Former CBC radio host Lesley Hughes thinks the way to prove she's not anti-semitic is by suing the country's major Jewish organizations dedicated to fighting anti-semitism.
Go figure.
Hughes, whose most current claim to fame is as a 9/11 Truther, says she's not being hired for freelance work because she's been labelled an anti-semite for something she wrote 7 years ago. She apparently hasn't considered that its her bizarre anti-American conspiracy theories that are the stumbling block.
In that 2002 column published by Winnipeg's community newspapers, Lesley Hughes wrote:
"Israeli businesses, which had offices in the Towers, vacated the premises a week before the attacks, breaking their lease to do it. About 3000 Americans working there were not so lucky."
The context of her assertion was that the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, had "warned the American intelligence community ... about the attacks on the twin towers on that heartbreaking day."
In short, the Mossad, knowing about the planned terrorist attacks, alerted Israeli businesmen to clear out asap, and they did just that, the lucky buggers.
Her column became a cause celebre in the 2008 federal election campaign, resulting in Liberal Leader Stephane Dion's jettisoning her as a liberal candidate in the Winnipeg riding of Kildonan-St. Paul. Ever since, Hughes and her supporters have been frantically proclaiming that she's a great friend of the Jews and nothing could be further from reality than allegations of anti-semitism on her part.
She's decided that lawsuits are the best way to prove that.
Lesley Hughes is apparently still mystified why anyone would see her writing as anti-semitic. So, let us explain.
As we said, Hughes is a 9/11 Truther, which means she's joined the community seeking the "truth" about the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York (primarily), because, obviously, the official story that groups of terrorists financed by Al Qaeda hijacked two jets and flew them into the World Trade Towers is not the truth.
The Truther community is a big tent. At one end of the spectrum stands The Jews Did It crowd which argues that Israel was behind the 2001 terror attack. Hughes has distanced herself as far as possible from that bunch. In an article for the far-left Canadian Dimension magazine titled Lesley Hughes Responds, she wrote:
"The Canadian Jewish Congress seems to have assumed that I am one of those who subscribe to a bizarre conspiracy theory that the world’s Jews were responsible for 9-11, a ludicrous idea I have never supported."
Nor, apparently, has she any truck nor trade with the other, extremely popular, end of the Truther spectrum which declares that the New York attacks were an inside job by the CIA or some other U.S. agency. As she wrote in Canadian Dimension:
"I have also been labelled an extremist nutbar who has promoted, rather than investigated, the possibility that 9-11 was an inside job."
Note the careful qualifying clause. She doesn't promote the idea, she investigates it. Weak, Lesley, weak.
Here, then, begins the problem for Lesley Hughes.
9/11 Truthers like her paint themselves as the last true searchers for truth. They're just asking questions to find the facts. What's wrong with that?
Well, Hughes apparently doesn't realize that this isn't the first time we've heard that line. And she won't like the truth about who used it before her.
In the Nineties, a new generation of Holocaust deniers popped up, only they didn't declare that the Holocaust was a myth invented by Zionists after the war. No, they said they were just asking questions to uncover the truth. Why were there no wartime pictures of gas chambers in Auschwitz? Do you know how long it takes to burn a body in a crematorium? How much fuel is needed? How could 6 million bodies be destroyed in such a short time? Just asking...
So you can see how the modern-day search for the truth of an alleged conspiracy is an eerie and unsettling echo of a previous search for the truth which hasn't been forgotten by people with a reason to have long memories.
Lesley Hughes has a coterie of supporters, one of the biggest of whom is Anthony Hall, an Alberta university professor and fellow 9/11 Truther. Hall, like Hughes, paints himself as an indefatiguable truth-seeker constantly under attack for exposing the lies of the establishment. He's written many internet articles on the subject, some of which veer into unrestrained cheerleading for the Durban Anti-Racism Conference which ended three days before the WTC attacks.
