Rocket Highway

Good evening. Or afternoon, or morning or whatever if you’re Cyrus or David living out in the lawless American West. Today I’d like to share with you the joy of Amazon customer reviews! Most of you have no doubt already had a run in with these funny, weird things, but I want to devote a little bit of time out of my day to discussing these.

I was browsing Amazon for some books and I came across the page for The Looming Tower by journalist Lawrence Wright. I’ve read the book, and I super-recommend it to anybody and everybody who wants to know anything about Al-Qaeda and 9/11 and all that fun stuff. It’s a compelling, well written and well sourced narrative following Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri(Al Qaeda’s Numero Dos) in their quest to destroy McDonalds and freedom or whatever. It also won a Pulitzer Prize and is pretty much universally praised for being an even-handed account of the events that led up to 9/11 that goes deep into the backstories of key players such as Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri. But wait, what’s this?

Well, it’s universally praised, except for by these four mavericks, who gave it one single star. What do they see THAT wrong with this book? You’d probably guess that there would be a crazy 9/11 conspiracy person, an anti-American/Israel zealot, and a super conservative person who won’t take any answer or explanation for anti-American sentiments in the Middle East besides ‘THEY HATE OUR FREEDOM, AND THEY ARE MUSLIM.’ Well, you’d be two thirds right, and you get the added bonus of some goofy wild card bullshit. Let’s take a look!

First One Star Guy: The 9/11 Truther Conspiracy Dork
This is of course the one we all knew was coming. “SmokeNMirrors” opens up with a powerful shot across the bow: “This is strictly for those who have a desperate need to believe the official story of 9/11″ Thanks, Jesse Ventura. I’ll include his text if you want to read it, I sure couldn’t finish it.

This is strictly for those who have a desperate need to believe the official story of 9/11: that 19 untrained men (at least 10 of whom were later found to be still alive after 9/11) under the direction of a known ex-CIA asset (who was dying in a cave), who had never before flown a passenger plane somehow managed to hijack four of them and fly without navigational assistance (using compasses, presumably) around the USA for a total of nearly two hours without the much-vaunted and trigger happy USAF managing to get off a single shot, without any of the 4 sets of crew managing to get off a single warning – despite the necessity to do nothing more than press a button, without any of the sets of crew, many ex-military, putting up the slightest bit of resistance to men of small stature carrying nothing more than Stanley knives. These 19 men then crashed their planes unerringly into targets they had no possible chance of finding in reality, and the buildings, weakened by the impacts and by the massive fires of jet fuel, melted to the ground, exhibiting at least 10 classic signs of explosive demolition. And of course there’s WTC7, hit by nothing except falling debris, yet it also melted to the ground in freefall speed at 5:20 in the afternoon, interestingly enough after both the BBC and CNN had already reported this building as having collapsed – in both cases while it stood clearly in the background behind the unwitting and ignorant reporter. The fact that the financial records from Enron, Worldcom and many other financial scandals were held in the SEC offices in WTC7 should be examined very closely, as should the “insider trading” which was traced to the door of the Executive Director of the CIA, Buzzy Krongard and then dropped. Also of interest is the massive amount of gold bullion stored under the WTC, only a fraction of which has so far been acknowledged as recovered.

This book, however, is a fiction which merges a small amount of fact and a large amount of media propoganda to paint a story that simply cannot be true. For an extremely advanced form of nano-thermite (Google the term) was recently discovered in the debris from the WTC which proves beyond doubt that the WTC in fact WAS explosively demolished. The fact that the Bush family had close ties to the company that ran “security” at the WTC is an indication of how this could have been done, added to the fact that most of the known research into and development of nano-thermite had been conducted by NIST up to that point. Lawrence Wright has, wittingly or unwittingly, fallen into the trap of believing an official story (sorry, but there’s not a single “official story” that can be taken at its word) with no basis in reality and woven a cunningly plausible but ultimately erroneous version of events, and should be read (and, if truth be told, classified) as fiction. Additionally his treatment of the logistics and preparation for the attacks themselves are totally unconvincing, lacking the substance and believability that should be present if the official story were true.

