate, if

anything, the claim being made, not the person making it.

Of course there is no denying that anti-Semites are roaming social media too,

making it even more unattractive to investigate in depth any issue that involves the

state of Israel and the Zionist networks supporting it. The anti-Semitism taboo on

investigating the crimes of the Israeli state and in particular, its role in 9/11 and the

War on Terror is in fact reinforced by these ‘fellow-travellers’. Yet however

unpleasant their company, the global catastrophe unfolding before our eyes makes it

mandatory to investigate its causes and driving forces. 18 years of widening war,

around six million dead,1 and more and more countries thrown into chaos, should be

enough to raise the question, Who was/is behind all this, beginning with the 9/11

attacks themselves? And who are more entitled than academics to provide an answer?

However, universities in Great Britain are no exception to the general trend of

corruption that is turning the majority of academics into ‘embedded’ intellectuals, who

like their colleagues in the media, travel with the troops on regime change expeditions

1 Calculated by mortality rates, see Nicolas J.S. Davies, ‘Die Blutspur der US-geführten Kriege seit

9/11: Afghanistan, Jemen, Libyen, Irak, Pakistan, Somalia, Syrien’, in Ulrich Mies, ed. Der tiefe Staat

schlägt zu. Wie die westliche Welt Krisen erzeugt und Kriege vorbereitet. Vienna: ProMedia, 2019.

1

and provide intelligence and propaganda.2 Staff members are disciplined by precarity,

reductions in pay and conditions, ‘peer review’, and dependence on funding, but

university managements are kept in line by rewards. As one university newspaper

reported during the February 2018 lecturers’ strike over new pension cuts, Vice-

Chancellors’ salaries were increasing. It noted that ‘stand out figures ...included

Sussex's VC who has a total salary over half a million pounds’.3

When I was appointed at the University of Sussex in 2000 I was complimented by

many with having landed in an institution famous for the space it offered to heterodox

scholars. In the appointment procedure I expressed my criticism at the illegal NATO

intervention in Yugoslavia then underway in the strongest terms and there was no

objection to that, on the contrary. My first research publication at Sussex was a piece

placing this intervention in historical perspective.4 When I retired, on the other hand, a

top NATO official, Jamie Shea, spokesman of the alliance at the time of the Kosovo

intervention and meanwhile deputy assistant Secretary-General, had been appointed

visiting lecturer. Following controversy among staff and students, his title was merely

changed to ‘visiting practitioner’ (Shea later became ‘External Advisor, Post-graduate

curriculum development’, at Sussex).

The growing role of the Israel lobby is even more pronounced. In February 2012, a

few months before I retired, an Israel chair was instituted at Sussex (and at a number

of other UK universities). Named, in this case, after Yossi Harel, the captain of the

ship bringing Jewish settlers to Palestine in 1947, and financed by a group of Israel

supporters in the UK, this chair was contested as well. Thus one informed comment on

the Sussex website considered it ‘highly inappropriate and unethical to create this

subject at Sussex which will undoubtedly be taught in an indoctrinating and biased

fashion. Most of the donors, including Ronald Cohen, Gerald Ronson, Lord

2 I have developed this at length in my Discipline of Western Supremacy, vol. III of Modes of

Foreign Relations and Political Economy. London: Pluto Press 2014.

3 ‘New figures show one Vice-Chancellor is earning £800k’, The Cardiff Tab, 22 February 2018.

https://thetab.com/uk/cardiff/2018/02/22/new-figures-show-one-vice-chancellor-is-earning-800k-see-

where-yours-ranks-33685 (last accessed 25 March 2019). See also The Guardian and The Telegraph,

both of 12 February 2019, for further details. The Guardian also notes in another report that ‘nearly 25%

of British universities [were] in deficit last year'.

4 ‘From Gorbachev to Kosovo. Atlantic rivalries and the re-incorporation of Eastern Europe’ Review

of International Political Economy, 8 (2) 2001, 275-310.

2

Weidenfeld and Leonard Blavatnik all have pro-Israel ties, and a few of them sit on

Zionist thinktank boards. How can an impartial study of this area be conducted, which

takes into account the plight of the Palestinian people, when all the funding comes

from Zionists?’

More followed. On 13 March 2019, the Weidenfeld Institute for Jewish Studies at

the University of Sussex was inaugurated at the German embassy in London.

Launched in memory of the late Lord Weidenfeld, ‘a long-term supporter of the

University of Sussex’s renowned work in German-Jewish studies and founding

supporter of its more recently established Chair in Modern Israel studies’, the Vice-

Chancellor, Adam Tickell, noted that ‘enlightening the current and the next generation

to the dangers of ignoring the lessons of the past’ (in matters of anti-Semitism) was

again urgent.5

Since it is hard to imagine socio-economic and political conditions in the

contemporary West that would endanger people for just being labelled Jewish (like

those existing in central and eastern Europe in the 1930s), today the accusation of

anti-Semitism has largely become a way of discrediting anti-Zionism and criticism of

the current Israeli regime. That is certainly how the Israeli government sees it. Since

2007, a ‘Hasbara’ forum reporting directly to the Israeli prime minister is entrusted

with propagating the ‘positive side’ of the country’s policies, which in many cases

have descended into outright criminality, notably in the occupied territories and

towards neighbouring states. One specific task of the Hasbara forum (the term means

’enlightenment’) is to denounce university professors and lecturers criticising Israel as

anti-Semites.6

In the period between 5 February 2019, when I was notified of the procedure

against me (which then had been underway for more than two months without

notification) and March the first, when I travelled to Sussex to defend myself against

this accusation, I further studied the subject, only to find again that the statement I

made is a statement of fact. There is no way that my right to speak out on this matter

can be suspended. For the average university management team today, this is an

entirely different matter. Unless they came in on other qualifications, they have

5 ‘Latest staff news: Sussex Weidenfeld Institute for Jewish Studies launches at London event’.

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/staff/newsandevents/?id=48112 (last accessed 25 March 2019).

6 Annette Groth, ‘Der Antisemitismusvorwurf als Disciplinierunginstrument und Diskurstotschläger’,

in Mies, Der tiefe Staat schlägt zu, pp. 97-8.

3

exchanged their role as scholars for the trajectory that if all goes well, ends with a

position as Vice-Chancellor and the remuneration that comes with it. Their concern is

not academic freedom, but funding, and at Sussex, the Israel chair and now also the

Weidenfeld Institute as a result rule out having anyone criticising Israel, even when

retired, associated with the University.

On 12 March I received a letter listing the following sanctions:

... You are asked to make a public apology on social media, acknowledging the hurt that your actions have caused and distancing yourself formally from anti-Semitism in any form. The wording of this apology must be agreed with the University prior to publication, and may be used by the University for its own purposes.

It was noted that the tweet remains in the public domain and continues to cause offence to some people and bring the University into disrepute; consequently, you are asked to remove the tweet made on 3 November 2018.

You are reminded of the required standards of behaviour for academic title holders, including Emeritus Professors, and advised that should you not comply... by 29 March 2019 then the matter will be referred back to consider whether further action should be taken... In the event of failure to comply, the on-going presence of the tweet in the public domain and your failure to comply with the decision of the Committee could form the basis of a fresh complaint against you, with all possible sanctions being available to the Committee (including removal of the right to use the title of Emeritus Professor).

You are reminded that even in the event that [the measures listed] are complied with in line with the required timescale, this will not prevent the Committee investigating any future complaints about your conduct in line with the Code.

On 14 March, one day after the inauguration of the Weidenfeld Insitute, I resigned

from my emeritus status in protest, with the following letter to the Vice-Chancellor.

Dear Professor Tickell

I have received the letter dated 12 March 2019 in which I am instructed to make a public apology for the grief I have caused by my Twitter reply on 3 November 2018 that ‘Israelis blew up the Twin Towers with help from Zionists in US govt’, retract it, and remove the message itself. It is also announced in the letter that henceforth I will be monitored in case new complaints might arise.

I can only conclude that neither my written representation dated 14 February 2019, nor the extensive oral representation I made in the presence of my wife on 1 March, to what I take was the Senior Management Group, have made any impact in the judgement of what I now understand was/is the [Academic Promotion, Advancement and Titles Committee].

As I have tried to make clear in the two representations, the University has conducted a procedure of which I was only informed after almost three months, in which various officers of the University were involved and a vote was taken among the members of the Department. Not unexpectedly after that vote, news of the procedure against me was making the rounds well beyond Sussex. The vote was taken in December without a regulation being available, and the regulation on which the decision of the committee is now based, was written after the fact and applied retrospectively. I will not mention again that for seven years now I have been active in the fight against the Far Right and the racism on which it thrives, and the insult that the accusation of anti-Semitism means for me personally.

4

I conceded in the oral representation that my comment may have been shocking for those who believe that ‘9/11’ was the work of Osama bin Laden and 19 Arab hijackers. I also made clear that had the University asked me right away to clarify I would have done that without further delay. However, as I have studied the matter closely and in context, on the basis of an extensive list of sources, I cannot retract it. As a scholar I must stand by the facts I discover in the course of my work. Never in my time as a researcher in Amsterdam or Sussex have I been forced to change any conclusions of scholarly work, and I will not now accept any restrictions on my academic freedom either.

Since in the APATC letter, there is no further mention of the University values listed in the December 2018 Code of Practice, such as 10 (e), promising support for those having the courage to change and be bold, and 14, the right to present ‘unpopular points of view’, I must conclude that from now on, should I retain the emeritus title, I would not be free to conduct my research in freedom, as article 14 claims to guarantee.

Therefore I resign from my emeritus status. I do so in protest over the treatment by a University that I have always felt a deep loyalty to, but which in this case has brought me into disrepute by a serious accusation which I reject as unfounded but against which it is difficult if not impossible to defend oneself nevertheless. As to the appeals procedure, the two solicitors who are advising me on this issue have come to the conclusion that if these are the standards the University adheres to, there is no point in appealing. Therefore I will not appeal, other than by defending my reputation publicly.

(details about acknowledgement and confidentiality)

With this letter I gave up the emeritus status and said goodbye, this time

definitively, to a University where I spent some of my best years. Of course it was not

necessarily very smart to post as a one-liner on Twitter a statement that was bound to

be controversial and reference it to a web encyclopedia that collates all that exists on

a given topic, ripe and green. However, the key question is not one of form but whether

Israelis blew up the Twin Towers or not. This I turn to next.