In a paper presented in Edmonton in September, 2008, Hall wrote:
In the long run global security through peace is only attainable through concerted efforts to ease the maladies identified at gatherings such as the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. (The Lies and Crimes of 911: A Canadian View of the War on Terror’s Origins, Anthony J. Hall Sunday, September 7th, 2008)
Here's how another observer, Linda Grant of the Guardian, saw the same conference
(The Guardian, Tuesday, December 18, 2001, The hate that will not die)
"...delegates from Arab governments and NGOs sought unsuccessfully to have Israel designated as a racist apartheid state, and called for the establishment of a UN committee to prosecute Israeli war crimes and to isolate totally the country. The European Roma Rights Centre issued its own statement, written by Dimitrina Petrova, its executive director: "The aggressive exclusion of Jewish participants and the accompanying, blatantly intolerant anti-semitic spirit plaguing the entire process, prompted us firmly to distance ourselves from this forums unfortunate outcome." In the exhibition area, a book of cartoons reminiscent of the Nazi era, depicting Jews with talons for hands and clutching blood-soaked money, was distributed by the Arab Lawyers Union. One of the unions leaflets, in which the Star of David (a religious symbol of Judaism, as well as an emblem of the Israeli flag) was superimposed on the Nazi swastika..."
When Anthony Hall was in Winnipeg this March, he was approached by the Jewish Post and asked about a website where some of his articles have been posted and which carried a colourful graphic of a swastika, or as the story in the Post described it "On the bottom right corner of the menu bar on www.mtl911truth.org there is a large swastika made up of bullets, the Israeli flag, the American flag, the British flag and the NATO flag."
"Prof. Evelyn Schaefer of the University of Winnipeg's Department of Psychology told Hall that the swastika was very offensive and that that she was displeased that Hall knew about this site and the swastika and had not asked to have his article removed." said the Jewish Post story.
Hall said he understood her concern and that he had in the past demanded an article of his be removed from an obviously anti-semitic website. He suggested she take up her objection to the swastika with the man behind mtl911truth.org.
Hall, and Hughes, have publicly condemned the anti-semitism that permeates the 9/11 Truther world.
But when you walk in the swamp, you can't be surprised to find the mud sticks to your shoes.
Hall travels the country promoting his 9/11 conspiracy theories and has found himself associating with others in the movement such as Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at Ottawa University who runs GlobalResearch.ca, a 9/11 website where one can find articles such as
Claim: WTC Leaseholder Silverstein Warned Not To Come To Work On 9/11
by Paul Joseph Watson
Global Research, May 15, 2007
New York 9/11 truth activist Luke Rudkowski claims WTC complex leaseholder Larry Silverstein and his daughter got a warning on the morning of 9/11 not to come to work that day - his source? - Silverstein's own security guards.
Here we go again.
There's that advance notice meme that's become a standard of the 9/11 conspiracy world.
In this case it's directed at Larry Silverstein, a real estate developer who won the lease on the World Trade Towers six months before the 9/11 attacks. The Truthers love to point out that Silverstein made a $124 million down-payment, then insured the complex for $7 billion, including coverage for terrorist attacks. He eventually collected $4 billion.
Do you recognize the story? Of course, it's the old Jewish lightning legend. Landlord, Jewish, burns down his business to collect the insurance, 21st Century style.
Are we seeing a theme running through this 9/11 Truth thing?
Which is why we shouldn't lose sight of Lesley Hughes and her little article. What did she write that's stirred up such a storm?
"Israeli businesses, which had offices in the Towers, vacated the premises a week before the attacks, breaking their lease to do it."
Jews? Check.
Advance notice? Check
Anti-semitism? Impossible, says Lesley Hughes. In fact, she was so sure of it she repeated--in her response printed in Canadian Dimension magazine Oct. 1, 2008-- her conviction that the Israelis should be applauded, not condemned.
"Six years ago, I wrote a column which examined evidence that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan may have been motivated by the drive for oil and drug profits.
As background, I reported that the intelligence agencies of Germany, Israel and Russia all warned the CIA that the attacks of Sept. 11 were coming, a fact also reported in the London Telegraph, the Jerusalem Post, and on Fox News. I noted that the U.S. disregarded the warnings, but Israeli businesses took them seriously, and (sensibly) vacated the Twin Towers."
