Time Immortal

Jay Currie has been busy, and deserves a ton of credit for breaking this story. Assists, as I understand it, go to Dr. Dawg and The Black Rod.

Briefly, what has transpired is this. Yesterday, Jay broke the story of Liberal Party of Canada candidate Lesley Hughes, who had for years been publishing Twin Towers conspiracy theories of an anti-Semitic nature on the internet. In one such writing, she asserted that Jewish businesses vacated the World Trade Centre in the days prior to the 2001 attacks.

(The “Jews were Warned!” meme is a fairly common one in the circles of those who insist that the most devastating act of Islamic terror perpetrated yet in North America was, in fact, an inside job or the work of the Israeli Mossad.)

Not twenty-four hours later, after initially defending his candidate and refusing to take action, Stephane Dion asked for, and received, her resignation from the electoral race in the Manitoba riding of Kildonan-St. Paul. This was a story that emerged, and was carried, almost entirely in the blogosphere — the mainstream media has been struggling to play catch-up.

And in a somewhat ironic twist, the Liberal Party’s “Team BC” website yesterday ran a story about an NDP candidate who is also a “troother” (e.g. a 9/11 conspiracy theorist), one Bev Collins by name.

Methinks that Jay has opened himself a rather large can of worms here. If you ever needed to see a quick demonstration of the power of the blogs, O Reader, look no further than this example.

Also: very sweet…I haven’t used the “Conspiracy nonsense” category in a while!

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Shaukat Khawja is complaining that the Jooooooooos only allow freedom of the press for themselves. It’s a perennial theme for the perpetually aggrieved blogger who calls himself ‘Rehmat’; the Joooooos are at fault for everything, and are responsible for everybody else’s shortcomings.

Oh, and the Joooooos are also out to denigrate everyone else’s Religion.

And look at this allegation: the Israeli Mossad was actually responsible for the Muhammed cartoons published in Denmark.

Shaukat is also up in arms over the insults directed at Jesus in the recent movie the Da Vinci Code, produced by (the Jew!) Brian Grazer. And while I appreciate Shaukat’s defence of Christ, I might point out that the Koran — which I can only assume Rehmat holds in high regard — does little better than the poor prose of Dan Brown when it comes to giving due glory to Jesus.

After all, the Koran denies Jesus’ divinity and asserts that He did not die upon the Cross. That’s about as insulting to Christian beliefs as anything portrayed in some crappy movie starring Tom Hanks‘ bad haircut.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Shaukat Khawja seems not to realize that the regions depicted on the map at the head of this blog post all got along more or less peacefully for several centuries prior to the arrival of Islam on the scene, and that since then the parts of the map denoted in various shades of green have been hotbeds of instability, roughly in proportion to the depth of the green hue.

(The green countries are, of course, those with higher concentrations of Muslims in the national populations. Deeper hues mean higher concentrations.)

It’s an interesting study in pathos, reading Rehmatpedia. One would think that not a single Qassam rocket had ever been fired into Israel by Muslims, that the Mossad was somehow behind it all. One would also think that the leaders of Hezbollah were Nobel Peace Prize winners, the wisest of thinkers and men of truly peaceful intentions. And one might half expect to see The Protocols of the Elders of Zion cited as truthful scholarship (although, perhaps disappointingly, this has not yet happened).

Islamist blogger (and Pickering, Ontario nuclear power plant worker) Shaukat Khawja — also known as Rehmat, owner/operator of the Rehmatpedia blog — has had some very…interesting things to say in the past, but I’ve a feeling that this latest offering of his (put not on his blog but in the IslamUnity.net forums) might just take the cake. If nothing else, it at least confirms a suspicion that I’ve had about the guy for a while: underneath any pretense he might have established about being committed to peace and mercy (the name “Rehmat”, if memory serves, means “mercy” or “kind”), he’s just your typical anti-Jewish bigot.

Choice samples from his latest include:

Jew elites always played a major part in great wars and reactionary movements. They’re known for tricking the both parties in a conflict. For example, Jews funded most of Crusades against Muslims and Jews; Jew sided on both sides of American Civil War; they were behind French Revolution and Communist Revolution in Russia – and they declared war on Nazi Germany, while 150,000 German Jews were serving Nazi Army and some Zionist terrorist groups were having honeymoon with Hitler and Mussolini regimes.

Jew elites, eh? You mean, like this?

Okay, Photoshoppery aside, Shaukat is here saying more or less the same thing that got Mel Gibson into trouble a couple years back: “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”. Now, to be fair, I’m sure that Jews probably did fight in e.g. the American Civil War, and then on both sides. But that is because such conflicts transcend religious considerations — neither the Civil War, nor the French or Russian revolutions or World War II were about religion, and did not have any real religious significance. Even the Crusades were more about politics and territory than they were about religion. And in such conflicts, people of the same religious stripe might well end up on opposite sides of the field of battle.

Case in point: there currently Muslims serving with e.g. NATO forces in Afghanistan, and who do battle with the Muslims in the Taliban.

Shaukat claims that he doesn’t need to prove this — or any other — statement made in the list of his that I have linked to, and yet the claim made above is hardly sufficiently self-evident to be able to stand on its own. Where is the evidence of Jewish funding of e.g. the Crusades against their own people?

Nazis never killed six million Jews. It’s 20th century’s biggest hoax – which has only flourished under government protection in several western countries.

Nazis are known for killing several million of Gypsies, Christians and Jews under their rule – but the largest victims were Gypsies. Even Auschwitz museum in Poland now have reduced the figure of Jewish killed by Nazis as 2.5 million.

Ah, Holocaust denial — pretty much a staple of Islamic discourse, unfortunately.

The problem with it is: the Nazis themselves were reasonably good book-keepers; we know from their own documentation that approximately 6 million Jews were murdered in various ways in the 1930s and 1940s. The figure of 2.5 million Jews that Shaukat gives is reflective of the number of Jews killed in Poland alone. And again, many of these deaths were documented and/or witnessed; the figures are not baseless.

Holocaust denial is ostensibly a punishable offence in Canada (not something I agree with, but that’s another matter). Strangely, however, I very much doubt that Shaukat is going to be charged with anything over this utterance.

September 11, 2001 attack on WTC and Pentagon was an inside terrorist job – conceived by Israeli Mossad, CIA and pro-Israel politicians and government officials.

Ah, the World Trade Center conspiracy. Another canard, and again a common staple of Islamic discourse.

There’s other stuff, some of it laugh-out-loud wrong, but these are some of the highlights. I think there’s room for one more, and that’s good…because of all the things Shaukat has asserted about Jews in his latest post, here’s my personal favourite:

Jews have the most powerful Jewish Lobby (AIPAC, ADL, AJC, etc.) in the US - which works for the interests of Zionist Israel instead of the US.

Here I had thought that the Hindu Jewish lobby was the most powerful. It appears, O Reader, that I have been grossly misinformed about the size thereof.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!