5

General. Background and Sources

The 9/11 attacks have been interpreted by several commentators, including former

Reagan administration official Barbara Honegger,7 as the 21st-century equivalent of

the 1933 Reichstag Fire, by which the Nazis imposed their dictatorship after Hitler had

been appointed Chancellor by president Hindenburg. Whilst there are similarities in

terms of the rolling back of civil rights and the launching of wars, the shift in world

politics that followed 9/11 was different. The current transformation is from the Cold

War stand-off to a neoconservative, Anglo-Zionist condominium, with war against

Iran, Russia and China looming. Unlike the pre-1991 situation in which the West,

organised around an Anglophone Atlantic bloc, was reined in the Soviet bloc, the

decolonising Third World and at home, by organised labour, in the new configuration

no such countervailing forces are recognised. Yet the tide of economic rivalry is going

against the capitalist heartland and the impetus to war, which in the 1930s came from

contender states challenging Western pre-eminence, in the current configuration of

forces emanates from the West.

It is my argument that 9/11 inaugurated the new world-political condominium, a

dramatic seizure of power under the auspices of neoconservatives in the United States,

Britain, and Israel. In a speech in 2007, the former NATO commander and presidential

hopeful, general Wesley Clark, declared that on 9/11 there was ‘a policy coup in this

country’. ‘Some hard-nosed people took over the direction of American policy and

they never bothered to inform the rest of us.’8

Since then, terrorist scares and actual outrages have become a key regulating

mechanism of our society, which due to the directive role of speculative capital, no

longer rests on a broad social contract. ‘7/7’ in Britain, the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan

massacres in France, and other incidents are examples. The question then arises who

the ‘regulators’ are, assuming these can be identified as conscious agencies in the

larger process.

77 Barbara Honegger, Behind the Smoke Curtain. What Happened at the Pentagon on 9/11 and What

Didn’t and Why it Matters, 2nd edition. Video by Mark Snyder. Seattle: Seattle 9/11 Truth, 2015 (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXBk8JqwFlw (last accessed 25 May 2018).

8 Cited in Christopher Bollyn, The War on Terror. The Plot to Rule the Middle East [foreword, A.

Sabrosky]. n.p.: www.bollyn.com 2017, p. 4.

6

9/11 was a conspiracy, not a simplistic one executed by 19 Arab hijackers in four

planes as the official and mainstream media account has it, but one evolving through a

long, intricate process of preparations, with its own successes and drawbacks on the

way. From the materials I have studied I draw the conclusion, not just that ‘the Twin

Towers were brought down by Israelis with help from Zionists in the US government’,

as I put it in my Twitter post of 3 November 2018, but that 9/11 as a whole represents

the coming together of neoconservative forces in Anglo-America and Israel. It was

planned and executed by extremist elements, but due to the fifteen military and

intelligence exercises conducted on that day, thousands of others participated

unwittingly; others may have had partial advance knowledge they decided not to

divulge, or just fell in line after the event.

As the former Director of Studies of the U.S. Army War College and emeritus

research chair at that institution, Dr Alan Sabrosky, concludes, 9/11 was a ‘Mossad-

orchestrated operation’. However,

Mossad did not do it alone. They needed local help within America (and perhaps

elsewhere) and they had it, principally from some alumni of PNAC (the misnamed

Project for a New American Century) and their affiliates within and outside of the

US Government who in the 9/11 attacks got the “catalytic event” they needed and

craved to take the US to war on Israel’s behalf. 9

In 2007, Francesco Cossiga, former president of Italy and the ultimate insider of the

actions of what is called the ‘deep state’, viz., the world of intelligence agencies and

undercover operations, said as much in an interview to the Corriere della Sera.

Cossiga was interior minister at the time of the most spectacular false flag operation in

post-war Europe, the abduction and assassination by the ‘Red Brigades’, of his own

Christian Democratic party chairman, Aldo Moro, in 1978.10 As Cossiga put it,

9 Alan Sabrosky, ‘Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake’, 2013.

https://zulfahmed.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/alan-sabrosky-demystifying-911-israel-and-the-tactics-of-

mistake/ (last accessed 10 August 2018) , emphasis added. I will not add qualifications such as ‘himself

Jewish’, because such a label, if it means anything at all, does not alter the status of an opinion.

10 See Philip Willan, Puppet Masters. The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy. London: Constable,

1991.

7

All of the democratic circles of America and of Europe ...now know well that the

disastrous [9/11] attack was planned and realized by the American CIA and

Mossad with the help of the Zionist world to put under accusation the Arabic

countries and to persuade the Western powers to intervene in Iraq and

Afghanistan.11

My claim about the Twin Towers is not more than a footnote to these statements,

and it too can be documented in detail. Not so much with published academic research,

for regarding 9/11 and the War on Terror as a strategic project which the attacks in the

United States were intended to kick-start, the funded and peer-reviewed universe of

mainstream academia has largely folded in on itself. As far as international studies go,

‘the response to September 11 has been comparatively muted’, William Brenner noted

five years after the attacks. ‘It has received little sustained attention, experienced no

fervent debate, and has been largely excluded from any central focus that might have

been anticipated.’12

Few authors openly questioning the official account of the attacks have been able to

get their work published by mainstream journals or established academic houses,

perhaps with Peter Dale Scott the sole exception.13 Others have been published by

smaller, critical publishers. The most important revelations by whistle-blowers all have

been self-published. No trespassers will be tolerated, as made clear when former CIA

director and Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, in his capacity as president of Texas A

& M University, censured a professor emeritus, Morgan Reynolds, for raising doubts

about 9/11, since ‘to suggest any kind of government conspiracy in the events of that

day goes beyond the pale’.14 That critical thinkers and publications likewise take the

11 History Commons, ‘Complete 9/11 timeline—geopolitics and 9/11—Israel’.

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?

timeline=complete_911_timeline&geopolitics_and_9/11=israel (last accessed 8 March 2019), citing

Corriere della Sera, 30/11//2007. Except in ‘9/11’ all dates have been written dd/mm/yy.

12 William J. Brenner, ‘In Search of Monsters: Realism and Progress in International Relations

Theory after September 11’. Security Studies. 15 (3). 2006, p. 497.

13 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11. Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. Berkeley, Cal.:

University of California Press, 2007.

14 Cited in Morgan Reynolds, ‘9/11, Texas A & M University, and Heresy’. In David Ray Griffin and

Peter Dale Scott, eds. 9/11 and American Empire. Intellectuals Speak Out. Northampton, Mass.: Olive

Branch Press, 2007, p. 103, cf. 112–13.

8

US government’s conspiracy theory of 9/11 as given and will even attack those

hesitating to accept it, underscores that in this domain, discipline, the core organising

principle of academia, is truly hegemonic.

This leaves the so-called ‘9/11 Truth movement’, such as Architects & Engineers

for 9/11 Truth, Lawyers for 9/11 Truth, and the like. But not only has 'truth' become an

invective to denounce those investigating 9/11, authors with inside information have

been repressed in various ways. Sibel Edmonds, who revealed advance knowledge by

the FBI, lives under a gagging order;15 Susan Lindauer, who did the same for the CIA,

was locked up incommunicado in a US maximum security complex.16 Philip Marshall,

the pilot who exposed details of the involvement of the Iran-Contra network (with

which he formerly had been associated himself), was assassinated in 2013.17

Writers investigating the role of Israel and Israeli agents are treated with the routine

accusation of anti-Semitism or worse. Ha’aretz newspaper, often a reliable source,

tried to make the investigative journalism of Christopher Bollyn suspect by reporting

that he ‘attended conferences with Holocaust deniers’. Yet Bollyn’s three books and its

source materials on the web are indispensable. The same for the writings of former

flight attendant Rebekah Roth, who decided to hide behind a curtain of fiction to reveal

some of the most spectacular details in four novels. Other unorthodox channels include

the theatre production of the Dutch actor-director, George van Houts.

However, now that a New York Grand Jury has admitted for scrutiny evidence on

9/11 contrary to the official account,18 things may be beginning to shift. With the new

book by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, 9/11 Unmasked, a catalogue of

the issues on which a panel of 23 experts from various backgrounds could agree

(several of them are associated with the submission of the Grand Jury case) the quality

15 Sibel Edmonds, Classified Woman. The Sibel Edmonds Story. Alexandria, Virginia: Sibel

Edmonds, 2012.

16 Susan Lindauer, Extreme Prejudice. The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of

9/11 and Iraq—The Ultimate Conspiracy to Silence Truth. Charleston, S.C.: Create Space, 2010.

17 Philip Marshall, The Big Bamboozle. n.p., https://thebigbamboozle.com 2012.

18 Manchester Gazette, ‘Legal Breakthrough in Special Grand Jury Petition for Sept. 11 Attacks’. (2

December 2018). https://manchestergazette.co.uk/9-11-grand-jury-investigation-launches/1857 (last

accessed 24 February 2019).

9

and reliability of ‘alternative’ material has been raised a notch further, although that

book does not discuss perpetrators or even the cui bono question.19

Historical Context: A Neoconservative Alliance to Balkanise the Middle East

Although I confine myself in this piece to the question of Israelis and the Twin

Towers, it is necessary to provide some historical context in order to make clear that

this was not just a forensic accident.20 To properly assess the forces that would

eventually unleash the War on Terror we have to investigate two fields of force which

blended into each other in the process. One was the control by Britain and the United

States of the Middle East, where the world’s largest and easiest accessible fossil energy

sources are located; the other, Israel’s contested presence as a militarised Western

outpost in an overwhelmingly Arab and/or Muslim region.

As to the first, Peter Dale Scott speaks of a ‘dark quadrant of unaccountable power’,

which provides a

roof of inscrutable governmental, financial, and corporate relationships between

the United States and Saudi Arabia. There is a “black hole” at the centre.... in

which the interests of government, petrodollar banks, intelligence agencies, and

multinational oil companies, are all inscrutably mixed.21

After the backing of the US dollar in gold was abandoned in 1971, it was

exchanged, informally, for a backing by Middle East energy sources (on the basis of an

agreement that trade in oil and gas would continue to be conducted in US dollars).

Following the first oil price hike in response to post-1971 dollar inflation, the Middle

East market also evolved into a key life support for the US and Western arms-

industrial complex. As Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler have demonstrated,

actual wars sucking in even more arms compensated for slack oil profits as if in a

balancing mechanism; whilst maintaining the petrodollar is an essential precondition

19 David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, 9/11 Unmasked. An International Review Panel

Investigation. Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2018.