Hughes styles herself as a freelance journalist and she could claim that her long career on CBC radio qualifies her to the title journalist.
But anyone professing to be a journalist would, even in 2002, instantly recognize the story of an advance warning to Israeli businesses as an offshoot of the anti-semitic canard that popped up literally within 24 hours of the terrorist attacks---the 4000 Jews Rumour.
Slate.com tracked the rumour to its apparent source.
On Sept. 12, 2001, an American website Information Times
The story spread like wildfire in the Arab world starting with the Sept. 15, 2001, story in Syria's government-owned Al Thawra newpaper, according to the U.S. State Department.
Even today it's an article of faith in the Middle East that Israel warned Jewish employees at the World Trade Centre to stay home on Sept. 11.
While the initial story was quickly debunked, it obviously morphed into a new variation, this time that Israeli businesses were told to get out of the WTC.
Any journalist would see the connection in a millisecond. And would start asking the proper questions.
What businesses got the advance warning? And how, exactly, did the word get out?
Did the message come through the secret shortwave radio that all Israeli businesses have to keep in touch with Tel Aviv? Or was it more personal, with a mysterious man coming through the front door, giving the secret Mossad handshake and the identifying code "Moishe sent me."
And then there's the question that dares not be asked?
Why did the secret warning from the Israeli intelligence service caution the Israeli business owners to get out quickly, break their leases if necessary, but above all DON'T TELL THE GOYIM.
Lesley Hughes stated as fact that Israeli businesses hightailed it out of the WTC without a word to anyone of the impending terror attacks. When confronted, she repeated the story. Proudly. Defiantly.
She's so convinced she's the last bastion of true investigative journalism that she's blind to the swastikas, the applause for Durban, the oblique references to Jewish lightning, the sly meaning of advance warnings--- for Jews only--- that infect her chosen 9/11 Truther community.
Anti-semitism? Me? How could you say that? she asks.
In the words of that old Jewish hillbilly----
If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
Go figure.
Hughes, whose most current claim to fame is as a 9/11 Truther, says she's not being hired for freelance work because she's been labelled an anti-semite for something she wrote 7 years ago. She apparently hasn't considered that its her bizarre anti-American conspiracy theories that are the stumbling block.
In that 2002 column published by Winnipeg's community newspapers, Lesley Hughes wrote:
"Israeli businesses, which had offices in the Towers, vacated the premises a week before the attacks, breaking their lease to do it. About 3000 Americans working there were not so lucky."
The context of her assertion was that the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, had "warned the American intelligence community ... about the attacks on the twin towers on that heartbreaking day."
In short, the Mossad, knowing about the planned terrorist attacks, alerted Israeli businesmen to clear out asap, and they did just that, the lucky buggers.
Her column became a cause celebre in the 2008 federal election campaign, resulting in Liberal Leader Stephane Dion's jettisoning her as a liberal candidate in the Winnipeg riding of Kildonan-St. Paul. Ever since, Hughes and her supporters have been frantically proclaiming that she's a great friend of the Jews and nothing could be further from reality than allegations of anti-semitism on her part.
She's decided that lawsuits are the best way to prove that.
Lesley Hughes is apparently still mystified why anyone would see her writing as anti-semitic. So, let us explain.
As we said, Hughes is a 9/11 Truther, which means she's joined the community seeking the "truth" about the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York (primarily), because, obviously, the official story that groups of terrorists financed by Al Qaeda hijacked two jets and flew them into the World Trade Towers is not the truth.
The Truther community is a big tent. At one end of the spectrum stands The Jews Did It crowd which argues that Israel was behind the 2001 terror attack. Hughes has distanced herself as far as possible from that bunch. In an article for the far-left Canadian Dimension magazine titled Lesley Hughes Responds, she wrote:
"The Canadian Jewish Congress seems to have assumed that I am one of those who subscribe to a bizarre conspiracy theory that the world’s Jews were responsible for 9-11, a ludicrous idea I have never supported."
