September 12, 2001, The Jerusalem Post, (08:15 - Wed, 1:25 a.m. EST) Thousands of Israelis missing near WTC, Pentagon,
September 13, 2001, The Posting by Marcio A. V. Carvalho, CNN USING 1991 FOOTAGE, (posted 5:34 a.m. Thu)
September 13, 2001, Fox News.com, Palestinian Officials Quash Pictures of Arab Celebrations,
September 15, 2001, Veritas News Service, The question no one dares to ask! by William Cooper,
September 16, 2001, Los Angeles Times, Anti-U.S. Displays Worry Palestinians, by Tracy Wilkinson,
September 17, 2001, Ha'aretz / David Irving’s ActionReportOnline, Five Israelis detained for "puzzling behavior" after WTC tragedy, by Yossi Melman,
September 18, 2001, 07:16:56 [itb] WTC X Files” 4,000 Jews Did Not Go To Work At WTC On Sept. 11, by Ihsan Hariadi, Msg 26333,
September 19, 2001, [Updated 14:12:04] Pakistani News Service, 4000 Israeli employees in WTC escape,
September 19, 2001, The [UK] Times, Bomber met Iraqi chief of intelligence, by Roland Watson, and Damian Whitworth,, in Washington,
September 20, 2001, [5:12 PM ET] More Than 6,300 Said Missing at WTC, by Larry McShane, Associated Press Writer,
September 21, 2001, New York Times, "Effort to ID Victims an Issue For Jews."
September 21, 2001, Pravda, Irina Malenko: 4,000 Israelis Working at the WTC Failed to Turn Up at Work on That Day, [16:49]
September 21, 2001 [04:26 p.m. EDT] ABC News, Foreign Nationals Add to List of Missing in Terror Attack,
September 22, 2001, pdastreet.forum, 4000 Israeli Employees in WTC Absent the Day of the Attack, [21:55:11]
September 25, 2001, USA Today, [21:55:11 p.m.]Rumor trackers are busier than ever, by Janet Kornblum,
September, 28, 2001, CNN News, FBI probing 'threatening' message, firm says, by Daniel Sieberg,
October 5, 2001, Slate.com 4,000 Jews, 1 Lie, Tracking an Internet Hoax. by Bryan Curtis, [5:30 p.m. PT]
October 8, 2001, Time Magazine, Waiting Games, War is nigh, and on the border with Afghanistan people can only wait, worry--and surf the Net, by Tim McGirk,
October 24, 2001, ThisIsLondon.co.uk, Suspects 'caught crashes on camera',
September 11, 2007 2:26 P.M., National Review Online, The Jews Knew? Remembering the Jewish victims of September 11, by Anne Morse,
September 12, 2001, news.com.au staff, It wasn't us: Hamas,
PALESTINIAN Islamic militant group, Hamas, has denied any involvement in the US terror attacks.
The group's spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin said: "We in Hamas, our battle is on the Palestinian land.
"We are not ready to move our battle out of the occupied Palestinian territories."
September 12, 2001, The Jerusalem Post, (08:15 - Wed, 1:25 a.m. EST) Thousands of Israelis missing near WTC, Pentagon,
The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack.
The list is made up of people who have not yet made contact with friends or family, Army Radio reported.
Telephone connections between Israel and the New York City and Washington, D.C. areas has been sporadic and unreliable since the multiple attacks yesterday.
Ten thousand people are estimated to have been killed in the New York attacks and another 800 in Washington.
Several hundred also went down with the hijacked planes.
September 13, 2001 (21:05) Israeli consul: Four Israelis in twin towers collapse,
Four Israelis were almost certainly in the twin towers of the World Trade Center when they collapsed, the Israeli consul in New York said this evening.
He added that in all likelihood, four more Israelis in nearby buildings are also among the casualties, Army Radio
September 13, 2001, The Posting by Marcio A. V. Carvalho, CNN USING 1991 FOOTAGE, (posted 5:34 a.m. Thu)
CNN USING 1991 FOOTAGE of celebrating Palestinians to manipulate you I'd like to add some ideas from here, down south.
There's an important point in the power of press, specifically the power of CNN.
All around the world we are subjected to 3 or 4 huge news distributors, and one of them - as you well know - is CNN. Very well, I guess all of you have been seeing (just as I've been) images from this company. In particular, one set of images called my attention: the Palestinians celebrating the bombing, out on the streets, eating some cake and making funny faces for the camera.
Well, THOSE IMAGES WERE SHOT BACK IN 1991!!! Those are images of Palestinians celebrating the invasion of Kuwait! It's simply unacceptable that a super-power of cumminications as CNN uses images which do not correspond to the reality in talking about so serious an issue.
A teacher of mine, here in Brazil, has videotapes recorded in 1991, with the very same images; he's been sending emails to CNN, Globo (the major TV network in Brazil) and newspapers, denouncing what I myself classify as a crime against the public opinion. If anyone of you has access to this kind of files, serch for it. In the meanwhile, I'll try to 'put my hands' on a copy of this tape.
But now, think for a moment about the impact of such images. Your people is hurt, emotionally fragile, and this kind broadcast have very high possibility of causing waves of anger and rage against Palestinians.
It's simply irresponsible to show images such as those.
Finally, I'd like to say that we all regret and condemn all that has happened in the last days; but Nikos has a point here. I really don't want to be misunderstood here, but the truth is that US government had shown no respect for other countries in the last decades. In the 60s and 70s they had halped lots of military coups throughout the world (including Brazil in 64). Later, with Reagan and Bush Father, the Washington Consensus have been demolishing the bases of our economies, making us more and more dependant (and, many of us, prehocupied with this situation).
Your current president quickly made things worse: Kioto Protocol, Star Wars, Colombia Plan, the exchange of rain forest for pieces of external debt, the abandonment of the position of third party in negotiations between IRA and England, and between Palestinians and Israel. All those mistakes in US external politics made your country more hatred than before, and, of course, more vulnerable.
Listen, I'm NOT justifying the terrorist actions that took place in your country; but it seems to me that, if your leaders had come along another path of thoughts and actions, you wouldn't be suffering what you are now.
Best regards, and the hope that everything is resolved for the best of all of us.
Márcio A. V. Carvalho
State University of Campinas - Brazil
September 13, 2001, New York Times, Hopes Are Raised, and Dashed, About Rescue of Firefighters, by Terence Neilan,
In a town eager for miracles, the news that five firefighters had been pulled out alive today from a sports utility vehicle buried under debris from the collapsed World Trade Center seemed for a moment to be an answer to those prayers.
But those hopes turned out to be false, based on mistaken reports.
The uplifting story of the "miracle five" was broadcast on CNN and local television stations, carried by The Associated Press and on Internet news sites and chased by newspapers across town.
