IT'S A DOGFIGHT! STEVE ALTEN AND FIERCE FRIEND TAKES ON KEVIN BARRETT AND HIS MUSLIM DOG "RUSHDIE"
Steve Alten wants me to cool it on Israel, and will tell me so today on Fair and Balanced, 9-10 a.m. Pacific (noon-1 pm Eastern) on http://NoLiesRadio.org -- to be archived for free listening any time at http://noliesradio.org/archives/category/shows/fair-balanced .
Steve Alten is the New York Times bestselling author of the 9/11 truth thriller The Shell Game which recently came out in a newly rewritten, updated, paperback edition. (Buy it! Pass it around!) He's also an American Jew, a moderate supporter of Israel (who dislikes extremists like Netanyahu), and now a critic of my recent attempts to explain to Americans how things look to most Muslims around the world.
After my talk "A Muslim View of 9/11 Truth" at the We Demand Transparency conference last Saturday in New York City, Steve and I got into a fairly raucous debate. Actually Steve was the raucous one, but don't tell him I said that ; ) In my talk, I had argued that most Muslims:
*Think 9/11 was part of an ongoing war on Islam;
*Think the main battlefront of that war is the Zionist settler-colonial occupation of Palestine, which has been a Muslim-ruled holy land for more than 1300 years, except for a few brief, bloody Crusader interludes, including the current one;
* Think a major motive of 9/11 was to bring the US into a long-term war against Israel's enemies -- namely, the whole Muslim world -- in a desperate attempt to lengthen Israel's otherwise short shelf-life. Hence the tendency of Muslims to highlight the evidence of Israeli involvement as discussed by such researchers as Justin Raimondo (The Terror Enigma), Christopher Bollyn and Michael Andregg .
What Steve objected to most of all was my saying that most Muslims think that pro-Israel Jews dominate the American mainstream media, with predictable consequences for coverage of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. I cited evidence of Jewish overrepresentation in the mainstream media, including a chart showing that in 2003 four-and-a-half of the five mega-media-conglomerates had Jewish CEOs (maybe-Jew and arch-Zionist Rupert Murdoch being the one-half). More evidence here. And still more in Phillip Weiss's wonderful piece "Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do?"
Steve thinks I'm wrong about most of this, and that expressing anti-Zionism and/or focusing on the Israeli 9/11 angle is bad for the 9/11 truth movement, and for me. He'll try to convince me today on Fair and Balanced, 9-10 a.m. Pacific (noon-1 pm Eastern) on http://NoLiesRadio.org -- to be archived for free listening any time.
salaam/shalom
Kevin Barrett
http://www.truthjihad.com
Author, Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters: http://www.questioningthewaronterror.com
IT'S A DOGFIGHT! STEVE ALTEN AND FIERCE FRIEND TAKES ON KEVIN BARRETT AND HIS MUSLIM DOG "RUSHDIE"