Nor, apparently, has she any truck nor trade with the other, extremely popular, end of the Truther spectrum which declares that the New York attacks were an inside job by the CIA or some other U.S. agency. As she wrote in Canadian Dimension:
"I have also been labelled an extremist nutbar who has promoted, rather than investigated, the possibility that 9-11 was an inside job."
Note the careful qualifying clause. She doesn't promote the idea, she investigates it. Weak, Lesley, weak.
Here, then, begins the problem for Lesley Hughes.
9/11 Truthers like her paint themselves as the last true searchers for truth. They're just asking questions to find the facts. What's wrong with that?
Well, Hughes apparently doesn't realize that this isn't the first time we've heard that line. And she won't like the truth about who used it before her.
In the Nineties, a new generation of Holocaust deniers popped up, only they didn't declare that the Holocaust was a myth invented by Zionists after the war. No, they said they were just asking questions to uncover the truth. Why were there no wartime pictures of gas chambers in Auschwitz? Do you know how long it takes to burn a body in a crematorium? How much fuel is needed? How could 6 million bodies be destroyed in such a short time? Just asking...
So you can see how the modern-day search for the truth of an alleged conspiracy is an eerie and unsettling echo of a previous search for the truth which hasn't been forgotten by people with a reason to have long memories.
Lesley Hughes has a coterie of supporters, one of the biggest of whom is Anthony Hall, an Alberta university professor and fellow 9/11 Truther. Hall, like Hughes, paints himself as an indefatiguable truth-seeker constantly under attack for exposing the lies of the establishment. He's written many internet articles on the subject, some of which veer into unrestrained cheerleading for the Durban Anti-Racism Conference which ended three days before the WTC attacks.
In a paper presented in Edmonton in September, 2008, Hall wrote:
In the long run global security through peace is only attainable through concerted efforts to ease the maladies identified at gatherings such as the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. (The Lies and Crimes of 911: A Canadian View of the War on Terror’s Origins, Anthony J. Hall Sunday, September 7th, 2008)
Here's how another observer, Linda Grant of the Guardian, saw the same conference
(The Guardian, Tuesday, December 18, 2001, The hate that will not die)
"...delegates from Arab governments and NGOs sought unsuccessfully to have Israel designated as a racist apartheid state, and called for the establishment of a UN committee to prosecute Israeli war crimes and to isolate totally the country. The European Roma Rights Centre issued its own statement, written by Dimitrina Petrova, its executive director: "The aggressive exclusion of Jewish participants and the accompanying, blatantly intolerant anti-semitic spirit plaguing the entire process, prompted us firmly to distance ourselves from this forums unfortunate outcome." In the exhibition area, a book of cartoons reminiscent of the Nazi era, depicting Jews with talons for hands and clutching blood-soaked money, was distributed by the Arab Lawyers Union. One of the unions leaflets, in which the Star of David (a religious symbol of Judaism, as well as an emblem of the Israeli flag) was superimposed on the Nazi swastika..."
When Anthony Hall was in Winnipeg this March, he was approached by the Jewish Post and asked about a website where some of his articles have been posted and which carried a colourful graphic of a swastika, or as the story in the Post described it "On the bottom right corner of the menu bar on www.mtl911truth.org there is a large swastika made up of bullets, the Israeli flag, the American flag, the British flag and the NATO flag."
"Prof. Evelyn Schaefer of the University of Winnipeg's Department of Psychology told Hall that the swastika was very offensive and that that she was displeased that Hall knew about this site and the swastika and had not asked to have his article removed." said the Jewish Post story.
Hall said he understood her concern and that he had in the past demanded an article of his be removed from an obviously anti-semitic website. He suggested she take up her objection to the swastika with the man behind mtl911truth.org.
Hall, and Hughes, have publicly condemned the anti-semitism that permeates the 9/11 Truther world.
But when you walk in the swamp, you can't be surprised to find the mud sticks to your shoes.