20 This has also been the method in my Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War. Prism of

Disaster. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.

21 Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State. Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S.

Democracy. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, p. 79.

10

for maintaining US primacy and the financing of the deficits by which rising military

expenditure is covered.22

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States and Britain no

longer had to take this powerful contender into account and were able to respond

aggressively to any sign of economic independence in the region with impunity. ‘This

explains the US wars in the Middle East, ... and also the goal of US neoconservatives

to realise their Greater Middle East project,’ writes Mohsen Massarat. That project's

aim, he notes, was to break down the region's strong states into many different. smaller

oil-producing states, ‘which will not be able to defend themselves against US dictates

in the decades to come.’23

As to the second field of force, Israel’s presence in the Middle East, its strategy of

destroying strong states coincides seamlessly with the Anglo-American need to control

the region's energy resources and the requirements of maintaining dollar hegemony.

The Israeli policy to ‘balkanise’ the region has its origins in geostrategic considerations

although these too have recently come to include an energy dimension.24 Israel

therefore constitutes one further component of the ‘black hole’ at the centre. The

relationship between the state of Israel and its supporters in Anglo-America, whom I

term Anglo-Zionists, in fact is far more fundamental also in terms of the deeper

religious and civilisational background, than the link with the Muslim Arabs. This

latter link is strategic, but not organic as the one with Israel.

Even if the arrangement between the US and Saudi Arabia to ensure that all OPEC

oil deliveries remain denominated in dollars is a lifeline for US power in the world,

there is no way the Saudis or any of the other Gulf monarchies can determine US and

Western policy, whereas Israel can. In addition, there is a complex relationship that

turns support for Israel into an article of faith even apart from the Israel lobby. Besides

a pervasive affinity that arises from shared frontier experience including the violent

encounter with natives, there is also the specific Jewish-Zionist connection. Guilt

complexes having their origin in not living in Israel but comfortably in North America,

feed a sometimes aggressive loyalty to the ‘chosen people’ facing a hostile

22 Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel. London: Pluto

Press, 2002, chapter 5.

23 Mohsen Massarat, ‘Die weltweite US-Kriegspolitik: Wettrüsten, Chaos im Nahen und Mittleren

Osten, Iran-Atomkonflikt und Dollarimperialsmus’. In Mies, Der tiefe Staat schlägt zu, p. 260.

24 Clément Nguyen, ‘Israël et sa géopolitique des hydrocarbures au XXIème siècle’. Perspectives

Libres, no. 19, 2016, 115-150.

11

environment in the Middle East. As Yuri Slezkine puts it in his classic study, The

Jewish Century: for American Jews, ‘Jewishness and possibly Americanness ...

depend on Israel’s continued chosenness.’25 However, as the actions of Far Right

Israeli governments grow bolder, Jewish people elsewhere face painful conflicts of

allegiance. Indeed in February 2005, Avi Shlaim, the renowned Israeli historian, wrote

that ‘Israel is increasingly perceived as a rogue state,’ wondering whether Zionism had

not become the outright enemy of the Jews, as evidenced by the resurgence of anti-

Semitism.26

This is a reminder that there are Zionist and non- or anti-Zionist Jews, just as there

are non-Jewish Zionists; all attempts to conflate anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and

criticism of Israeli policies will run aground on this inescapable reality. One only has

to think of the fact that concerning the war in Iraq, the majority of American citizens

considering themselves Jews disagreed with the Israel lobby in the US, led by

neoconservative Anglo-Zionists and dual nationals such as Richard Perle, Paul

Wolfowitz, and others.27

Because my aim here is to document that Israelis blew up the Twin Towers with

help from US Zionists (not only those in government), I will concentrate on the Israeli

leg of the alliance to break up the Middle East, for which the War on Terror would

provide the strategic umbrella. If as a result, the role of figures like vice-president Dick

Cheney, or national security adviser and later, Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice,

and others primarily representing the energy bloc, will be underplayed, the fact that in

9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror two strategies came together will be the

presupposition throughout.

In fact neoconservatism, as a militant, Messianic Western supremacism committed

to subduing the least sign of resistance, itself was the expression of how the two

strands blended into one. After the Six Days’ War of 1967, Israel became the target of

Third World wrath on account of its continued occupation of Arab lands. The Jewish

state shifted to enhanced militarization in the late 1960s, partly to offset the feared

25 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004, p.

365.26 Cited in Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9/11. The Deception That Changed the World [foreword, G.

Stanish]. n.p.: www.bollyn.com, , p. 189.

27 John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York:

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007, p. 243.

12

contraction of US involvement, partly in response to the growing strength of the Israeli

Left. Between 1967 and ’73, defence expenditure ran as high as 23 per cent of GDP,

attracting big private conglomerates into the armaments sector alongside the state’s

own holding companies.28 This contributed to preparing the ground for a further

confrontation with the Arab neighbours by broadening the bloc of interests committed

to military solutions. The OPEC oil cartel and the New International Economic Order

drive meanwhile worked to isolate the country, culminating in the condemnation of

Zionism as racism by the UN General Assembly in 1975. Israel as a result moved

closer to some of the less savoury Third World regimes, such as South Africa and

Central American dictatorships like Guatemala and El Salvador. In many cases Israel

became the caretaker of US interests which Congress hesitated to defend even under

Reagan. 29

In the Middle East, Israel dug in by holding on to the occupied territories, turning

the conflict with the Palestinians and the wider Arab and Islamic worlds into a

quagmire from which it would not be able to extricate itself. As a result, ‘rather than

representing a permanent escape from the ghetto, Israel became the ghetto’s mirror

image—an armed camp’.30 True, this allowed Israeli society to solve a foreign conflict

within its own body, the relation between the European Jews, the Ashkenazi, who

dominate the country’s ruling class; and the Sephardim, non-European Jews brought in

from North Africa and elsewhere to maintain preponderance in the demographic

balance with the remaining Palestinians. By letting the economically disadvantaged

Sephardim settle in the occupied territories, the Israeli state gave free rein to a

pervasive belief that the conquest of the West Bank (‘Judea and Samaria’) and East

Jerusalem was a fulfilment of a biblical promise—a belief that chimes with the views

of Zionist sympathisers in the United States. It also enabled a reconciliation between a

rightwing, ‘Revisionist’ Zionism (who claim the title to the entire biblical Palestine)

and a neo-orthodox, ‘national’ Judaism.31

28 Nitzan and Bichler, Global Political Economy of Israel, pp. 128-91.

29 See my Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq. London: Pluto Press and New Delhi: Sage

Vistaar, 2006, pp. 126, 205-6, 215.

30 Slezkine, Jewish Century, p. 365.

31 I have developed this at length in my Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion, vol. II of Modes of

Foreign Relations and Political Economy. London: Pluto Press, 2010, pp. 189-204 & passim.

13

Revisionist Zionism

The roots of the current Israeli regime are in Revisionist Zionism, with its tradition of

forcing the West into supporting Israel, if need be by terrorism. Zionism as such

emerged in the late nineteenth century, in the context of a chauvinist nationalism,

fuelled by imperialism, which often turned against minorities such as Jews. At the

dawn of the 20th century and to the extent they had not assimilated into the

surrounding societies, the mass of European Jewry (5.2 out of 8.7 million) lived in the

Russian empire.32 Although many Jews by then were aware of Zionism, the actual

adherents of the idea represented less than one percent of all European Jews; in the

west, the assimilation ideal still prevailed, whilst in Russia, the large majority of

Jewish youth was revolution-minded, socialist, not Zionist.33 Even Marxist Zionists

had little influence.34

The rumblings of the Russian Revolution during World War I provided the impetus

for synchronising Western imperialism and Zionism. For a variety of reasons (to keep

Russia in the war, the Suez Canal lifeline, and others), the Balfour Declaration of 1917

granted the Jews the right of ‘return’ to Palestine, the core myth of Zionism. Lord

Rothschild had asked for this statement, but the Rhodes-Milner Group, the imperialist

core of the British ruling class of which he was a member, was ambivalent; overall

British policy was pro-Arab, and in India it was pro-Muslim. As the trustee of the

League mandate over Palestine following the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Britain

envisaged the Jews as an economically active element that would energise an Arab

federation there. As Lord Milner himself stated in a speech to the House of Lords in

1923, there was no question of giving in to the demands of the ‘extreme Zionists’.35

The Zionists themselves on the other hand thought in terms of taking full possession

of Palestine, knowing this would entail violence and war. In 1922 David Ben-Gurion,

the leader of secular Zionism and future prime minister for the Mapai party, explained

32 Slezkine, Jewish Century, p. 159.

33 Slezkine, p. 149; cf. Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust. New

York: Anchor Books, 1976, p. 31.

34 Ber Borochov, Nationalism and the Class Struggle. A Marxian Approach to the Jewish Problem.

Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press , 1972 [1937, written 1905-‘16].

35 Cited in Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. From Rhodes to Cliveden. New

York: Books in Focus, 1981 [1949], p. 172.

14

that ‘we are not yeshiva students debating the finer points of self-improvement, we are

conquerors of the land.’36

The Revisionists were the more radical representatives of this point of view. Their

leader, Vladimir ‘Zeev’ Jabotinsky, in his ‘Iron Wall’ article of 1923 argued that in a

future Jewish state, there had to be a sharp divide from the remaining Palestinian

Arabs. 37 The Revisionists had their own paramilitary force, the Betar (of which the

future Likud leader, 16-year-old Menachem Begin in Poland would become a member

in 1929) and in 1924 they attended the world fascist conference in Rome. Italian

fascism was not anti-Semitic and Betar fighters were even trained by blackshirts until

Mussolini yielded to pressure from Hitler in 1936 and ‘37 and the Betar training camp

was closed down.38 When Jabotinsky distanced himself from dealing with fascists,

Avraham Stern and the later Likud prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, continued to make

proposals both to Mussolini and to Hitler about an anti-British military alliance in

Palestine. The World Zionist Organization too negotiated with Hitler’s representatives

on how the expulsion of Jews could be turned into a conquest of the Holy Land.39

Back in 1931, Jabotinsky’s faction defected from Haganah, the military arm of the

mainstream Zionists. Irgun as an underground terrorist organisation was set up to

compensate for the unreliable Stern gang (Lehi). Jabotinsky was not a fascist himself

(many of his followers were) but he had no qualms about sacrificing the safety of non-

Zionist Jews for the greater good, as exemplified by his contacts with the notorious

Ukrainian anti-Semite, Petliura; another sign of things to come once the Revisionists

took over in Israel in 1977.40

The key difference between mainstream Zionism and the Revisionists was the size

of a future Israel. Jabotinsky’s faction left the World Zionist Organisation in 1935 over

36 Cited in Slezkine, Jewish Century, p. 212. Yeshivas are faith schools, the Judaic equivalent of

Muslim madrassas.