It began with an account that the five firefighters had been found in the sports utility vehicle this morning, trapped in the ruins.
Construction workers at the scene, caught up in the exuberance, gave credence to the reports when they said they had seen the rescued firefighters pass by, miraculously unscathed.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has said that more than 300 firefighters are among the nearly 4,000 people who are unaccounted for since the collapse of the twin towers, and the reports about the five raised hopes for the families and colleagues of many of the missing firefighters. Calls flooded a hot line maintained by fire officials for information on the missing.
In the days since a pair of hijacked jets slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, there have, indeed, been several miracle rescues. But this was not to be one of them.
After several hours of confusion, officials said the reports were a mistake that grew from the rescue of three firefighters who were briefly trapped this morning when they fell into one of the voids in the debris as they dug for fallen colleagues.
The peril for those involved in the search and rescue effort remained real enough today.
Workers in the area immediately surrounding the site of the World Trade Center were forced to flee as other buildings seemed in danger of collapse.
The top 10 floors of 1 Liberty Plaza began buckling this afternoon, and construction engineers said 3 World Financial Center, which houses American Express , was being closely watched. The Liberty Plaza building, constructed in 1973, is a block from where the twin towers of the World Trade Center stood.
The rescued firefighters had spent more than 50 hours pinned inside a Chevrolet Suburban fire chief's vehicle, city officials said.
And according to television reports, rescue workers have made contact with several other people believed to be still trapped in the rubble. One of them, in the basement of the North Tower, was using a wireless organizer to send e-mails.
According to the reports, the person in the basement had been communicating with rescue workers by using the device, reportedly a Blackberry, since 4:30 this morning. He was believed to be trapped under mounds of steel, and the reports said rescue workers were cutting through the metal piece by piece to try to reach him.
Two survivors interviewed at Bellevue Hospital by Agence France-Presse supported the reports that others might still be trapped alive in the rubble.
"There are tunnels underground that connect all the five or six buildings below ground," said Hursley Lever, a mechanic who was at work in an elevator in the North Tower, the first to be hit, when the tower was attacked.
Another survivor, Marlene Cruz, who also worked at the towers, said: "If you know the building you'll get from one building to another. It's pretty well constructed, so if somebody is down there, they may be still alive."
A more tragic note involved another survivor, Ronnie Clifford, who worked at the South Tower. His brother John, of Cork, Ireland, told The Irish Times that hours after learning that Ronnie had managed to escape he was told that their sister, Ruth McCourt, and her 4-year-old daughter, Juliana, had died aboard one of the hijacked planes that rammed the twin towers. John Clifford said Mrs. McCourt had spent most of the last 30 years living in the United States, most recently with her husband, David, in Connecticut.
Meanwhile, rescue workers at the scene issued a call today for new supplies, including dust masks, safety goggles, sunscreen, foot powder, ace bandages, can openers, blankets and dog boots for the canine unit.
The public was requested to bring anything they could to the Jacob Javits Center on West 34th Street, Manhattan.
In Washington, President Bush announced this morning that he would visit the scene of the World Trade Center site on Friday. He announced his planned visit during a brief televised telephone call with Governor George E. Pataki and Mayor Giuliani this morning.
The president was criticized for delaying his return to Washington from a visit to Florida on Tuesday, the day of the terrorist attacks, by stopping off in Louisiana and Omaha on his way back to the White House. The administration said Wednesday that Mr. Bush followed the circuitous route because he had himself been a target of the terrorists.
"I weep and mourn with America," the president said in his call today. "There is a quiet anger in America," he added. But he went on to warn Americans not to aim their anger at Arab-Americans and Muslims, even though Islamic extremists are high on the list of possible suspects in the trade center and Pentagon attacks.
"My resolve is steady and strong about winning this war that has been declared on America," Mr. Bush said. "It's a new kind of war. The government will adjust and this government will call other governments to join us."
"Every world leader I've talked to in recent days has been impressed by what they have seen about our nation and the fabric of our nation."
In a CNN interview today, President Jacques Chirac of France said that in an opinion poll the French people indicated that they were "totally supportive of the United States" and that the French were ready to help. Other world leaders have made similar statements of support.
Except for a heavy military presence, the area of the devastation in Lower Manhattan had an essentially abandoned air this morning, a Times reporter on the scene, Lynette Holloway, said. Soldiers in fatigues were posted on practically every street corner and military officers and plainclothes policemen patrolled the streets, she said.
Tents to house the military were set up in Bowling Green Park.
Sanitation workers continued to clean up the area of the collapsed buildings and building custodians with brooms were sweeping up outside.
Small delicatessens were reopening, but mainly to clean up, Ms. Holloway said. At 56 Water Street, however, a larger deli was open for business, selling products like packaged chips and cleaning out rotted fruit and vegetables.
The new death toll was made at a news briefing this morning by Mr. Giuliani, who said 46 of the 94 recovered bodies had been fully identified, and that some 70 different body parts had also been pulled from the rubble.
"I'm sorry that I have to describe it that way," he said, "but that's unfortunately the situation that we're facing."
"We may not be able to recover everyone," he added, saying the number of those people known to be missing totaled 4,763.
The mayor said the missing included people from the two airliners that crashed into the twin towers, and "information we've been able to glean from businesses" who are looking for people that they believed were working at the trade center "and they haven't been able to make contact with."
A permanent center has been set up at a city armory at Lexington Avenue and 26th Street, where families whose relatives are among the missing can register and take identifying data.
The center began operating at 8 a.m. and will stay open until midnight. It will then "operate every single day," Mr. Giuliani said. "We'll do everything we can to help you."
The mayor also announced that although Manhattan below 14th Street remained closed to everything but emergency vehicles, he hoped to get a good deal of the area opened by midnight tonight, with the goal of opening corridors down to Wall Street.
At the Pentagon, meanwhile, officials said this morning that 126 people were missing from Tuesday's attack. They said this did not include the 64 passengers and crew of the jetliner that crashed into the building.
In New York, a spokesman for Bellevue Hospital announced that about 250 patients had been treated there so far and that 33 had been admitted for further treatment. Their injuries included broken bones and bruises, but he added that a number of newer patients were suffering "severe stress symptoms, the beginning of post-traumatic stress."
The total included 82 firefighters and 38 police officers, most. No survivors were admitted so far today, he added.
The spokesman said hundreds of people had come to Bellevue to donate blood but that no more donations could be accepted. "Perhaps more will be taken on Monday," he added.
September 15, 2001, Veritas News Service, The question no one dares to ask! by William Cooper,
http://williamcooper.com/
- Exclusive,-- Who benefits from the World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist attacks? I can tell you that no Arab nation benefits. I can tell you that no Muslim benefits. So why would any of them mount an attack that even the most stupid idiot fanatic in the world would understand to be the instrument of the absolute condemnation and alienation of his cause by all humanity? Like most Americans I looked to the Arab world for the source of the attack, Not because it was the most obvious solution, but because I have been programed by the media to look only in that direction. I did not look elsewhere until stories appeared that set alarm bells ringing. Are we being deceived and manipulated? Who benefits from these attacks?
