Friday, February 16, 2007
 9/11 scholar Dr. Kevin Barrett recounts a conversation with the author of a series of attacks in the corporate mainstream media publication Phoenix New Times, which has been attempting to link an upcoming area 9/11 conference to so-called "Holocaust denial.": "[...]While Stephen Lemons is not quite a candidate for Flowers for Algernon, he, like Hannity, seems to be exactly what Hannity called me–"a very angry man." I spent about two hours on the phone with Lemons yesterday, listening to him rant and insult me, trying to talk him down from his bad PCP trip or whatever it was that was making him so apoplectic. I would explain something to him patiently and clearly–what the word "myth" means to scholars, for example–and he would bellow and howl and rant about how we professors could twist words around any way we wanted, because we were all a bunch of pretentious pedants, but how he didn’t buy such intellectual mumbo-jumbo. Obviously Lemmons, like Hannity, still hates his teachers.
I guess I didn’t succeed in calming him, since he is still hysterically angry at everyone involved in the 9/11 Accountability Conference to be held in Chandler, AZ Feb. 23rd-25th. Why do 9/11 skeptics drive him into a blind fury? Perhaps for the same reason cult members hate those who wish to deprogram them. People who invest their self-image in any myth (meaning "sacred story") fly into a rage when anyone challenges their faith. That is why religious doubters were burned as witches and heretics, and honest journalists and historians are reviled as "conspiracy theorists."
Lemmons' hysteria, like any cult member's hatred of a would-be deprogrammer, is presumably driven by the sneaking suspicion that the deprogrammer might turn out to be right. But that would be too horrible to contemplate! Rev. Moon, a flimflam artist? Bush and Cheney false-flag terrorists? Best to banish the horrible thought by flinging insults the way frightened monkeys fling their turds.
Well, be afraid, Stephen, be very afraid! It is you, not the 9/11 Accountability people, who belongs to a tiny lunatic fringe of nutty conspiracy theorists. A recent New York Times poll showed that only 16% of the American people believe the government is telling the truth about 9/11. That means that fewer than one in six Americans accept the government's "19 Arabs led by a guy on dialysis in a cave" conspiracy theory. The other 84% of us–the sensible majority–believe the government is lying. Last year’s Scripps-Howard poll found that 36% of us — roughly 100 million Americans–say top US officials perpetrated or allowed the 9/11 attacks in order to launch their war in the Middle East. No wonder Lemons is pulling his hair out.
Maybe, if only for the sake of his cardiovascular system, Lemons should take a deep breath, kick back, chill out, have a look at the DVDs 9/11 Press for Truth and 9/11 Mysteries, take several more deep breaths, read a couple of David Griffin books, do some yoga, put on soothing classical music, and repeat to himself over and over "I will practice non-attachment and look at this 9/11 stuff with an open mind."
If that doesn’t work, there are always anger management classes.
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[Kevin Barrett is the lead editor of 9/11 and Empire v.2 (Interlink,
2007) and the author of Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie
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