Aside from Fish's story, the growing 9/11 truth movement in the United States, and around the world has received almost zero mainstream media coverage in the West, perhaps the biggest reason why people have turned to the Internet for accurate news, reliable information, and informed analysis.
CNN, Fox News, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and every other major news outlet in the Western media have not upheld the moral and political values of Western civilization: self-government, freedom, and reason. Journalists, and editors who have dared to cover the 9/11 truth movement have explicitly aimed to discredit, and demonize the largely decentralized group of activists, scholars, scientists, architects, engineers, firefighters, and police officers as "fringe losers" and "conspiracy theorists." But the truth is that the 9/11 truth movement contains ordinary people who pay their taxes, and take their kids to school. And they are not a minority. In September 2006, Time magazine published an article by Lev Grossman called, "Why the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Won't Go Away," who observed that; "This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality."
But, for whatever reasons, journalists in the mainstream media, and alternative media have kept silent about the reality of the U.S. government cover-up of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Regular people have resorted to learning critical information about their world the old-fashioned way; by talking and sharing information with friends, and strangers. In spite of the media and state gods, hundreds of millions of people worldwide have persistently questioned the official 9/11 story for almost nine years.
Jennifer Harper of The Washington Times gave one of the few non-slanted depictions of the evidence pointing to government involvement in 9/11 in her February 2010 column. She wrote:
"A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center.Richard Gage, fonder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth, along with Professor David Ray Griffin, physicist Steven Jones, and Danish scientist Niels Harrit, who collectively have provided bulletproof evidence that the three buildings that fell on 9/11 were a result of controlled demolition, are not activists in any traditional sense. Gage is a registered member of American Institute of Architects, Griffin taught religion and theology at Claremont School of Theology, Jones is a physicist from Brigham Young University, and Harrit is part of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen. These men are not radicals who have grand ideological plans for the world. They are not against the government because it is the cool thing to do. And they can't be dismissed as ludicrous pseudo-intellectuals with nothing to their game. Far from being conspiracy nut jobs, they are brave truth-tellers who ought to be taken seriously."In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards," says Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
Mr. Gage, who is a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than 1,000 of his peers to sign a new petition requesting a formal inquiry.
"The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers' destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials," Mr. Gage adds.
The technical issues surrounding the collapse of the towers has prompted years of debate, rebuttal and ridicule."
But Fish, in the pattern of other so-called debunkers, decided to take the low road and trivialize Gage, as well as the whole 9/11 truth movement. He gets so many things wrong in his article that it is hard to know whether this is another piece of propaganda, or if Fish is actually a dittohead. In a lot of ways I hope the former is true because the resistance to 9/11 truth by propagandists is much easier to deal with, and defeat in the long run, than resistance by closed-minded zombies who religiously hold to the Bush administration's claims that Al Qaeda was responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The first error that Fish commits is characterizing the 9/11 truth movement as a collection of "left-wing conspiracy theorists." This characterization is completely untrue. In a poll done by The New York Times/CBS News in 2006, only 16 percent of Americans said that the Bush administration was telling the truth about the 9/11 attacks. 53 percent believed that the government was hiding information, and 28 percent was confident that the government was lying about the nature of the attacks. From this poll, and other polls, we can confidently conclude that the 9/11 truth movement includes Reagan conservatives, libertarians, radical left-wingers, and middle-of-the-road people. It is much less a political movement than a general truth-telling, and government reform movement. People are not attracted to 9/11 truth because it fits in with their preconceived ideas about the world, in fact, they let go of any previous political baggage, and undergo the baptism of truth. Many find out rather reluctantly that the left-right paradigm is a false political reality perpetuated by the two major political parties along with the corporate media, and that the real battle is between unaccountable centralized corporate power, and transparent decentralized people power.
The next mistake that Fish makes is comparing the reasonable questioning of 9/11 with the unreasonable questioning of President Obama's faith, and historical lineage. Fish writes:
"Like many others, I was aware of these theories and aware too that a significant percentage of Americans (about the same percentage that believes President Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya) was at least partly persuaded by them."It's easy to put both camps in the same "misinformed and crazy" category, but any investigator that cares about the truth immediately finds gaping holes in the official 9/11 story, whereas the questions surrounding Obama's birth are less credible, and not all that important as far as public policy is concerned. The set of lies surrounding 9/11 have resulted in the deaths of one million people, the displacement of four million people, the invasion and destruction of two innocent countries, the loss of American freedoms, serious human rights violations, and trillions of dollars wasted in an illegal war on terror. Any revelation about Obama's background can't compare to revelations about the fraudulent and destructive war on terrorism that can only be ceased once the American people discover the whole truth about its origins, and the diabolical motives for waging such a war.
Fish, who has been described as the second most famous professor of English in America, after Henry Louis Gates Jr., is an ardent defender of political correctness, and exemplary of the stupidity, and blindness that plagues Academia. He once said that objectivity is dead, but neglected to mention who killed it. Judith Shulevitz, the culture editor of Slate, wrote a very critical article about Fish in December 1999 titled, "The Indefensible Stanley Fish." She said:
"Fish's sin, according to his journalistic critics, is moral relativism. He is the founder of "reader-response" criticism, which holds that texts don't have intrinsic meaning--meaning is a byproduct of the encounter between reader and text. He advocates campus speech codes, the ultimate in political correctness. He defends the cultural-studies journal Social Text and the field of "science studies," even after they were humiliated through a brilliant prank by physicist Alan Sokal. And yes, he is one of the highest-paid English professors around. He currently gets $230,000 a year from the University of Illinois. This, it is felt, does not reflect an amusing brashness. It reflects a lack of principle."Fish, like other moral relativists, doesn't believe that truth can be reached through scientific thought, and reasonable debate, because everybody either has a secret political agenda, or they are under the sway of a particular ideology. He arrogantly dismisses that objective scholars, citizens, and scientists can know the truth. What's more disturbing is that he believes it is not necessary to know the truth even if it did exist, and could be known. He is more shrewd than foolish, Shulevitz observed; "Fish is a political realist, not a head-in-the-clouds theorist."
In my post from three months ago called, "The Citizen-Philosopher," I quoted philosopher Karl Popper who held that truth is worth knowing, but must be distinguished from the quest for certainty. Popper:
"Our quest for truth is an endless task, but we must distinguish that clearly from the quest for certainty. . . We want to find truth, but we never are sure whether we have really found it." - Karl Popper in May 1993, speaking to his former student and Professor Dimitris Dimitrakos on Greek television in Delphi, Greece.Truth is worth knowing. It may take long, and it may be bitter, but there is nothing like it. It is more interesting than fiction, and scarier than lies. Fish's article should serve as a reminder to all of us that some of the biggest enemies of 9/11 truth are enemies of truth itself. We must swat away the relativists like Fish that are in academia with one hand, and crush down the propagandists in the media with the other hand. And for Fish, we should use both hands since he is more of a propagandist than a public intellectual. We must challenge their baseless assertions, and foolish worldview that 9/11 was committed by Islamic extremists. By finding the truth we can find grace. Without it, we won't be able to bring justice to the innocent human beings who are being killed daily in the war on terror, heal the wounded, or punish the wicked. If we do not sincerely seek the truth about the 9/11 attacks so that it can be demonstrated in court in front of the whole world, then we will never be full human beings. We will forever be stuck in the shadow of lies, and war propaganda, blindly killing each other for no good reason. And that is not a fate that I want for humanity.