Questions that remain unanswered from the first World Trade Center Attack.
1. Who is Josie Hadas?
2. Where is Josie Hadas?
3. What was the cargo that Josie Hadas hired Mohammad Salameh to move?
4. Why have the police and the media not explicitly reported that bomb related wiring, instruction sheets and traces of explosives were found in the apartment of Josie Hadas and not in the apartment of Mohammad Salameh?
5. Why did Mohammad Salameh go to the police station twice to make a report of the theft of the van if he was a terrorist?
6. Why did Mohammad Salameh go to the Ryder van rental agency twice to collect a paltry $400.00 if he was a terrorist? Why did he rent the van in his own name if the use was to be a bombing?
7. Why did Mohammad Salameh not run away or try to hide if he was guilty?
8. Why was Mohammad Salameh's link to a given mosque so important while other criminals, such as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Oliver North, Mike Milken, and most others were never linked to their religious affiliation or
the church they attended.
8. What was the real role of the FBI in the bombing?
9. What was the role of the CIA in the lives of those accused?
Points to ponder about the second World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
1. Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said, "There is such a taboo on suicide in Islam, it is completely prohibited in Islam, that we find it inconceivable that somebody would invoke the name of God and then commit some act that is totally opposed to the faith."
2. The video of Palestinians in the streets celebrating news of the attacks was made at around noon according to visible shadows. At the time the video was shot it had to have been near or after sunset in that part of the
world. Therefore the video could not have been shot on the day or at the time claimed.
3. Devout Muslims who would be willing to sacrifice themselves for their cause do not frequent bars and do not ever drink alcoholic beverages.
4. A devout Muslim would not take a copy of his holy book the Quran to a bar and leave it behind when he left after spending an evening drinking, participating in lapdances, and bragging about pending bloodshed to take
place the following day. Who is so stupid that they would believe this?
5. Men who have been so careful during 5 years of planning, training, and careful preparations that never allowed even one leak do not brag the night before their mission that they are going to cause violence and bloodshed the
following day, using credit cards with their correct names, allowing drivers licenses with photos to be xeroxed, nor do they spread incriminating evidence around like popcorn.
6. A devout Muslim on the way to his death would not leave his holy Quran in a parked car. He would take it with him.
7. According to news accounts the perpetrators planned the attack as long ago as 5 years, trained to carry out the attack, pulled it off without a hitch, and no information regarding the attack was ever leaked to anyone.
8. Reference #7. Now someone wants us to believe that these were a bunch of drunken fools who shot pistols in their homes, braggarts, who spoke of impending violence and bloodshed to everyone they met and left incriminating evidence everywhere. We are supposed to believe that by some incredible miracle they escaped the notice of every law enforcement and intelligence agency in the entire world. Now read #7 again.
9. Why did the hijackers force passengers to call relatives?
10. They were able to hijack 4 large commercial jets full of passengers without any problem.
11. They were able to deviate from the flight plan and crash into their targets without any effort from law enforcement or the military to stop them.
12. The simultaneous hi-jackings of 4 large commercial jet aircraft did not alert anyone to the possibility of the impending attacks.
13. Despite the evidence of wreckage strewn over several miles in Pennsylvania and the testimony of eye witnesses the government still denies that Flt-93 was shot down by an F-16 fighter aircraft that was identified as having flown for many miles alongside and behind the hi-jacked plane.
Reference the links to the CNN Transcript and the link F-16 Fighter below:
14. Within an hour of the attacks the FBI knew the names, addresses, flight schools they had attended, the aquaintences of the suspects, and had begun a nationwide roundup... yet they cannot find Chandra Levy nor can they say what happened to Jon Benet Ramsey. Pretty strange don't you think? So who benefits? The answer is obvious and very disturbing. Everyone in the oil business will benefit, especially the Bush family and their business partners. Everyone in the defense industrial complex will benefit. The United Nations will benefit. The State of Israel will benefit bigtime. Tyranny in the name of security will benefit and rule over the American
People. And don't be surprised if many Patriots and politically incorrect Americans begin to disappear overnight like the Jews and Gypsys in Nazi Germany. For more points to ponder and support for the above article please visit
the following links.
FBI Pressures Scientists to Lie!
http://www.public-action.com/SkyWriter/WacoMuseum/death/tscr/whitehur/fw_test.html
Blindness & Blowback in the World Trade Center Case.
http://www.yale.edu/ydn/paper/2.15.96/2.15.96storyno.DA.html
FBI Linked to Bombing
http://www.louisbeam.com/fbilinked.htm
FBI Bomb Builders Exposed
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur46.htm
Save Your Children
http://www.stolaf.edu/orgs/pjrn/apr00bombing.html
Kenya/Tanzania Bombs: Perpetrators Caught?
http://www.twf.org/News/Y1998/19980817-Perpetrators.html
Profiling Islam as Terrorism
http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/Articles/politics/profiling_islam_as_terrorism.htm
Man charged in bombing of New York skyscraper!
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V113/N11/bombing.11w.html
Who did it and why?
http://www.iiie.net/Articles/WTCbombing.html
Final Examination
http://www.fplc.edu/exams/trtfl93.htm
Findings of the Muslim Experts
http://www.islam.co.za/themessage/docs/S_emerson.html
Zionist Propaganda and the World Wide Web
http://www.ummah.org.uk/moa-on-line/liars.html
FBI Ignored French Warning
http://news.excite.com/news/r/010913/05/news-attack-france-militant-dc
Men Bragged of Attack!
http://www.icflorida.com/partners/wftv/news/2001/daytona_club.html
Passengers forced to phone relatives!
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/12/uvict.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/09/12/ixhome.html
FBI Ignored Warnings
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/9/13/171838.shtml
Plot in Work 5 Years
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/9/14/101424.shtml
3 men in bar talked of impending bloodshed left Quran on barstool!
http://us.news2.yimg.com/f/42/31/7m/dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010913/us/attacks_florida_18.html
CNN Transcript September 13th 11:43
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/13/bn.01.html
F-16 Fighter with Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_398414.html?menu=
German Police Confirm Iranian Deportee Phoned Warnings!
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_398414.html?menu=
Who is Osama Bin Laden?
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html
Islam - The Modern Religion is located at -
http://www.themodernreligion.com
September 16, 2001, Los Angeles Times, Anti-U.S. Displays Worry Palestinians, by Tracy Wilkinson, Times Staff Writer
JERUSALEM -- The Palestinians have a major public relations problem. First, there were the pictures of cheering Palestinians in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Then, over the weekend, a few Muslim fundamentalists in the Gaza Strip raised a huge poster of Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the U.S. attacks.
