After listening to this interview on Australian TruthNews radio where it is noted that Blakeney is promoting very bad 9/11 info and categorically blaming Israel for 9/11, I went back and revisited this post. In my original blog below, I express how I thought the case against Blakeney was being overstated, as admitted by ScottSummers, who first raised the issue at the JREF forum, and I thought Pat Curley from the Screw Loose Change blog should have followed suit in adapting this more reserved approach. It's easy to accidentally align ones self with individuals possessing such views through social networking sites and as Blakeney said, "the fact that an article of" his "is on a website next to the wife of a Holocaust revisionist" does not equal "having lots of connections to...Holocaust Deniers." That said, ScottSummers makes several good points about Blakeney's failure to distance himself from his anti-Semitic associations in posts published on the JREF thread after this blog was published.
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?postid=7245668#post7245668 http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?postid=7250247#post7250247
Pat Curley Insinuates That Anthony J. Hall and Joshua Blakeney are Anti-Semites
As summarized by Blakeney, "According to [Pat Curley at] Screw Loose Change the fact that an article of mine is on a website next to the wife of a Holocaust revisionist equates to me 'having lots of connections to...Holocaust Deniers'"
http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/2011/05/up-canada-way.html
The article Blakeney posted was a review of National Post columnist Jonathan Kay's new book Among the Truthers written by his professor at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada, Anthony J. Hall.
Pat's blog was inspired by a post by Scott Sommers at the JREF forum who initially wrote:
Another Connection between 9/11 Truth and Holocaust DenialHowever, another poster calling himself Walter Ego stated that he has "seen no evidence that Blakeney is a Holocaust denier" and asked Sommers if he had "a quote where Blakeney specifically denies there was a Holocaust?"
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it's widely know that 9/11 Truth personalities and groups are well-connected with Holocaust Denial. Here's another one for you.
As I have posted many times before, I watch the Facebook accounts of people who say they are advocates for a 9/11 Truth-sort-of-thing. Joshua Blackeney, a well-known Canadian 9/11 nut case, is connected through Facebook to Bradley Smith, the 'founder' of the Committee for Open Debate and the Holocaust. Yes, it is a Holocaust Denial kind of thing. Here's its webpage http://www.codoh.com/
God, these guys are disgusting.
Sommers replies, "No I don't. I doubt he is one. You're right that I have overstated the case and if Mr. Blakeney reads this, I apologize to him for my carelessness."
Pat, however, did not follow suit and say that he overstated his case, but rather moved along to quote from another of Hall's articles where he states that "many intelligence services had prior knowledge that something very drastic was about to happen in the days and weeks leading up to 911. One of those intelligence services was indeed that of Israel."
As Pat notes "Hall's review is extremely long." Jonathan Kay commented on this as well at his website for the book stating:
Dear lord: An *11-thousand*-word review... I doubt anyone will read the whole thing — though I do recommend fast-forwarding to the part where the author describes “Kay’s preference for Wendy’s bacon cheeseburgers over the [9/11 Truth] food for thought that the author could have ingested had he opened his mind and come out of his self-imposed isolation.”Well, I finally got around to reading the whole thing and I'm going to hazard a guess and say that Pat did as Kay predicted and did not, or else he would have caught the following from Hall, "...It cannot be denied that there are some wild and unsupported and even anti-Jewish, anti-Jesuit, or anti-UN theories about who did 9/11..."
As George Washington's Blog has also pointed out:
There are admittedly a very small number of people claiming that they are for 9/11 truth but making anti-semitic remarks. However, they are shunned by the overwhelming majority of 9/11 activists who abhor anti-semitism. People who say "the Jews did it" and then use a bunch of anti-semitic and derogatory language are probably government infiltrators. Again, however, debating factual evidence one way or the other concerning the possible involvement of people affiliated with an allied intelligence service -- British or Israeli -- is not anti-semitic ... it is Constitutionally-protected free speech."Hall further writes:
Kay diagnoses the mental ailment he claims to have discovered to be so menacing that the malady must be combated through the deployment of a universal regime of public education to take effect before the so-called conspiracists “have a chance to [further] infect our thinking.”Huge leaps of illogic, indeed. It is clear that Hall is not an anti-semite or holocaust denier.
Kay proposes that the basis of this new initiative in mass education should be “a Protocols-centered curriculum.”... The Protocols to which Kay refers are, of course, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This notorious forgery was distributed by its disgruntled and soon-to-be-dethroned czarist disseminators with the aim of stimulating anti-Jewish hatred among its readers. Kay rightfully sees the Protocols as a toxic stimulant for many surges of anti-Jewish thought and action over the years. But Kay does not leave it there. He goes further, much further.
The author advances the view of Daniel Pipes in characterizing the Protocols as the primary archetypal source informing the thinking of virtually every individual and group, including Marx and Marxists, that has put forward any theory whatsoever concerning the alleged abuse of power by any elite minority said to dominate any allegedly subjugated majority. As Kay sees it, “the Protocols would remain ensconced as a sort of universal blueprint for all successor conspiracist ideologies that would come to infect Western societies over the next nine decades,– right up to the modern-day Truther and Birther fantasies of the twenty-first century.”
There are huge leaps of illogic in Kay’s identification of one of the primary texts used to incite Nazi hatred of Jews as a “universal blueprint” extending even to those who study, say, the science of how World Trade Center 7 was downed through controlled demolition. The extremism entailed in such outrageous overreach of the evidence surely confirms the extremity of Jonathan Kay’s zeal to nail the so-called Truthers to the cross of so-called “Trutherdom.”
As 911review.com notes, "The association of challenges to the official myth of 9/11 with deniers of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews is one of the more potent weapons in the arsenal of the apologists for the official myth." Of course the potency is diminshed when "debunkers" pull this card so tenuously.
On a final note, Pat states that "Hall's review... largely boils down to griping that Kay doesn't engage in a point-by-point debunking of 9-11 nuttery. Of course, point-by-point debunking doesn't impress the Truthers anyway, as can be seen by their reaction to the Popular Mechanics book."
Reaction to? How about debunking of! You really oughta know better, Pat