37 Cited in Alastair Crooke, ‘Quand Israël et l’Iran s’alliaient discrètement.’ Le Monde Diplomatique,

February 2009, pp. 1, 13.

38 Lenni Brenner, ‘Zionist-Revisionism: The Years of Fascism and Terror’. Journal of Palestine

Studies, 13 (1) 1983, p. 69.

39 Jeff Halper, War Against the People. Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification. London:

Pluto Press, 2015, p. 186; Brenner, ’Zionist Revisionism’, pp. 79-81, 87-8.

40 Hilton Obenzinger. ‘Jabotinsky’s Legacy Continues’. Journal of Palestine Studies, 14 (1) 1984, p.

137.

15

the planned creation of a separate state of Jordan out of the British mandate.41 For them

a Jewish state would have to include the area that according to Israeli writer Israel

Shahak, had been determined by rabbinical authorities. It comprised, besides Palestine,

1. all of the Sinai and a part of Egypt up to the environs of Cairo;

2. all of Jordan and a large chunk of Saudi Arabia, all of Kuwait and a part of

Iraq south of the Euphrates’

3. all of Lebanon and all of Syria plus a large part of Turkey up to Lake Van;

4. Cyprus.42

Of course this would only be achieved by way of major wars with Israel’s powerful

regional adversaries. When the prospect of holding on to the occupied territories

darkened after the much more closely fought war between the Jewish state and its

neighbours in 1973, the Revisionists therefore began to hatch ideas about making the

United States shoulder the burden. This strategy was reciprocated in the US by the

Anglo-Zionist/cold warrior coalition eventually organised in the Project for a New

American Century, PNAC, concerned also about maintaining control over Middle East

oil to sustain the global reserve role for the dollar.

Mobilising the West Against the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims

As noted, Menachem Begin would be the first Likud leader and prime minister. Shamir

was his successor, whilst Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was Jabotinsky’s

secretary. There was never any doubt about the nature of this current. As the head of

Irgun, Begin ordered the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed

the British Secretariat and military command of Palestine, in July 1946. Disguised as

Arabs, Irgun and Haganah terrorists placed bombs hidden in milk cans in the cellar of

the hotel, killing 91 people.43 Hence, when Begin founded the Herut party in 1948, a

group of prominent Americans of Jewish background, including Albert Einstein and

Hannah Arendt, signed an op-ed letter to the New York Times in which they criticised

41 Ian S. Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York: Council

on Foreign Relations, 1988, p. 38.

42 Cited by Glen Stanish in Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. xxii.

43 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 53-7.

16

Herut as a party close to fascism. They warned that given Begin’s credentials, this

party, once in power, might resort to terrorist policies.44

Israel was born in a war against the Palestinian population and the Arab neighbours.

At the start 650,000 Jews faced a Palestinian population three times as large and

owning 93 per cent of the land, but armed gangs of Zionists and Red Army veterans

were militarily superior. In the foundational war they destroyed nearly 400 Arab towns

and villages and drove out 700 thousand Palestinians. By 1962, the ratio of land

ownership had been exactly reversed.45 Yet there was no way the Israelis could rest on

their laurels and the Azhkenazi founders of the state actually saw war with the Arabs as

a necessary condition to integrate the Sephardim brought in from North Africa and the

Middle East. Only thus would they be kept from fraternising with Arab neighbours

with whom they had lived, mostly peacefully, for so long, and become part of the

fighting nation. Without war, the mainstream leadership around Ben-Gurion argued,

the necessary moral tension would be lacking.46

In 1956 Britain and France launched their attack on Egypt to recapture control of

the Suez Canal nationalised by Nasser. Israel attacked through the Sinai. Bomb attacks

on US and UK targets in Cairo, attributed to Arabs but in fact organized by the Israeli

military under defence minister Pinas Lavon, had exacerbated Western animosity

towards the Egyptian leadership.47 The issue of Israel’s size also came up: on the third

day of the campaign, Ben-Gurion announced in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, that

the real war goal was ‘the restoration of the Kingdom of David and Solomon’.48

However, the Suez operation ended in a debacle, since the United States was in no

mood to drive the non-aligned countries into the arms of the Soviet bloc by supporting

Anglo-French gunboat policies. For Israel the consolation prize came when one of the

last prime ministers of the IVth Republic in France, Guy Mollet, not only decided to

develop a French military nuclear capacity, but also to supply Israel with a nuclear

reactor and blueprints for an enrichment facility.49 This eventually would turn the

44 Todd E. Pierce, ‘Neocons : The Echo of German Fascism’. Consortium News, 27 March 2015.

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/27/neocons-the-echo-of-german-fascism/ (accessed 28 March

2015).

45 Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, pp. 92, 96.

46 Cited in Nitzan and Bichler, Global Political Economy of Israel, p. 102.

47 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 59, details on p. 74.

48 Israel Shahak cited by Stanish, in Bolllyn, Solving 9/11, p. xxi.

49 Claude Serfati, Le militaire. Une histoire française. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam. 2017, p. 57.17

Jewish state into a nuclear-armed regional power, an enduring obstacle to the UN

project of a nuclear-free Middle East.

The Six Days’ War then brought the long-desired extension of territory. It also

reinforced the militarist, ultra-nationalist current in Israeli politics. Two years earlier

the ruling Mapai party had split and a more aggressive faction, led by Ben-Gurion,

future president Shimon Peres, and Moshe Dayan, the victorious defence minister,

broadened the Revisionist bloc committed to holding to the occupied territories and if

need be, terrorise the West into supporting it. During the fighting, the US Navy signals

ship, USS Liberty, was attacked by Israeli jets, killing 34 US sailors and wounding

more than one hundred others. The intent to sink the ship was not in doubt, but whether

the Israeli high command’s fear was that it was monitoring the seizure of the Golan

Heights and other territorial operations, or whether it wanted to conceal that 1,000

Egyptian prisoners of war had been massacred in the Sinai, is uncertain.50

After victory, militant Zionists wanted active colonisation of the West Bank, the

Gaza strip and the Golan. The concept of the West Bank as biblical ‘Judea and

Samaria’ combined territorial aspirations with the imaginary of the religious Jews.

Gush Emunim (‘Bloc of the Faithful’) was formed when Orthodox scholars spent the

spring 1968 Passover at an Arab hotel in Hebron. A manifesto of the Movement for the

Whole Land of Israel reiterated the Zionist claim that colonisation was the return of a

biblical ethnos driven from its original territory two millennia before.51 The

Palestinians now turned to plane hijacks to call attention to their plight and a radical

wing, ‘Black September’, massacred the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972. In

the ensuing hunt for perpetrators, serious frictions between the CIA and the Mossad

played out as both intelligence agencies operated different double agents, a sign of

things to come in the events surrounding 9/11. 52

With oil becoming more important, Israel now faced growing challenges to

maintain its privileged if precarious position as the spearhead of the Western thrust into

the Middle East. However, US pressure on the Soviet Union to facilitate emigration (as

50 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 60, 64

51 Gabriel Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion. The Rise of

Fundamentalisms Around the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 2003, p. 141; Lustick, For

the Land and the Lord, p. 43.

52 Ola Tunander, ‘The War on Terror and the Pax Americana’. In Griffin and Scott, 9/11 and

American Empire, pp. 152-5.

18

a price for arms control agreements) resulted in a sharp upturn of Jews leaving the

USSR; it also fed resurgent Zionist fervour in Israel even though the vast majority of

Soviet Jews used their exit visas to settle in the United States.53

Likud Revisionists at the Helm

After the election of Menachem Begin in 1977, the colonisation of the occupied

territories, which hitherto had been a matter of ‘civic’ initiatives, became government

policy. Ariel Sharon, the popular tough-talking general, in his capacity as Likud

minister of land administration, assumed office with a plan to settle one million Jews

on the West Bank in the next decades. By now there was little distance left between the

Revisionists and the former mainstream: one year before the Likud takeover it was

prime minister Yitzhak Rabin who brought his colleague from Apartheid South Africa,

Vorster, to Israel. He also began the arming of the fascist Phalange in Lebanon.54 In

combination with Israeli support for murderous Far Right regimes in Central America,

these connections brought out the racist principles on which the enlarged state of Israel

now had become dependent for its survival and that would eventually culminate in the

Basic Law of July 2018.55 In the words of Jan Nederveen Pieterse,

Israel’s connection with Third World fascism stems from the same roots as

Zionism’s connection with fascism. It is a consequence of the alliance with

imperialism: an alliance that came naturally to an upper stratum of Jews, but that

came to the majority of Jews only at a time when there was practically no other

choice. The alternative was social revolution 56

Concern over the Far Right credentials and policies of the Likud government

meanwhile prompted a campaign to have the Israeli school system adopt a definition of

53 Slezkine, Jewish Century, p. 358.

54 Obenzinger, ‘Jabotinsky’s Legacy’, p. 139.

55 Chana Roberts, ‘Israel’s Nationality Law: What, exactly, does it say?’ Israeli National News, 29

July 2018. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/249673 (last accessed 13 February

2019).

56 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Israel’s role in the Third World: Exporting West Bank expertise’, Race &

Class, 26 (3) 1985, p. 27.

19

fascism not confined to anti-Semitism.57 Abroad, Arthur Koestler in The Thirteenth

Tribe demolished the Zionist myth of a ‘return’ of an ethnically Jewish people to the

Holy Land, since in fact, the largest single accretion to ‘diaspora’ Jewry were converts

to Judaism in the mediaeval Khazar empire in Ukraine and southern Russia.58

The Revisionist Zionists in power had other priorities. They began to explore how

the United States could be mobilised to join the fight against Israel’s enemies. In 1979,

the first head of Mossad, Isser Harel, in an interview stated that the United States had

developed an alliance with two countries, Israel and Saudi Arabia, but that ‘the alliance

with Saudi Arabia was dangerous and would develop a tolerance for terror among

Americans... If the tolerance continued Islamic fundamentalists would ultimately

strike America’.59 Prime minister Begin was meanwhile cultivating key contacts in the

United States, both among Protestant fundamentalists and among neoconservative

Anglo-Zionists (both Jewish and non-Jewish). Among his interlocutors were the New

York Jewish intelligentsia, men like Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, who in

the late 1970s abandoned their traditional left liberal position for the hard-line Cold

War stance and unconditional support for Israel that gave the name to

neoconservatism.