Palestinian authorities have dealt with these displays in the way they know best: They confiscated journalists' pictures and pretended the incidents didn't happen.
"We know we are under a spotlight," a Palestinian security official conceded Saturday in a telephone interview from Gaza City.
Images of young Palestinians rejoicing at American death, or honoring the suspected orchestrator of such carnage, make the Palestinians look bad at an enormously sensitive time and play into the hands of Israel, the official said.
"The Israelis take it as though we are anti-American and use it against us," he said.
The official said police were under orders to prevent the demonstrations.
The videotapes and camera film were eventually returned to the Western journalists, the official said. This could not be confirmed immediately. Film was also seized last week from photographers at Palestinian celebrations in Nablus, and the journalists were threatened.
The official, who serves in one of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's principal security forces and spoke on condition of anonymity, said pro-Bin Laden demonstrations are rare and are executed by what he regards as an ill-informed minority, in this case members of the militant Islamic Hamas movement.
His comments echoed those of top Palestinian representatives such as Hanan Ashrawi and Information Minister Yasser Abed-Rabbo, who said Palestinian reactions were being distorted to turn the world against the Palestinian cause.
There is no denying, however, that anti-American sentiment has run high among Palestinians, especially during the last year of Israeli-Palestinian clashes that have left more than 700 people dead, most of them Palestinians.
The Palestinian reaction to what happened in the United States last week is complex. Huge numbers of Palestinians do not approve of the murder of innocent civilians. But they are extremely angry at what they see as an arrogant U.S. policy that favors their worst enemy, Israel, and the use by Israel of powerful American weapons.
Many Palestinians have expressed satisfaction that the United States finally understands what it feels like to be brutally attacked.
Arafat, meanwhile, is keen to get on America's good side and has even offered to join the Bush administration's "global alliance against terrorism" in hopes of staving off further Israeli assault.
But he will be under pressure to restrain militant groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, which are responsible for suicide bombing attacks on Israelis and are very popular among Palestinian masses.
September 17, 2001, Ha'aretz / David Irving’s ActionReportOnline, Five Israelis detained for "puzzling behavior" after WTC tragedy, by Yossi Melman, Elul 29, 5761, Israel Time: 00:01 (GMT+3)
FIVE Israelis who had worked for a moving company based in New Jersey are being held in U.S. prisons for what the Federal Bureau of Investigation has described as "puzzling behavior" following the terror attack on the World Trade Center in New York last Tuesday. The five are expected to be deported sometime soon.
The families of the five, who asked that their names not be released, said that their sons had been questioned by the FBI for hours on end, had been kept in solitary confinement for three days, and had been humiliated, stripped of their clothes and blindfolded.
The mother of one of the young men explained the chain of events as she understands it to Ha'aretz:
She said that the five had worked for the company, which is owned by an Israeli, for between two months and two years. They had been arrested some four hours after the attack on the Twin Towers while filming the smoking skyline from the roof of their company's building, she said. It appears that they were spotted by one of the neighbors who called the police and the FBI.
The mother said that the families and friends of the five in Israel had known nothing of the men's whereabouts for a number of days.
"When they finally let my son make a phone call for the first time to a friend in the United States two days ago, he told him that he had been tortured by the FBI in a basement," the mother said. "He was stripped to his underwear; he was blindfolded and questioned for 14 hours. They thought that because he has citizenship of a European country as well as of Israel that he was working for the Mossad [Israel's secret service]."
Seven FBI agents later stormed the apartment of one of the Israelis, searched it and questioned his roommate. The Israeli owner of the company, who has U.S. citizenship, was also questioned. Both men were subsequently released.
The families here complained that the Israeli consulate in New York and the situation room set up by the Foreign Ministry there to locate missing Israelis had done nothing to help their sons. The Foreign Ministry told the families that the FBI had denied holding the five and that the consulate had chosen to believe the FBI, the mother said.
The five were transferred out of the FBI's facility on Saturday morning and are now being held in two prisons in New Jersey by the Immigration and Naturalization Services. They are charged with illegally residing in the United States and working there without permits.
The Foreign Ministry said in response that it had been informed by the consulate in New York that the FBI had arrested the five for "puzzling behavior." They are said to have had been caught videotaping the disaster and shouting in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery
December 17, 2001, The Guardian, The hate that will not die, by Linda Grant,
Millions believe 4,000 Jews stayed away from the World Trade Centre on September 11. Harmless conspiracy theory? Or sign of a virulent new anti-semitism? Linda Grant on how the Arab world is exporting an old hatred to the west.
On September 18, Al-Manar television based in Beirut broadcast a news item that subsequently appeared on its English-language website: "With the announcement of the attacks at the World Trade Centre in New York, the international media, particularly the Israeli one, hurried to take advantage of the tragedy and started mourning 4,000 Israelis who work at the two towers. Then suddenly, no one ever mentioned anything about those Israelis and later it became clear that they remarkably did not show up for their jobs the day the incident took place ... Arab diplomatic sources revealed to the Jordanian al-Watan newspaper that those Israelis remained absent that day based on hints from the Israeli general security apparatus, the Shabak, the fact which evoked unannounced suspicions on American officials who wanted to know how the Israeli government learned about the incident before it occurred."
This is the first recorded account of an urban legend that has swept the Arab world. Not a single fact in it has ever been substantiated. It appears to be based on concern expressed by the Israeli government for the fate of 4,000 Israelis resident in New York, a small number of whom worked at the World Trade Centre. Within a matter of days it was no longer 4,000 Israelis who were supposed not to have turned up to work, but 4,000 Jews; then reports appeared that "not a single Jew" died on September 11. The story dug itself into the official version of events, appearing in the mainstream Arab press as well as on neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites based in America. An opinion poll conducted on October 1 by Paknews.com, a sophisticated English-language online news site, asked how readers regarded the story of the 4,000 Jews not reporting to work. Fully 71 % thought that it was a "possible fact".
Possible fact soon became established fact among government ministers in the Arab world. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post on October 19, "At a meeting in Damascus last week with a delegation from the British Royal College of Defence Studies, [Syrian Defence Minister Mustafa Tlass] said the Mossad planned the ramming of two hijacked airliners into the WTC's towers as part of a Jewish conspiracy. He also told the British visitors that the Mossad had given thousands of Jewish employees of the WTC advance warning not to go to work that day." Yosri Fouda, deputy executive director of the London bureau of the television station Al-Jazeera, dismisses these conspiracy theories as the work of "half-educated people". Al Manar, the source of the story, according to its website is "the first Arab establishment to stage an effective psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy." Fouda describes it as "Hezbollah TV". "There are hundreds of conspiracy theories in the absence of compelling evidence," he says. "These ideas hit a nerve with those who don't enjoy very basic human rights and liberties."
