It’s sad how easily Americans will believe that 9/11 was some sort of government or neoconservative conspiracy. A recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll found that “Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is ‘very likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them ‘because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.’” And conspiracy theories have proliferated so widely that Popular Mechanics devoted an entire book to debunking them.
The latest incident comes via Wonkette, which notes that a speech by Bill Kristol at the University of Texas at Austin was disrupted by nutcases brandishing this “evidence” that the Project for a New American Century masterminded 9/11:
“9/11 is your Pearl Harbor,” said one student protestor, referring to a pre-Sept. 11 statement released by the Project for a New American Century, a conservative think tank Kristol chairs.
In a Sept. 2000 report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses, ” the group wrote, “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Some of the student protestors are members of the new UT student organization, Project for the New American Citizen, but the group did not officially organize the protest, said founder Matt Dayton. The nonpartisan, anti-imperialism group encourages people to seek out truthful information regarding the U.S. government’s policies and actions, said Dayton, an art studio and radio-television-film junior. The group’s name is a counter to Kristol’s neoconservative think tank.
Dayton said students from his organization protested Kristol because he refuses to address what was said in the Sept. 2000 report.
“They openly needed a new Pearl Harbor in order to enact their new foreign policy,” Dayton said. “It’s either use it or lose it with your freedom of speech,” he said.
With reasoning skills like that, he’s sure to graduate with honors!
Update 10/5 8:51 AM: Meanwhile, protestors at Columbia shut down a speech by the founder of the Minuteman Project in another disturbing incident:
Students stormed the stage at Columbia University’s Roone auditorium yesterday, knocking over chairs and tables and attacking Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minutemen, a group that patrols the border between America and Mexico.
Mr. Gilchrist and Marvin Stewart, another member of his group, were in the process of giving a speech at the invitation of the Columbia College Republicans. They were escorted off the stage unharmed and exited the auditorium by a back door.
Having wreaked havoc onstage, the students unrolled a banner that read, in both Arabic and English, “No one is ever illegal.” As security guards closed the curtains and began escorting people from the auditorium, the students jumped from the stage, pumping their fists, chanting victoriously, “Si se pudo, si se pudo,” Spanish for “Yes we could!”
However, I’m also troubled by the description of the event on Power Line, where I first saw it. The author, Scott Johnson, titled the post “The zoo at Morningside heights” and writes that “Public discourse at Columbia is for now in the hands of intellectual savages” — language that is at the least in very poor taste given the racial and ethnic composition of Columbia in general and the protestors specifically.