Israeli-US Preparations for a War on Terror

‘That Jews were numerous, wealthy, and powerful in America was an obvious reason

for the commitment to Israel, but not the only one,’ writes Franz Schurmann. There

was also, notably in the Democratic Party, the idea that here was a progressive,

socialistic, non-communist nation-building experiment that deserved support.

However, ‘In the early 1970s, that special United States-Israel ideological relationship

was transformed into a simple political-military tie.’60 As the US took the place of

57 Amnon Kapeliouk, ‘Exaltation nationaliste, négation de la démocratie. L’agressivité de l’extrême

droite israélienne’. Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1979. Archives 1954-2012 [CD-Rom ed]..

58 Arhur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe. The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage. New York: Random

House 1976. This theme was later expanded by Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People [trans.

Y. Lotan]. London: Verso, 2009.

59 Cited in Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 70-71.

60 Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power. An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents and

Contradictions of World Politics. New York: Pantheon, 1974, p. 534.

20

France as Israel’s major foreign source of support, it began providing Israel with

military technology at a level no other ally enjoyed. As a result the country would turn

from an arms importer to a top-10 exporter of advanced weapon systems within a

decade. In turn, the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, coinciding with the second oil price

hike, worked to upgrade Israel as a US partner in many respects, among them the right

to compete for US weapons orders. In the framework of the line-up of the second Cold

War, the Reagan administration would come to view Israel as a strategic partner in the

region against Soviet influence.61

I already referred to the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1973 trade bill that tied

commercial equality for the USSR to acquiescence in Jewish emigration to Israel,

mortgaging détente on the Zionist project. This was the moment the traditional US

militarists (Henry Jackson’s nickname was the ‘Senator from Boeing’) teamed up with

the Anglo-Zionists such as the investment banker and veteran Cold War diplomat, Paul

Nitze, to campaign for the deployment of an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system and

restore nuclear superiority over the USSR. Richard Perle acted as a liaison between

Jackson and the ABM group and later became Nitze’s assistant in the Pentagon.62

To set the agenda for the Anglo-Zionist neoconservative alliance, the Likud

leadership organised a conference in Jerusalem in July 1979, devoted to developing a

comprehensive response to ‘terrorism’, read: national liberation as represented by the

PLO. To get the American military-industrial complex on board, Soviet support for

international terrorism was made the focus of attention. Following the opening of the

event by prime minister Begin, Benzion Netanyahu, the founding chairman of the

Jonathan Institute (named after his other son, killed in the Entebbe raid on a hijacked

Israeli passenger jet), argued that the event ‘was called to serve as the beginning of a

new process—the purpose of rallying the democracies of the world to a struggle

against terrorism.’63 This was the first explicit articulation of the War on Terror

project.

There were two US delegations at the Jerusalem event: the Democratic one was led

by Henry Jackson, the Republican one by George H.W. Bush, former CIA director and

then still a presidential hopeful before becoming Reagan’s vice-president in 1981. The

61 Halper, War Against the People, p. 41.

62 Ronald Brownstein and Nina Easton, Reagan’s Ruling Class. Portraits of the President’s Top One

Hundred Officials, 2nd ed. New York: Pantheon, 1983 [1982], p. 500.

63 Cited in Bollyn, War on Terror, p. 57, emphasis added.

21

conference’s key theses were that a ‘war on terror’ had to be waged through pre-

emptive attacks on states supporting terrorism; that a dedicated intelligence

infrastructure be established; and that civil liberties had to be rolled back for those

suspected of terrorism, and possibilities for preventive detention without charge as well

as torture, widened. Simultaneously the ‘terrorists’ should be dehumanized in the eyes

of the public. As Ian Black wrote in the Jerusalem Post on the first day of the

conference, ‘The conference organizers expect the event to initiate a major anti-

terrorist offensive’.64

Identifying ‘Moscow’ as the hub of ‘international terrorism’, something we today

would call ‘fake news’, was taken up by Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Vietnam

veteran and former NATO commander Alexander Haig, Jr. He based himself on the

proofs of Claire Sterling’s Terror Network, which aimed to expose a world-wide terror

operation managed by the KGB but in fact relied on CIA disinformation trying to link

the Italian Red Brigades to Moscow.65 Sterling, herself a participant in the Jerusalem

conference, in a follow-up article sought to link the attempt at the life of Pope John

Paul II in Rome in May 1981 to Soviet anger over the pontiff’s role in supporting the

anti-communist trade union Solidarnosc in Poland, but that story too was a hoax.66

Around that time an Israeli official, Oded Yinon, came up with the plan to try and

break up Israel’s neighbours along ethnic and religious/sectarian lines, beginning with

Lebanon. Officially titled ‘A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties’, the Yinon

Plan appeared first in February 1982 in the journal of the information department of

the World Zionist Organization in Jerusalem, Kivunim, before being translated into

English by an Israeli critic. The Lebanese scenario of which Yinon spoke, would

involve that country’s ‘total dissolution into five provinces’; this in turn should serve

‘as a precedent for the entire Arab world including, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian

Peninsula.’67

After the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of Palestinians in

two large refugee camps that it entailed, weapons captured there were passed on to the

64 Cited in Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 41. Cf. Diana Ralph, ‘Islamophobia and the “War on Terror”: The

Continuing Pretext for U.S. Imperial Conquest’, in Paul Zarembka, ed. The Hidden History of 9-11, 2nd

ed. New York: Seven Stories Press 2008 [2006], p. 265.

65 Bob Woodward, Veil. The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-87. London: Headline, 1988, pp. 139-40.

66 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent. The Political Economy of the

Mass Media. London: Vintage Books, 1994 [1988], pp. 144-6, 152

67 Cited in Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 24.

22

mujahedeen in Afghanistan, already supported by the CIA and Saudi Arabia. This is

how Israeli military intelligence (AMAN), under the command of future prime

minister Ehud Barak, became involved in the network of Osama bin Laden. The

latter’s trainer, Ali Mohamed, was a Hebrew-speaking Egyptian working for Israeli

intelligence and also a US Army special forces reserve officer. He would be directly

involved in the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi that killed 250 people, yet

somehow this seems not to have affected his links to the CIA.68

Other instances of double agent and false flag operations followed when the Reagan

administration dispatched US Marines to Beirut International Airport in the hope of

containing the fighting. In October 1983 241 of them perished in a suicide attack; a

subsequent attack on a French military contingent killed 56 soldiers. V. Ostrovsky, a

former Mossad officer, maintains in a book that Israel had at least advance knowledge

but that Sharon did not want US and French forces there. The attacks were also

intended to mobilise the Americans against the Arab world on the side of Israel.69 For

the State Department this needed no further argument. Haig had been convinced of the

‘terror’ narrative by reading Claire Sterling's book, but George Shultz, his successor as

Secretary of State, was transformed by the US losses in Lebanon. In April 1984 he

spoke about a more active response to terrorism including pre-emptive strikes.70 Soon

after, he got a chance to further reflect on this in a follow-up terrorism conference of

the Jonathan Institute, this time in Washington.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s UN ambassador at the time, convened the conference

and also edited the proceedings. He defined the ‘two main antagonists of democracy in

the postwar world’, communist totalitarianism and Islamic radicalism, as together

constituting a ‘worldwide network of terror’. What was needed in the West was a

‘realignment of attitudes’. Marxism and Islam had combined in giving terrorism its

impetus, and the United Nations had justified it by calling terrorism a struggle for

national liberation.71 The conference was a high-level gathering: on the US side,

besides Shultz, Attorney General Ed Meese, FBI Director William Webster, UN

ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, members of Congress and a host of academics and

journalists all participated.

68 Tunander, ‘The War on Terror and the Pax Americana’, p. 155; cf. Bollyn, War on Terror, p. 44.

69 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 66.

70 Woodward, Veil. Secret Wars of the CIA, pp. 442, 444. 71 Benjamin Netanyahu, , ed. Terrorism. How the West Can Win. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,

1986, pp. 3, xi, 12

23

The three main lines of the strategy formulated at the 1984 conference were, first,

the idea of a forward defence against terrorism; secondly, getting the media to avoid

any investigation into the possible motives of terrorists; and finally, the need for a

Pearl Harbor-like event to shock people out of their complacency. On this theme,

Netanyahu himself led the discussion. Violence, he argued, was already so endemic in

the international system that people’s sensibilities had been numbed. However,

Terrorism follows an inexorable, built-in escalation. To be effective, it must

continually horrify and stupefy. Yet once we have become accustomed to a

particular level of violence, a new outrage is required to shock our sensibilities. It

used to be enough for terrorists to hijack a plane to attract international attention;

next it became necessary to kill a few hostages; in the future, more violence will

be required.

Only if there would be one mighty blow, and then ‘a successful war on terrorism...

not just erratic responses to individual terrorist acts’, the United States would be able to

build ‘an anti-terrorist alliance ... with two or three or possibly more countries.’ This

committed group of states would be in a position to ‘credibly threaten the offenders,

and [it] alone can impel the neutrals to shed their neutrality’. But this required that the

blow would be big enough; only then would the ‘citizens in a democracy’, united in

fear and seeing themselves as ‘soldiers in a common battle’, would be ‘prepared to

endure sacrifice and even... immeasurable pain’. 72

Whether Desert Storm, the operation to drive out Saddam Hussein’s army from

Kuwait in 1991, and especially, the encouragement of Kurdish and Shi’ite uprising of

against the Sunni leadership in Baghdad, were also part of the Dark Quadrant

balkanization strategy, would take us too far. There is no doubt however that the

collapse of the Soviet Union made it possible to openly contemplate this option. In

1992, Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, a highly influential neoconservative ideologue

who participated in the Washington conference of 1984, wrote an article in Foreign

Affairs entitled ‘Rethinking the Middle East’ that harked back to the Yinon Plan of a

decade earlier. From the 1950s Lewis had supported the Israeli Far Right and

advocated the idea of a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam; key

72 Netanyahu, Terrorism, pp. 218, 225-6..

24

neoconservatives such as Richard Perle considered him their mentor. In the article

Lewis added his voice to calls for a ‘Lebanonization’ of the region.