Does it matter to the west that absurd conspiracy theories like this one have taken hold, not just in the Middle East but throughout the Arab and Muslim world? Aren't they just the posturing of the powerless? Perhaps, but three months after September 11, some of its complex causes are starting to be revealed. As we dig deeper we find that one root of the assault lay in the emergence of the doctrine of Islamism, a fusion of a narrow, intolerant fundamentalist reading of the Koran with a political movement opposed to all western social, economic and cultural influence. One of its central beliefs is in the enduring evil of Judaism and the Jews, irrespective of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and transcending borders or national disputes. Why Jews? Because if America has been branded the enemy, the Great Satan, and Jews are widely believed to "control" America, in the gruesome logic that follows, it becomes "obvious" that Jews have a "secret plan" to destroy Islam and the Arab world.
These ideas are neither of recent origin, nor confined to the Middle East. In 1983, in his Pakistan-set novel Shame, Salman Rushdie wrote of anti-semitism among those who had never met a Jew. More worryingly, alliances are being made between Muslims who buy into such theories, and the American neo-Nazi and white supremacist parties that have found in them a gullible new audience to advance theories discredited in the west for more than 50 years.
In the week before September 11 there were already disturbing signs that anti-semitism was reaching a new pitch. The attack on New York took place three days after the chaotic close of the Durban Anti-Racism Conference in which 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 NGO resolution was not backed by major human rights groups such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. 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 forum's unfortunate outcome."
The language was so intemperate that Mary Robinson, the UN human rights commissioner, refused to present it to the governmental conference. The atmosphere at the conference has been described as saturated with anti-semitism. 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 union's 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, so shocked Robinson that she declared at an official dinner: "When I see something like this, I am a Jew." A session on anti-semitism at the conference was broken up by protestors. There was opposition to having anti-semitism designated a hate crime and Robinson was booed when she referred to the holocaust against the Jews. Karen Pollock, director of the Holocaust Education Trust, which provides schools in Britain with resource materials and teacher training, represented the Board of Deputies of British Jews at the conference. In a briefing to the board on her return, she reported on the NGO forum: "Session after session seemed to provide platforms for extreme anti-Jewish propaganda. A session on hate crime not only had a speaker whose thesis was that Israel's existence was a 'hate crime', but when one person asked a question, he was heckled with shouts of, 'Jew! Jew! Jew!'."
That the campaigners on behalf of Palestinian rights were surprised at the negative reaction to the blatantly anti-semitic material they brought with them, indicates how commonplace such hate speech has become in the Arab world, the extent to which it now forms a normal part of political discourse. I asked Rina Attar Goren, European director of the Middle East Media and Research Institute (an independent organisation that monitors and translates the Middle East press) if she could provide any recent examples of anti-semitic, as opposed to anti-Zionist, material from the Arab and Palestinian media. "How many do you need?" she asked me. "Five, 10, 100?" A few hours later she emailed me 20 articles, dating from February 2000 to this month, revealing an anti-semitic propaganda campaign that went far beyond the limits of the Palestinian cause. Several were from the state-sponsored Egyptian press. They included a number of pieces on Holocaust denial (claiming that the Nazi genocide against the Jews was a lie made up by Jews to wring money out of western governments, and to justify taking over Arab lands) and repeated reiterations of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", an anti-semitic forgery originating in 19th-century tsarist Russia that invented a secret cabal of Jews plotting to take over the world.
The "Protocols" are enshrined in the Charter of the Palestinian organisation Hamas: "After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates," it says. "When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying." An Arabic translation of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf is being distributed by Al-Shurouq, a Ramallah-based book distributor, to East Jerusalem and territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority. According to an Agence France Presse report on September 8, the book, previously banned by Israel, had been allowed by the PA and was sixth on the Palestinian bestseller list.
The PA, with EU funding, has been updating schoolbooks that had not been replaced since the time of Jordanian rule. Most of the anti-semitic stereotyping and incitement against Israel has gone, but last year Israel and the PA met in Cyprus to discuss how the Holocaust against the Jews should be represented. Dr Musa Al-Zu'but, chairman of the Palestinian Legislative Council education committee, writing in the PA newspaper Al-Risala on April 13, 2000, said: "There will be no such attempt to include the history of the Holocaust in the Palestinian curriculum ... The Holocaust has been exaggerated in order to present the Jews as victims of a great crime, to justify [the claim] that Palestine is necessary as a homeland for them, and to give them the right to demand compensation."
The most extreme example I received was written by Dr Ali Aqleh Ursan, chairman of the Arab Writers Association, in the Syrian publication Al-Usbu' Al-Adabi on February 5 2000: "The covetous, racist, and hated Jew Shylock, who cut the [pound of] flesh from Antonio's chest with the knife of hatred, invades you with his money, his modern airplanes, his missiles, and his nuclear bombs. You must face a hard question: Do you, Christians and Muslims, wish to live, survive and fulfill your convictions? Or are you Abraham's bleating lambs on the threshold of the Jewish altar, who are led to be sent to the Hereafter?"
Much of this is no more than empty rhetoric; the only weapon of those who are helpless, dispossessed and preyed on by corrupt, undemocratic governments. It stems in part from rage at poverty and the lack of human rights (and for the Palestinians, experience of the humiliation and brutality of occupation), and partly from religious fundamentalism, which in all faiths tends to produce violent extremism, Judaism being no exception. Last week, two members of the Jewish Defence League, a far-right racist organisation banned in Israel, were arrested by the FBI on charges of plotting to bomb the King Fahd mosque in Culver City, California, as well as the offices of Darrell Issa, an Arab-American congressman from southern California. The JDL was founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, a racist demagogue whose follower Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994. Nor are secular movements immune. "Death to the Arabs" is a familiar cry on the Israeli football terraces among supporters of the Betar teams, which originated in right-wing Zionist youth movements.
But the prevalence and intensity of anti-semitism in the Arab world make it an altogether more chilling phenomenon. Hasem Saghiyeh, a columnist on Al Hayat, a London based pan-Arab newspaper who has written on and studied anti-semitism in the Arab and Muslim world, describes it as dangerous and increasing at an unprecedented speed. "There are no historic roots for anti-semitism in Islam," he says. "It's a new-born phenomenon that began with contact between Arabs and European Christians in the late 19th century. It really emerges this century not out of myths about Jews, as it did in Europe, but in a real and concrete fight for land. The process of translating books like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on a popular scale started in Egypt in Nasser's time [the 50s and 60s], but only the fundamentalist movement incorporated them into its literature. Arab and Muslim anti-semitism is rooted in a certain uneasiness with modernity because deep down it is seen in connection with colonialism, and [to the fundamentalists] Jews are associated with both communism and capitalism."