Hall travels the country promoting his 9/11 conspiracy theories and has found himself associating with others in the movement such as Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at Ottawa University who runs GlobalResearch.ca, a 9/11 website where one can find articles such as
Claim: WTC Leaseholder Silverstein Warned Not To Come To Work On 9/11
by Paul Joseph Watson
Global Research
New York 9/11 truth activist Luke Rudkowski claims WTC complex leaseholder Larry Silverstein and his daughter got a warning on the morning of 9/11 not to come to work that day - his source? - Silverstein's own security guards.
Here we go again.
There's that advance notice meme that's become a standard of the 9/11 conspiracy world.
In this case it's directed at Larry Silverstein, a real estate developer who won the lease on the World Trade Towers six months before the 9/11 attacks. The Truthers love to point out that Silverstein made a $124 million down-payment, then insured the complex for $7 billion, including coverage for terrorist attacks. He eventually collected $4 billion.
Do you recognize the story? Of course, it's the old Jewish lightning legend. Landlord, Jewish, burns down his business to collect the insurance, 21st Century style.
Are we seeing a theme running through this 9/11 Truth thing?
Which is why we shouldn't lose sight of Lesley Hughes and her little article. What did she write that's stirred up such a storm?
"Israeli businesses, which had offices in the Towers, vacated the premises a week before the attacks, breaking their lease to do it."
Jews? Check.
Advance notice? Check
Anti-semitism? Impossible, says Lesley Hughes. In fact, she was so sure of it she repeated--in her response printed in Canadian Dimension magazine Oct. 1, 2008-- her conviction that the Israelis should be applauded, not condemned.
"Six years ago, I wrote a column which examined evidence that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan may have been motivated by the drive for oil and drug profits.
As background, I reported that the intelligence agencies of Germany, Israel and Russia all warned the CIA that the attacks of Sept. 11 were coming, a fact also reported in the London Telegraph, the Jerusalem Post, and on Fox News. I noted that the U.S. disregarded the warnings, but Israeli businesses took them seriously, and (sensibly) vacated the Twin Towers."
Hughes styles herself as a freelance journalist and she could claim that her long career on CBC radio qualifies her to the title journalist.
But anyone professing to be a journalist would, even in 2002, instantly recognize the story of an advance warning to Israeli businesses as an offshoot of the anti-semitic canard that popped up literally within 24 hours of the terrorist attacks---the 4000 Jews Rumour.
Slate.com tracked the rumour to its apparent source.
On Sept. 12, 2001, an American website Information Times
The story spread like wildfire in the Arab world starting with the Sept. 15, 2001, story in Syria's government-owned Al Thawra newpaper, according to the U.S. State Department.
Even today it's an article of faith in the Middle East that Israel warned Jewish employees at the World Trade Centre to stay home on Sept. 11.
While the initial story was quickly debunked, it obviously morphed into a new variation, this time that Israeli businesses were told to get out of the WTC.
Any journalist would see the connection in a millisecond. And would start asking the proper questions.
What businesses got the advance warning? And how, exactly, did the word get out?
Did the message come through the secret shortwave radio that all Israeli businesses have to keep in touch with Tel Aviv? Or was it more personal, with a mysterious man coming through the front door, giving the secret Mossad handshake and the identifying code "Moishe sent me."
And then there's the question that dares not be asked?
Why did the secret warning from the Israeli intelligence service caution the Israeli business owners to get out quickly, break their leases if necessary, but above all DON'T TELL THE GOYIM.
Lesley Hughes stated as fact that Israeli businesses hightailed it out of the WTC without a word to anyone of the impending terror attacks. When confronted, she repeated the story. Proudly. Defiantly.
She's so convinced she's the last bastion of true investigative journalism that she's blind to the swastikas, the applause for Durban, the oblique references to Jewish lightning, the sly meaning of advance warnings--- for Jews only--- that infect her chosen 9/11 Truther community.
Anti-semitism? Me? How could you say that? she asks.
In the words of that old Jewish hillbilly----
If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.