A possibility, which could even be precipitated by [Islamic] fundamentalism, is

what has of late been fashionable to call ‘Lebanonization.’ Most of the states of

the Middle East—Egypt is an obvious exception—are of recent and artificial

construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is

sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no

real sense of common identity.... The state then disintegrates—as happened in

Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions, and

parties.73

Clearly the United States would only be able to play a role in this process if it

avoided a post-Cold War demobilisation, and this was taken up by the Anglo-Zionist

bloc with the Defence Planning Guidance, FY 1994-1999.74 In this document,

commissioned by deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative

doctrine of global military supremacy for the United States was laid out with all its

implications. These included the breaking up of the existing Middle East. As General

Wesley Clark reported later, right in 1991 Wolfowitz told him that the US could now

use military power in the Middle East without the Soviets stopping them; there would

be an interval of five to ten years to clean out Soviet client regimes in the Middle East

before the next major contender state would arise.75

The problem that there might be no credible enemy any longer was solved by

Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ argument, first in a Foreign Affairs piece

in 1993 and subsequently in the book of 1998. In hindsight the ‘Clash of Civilisations’

thesis can be seen as a bridge between the original Netanyahu project of a War on

Terror and its revival following 9/11. Terrorism according to Huntington has its roots

73 Bernard Lewis,‘Rethinking the Middle East’. Foreign Affairs 71 (4), 1992, pp. 116-7; cf. History

Commons, ‘Geopolitics and 9/11—Israel’ referring to the Lewis article.

74 Defence Planning: Guidance FY 1994-1999 (16 April 1992, declassified 2008).

https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-docs1-12.pdf (last accessed 16

December 2018).

75 Scott, American Deep State, p. 84.

25

in a ‘demographic explosion in Muslim societies’, which turned ‘large numbers of

often unemployed males’ into a ‘natural source of instability and violence’.76

This was corroborated in Israel and the occupied territories when roughly one

million Russian-speaking people migrated to Israel in the 1990s, raising their share in

the country’s population to over 18 percent. They took the place of Palestinian

workers, who as a result became superfluous. In 1993, the year of the Oslo agreements

on a two-state solution, Israel began to close the transit points for Palestinian labour.

Russian-speakers and other less favoured Jewish Israeli’s now moved to the

proliferating settlements in the occupied territories in force.77 As successive Likud

governments no longer hid their unwillingness to abide by the Oslo principles,

impatience as to the envisaged US role in a ‘War on Terror’ mounted. In 1995

Netanyahu even predicted that ‘if the West doesn’t wake up to the suicidal nature of

militant Islam, the next thing you will see is militant Islam bringing down the World

Trade Center.’78

In 1996, a group of dual nationals led by Richard Perle published A Clean Break for

the incoming Netanyahu government. The report deplored the strategic and economic

paralysis that a combination of quasi-socialist Zionism and the ‘peace process’ had led

the country into. It recommended that Zionism be reconstituted on a new intellectual

foundation: not only market-oriented, but also ‘one that restores strategic initiative’.

Besides a more aggressive approach to the Palestinians (including the right of ‘hot

pursuit’), the report claimed that ‘a new basis for relations with the United States’

should be forged, ‘furthering values inherent to the West.’ Israel’s new agenda must

‘reestablish the principle of pre-emption, rather than retaliation alone’, and cease ‘to

absorb blows to the nation without response’.79 Israel should aggressively confront

Lebanon, Syria and Iran, and ‘focus upon removing Saddam Hussein from power in

Iraq’. Replacing him with a restored Hashemite monarchy would allow weaning the

76 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. London:

Touchstone, 1998, p. 265.

77 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin,

2007, pp. 430-32.

78 Cited in Laurent Guyénot, ‘9/11 Was an Israeli Job. How America was neoconned into World War

IV’. Unz Review, 10 September 2018. https://www.unz.com/article/911-was-an-israeli-job/ (last

accessed 9 February 2019). Also on video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMLO558gec

79 Richard Perle et al., A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Jerusalem and

Washington: The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 1996, pp. 5-6.

26

Shia there and in Lebanon from Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. Echoing the Lewis

‘Lebanonization’ project (or the Yinon Plan for that matter), the Report further

advocates supporting Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria and secure ‘tribal

alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory’. 80

One year on, several of the Clean Break authors would join the notorious Project for

a New American Century (PNAC). Its study, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, repeated

the mantra’s of Wolfowitz’s Defence Planning Guidance. It conceded that establishing

US global supremacy by way of a revolution in military affairs would require time,

‘absent some catastrophic and catalysing event—like a new Pearl Harbor’. The PNAC

group would move into key positions in the Bush Jr. administration and according to

Jeremy Scahill were busily engaged in planning a global war that ‘would extent to the

home front with warrantless wiretapping, mass arrests of Arabs, Pakistanis, and

Muslim immigrants and a prodigious rollback of the civil liberties of American

citizens’.81 That would be the long-awaited War on Terror, which rages on today.

Blowing Up the Twin Towers

I now have to narrow down the account to the one issue I want to document, the

question of the perpetrators of the demolitions of World Trade Centre 1 and 2 (7,

which also was demolished, I will mostly leave aside). This means skipping evidence

of advance knowledge in the US government, the details of the alleged plane hijacks

and whether they ever flew into any buildings at all, the issue of what happened at the

Pentagon and why, and so on and so forth. Also the crucial issue of the 15 large

exercises which caused so much confusion, and the very real possibility that Ptech

software installed in practically all relevant US government computer systems, in

combination with the exercises effectively grounded US air defence systems.

Here then are the bare facts immediately connected to the demolition of the Twin

Towers, for which I have been sanctioned by the University of Sussex following

complaints over alleged anti-Semitism.

80 Perle et al., A Clean Break, pp. 2-3 and passim.

81 Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars. The World is a Battlefield. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013, p. 15. I have

documented how Philip Zelikow and others were theorising the consequences of a new Pearl Harbor in

advamce of 9/11 in The Discipline of Wsterm Supremacy, pp. 222-5.

27

Israeli Agents in the Sights of US Law Enforcement

I begin with the Israeli ‘art students’, on whom the first reports date from April 2000

and whose exploits have been the subject of different interpretations. The art works

were offered for sale at workplaces and even private homes of intelligence and law

enforcement officers on the basis of detailed foreknowledge, e.g. addresses not in the

public domain. ‘In January 2001, the security branch of the U.S. Drug Enforcement

Agency began to receive a number of peculiar reports from DEA field offices across

the country.’ In March, the DEA gave out a National Security Alert that this was a

spying operation given the art students’ obvious interest in the lay-out of federal law

enforcement and defence facilities.82

The DEA was central in this investigation because phone numbers obtained from

some of the art students corresponded with numbers gathered in an ongoing ecstasy

investigation, a drug of which the international trade is dominated by Israeli organised

crime (production is concentrated in the Netherlands).83 In March 2001, the National

Counter-intelligence Executive (NCIX), a branch of the CIA, confirmed the DEA’s

National Security Alert and some 140 Israeli nationals were detained or arrested

between March and 11 September 2001. In a 60-page internal DEA memo names and

details are listed of the detainees, several of whom turned out demolition specialists.

One, a platoon leader from the Israeli army, ‘acknowledged he could blow up

buildings, bridges, cars and anything else he needed to... [He] asked agents not to

divulge this information ... because it would lead to his immediate arrest in Israel'.84

The FBI also tracked down a second man, whom the platoon leader claimed to have

met in a pub. This man too was a demolition expert. None of the arrested were art

students, and their military background was not just a matter of having been through

Israeli compulsory military service either: ‘many... had served in the military

intelligence services or in electronic or communications units of the Israeli army’.85

82 Christopher Ketcham. ‘The Israeli “art student” mystery’. Salon.com, 7 May 2002.

https://www.salon.com/2002/05/07/students/ (last accessed 15 February 2019); History

Commons,‘Profile: “Israeli art students”. http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?

entity=_israeli_art_students_ (last accessed 15 February 2019).

83 Drugs Enforcement Agency, Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities.

(June 2001), p. 1; Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 38-9.

84 DEA, Suspicious Activities, p. 31.

28

More than 30 out of the 140 art students lived in Hollywood, Florida, a city of

140,000 inhabitants, not far from where fifteen of the nineteen alleged 9/11 hijackers

lived—nine in the city itself, six in the vicinity.86 Also in Florida were warehouses of a

beach store chain, owned by Shaul and Meir Levy, with headquarters in Miami

doubling as an art distribution centre. Not only were these warehouses far too large for

the line of business they were supposedly supplying; on the eve of 9/11, Ehud Olmert,

then mayor of Jerusalem, was on a secret visit to New York City where he met the

Levy brothers .87 There was a second headquarter-like concentration of suspected

Mossad operatives in Bergen and Hudson Counties, New Jersey, but the Arabs they

‘monitored’ included the hijackers of the plane that allegedly hit the Pentagon.88

To answer the question whether the spies in Florida and New Jersey were

monitoring the Arabs to expose them or for other reasons, one must know Israeli

intelligence routinely operates Palestinian and other Arab agents; two cousins of

alleged 9/11 hijacker Zaid Jarrah were for instance working for Israel in Lebanon.89

Also, the fact that the DEA was being targeted suggests the operation was at least

partly intended to counteract a previous DEA investigation of an ecstasy ring.90

In August, Mossad, after initial denials, unexpectedly conceded the existence of the

spying operation but claimed it had been to expose an Arab terrorist network. The

intelligence service used German media to convey that it had supplied to the CIA the

details of ‘19 terrorists living in the US’, including four who eventually would also be

on the list of the 9/11 hijackers: Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, Marwan

Alshehhi, and Mohamed Atta.91 To be able to establish one month in advance that the

85 Gerald Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers and FBI Suspects in the September 11

Attacks and Their Failure to Give Us Adequate Warning: The Need for a Public Inquiry. Memorandum

to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, the Senate Select Committee

on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (pdf, 15 September 2004), pp. 6-

7.

86 Guyénot, ‘9/11 Was an Israeli Job’; Ketcham, ‘The Israeli “art student” mystery’.

87 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 2012: 128-9, 131, 138-42.