On September 11 many Americans discovered to their amazement that large parts of the world hated their country. During the week in Durban, many Jews discovered that the old hostility against them had not died or been driven to the extreme, unrepentant margins. The question they began to ask was whether there was a serious chance of history repeating itself. Addressing a conference early in November, Dr Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain, warned that Islamic extremists were in danger of reawakening the same anti-Jewish hatred that had led to the Holocaust: "The same demonisation, the same evil fantasies ... as if humanity had learned nothing from the past." But a major difference between the 30s and today is that there can be no mass genocide against the Jewish populations of the countries that produce the most virulent anti-semitism, because those countries have few or no Jewish citizens. Between 1948 and 1956, half a million left, fled or were expelled from the Arab world in the aftermath of the creation of Israel, quarter of a million from Morocco alone. The export of these ideas is the danger, when they enter the mainstream of British, European and American Muslim communities through newspapers, websites and sermons in mosques.
White supremacist hate-groups, such as America's neo-Nazi National Alliance, have seen in the anti-semitism of the Arab and Muslim world an opportunity to make strategic alliances under the pretence of support for Palestinian rights. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the US organisation that campaigns against anti-semitism, Muslims, a weekly English-language newspaper based in New York, reprinted on October 5 an article by William Pierce (leader of the alliance), under the headline: "Israel Wants America to Send Ground Troops, Whip Muslim Armies, Take Over their Countries and Install Puppet Governments That Will Follow the Jews' Orders." In November, the alliance organised a march on an Illinois mosque with the purpose of attacking Muslims. At the march hundreds of members of an organisation called the World Church of the Creator handed out recruitment leaflets quoting Bin Laden's call for a war on Jews and demanding an end to American support for Israel. But the same organisation has another leaflet showing a picture of the WTC attack, asking: "Are you prepared to fight the Arab holy war on American soil? End Muslim immigration now!"
The anti-semitic canards and forgeries originate in Christian Europe, (some centuries old, such as the Norwich blood libel that accused Jews of the ritual killing of Christian children for the Passover seder) and were exported from the west to the Muslim world. Long ago discredited here, those myths and conspiracy theories are being sent back again, where they are used as a propaganda tool by a hard core of racists.
The Jewish community in Britain has referred to the police 13 cases of written incitement to murder Jews. A leaflet distributed in October last year in Stamford Hill, north London included a quote from a commentary on the Koran that states: "The hour [ie the Messianic age] will not come until the Muslims kill the Jews." So far there seems to be no political will to prosecute. Meanwhile, on the advice of the police acting on operational intelligence, the community is on maximum security. In the US, 73% of all reported hate crimes on the basis of religion in 2000 were against Jews, according to official FBI figures, though this may reflect a greater confidence in reporting them than among other groups of more recent immigrants. Attacks on mosques since September 11 will undoubtedly transform those figures dramatically.
Whine argues that anti-semitic attacks have not gone away, they are merely held in check by ferocious security arrangements that create an image of a defensive, paranoid, suspicious religion. Rabbi Tony Bayfield, chief executive of the Reform Movement of British Jews, says: "The Sternberg centre where I work is supposed to be a major face of the Jewish community to the outside world, and I don't like having high gates and security cameras. What kind of message does it send out? But every synagogue has to be guarded for Sabbath service, and there is no question that the police think it's necessary."
Until now, when Jews looked for support at a time of rising anti-semitism, their natural allies were the anti-racist left. But because anti-semitism is now inextricably linked with the situation in Israel and Palestine, and because of the resurgence of the Zionism is Racism argument, which rejects a two-state solution, some critics of Israel no longer seem willing to make a distinction between those Jews who support and those Jews who oppose the Israeli occupation. Any support of Israel's right to exist as a sovereign state under any conditions at all is branded as Zionism, and hence collusion in racism and apartheid. In October, the poet Tom Paulin wrote to the Guardian to demand that if it employs journalists who hold such views, they should declare their "Zionist credentials". Beyond the left there is a widespread belief in Britain, reinforced by news reporting and comment pieces, that the attack on September 11 would never have happened if it had not been for Israeli brutality in Gaza and the West Bank. Others go further and argue that the existence of Israel and its support by the US is a threat to world peace. Many Jews now feel that they are being made the scapegoats for a complex phenomenon combining globalisation, the rise of fundamentalism, oil interests, anti-Americanism and Middle East politics - that if the third world war begins it will, as usual, be blamed on "the Jews".
The anti-semitism unleashed in the past three months poses complex questions for Jews, Muslims and those who campaign against injustices suffered by others. It will be interesting to see, in time to come, how well any of us does in addressing them. As a British Jew I can offer some ways in which some of us can begin to construct a defence against ant-semitism. It would involve the left realigning itself: ceasing the demonisation of the Jewish majority who defend Israel's existence; making alliances with Jews, such as those who support Peace Now and Gush Shalom, which are actively seeking an end to the horrific violence of the past year, one which would provide a just solution to the long agony of the Palestinians. Both the left and British Muslims would have to begin to recognise the massive rise of anti-semitism in the Arab and Muslim world for what it is: anti-semitism rather than any cogent analysis of the problems of the Middle East. It would involve British Muslims announcing in their press, their mosques and their community centres that Muslims are being manipulated into believing myths, urban legends and racist slanders peddled by those with no interest in tolerance, human rights or justice; that Islamophobia and anti-semitism fall under the same heading - racist scapegoating. In fact, hearteningly this process is already beginning to occur. Writing in this week's edition of the Egyptian newspaper Al Haram, the columnist Hani Shukrallah discusses the imminent televisation throughout the Arab world of a new dramatisation of the Protocols. How, he asks, can the Arab world preserve its civilisation "by reproducing one of the ugliest products of the west's?"
British Jews have long been embroiled in an argument among themselves that mirrors the fierce debates inside Israel. It seems axiomatic to some of us who have maintained our faith with the peace activists of Gush Shalom and Peace Now that if justice were to be delivered to the Palestinians in the form of a state based on UN Resolution 242, and solutions found to the problems of the division of Jerusalem and the status of the refugees, most of the Arab anti-semitism would wither away. Not all Jews, particularly on the right, are convinced that a two-state solution will fully satisfy the Palestinian demand for the return of their homeland, particularly when the maps in the new textbooks in Palestinian schools explicitly refer to the whole of Israel as Palestinian territory. After the recent bloodbath perpetrated by Hamas, who have the most virulent anti-semitism enshrined in their charter, the tendency is for the slogans of peaceniks to turn to ashes in the mouth. Instead we think of the assault by the Holocaust deniers of the Arab and Palestinian world on our right to remember the dead of Shoah, and if we wish to speak now, it is to say, defiantly: "Am Yisroel Chai" - the children of Israel live.