To get a truer picture of the events leading up to 9/11 a far more believable (and far more thoroughly researched) book is The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11–and America’s Response by Paul Thompson. Or anything by David Ray Griffin.

Google the term “Nanothermite’? Yeah right dude. Google Ron Paul. *dons leather trenchcoat, hits “play” on Winamp playlist containing the entire Dream Theater discography*

Second One Star Guy: THE ZIONIST OVERLORD WORLD GOVERNMENT BUG PEOPLE

While I’m slightly more sympathetic to where this guy’s coming from, he makes the same mistake lots of young leftists or rightists make: going off the ideological deep end. He’s read a bit, but not quite enough to realize that he’s just a callow kid yet. Or he is just legitimately a weird person, who knows. Here we go!

Wright’s book entitled The Looming Tower serves as scripture for the War on Terror. The book fulfills the following Zionist goals.

(1) It ties a lot of disconnected information together to fabricate a compelling script defining a vast Islamic fundamentalist terrorist conspiracy, which UBL is supposed to head but really does not exist and which can only be fought by stripping Americans of their Constitutional rights.

(2) It transformed the Zionist genocidal war against Palestinians into the American War on Terror with the goal of forever hitching the USA to Zionist ideology and policy.
The Israeli Coin and Mint’s Twin Towers Medal
A Perfect Example of Zionist Opportunism

(3) It justified an Afghanistan and then an Iraq invasion as well as attacks on Somalia, Lebanon, Gaza, and Pakistan that made no sense whatsoever for the USA however much Zionists might welcome the incineration of Arabs and Muslims.

(4) It creates a framework to demonize the most mainstream currents of Islam in order to facilitate the marginalization of American Muslims and to make sure that they cannot participate in a meaningful way in the debate over American foreign policy.

(5) It provides a rationalization for a pointless continuation of the War against Terror in Afghanistan in order

* to forestall attempts to bring Bush administration criminals to justice,
* to discourage scrutiny of Zionists in the Obama administration,
* to keep Israel and Zionist plutocrats on the expanded military gravy train,
* to continue intimidation of American Muslims, and
* to prevent the American public from realizing that the US and Israel have no interests in common whatsoever.

Remnick made this achievement possible by providing Wright with full use of the fabled New Yorker resources for research and fact checking although in this case they were corrupted to provide distortion and fabrication conforming to the desires of wealthy Zionist advertisers, who brought the magazine back from the brink of bankruptcy.

With such talented support Wright’s lies are sophisticated. They depend on subtle mistranslation or elipsis and calculated distortion of the timeline. They start from the beginning of the book with the discussion of Sayid Qutb and continue right through to the end.

The crowning example is Wright’s explanation of the meaning of the book’s title on pp. 394-395.

“The duties of this religion are magnificent and difficult,” bin Laden said in a videotaped speech that was later discovered on the computer of a member of the Hamburg cell. “Some of them are abominable.”

Bin Laden spoke about the Prophet, who warned the Arabs that they would become weak because of their love of lif and their fear of fighting. “This sense of loss, this misery that has befallen us: all these are proof that we have abandoned God and his jihad,” bin Laden said. “God has imposed inferiority on you and will not remove it from you until you return to your religion.”

Recalling the Prophet’s injunction on his deathbed that Islam should be the only religion in Arabia, bin Laden asked, “What answer do we have for God on the day of reckoning? … The ummah in this time have become lost and have gone astray. Now, ten years have passed sine the Americans entered the land of the two holy places. … It becomes clear to us that shying away from the fight, combined with the love of earthly existence that fills the hearts of many of us, is the source of this misery, this humiliation, and this contempt.”

These words reached into the hearts of nineteen young men, many of whom had skills, talent, and education, and were living comfortably in the West; and yet they still resonated with the sense of shame that bin Laden sang to them.