88 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, 00. 26-31.

89 History Commons, ‘Geopolitics and 9/11—Israel’, citing Jerusalem Post, 3/11/2008 ; London

Times, 9/11/2008; Independent, 13/11/2008; New York Times, 19/2/2009.

90 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, pp. 10-11.

91 History Commons, ’Israeli art students’, citing Die Zeit 1/10/2002; Der Spiegel, 1/10/2002; BBC,

2/ 10/2002; Ha'aretz , 3/10/2002.

29

number of terrorists would be nineteen was obviously a remarkable intelligence feat,

because the official count of the number of hijackers would also be 19, including the

four named.92 However, five days after the attacks, Mossad let it be known it had

warned their US counterparts in August that some 200 Arab terrorists linked to Osama

bin Laden in Afghanistan had been preparing a major onslaught on the mainland US.93

Mossad also warned of ‘suspected Iraqi involvement’, which Shea dismisses but which

Susan Lindauer had been instructed by her CIA supervisors to find proof for at the UN

throughout 2001, with the focus on the WTC from June on.94

Art Students and Demolition Fuses in the World Trade Centre

Why the Florida-centred spying operation was not actively pursued by the CIA may

have been because, as one US government source cited by Ketcham suspected, it may

have served as a cover for something else. The spies may even have been ‘meant to be

caught and connected to DEA surveillance so that a smaller number of spies also

posing as art students could complete other missions.’95

This gets us to the World Trade Center in New York. From at least March 2000 a

Vienna-based group calling itself ‘Gelatin’ had been allowed to take up residence on

the 91st floor of WTC 1 (the North Tower), supposedly to prepare a conceptual art

performance, called ‘The B-Thing’, the installation of a wooden balcony on the outside

of a window. The New York Times in August 2001 ran a report on the book in which

the project was documented, and which contained photos of the balcony taken from a

helicopter by one Josh Harris, an Internet entrepreneur specialising in virtual reality,

who had rented the helicopter for a flight round the towers. He also rented a top-floor

suite in the Millennium Hilton hotel, across the street from the Gelatin studio, to

publicise the performance.96 Why Harris was so keen on showing to the NYT all the

92 History Commons, ‘Israeli art students’ citing Forward 15/3/2002.

93 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, pp. 32-3, citing Daily Telegraph 16/9/2001 and

Los Angeles Times, 20/92001.

94 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, p. 35; Lindauer, Extreme Prejudice, pp. 21, 86-

7.

95 Cited in Ketcham, ‘The Israeli “art student” mystery’, emphasis added. History Commons, 'Israeli

art students’ citing Salon.com, 7 May 2002. Cf. Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, p. 12.

96 Shaila K. Dewan, ‘Balcony Scene (or Unseen) Atop the World; Episode at Trade Center Assumes

Mythical Qualities.’ The New York Times, 18 August 2001.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/nyregion/balcony-scene-unseen-atop-world-episode-trade-center-

30

expenses he incurred for the Gelatin balcony stunt and whether the helicopter flight

may also have served to prepare for further virtual reality events falls outside the scope

of his piece.

The Gelatin team was Vienna-based and consisted of four members but there were

also 14 others in residence on the same floor. Gelatin removed all traces of their long

stay on the 91st floor almost immediately and ‘by prior agreement, the group

confiscated all film and video of the project taken by invited witnesses’. 97 However,

the B-Thing book includes a two-page photograph of the artists, one of whom wears a

climbing harness. Ceiling tiles have been removed, exposing the steel girders between

the 91st and 92nd floors. Also, the harnessed ‘balcony artist’ in the foreground is

standing between stacks of cardboard boxes which the team told the NYT was their

‘clubhouse’. On closer look, it can be seen the boxes are marked ‘BB-18’.

Rebekah Roth, the former flight attendant turned author, tracked down the BB-18

code to a type of remote controlled demolition fuse (other sources speak of a

demolition fuse accessory) marketed by a company named Littelfuse in Chicago.

assumes-mythic-qualities.html (last accessed 16 February 2019). As late as 2016, Harris still believed he

was under FBI surveillance over his involvement in the Gelatin art installation, Wikipedia, ‘Josh Harris’.

97 Dewan, ‘Balcony Scene (or Unseen) Atop the World 2001’.

31

Littelfuse markets a BB-series of such fuses, of which one is the BB-18 type.98 Via a

bankruptcy of the parent company Tracor and subsequent mergers (at one point

involving former CIA director Bobby Ray Inman as a company director), the successor

companies of Tracor became a subsidiary of Kelloggs/Halliburton, where Dick Cheney

had been CEO before he became vice-president in 2001.99 These latter connections

need not be unexpected in corporate histories in the military-industrial complex; what

counts is that Gelatin, sharing the floor with 14 other ‘artists’ were surrounded by vast

stacks of demolition fuses.

As to the nationality of Gelatin and the 14 others, we cannot be entirely certain. The

NYT report speaks of Austrians, but refers only to the four team members; Eastman

speaks of 14 Israelis, but I found this inconclusive.100 The question how anyone,

assuming it was not a coincidence that the boxes used for the ‘clubhouse’ were filled

with remote control demolition fuses, would get round WTC security to install them

can be answered with much more certainty.

Getting Round the Security of the Towers

As Alan Sabrosky writes, the question of security is crucial: ‘one does not casually cut

open walls, implant explosives, run cables and wire everything together in buildings

with state-of-the-art electronic surveillance and 24/7 on-site security’.101 The New York

Times asked, ‘how did a balcony escape the notice of one of the most security-

conscious office towers in the world? An examination of the security system revealed

that it was focused on the ground floor and basement... There's no surveillance on the

facade itself.’102 Gelatin and the 14 others also had construction IDs for the entire WTC

complex, although they obviously were not electricians or the like.103

98 Rebekah Roth, ‘9/11 from Cheney to Mossad’. SGT Report, 11 September 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg7Qt4bV0B8l (last acccessed 13 February 2019), at 4.21-5.38.

99 Roth, ‘9/11 from Cheney to Mossad’, at 5.50-6.53 and 2.09.

100Dick Eastman, ‘The 14 Israeli “art students” were inside the WTC towers camping with

construction passes.’, Bilbiotheca Pleyades, 2009.

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_911_125.htm (last accessed 15 February

2019)

101 Sabrosky, ‘Demystifying 9/11’.

102 Dewan, ‘Balcony Scene (or Unseen) Atop the World’.

32

After the first bomb attack on the North Tower in 1993, a complete revamp and

upgrade of security of the WTC complex was undertaken (also of the elevator systems,

cf. below). For this task, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the

freeholder of the WTC complex, hired Kroll Associates, the firm of Jules B. Kroll.

Another security contractor was Securicom, of which Bush cousin Wirt Walker III was

CEO until January 2002 and the president’s brother Marvin, a director until 2000,104

but the Kroll contract hides more relevant connections. In 1992, Kroll hired Abe

Shalom, the former head of Israel’s secret service GSS, or Shin Bet. Shalom initially

had tried to get the contract for WTC security with his own Tel Aviv firm in 1987, but

this was cancelled when the Port Authority found out he had been fired from Shin Bet

for a grave war crime. Now he was back in the WTC as a Kroll employee.105

Right in 1993, the insurance giant AIG took a 20 percent participation in Kroll.

Jeremy Kroll, the son of Jules, was managing director of Marsh Kroll, the security firm

that is a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan, which is headed by Maurice Greenberg,

son of ‘Hank’ Greenberg, the CEO of AIG. Jerome M. Hauer, the managing director of

Kroll. as director of Mayor Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) had

previously arranged that its command bunker be built in WTC 7.106 The Kroll and

Greenberg families are deeply immersed in the Israel support network. Jules Kroll’s

wife is vice chair for New York of the biggest private US fundraising operation for

Israel, the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), the organisation of which Larry Silverstein,

who acquired the lease of the Twin Towers on 24 July 2001, had been national

chairman.107

Why Silverstein would take this step, knowing that the Twin Towers were white

elephants of which the cleanup for asbestos, postponed since the 1980s, alone was

estimated at almost $1 billion in 1989, can only be guessed. When he bought the lease

(he owned WTC 7 already for a number of years), it was insured by Greenberg’s AIG.

103 Roth, ‘9/11 from Cheney to Mossad’, at 2.02 -2.23. One anonymous source in a message to Dick

Eastman stated that the 14 were separate from Gelatin and that security of the towers should be focused

on. Eastman, ‘The 14 Israeli “art students”‘. A photocopy of one Gelatin team member’s construction

ID dated 1 May 2000 is in Rebekah Roth, Methodical Deception, n.p. KTYS Media, 2015, p. 265.

104 David Ray Griffin,. ‘9/11, the American Empire, and Common Moral Norms’. In Griffin and

Scott, p. 12.

105 Ths story and further connections of Shalom’s are in Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 167-9.

106 Bolyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 163-5, 175-6.

107 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp. 177-9.

33

Right on the 24th ‘they took the precaution of having the contract reinsured by

competitors’.108 Silverstein paid 14 million of his own money (in addition to his

partners share in the purchase), but immediately renegotiated the insurance contracts to

cover terrorist attacks, doubling the coverage to $3.5 billion, and stipulated the right to

rebuild should the towers come down.109

Whatever the questions that the Twin Towers’ purchase may give rise to, there was

no doubt about Silverstein’s Zionist connections. The head of the New York Port

Authority, who granted the lease to Silverstein and Frank Lowy, his partner in the

purchase, was Lewis Eisenberg, another UJA member and former vice-president of

AIPAC, the prime Israel lobby group in the US. As Ha’aretz reported on 21 November

2001, Silverstein was also close to Netanyahu ever since the latter’s days as UN

ambassador, and called him every Sunday.110 That Silverstein breakfasted every

morning in the ‘Windows on the World’ restaurant high up in the North Tower, except

on 9/11, when he had an appointment with his dermatologist, or that his children, who

both worked in the Twin Towers, that morning were late for work,111 I leave for others

to speculate on.

