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Tag: 9/11

James Forrestal, Harry Truman, and Israel

David Martin

Alison Weir, the former journalist who heads up an organization aptly named, If Americans Knew, chose an equally appropriate title for her very popular 2014 book,  Against Our Better Judgment, The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.   The fact of the matter is that the better judgment of the United States was, unlike today, well represented by its foreign policy leadership in 1948 when Palestine was most inequitably divided into Jewish and Arab parts by the United Nations, and the Zionist leaders of the Jewish part announced the creation of the brand-new state of Israel.  President Harry Truman made his decision endorsing the partition over the solid advice he received by the experts in his…

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Video on 9/11 Removed from YouTube as “Hate Speech”

David Martin

If for some reason you should find yourself at the Internet site with this URL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ7ojSe-wqg&t=21s, what you will find there is not a YouTube video, but a black rectangle bearing this message in white, in the manner of chalk on a blackboard: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.  Learn more about combating hate speech in your country.”  Below that, in purple, is a “Learn more” click-on. Doing that, you get: Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube. We remove content promoting    violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on any of the following attributes: Age Caste Disability Ethnicity Gender Identity and Expression Nationality Race Immigration Status Religion Sex/Gender Sexual Orientation Victims…

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An “Adult Content” YouTube Video

David Martin

On August 4, I received this rather surprising email: Hi David Martin, We wanted to let you know that our team has reviewed your content and we don’t think it’s in line with our Community Guidelines.  As a result, we’ve age-restricted the following content: Video:  At What a Cost We haven’t applied a strike to your channel, and your content is still live for some users on YouTube.  Keep reading for more details on what this means and steps you can take if you’d like to appeal this decision. What “age-restricted” means We age-restrict content when we don’t think it’s suitable for younger audiences.  This means it will not be visible to users who are logged out, are under 18 years…

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Pearl Harbor vs. 9/11

David Martin

(Piece originally written by Dave Martin in 2014) When asked the question, “What impresses you more about George W. Bush and Barack Obama, their absence of intelligence or their absence of integrity,” a ready answer comes to mind, and it is clearly not the same for each. But in the case of Bush’s first Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, I think you will have to agree that it’s a tough call. That was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw in the pages of The New York Times that Rumsfeld had essayed a comparison between the momentous events in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and in New York City, Arlington, VA, and Shanksville, PA, on September…

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9/11, the Discreet Charm of the Japanese, and the Alchemy of Narrative

Jonathan Revusky

A year and a half ago, I wrote a little piece about 9/11 flight attendant Betty Ong. While I have been certain for some time that Betty Ong never existed, and also reasoned that if one found one such fake, there were bound to be some others, I still assumed that most of the nearly 3,000 victims were real people who really did die that day. It is only recently that I have come to the conclusion that there was, in fact, nothing particularly special about Betty Ong, and if I had chosen any other random victim of that day, I would have almost certainly come to the same conclusions as I did about Betty Ong. This conjecture was put to the test…

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The Illustrated 9/11 Commission Report: It’s not a comic book! It’s a graphic adaptation!

Jonathan Revusky

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby! Over recent days, as yet another 9/11 anniversary has come and gone, I have been trying to trace back how my thinking has evolved since that murky event. Two decades is quite a big chunk of anybody’s life and one’s thinking is bound to evolve. Mine certainly did. Not just about 9/11, mind you, but making sense of that event definitely played a huge role. Eighteen years ago, my thinking about politics and history was really quite conventional. That is surely why it took me so long to question what we were told. Well, to be clear, I did question things, in particular the so-called “War on Terror”, right from the very start. I…

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Revisiting 9/11, Betty Ong, and the Mystery of “Black Betty”

Jonathan Revusky

♫ Je vous parle d’un temps ♫ ♫ Que les moins de vingt ans ♫ ♫ Ne peuvent pas connaître ♫ Charles Aznavour I recall how, as a child, in my teens, and as a much younger man than now, people of the older generation would reminisce nostalgically about where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. When such conversations arose, naturally, people of my generation would feel kind of left out. On the day in question, 11/22/1963, I myself was not yet born. In fact, I did not exist at all, since I was conceived about 4 months after that. It occurred to me recently that now, with 9/11, things have come full…

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