December 2, 2010
Jonathan Kay attacks a "Truther" to introduce his Foxified account of 9/11
Dr. Anthony J. Hall
More by this author...Jonathan Kay has made it an issue of national news in The National Post that my graduate student, Joshua Blakeney, is the proud winner of the Queen Elizabeth II scholarship for academic excellence. This award will help Joshua in supporting his research for his MA thesis on the academic controversies surrounding the background, substance, and outgrowths of the events of September 11, 2001.
The Editor of The National Post was in a conflict of interest when he wrote the story on my graduate student's scholarship without revealing that Mr. Kay too has an externally-funded agenda of research and publication on 9/11.
Moreover, Mr. Kay misrepresented my graduate student's thesis subject by planting the disinformation that "Washington did 9/11."
The point of Mr. Blakeney's thesis, as we have discussed it so far, is to evaluate the academic literature on the contested events of 9/11, not to jump immediately to the needed outcome of an empirically-verifiable alternative to the current unsupported and unsupportable government conspiracy theory. Such a needed outcome will require much more than the forthcoming MA thesis by my gifted and hard working graduate student.
Jonathan Kay has already made in clear in a letter to Joshua Blakeney that he will defend the official government conspiracy theory in his forthcoming book, "Among The Truthers."
A colleague recently proposed the following short summary of the official government story of 9/11. It is that nineteen Muslims boarded four aircraft in the morning of 11 September 2001. Five of them boarded flight AA11 that departed from Boston; five boarded UA175 that also departed from Boston; five boarded flight AA77 that departed from Dulles Airport, Washington, D.C.; and four boarded flight UA93 that departed from Newark International Airport.
These four terrorist teams hijacked the aircraft in mid-air with knives, seized control over the aircraft and flew the aircraft into buildings, killing themselves, the passengers and the crew.
They flew the aircraft designated as flight AA11 into the North Tower, flight UA175 into the South Tower, flight AA77 into the Pentagon and attempted to crash flight UA93 into the White House but did not succeed to carry out their plan due to the uprising of the passengers. The aircraft then crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The hijackers were swiftly identified as having links to al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden later admitted to have personally selected the hijackers for these specific attacks.
As a result of the impact of the aircraft who caused substantial structural damage and started a huge fire, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, collapsed, causing thereby the deaths of over 2,500 persons. In total approximately 3,000 persons of dozens of nationalities died as a result of these pre-meditated attacks on U.S. soil.
Joshua Blakeney's MA thesis will deal with various academic critiques of the version of events outlined above.
In all probability Mr. Blakeney will want to address the contents of Mr. Kay's forthcoming book. It is being timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary with the events of 9/11.
It seems Mr. Kay's book is to be a psychoanthropology of the so-called 9/11 Truthers. It is to be published by a subsidiary of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch's media empire whose flag ship operations include Fox News.
In my view the term, truther, is one that refers to those who do not accept the current government account of the events of 9/11; those who afford importance to the quest for the truth of what actually happened on 9/11.
Jonathan Kay did not pass the test of full disclosure on his own activities as a 9/11 researcher when he decided to make national news of Joshua Blakeney's Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship for academic excellent in his graduate work at the University of Lethbridge.
Since Mr. Kay chose to issue a National Post Fatwah on externally-funded research and publication on 9/11-related matters in Canadian universities, he must now come clean in on his own financial arrangements.
Who is funding The National Post editor's own agenda of 9/11-related research and publication? Who paid him how much, and for what?
Dr. Anthony J. Hall is Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge.
Professor Hall's text, Earth into Property, was recently selected by The Independent in the UK as one the best books of 2010. Earth into Property is not a 9/11 book in the same sense that Jonathan's Kay's, "Among The Truthers," is a 9/11 book. Published by McGill-Queen's University Press, Earth into Property, provides an account of the genesis of global capitalism since 1492. The volume's contents, however, do include sections that directly address the lies and crimes of 9/11 as well as the genesis of the privatized terror economy.