Repairs and Elevator Maintenance After the 1993 WTC Attack

Preparing the Twin Towers for demolition may have have been helped by the fact that

the blueprints of the buildings were also in the possession of the company that headed

the investigation of the 1993 bomb attack, a subsidiary of Systems Planning

Corporation (SPC) of which Dov Zakheim was CEO. Zakheim was a neoconservative

and actually wrote a paper for PNAC about orchestrating a catastrophic event to force

the US into the Middle East to assist Israel.112 Ha’aretz characterised him as ‘a

religious, kippa-wearing Jew who is thought to be in favour of settlements in the

[occupied] territories’.113 During the 2000 election, Zakheim served as a foreign policy

adviser to candidate Bush, as a member of the group led by Condoleezza Rice. He

108 Guyénot, ‘9/11 Was an Israeli Job’.

109 Coen Vermeeren, 9/11 is gewoon een complot. N.p.: Obelisk, 2016, p. 157, and Guyénot.

110 All details from Guyénot , ‘9/11 Was an Israeli Job’. 111 History Commons, ‘Complete 9/11 timeline and day of 9/11’

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&day_of_9/11=dayof911

(last accessed 8 March 2019), citing New York Observer, 17/3/2003; New York Magazine, 18/4/2005.

112 Honegger, Behind the Smoke Curtain, at 46.49.

34

already held office in the Reagan administration and after Bush was made president,

was appointed Under Secretary of Defence (Comptroller). Zakheim served as

Comproller until 2004, tasked with tracking down trillions of dollars missing from its

accounts.114 A key technology marketed by SPC was the remote controlling of planes,

called the Flight Termination System. This technology in case of a hijack could

literally hijack the hijackers and land the plane safely wherever it wanted, not just one,

but eight planes at a time.115

Since this can only be satisfactorily discussed as part of the entire 9/11 scenario, let

us concentrate on the Towers’ blueprints, which also will have been of interest to the

new elevator maintenance company contracted after the attack of 1993. Until then, the

World Trade Centre had been under contract with one of the oldest and largest elevator

companies in the United States, Otis. In the 1993 attack, Otis mechanics behaved in an

exemplary way, leading the rescue of some 500 people trapped in elevators; others

were dropped by helicopter on the roofs of the towers, and so on. Therefore it came as

a great surprise that after the disaster the contract for the elevator maintenance was

given to an unknown Florida company, ACE Elevator Co. From 1994 to 2001 ACE

was in charge of the elevators, working alongside another unknown company, LVI

Services, entrusted with the asbestos removal.116 Why ACE was chosen or why it went

bankrupt in 2006 (a new, unrelated ACE company reappeared later) after winning the

largest elevator maintenance contract in history and in spite of the massive insurance

payout to Silverstein Properties after 9/11 we don’t know. There is no doubt however

that the elevator shafts, being right next to the bearing columns of the Twin Towers,

according to a former employee of Controlled Demolition Inc., Tom Sullivan, would

have been an ideal location for pre-placed explosives.117

113 Dalia Karpel, 'What's Wrong with this Picture?' Ha’aretz, 7 August 2002.

https://www.haaretz.com/1.5036858 (last accessed 16 February 2019).

114 Wikipedia, ‘Dov S. Zakheim’.

115 Jerry Mazza, ‘Recherche des trillions perdu’. Deep Politics Forum, 20 July 2006.

https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?4765-Dov-Zakheim#.XGfvO7go-M8 (last

accessed 16 February 2019).

116 Rick Shaddock, ‘ACE Elevator Company. 9/11 Questions and Research. How could explosives be

planted in the WTC?’ ANETA.org. n.d. http://aneta.org/911experiments_com/AceElevator/ (last

accessed 12 March 2019).

117 Cited in AE911truth.org ,‘Security Alerts, Disabled Fire Alarms, and Unused Elevators:

Suspicious Events at the World Trade Center Before 9/11’. Architects & Engineers 911truth.org (7 35

So we have ‘artists’ occupying a floor filled with demolition fuses who had

construction IDs giving them access to the buildings since early 2000, and ACE

elevator mechanics working in the shafts since 1994, with 83 of them present on 9/11

(they were all sent home before the towers came down).118 Because of the ACE

contract, there was nothing unusual in the fact that the elevators were frequently out of

order for repairs in the period prior to 9/11119 In the North Tower one of the two

elevators that went straight all the way up the building was out of operation for five or

six weeks prior to the 9/11 attack, whilst in the South Tower there were also two

elevators that went all from the base of the tower to in this case, the 78th floor; both

were out of service.120

In addition, in the two weeks prior to 9/11, security was heightened in and around

the towers, allowing unusual movement by unknown people to go unquestioned. There

was an increase in security at the World Trade Center in the two weeks before 9/11, for

reasons that are unclear, but which ended the day before the attacks. Finally, in the

week prior to 9/11, the fire alarm system of WTC 7 was placed in test condition, so

that it would not go off or as the National Institute of Standards and Technology

(NIST, a branch of the Department of Commerce) pointed out, ‘any alarms received

from the system were considered the result of ... maintenance or testing and were

ignored.’121

Israelis Arrested on 9/11

The Twin Towers did not so much ‘collapse’, they exploded, beginning with

explosions at the basement level; the dust revealed traces of thermite and particles that

can only be formed by extremely high temperatures far in excess of burning kerosene.

WTC 7 on the other hand was a straight collapse as a result of controlled demolition.122

The unlikely ownership and insurance changes, the ‘artists’ in climbing harnesses, the

September, originally Shoestring 9/11, June 2018). https://www.ae911truth.org/news/479-security-

alerts-disabled-fire-alarms-and-unused-elevators-suspicious-events-at-the-world-trade-center-before-9-

11 (last accessed 12 March 2019).

118 Shaddock, ‘ACE Elevator Company. 9/11 Questions’.

119 AE911truth.org ‘Security Alerts’, citing ABC News correspondent Don Dahler.

120 AE911truth.org, ‘Security Alerts’. 121 AE911truth.org, ‘Security Alerts,’ citing NIST.

122 Griffin and Woodworth, 9/11 Unmasked, pp. 1-66.

36

demolition fuses on the floor they occupied, their access to the towers on account of

their construction IDs, possibly using the building plans of the SPC subsidiary and/or

working with ACE elevator mechanics, it all points in the direction of ‘Israelis with

help of Zionists’ but still leaves many questions open. Was the Israeli art students’

spying operation, in which several demolition experts took part, a diversion to allow

the Gelatin group to do their ‘B-thing’? Who were the 14 other ‘artists’ sharing the

91st floor of the North Tower with them?

Here the New Jersey group of Israelis must be taken into account. On the day itself,

five men were caught by the FBI who had been filming the exploding towers from

across the Hudson from a white van. Bomb-sniffing dogs reacted as if they had

detected explosives, but officers were unable to find anything.123 A 579-page FBI

report on the matter (partially declassified in 2005), found that the five worked for

removal company linked to another firm called Classic International Movers, at which

other Israelis worked, five of whom were also arrested on account of having been in

touch the nineteen presumed suicide hijackers.124 Another van was stopped on one of

the bridges connecting New York to New Jersey. As CBS’s Dan Rather reported live,

this van was filled with enough explosives ‘to do great damage to the George

Washington Bridge’.125 In all, 60 more Israelis (on top of the 140 arrested prior to the

attacks) were arrested in the United States on or immediately after 9/11.126 The owner

of the New Jersey moving company was interrogated by the FBI but then fled to Israel

with his family; a New York newspaper reported later that this moving business had

been an Israeli front operation.127

The Cover-Up

In December 2001, Fox News broadcast a four-part documentary on the Israeli ‘art

students’, citing a highly-placed investigator that ‘the Israeli [DEA Groups] may have

gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. ...there are tie-

123 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, p. 27. They were named Sivan and Paul

Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari, and Yaron Schmuel. The last three would later appear in an

Israeli TV talk show to confirm thery had been there ‘to document the event’. Bollyn, Solving 9/11, pp.

4, 6.124 Guyénot , ‘9/11 Was an Israeli Job’.

125 Cited in Sabrosky, ‘Demystifying 9/11’. 126 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 8. 127 Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 5.

37

ins.’ However, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified’.128 The official

9/11 Commission, as in so many other instances of potentially great importance,

‘make[s] no mention of any Israeli warnings’.129

It is the same for the Israelis arrested on or after 9/11. As Alan Sabrosky notes,

What is fascinating is how little impact [the account of the Israelis arrested on

9/11] has had on public awareness of the details of 9/11, much less official US

policy based on it. A “cloak of silence” had descended over any official or

mainstream media discussions of 9/11 that did not conform to the official

interpretation, thereby keeping such dissonance from the general public.130

Clearly the threat of being accused of anti-Semitism is a powerful silencer. As Carl

Cameron, the maker of the Fox documentary on the Israeli art students, reported,

‘Investigators within the DEA, INS, and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or

even suggest Israeli spying is considered career suicide.’131

Why the CIA was pushing for extraditing the original art students arrested in the

DEA operation, instead of pursuing the investigation in depth (if need be through the

FBI, given the limits of the CIA’s operational possibilities in the US itself) has

remained a mystery. ‘Why the Israeli government decided not to share with us all the

critical information they had, and the extent of that information’, and the possible

condoning of the spying operation by the CIA, also remains unanswered.132

One reason was certainly the aggressive response of Jewish and pro-Israel

organisations to any hint of a departure from the ‘Muslim radicals’ narrative that they

successfully floated immediately prior and after the attacks. Fox withdrew its four-part

documentary under pressure from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs

(JINSA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL, the anti-Semitism watchdog), and other

pro-Israel organisations. As the ADL put it, posting this information amounted to

‘sinister dangerous innuendo which fuels anti-Semitism’. The Washington Post

followed up with an explicit denial by Bush administration officials that the art

128 Cited in Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, p. 25.

129 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, p. 37.

130 Sabrosky ‘Demystifying 9/11’. 131 Cited in Eastman, ‘The 14 Israeli “art students”’.

132 Shea, Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers, pp.46-7 citing Yedioth Ahronoth, 2/10/2002 on

the CIA push for extradition; and p. 4.

38

students had been spies (never mind Mossad itself had acknowledged they were), and

the New York Times never covered the story in the first place.133

Did ‘Israelis blew up the Twin Towers with help of Zionists in the US

government’? On the basis of the above, I think this is highly likely. Therefore I will

not accept the humiliating sanctions imposed on me on 12 March last, which I consider

a violation of my freedom of speech, and more specifically, of my academic freedom

as a scholar. That is why I resigned from my emeritus status at the University of

Sussex per 14 March.

133 History Commons, ‘“Israeli art students”. citing Washington Post, 6/3/2002