What do we want? What do we want?
Don’t we want to please God?
Don’t we want Paradise?

He urged them to become martyrs, to give up their promising lives for the greater glory that awaited them. “Look, we have found ourselves in the mouth of the lion for over twenty years now,” he said, “thanks to the mercy and favor of God: the Russian Scud missiles hunted us for over ten years, and the American Cruise missiles have hunted us for another ten years. The believer knows that the hour of death can be neigher hastened nor postponed.” Then he quoted a passage from the fourth sura of the Quran, which he repeated three times in the speech — obvious signal to the hijackers who were on their way:

Wherever you are, death will find you,
even in the looming tower.

No English translation of the Quranic verse 4:78 renders ÈÑæÌ ãÔìÏÉ as in the looming tower.

Muhammad Asad interprets the verse as:

Wherever you may be, death will overtake you — even though you be in towers raised high.

The mistranslation of mushayyadat meaning lofty may be a confusion of the Hebrew word shed meaning demon with the colloquial Arabic pronunciation musheyyda.

The faulty rendering is only a small piece of the Wright’s big lie. He states in his “Notes” (p.485) that he took “Speech of Sheikh Osama Bin Laden on the occasion of the Fitr celebration of the first schawal 1420″/”Rede des Scheich usamma Bin LADEN anlasslich des Fitr-Festes erster schawal 1420″ from the “Motassadeq Document which Chester Rosson translated.

Ramadan 1420 took place in Dec-Jan 1999-2000. Eidu-l-fitri was Jan. 7, 2000.

The Quranic passage 4:78 is a hardly inappropriate reminder to people in the midst of a celebration that they should still think about the time when they will be called to final accounting after death.

Probably many Eidu-l-fitri sermons with which UBL grew up contained such recommendations.

The speech had absolutely no connection to the 9/11 attack as is almost certainly true for UBL himself.

Because the entire mythology of the War on Terror is filled with the sort of misrepresentations littering the Pulitzer Prize winning Looming Tower, Zionists like Frum (and Judea Pearl) are absolutely unwilling to countenance any critical reevaluations of the case for the war from which they and the State of Israel have benefitted so much.

Point 1 is kind of crazy but I guess I agree with parts of it. Point 2 is kind of uhhhh not really man you’re kind of deciding ahead of time what this book does, Point 3 is no not really at all, Point 4 is lol come on man al Qaeda doesn’t represent mainstream Islam, you’re killing me here and I basically stopped after that. Sorry to be so flippant but tell me this goofy Leftier-than-thou butthole guy provides anything substantial after that little tirade in which he admitted in too many words that the purpose of the book flew right over his weird haircut encrusted head. Maybe I give him too much credit, he might actually sympathize with Al Qaeda. Ha ha ha.

To be fair, he makes a lot of good, true points, but all hilarious hyperbole aside, he attributes FAR too much sinister motive to this book, and it’s silly.

Third One Star Guy: The Freshman Girl Taking a Poli Sci Class for Basic Studies and is Assigned This Book By Her Well-Meaning But Naive Professor

I need no words of explanation.

I’m in the middle after 3 weeks because its soo boring. Hopefully I’ll find excitement near the end.

An amazon admin saw this and, taking pity, deleted the parts where she said ‘omg’ and ‘lol!’

Fourth One Star Guy: The Boring Loser Who Only Reads Academic Journals And Scoffs at Everything Else

YEAH RIGHT I COULD HAVE PUT THE ESSENTIAL FACTS TOGETHER IN ONE ESSAY AND REGULAR PEOPLE WOULD BE WILLING TO READ IT

This book is overwritten. The actual content could be in an essay. There are pointless diversions, etc., etc.,and when it gets to actual facts it jumps around. It really needs an editor who knows the subject.

*throws pie at this guy*

In closing, I’d just like to say I don’t think you’re dumb if you don’t like this book, I just think you’re dumb if you’re one of these four people. If you’re not one of these four, then you should get ahold of the Looming Tower and give it a read!