[From rabble news]
by David Rovics
I found myself once again singing at an anti-war rally two weeks ago, and once again being confronted by a red-faced white man with an ominous hand-written sign reading, “9/11 was a lie.”
Most of the crowd was filing off for the post-rally march, aside from a few of my loyal fans who were sticking around for the rest of my set. Among them was the red-faced man, apparently not a fan, who walked towards the small stage with the wild-eyed certainty of a zealot.
“Wake up, David Rovics! David Rovics, wake up to the truth of 9/11!” He was screaming at the top of his lungs, standing about two feet from me. (I continued with the song.) In case I didn’t get the message the first time, the red-faced man repeated his mantra. “Wake up! Wake up to the truth of 9/11!”
People like him, whoever he was, have become a fixture of antiwar and other protests since sometime soon after September 11, 2001. They regularly call in to radio talk shows, maintain many websites, produce innumerable documentaries, publish plenty of books, hold regular conferences, and show up with alarming predictability to heckle and denounce prominent progressive authors and activists at their speaking engagements.
If you bother slogging through the volumes of books and stacks of documentaries that “9/11 Truth” people will foist on you if you let them, you will find that most of them are propaganda pieces and most of the “experts” are not experts in relevant fields.
When you do look beyond this mass of misinformation for real experts, you will easily find pilots who can discount the claims of the Truthers that maneuvering the planes into the towers was a particularly challenging thing for people with only a little flight training to pull off. You will easily find mechanical engineers familiar with the structural flaws in the design of the WTC that allowed it to collapse in the first place, and physicists who can explain why such large buildings would appear to be imploding as if in a controlled demolition, or why people on the scene would have thought they were hearing explosions, etc.
My purpose here is not to disprove all the hypotheses presented by the Truthers and their propaganda pieces %u2013 if you want to look into “debunking the debunkers” yourself, there is plenty of information out there, and Popular Mechanics’ issue on the subject is a good place to start.
The fact is, the scientific community, while certainly not immune to political pressure, is generally able to function with a grounding in actual science, and is not capable of participating, as a community, in some kind of mass conspiracy of silence or cover-up. There is no way to bribe that many scientists. Too many of them believe in the importance of science for science’s sake, in honesty.
This can be amply demonstrated by the fact that with all the political pressure and money of the U.S. government and ExxonMobil combined, there is still essentially unanimity among climate scientists worldwide that climate change is real, is caused by humans, and is dangerous for our species and others. Even after all the billions upon billions of dollars spent by the tobacco industry to obfuscate reality and bribe policymakers, the scientific community was able to study the issue and determine incontrovertibly the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.
Continue reading The truth about the 9/11 ‘truth movement’ at rabble news
Tags: war <BR/>