But these are not the only Hebrew words that are important to us. My own belief - which deepens with each incursion by the Israeli army into Palestinian territory - is that we can survive without the settlements and the policies of Ariel Sharon, whose endgame is to foment civil war among the Palestinians as an excuse to re-occupy and turn Gaza and the West Bank into Lebanon. We cannot survive without what animates our culture: Jewish morality. Not without "Tzedek" (justice) or "Rachmanut" (compassion.) We cannot survive if we forget that they apply not only to ourselves but to others. To all of us - Jews, Muslims, activists on behalf of Palestinian rights - Primo Levi's urgent message still applies: "Shutting his mouth, his eyes and his ears, he built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door."
September 18, 2001, 07:16:56 [itb] WTC X Files” 4,000 Jews Did Not Go To Work At WTC On Sept. 11, by Ihsan Hariadi, -msg 26333, Archive Localization: Bahasa Indonesia
[itb] WTC "X_Files" (3)
Regardless of the accuracy of the following information, I belive, Mulder and Scully would have alot of work to do if they intend to to disclose a bunch of undisclosed information related to the * September 11, 2001 disaster * which have been and would likely be kept secret by FBI and other US Authorities, even from US public, due to "security" reasons.
----------------------------------------------< ihsan >---------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 03:20:17 -0700 (PDT)
From: A Nizami <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
--------------------------------------------
If this true, then there is a possibility the Jews who attack WTC and Pentagon and put the blame on Arab. After all there are some funny things:
1. The "Main Suspect" Adnan and Ameer Bukhari are later found out to be untrue. Ameer Bukhari died a year ago.
2. The dead hijacker in WTC plane crash, lately found alive in Arabia. He is not involved, and his ID stolen
while he was in USA. Mossad could steal the ID.
3. Barbara Olson, one of the eye witnesses never mention any Arab.
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From : "InfoTimes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date : Tue, 18 Sep 2001, 02:43:08 -0400
Subject: [muslim] 4,000 Jews Did Not Go To Work At WZC On Sept. 11
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INFORMATION TIMES: http://www.InformationTimes.com
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[4,000 Jews Did Not Go To Work At World Trade Center On Sept. 11]
< http://www.manartv.com/html/engmiddle.html >
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4,000 Israeli Employees in WTC Absent the Day of the Attack
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With the announcement of the attacks at the World Trade Center in New York, the international media, particularly the Israeli one, hurried to take advantage of the incident and started mourning 4,000 Israelis who work at the two towers. Then suddenly, no one ever mentioned anything about those Israelis and later it became clear that they remarkably did not show up in their jobs the day the [four passenger aircraft hijacking and crashing] incident [at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and Pennsylvania] took place [on Tuesday, September 11, 2001].
No one talked about any Israeli being killed or wounded in the attacks. Arab diplomatic sources revealed to the Jordanian al-Watan newspaper that those Israelis remained absent that day [Tuesday, September 11, 2001] based on hints from the Israeli General Security Apparatus, the Shabak, the fact which evoked unannounced suspicions on American officials who wanted to know how the Israeli government learned about the incident before it occurred, and the reasons why it refrained from informing the U.S. authorities of the information it had.
Suspicions had increased further after Israeli newspaper Yadiot Ahranot revealed that the Shabak prevented Israeli premier Ariel Sharon from traveling to New York and particularly to the city's eastern coast to participate in a festival organized by the Zionist organizations in support of the "Israel". Aharon Bernie, the commentator at the newspaper, brought up the issue and came up with a negative conclusion, saying "no answer". He then asked about the clue behind the Shabak's position in preventing Sharon's participation, and again without giving an answer.
Bernie added that Sharon, who was delighted for having his speech on top of the festival agenda, asked the head of the organization to mediate and convince the Shabak to change its position, but his attempts were in vein. The next day after Sharon's secretary officially announced that Sharon would not participate the incident [at the World Trade Center] took place.
For its part, the Israeli Ha'aretz newspaper revealed that the FBI arrested five Israelis four hours after the attack on the [World Trade Center] Twin Towers while filming the smoking skyline from the roof of their company's building. The FBI had arrested the five for "puzzling behavior". They are said to have been caught videotaping the disaster in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery.
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September 18, 2001, (Untrusted Source Material) 4,000 Israeli WTC Employees Absent Day of Attack
Israel (Ha'aretz) and Beirut (AL-MANAR Television)-- With the announcement of the attacks at the World Trade Center in New York, the international media, particularly the Israeli one, hurried to take advantage of the incident and started mourning 4,000 Israelis who work at the two towers.
Then suddenly, no one ever mentioned anything about those Israelis and later it became clear that they remarkably did not show up in their jobs the day the [four passenger aircraft hijacking and crashing] incident [at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and Pennsylvania] took place [on Tuesday, September 11, 2001].
No one talked about any Israeli being killed or wounded in the attacks. Arab diplomatic sources revealed to the Jordanian al-Watan newspaper that those Israelis remained absent that day [Tuesday, September 11, 2001] based on hints from the Israeli General Security Apparatus, the Shabak, the fact which evoked unannounced suspicions on American officials who wanted to know how the Israeli government learned about the incident before it occurred, and the reasons why it refrained from informing the U.S. authorities of the information it had.
Suspicions had increased further after Israeli newspaper Yadiot Ahranot revealed that the Shabak prevented Israeli premier Ariel Sharon from traveling to New York and particularly to the city's eastern coast to participate in a festival organized by the Zionist organizations in support of the "Israel". Aharon Bernie, the commentator at the newspaper, brought up the issue and came up with a negative conclusion, saying "no answer". He then asked about the clue behind the Shabak's position in preventing Sharon's participation, and again without giving an answer.
Bernie added that Sharon, who was delighted for having his speech on top of the festival agenda, asked the head of the organization to mediate and convince the Shabak to change its position, but his attempts were in vein. The next day after Sharon's secretary officially announced that Sharon would not participate the incident [at the World Trade Center] took place.
For its part, the Israeli Ha'aretz newspaper revealed that the FBI arrested five Israelis four hours after the attack on the [World Trade Center] Twin Towers while filming the smoking skyline from the roof of their company's building. The FBI had arrested the five for "puzzling behavior". They are said to have been caught videotaping the disaster in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery.
Full story: http://www.manartv.com
http://www.haaretzdaily.com
September 18, 2001, CNN News,"Jewish New Year Begin on Somber Note,"
The Jewish new year, known as Rosh Hashana, opened on a somber note in New York synagogues as congregations mourned the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks while marking the holiday.
At one synagogue on Manhattan's upper West Side, the congregation gathered Monday night for Rosh Hashana minus six members who were lost during last week's attacks.
Five of them were in the World Trade Center, and one was in the plane that hit the Pentagon. None of their bodies have been recovered.
Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor officiated at three of their funerals Sunday, but the other three families still hold out hope.
"Our world is not and cannot be the same after the events of one week ago," Bretton-Granatoor told his synagogue.
"We grieve with those who still search. We grieve with those who have lost loved ones."
Bretton-Granatoor urged his synagogue to love God and one another in the face of the tragedy.
"What we must do is hold each other a little tighter, care more for one another," he said.
"The history of our people is strewn with one awful event after another, and yet our people have constantly clung to life."
-- CNN's Elizabeth Cohen contributed to this report.
September 19, 2001, [Updated 14:12:04] Pakistani News Service, 4000 Israeli employees in WTC escape,
ISLAMABAD, September 19 (PNS): PNS Note: This item news was first filed by AL-MANAHAR Lebanon. Till date, no other verification of this news has been received. We will continue to strive to bring you most recent and up-to-date minute by minute developments on tragic WTC incident, as reported by our reporting network as well as independent syndicated networks.
Nearly 4000 Israeli employed in World Trade Center in New York were absent on the day the incident of air attacks took place in US on September 11.
"No one talked about any Israeli being killed or wounded in the attacks" Arab diplomatic sources revealed to the Jordanian al-Watan newspaper adding that those Israelis remained absent that day based on hints from Shabak, the Israeli General Security Apparatus.
According to an Israeli newspaper Yadiot Ahranot, the Shabak also prevented Israeli premier Ariel Sharon from traveling to New York and particularly to the city's eastern coast to participate in a festival organized by the Zionist organizations in support of the "Israel". End.
Sept. 23, 2001, paknews.com comment thread,
Comments by: arjun34
Heading: This rumor is not true..
Comments: According to this UK map of missing people, Israel is missing 113:
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2001322462,00.html
It's not even plausible that there were 4,000 Israelis that worked there!
(The archived page directed to has been recoded and is illegible)
Comments by: s. grant
Heading: israelis escaped world trade blast
Comments: this is a lie--you should check your sources if you have any--all of the israelis at the world trade center lost their lives--about 130 of them. this kind of story really hurts your credibility!
September 19, 2001, The [UK] Times, Bomber met Iraqi chief of intelligence, by Roland Watson, and Damian Whitworth,, in Washington,
A LINK between Iraq and one of the World Trade Centre attackers was disclosed last night amid British concerns that Washington might use President Bush’s war on terrorism as a pretext to topple Saddam Hussein. American intelligence officials said that Mohammed Atta, who is believed to have been at the controls of the first jet to crash, met the head of Iraqi intelligence this year. They stopped short of saying the meeting demonstrated that Saddam’s hand lay behind the attacks. But some leading figures in the Bush Administration believe that they could yet build a case for Iraq's involvement. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, refused to rule out the possibility that a state had sponsored the hijacks, which have claimed more than 5,000 lives. John Ashcroft, the Attorney-General, declined to comment on reports of Iraqi involvement. Mr Rumsfeld made clear yesterday that the US was not ready to share with the Taliban evidence of Osama bin Laden’s involvement, despite requests to do so from Pakistan. He said it would compromise the US’s intelligence sources, adding: “Does it make sense to begin releasing intelligence information? Of course not.” Mr Ashcroft said that the FBI had received 96,000 leads in the past seven days. He also said that there may have been more than four aircraft intended for last week’s attacks. FBI chiefs also raised the possibility of a second wave of violence. They said that evidence collected during the past seven days pointed to September 22 as a significant date. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said that the attacks on September 11 were “part of a larger plan with other terrorism acts, not necessarily hijacking of airplanes. Those acts were going to occur in the United States and elsewhere in the world.” The suggestion of possible Iraqi involvement will heighten British concerns that the more hawkish voices in Washington could drag the US into hasty moves towards settling “unfinished business” in Baghdad. British officials fear that any such action would destabilise the Middle East and hinder the campaign to bring bin Laden to justice. Richard Cheney, the Vice-President, said that the US would have no reluctance in pursuing Saddam if he was harbouring terrorists. He said that Saddam was “bottled up” at the moment, but that he was linked to "some activities related to terrorism". Richard Perle, the chairman of the Defence Policy Board, said that a "primary goal" of the war on terrorism should be to overthrow Saddam.
September 20, 2001, [5:12 PM ET] More Than 6,300 Said Missing at WTC, by Larry McShane, Associated Press Writer,
NEW YORK (AP) - Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Thursday that the number of missing and presumed dead at the World Trade Center has climbed to 6,333 - an increase of more than 900 since the last estimate.
"The number may go up or down," Giuliani said. He said the higher number reflects reports of foreigners believed to be in the ruins.
Giuliani has said it is virtually certain that no one will be found alive. The number of missing had been at 5,422 for several days.
According to the mayor, the British consulate reported that 250 of its citizens were among the missing.
The bodies of 241 people have been recovered from the Trade Center ruins. Of those, 170 have been identified by the coroner.
Earlier Thursday, with the small steps of children walking back into schools and the sounds of traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, lower Manhattan edged closer to normal.
But at ground zero, where two of the world's tallest buildings were demolished by terrorists, rescue workers hunting survivors toiled in vain. A delegation of 40 U.S. senators toured the World Trade Center site for a firsthand look at the devastation.
Giuliani acknowledged that the combination of the 2,000-degree fire caused by the explosion of two hijacked planes and the implosion of the 110-story towers make it likely that some victims' bodies will never be recovered.
"Even weeks ahead, while we're removing stuff, obviously we're going to be looking," Giuliani said.
"Right now, the possibility still remains. They're slim, but they still remain."
Still, the curtain of sadness that had enveloped the city since Sept. 11 parted a bit on Thursday, as thousands of students who were driven from their classrooms near the World Trade Center by the attack went back to school.
But not back to their own schools, which remain closed. Instead, they moved into other schools around the city, a tight squeeze but not an unhappy one.
"I'm excited to be back," said kindergartner Jason Brilliant as he arrived at Public School 3 in Greenwich Village. "It was a long time because the World Trade Center went 'boom.'"
Parents exchanged hugs and smiles outside the school's red doors.
"The kids were amazing," said teacher Julie Hiraga, who clutched the hands of two students as they ran for safety last week.
The Brooklyn Bridge - a pathway to safety for thousands as they fled the collapsing Trade Center - reopened two Manhattan-bound lanes to automobile traffic for the first time since the attack. The Holland Tunnel could reopen next week, Port Authority officials said.
A delegation of 40 U.S. senators, led by Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Minority Leader Trent Lott, toured the Trade Center site for a look at the ruins left by the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil.
"We support you," said Daschle, D-S.D. ``We're here because we recognize this loss must be shared not only by New Yorkers, but by all Americans."
The group pledged to help the city recover and rebuild from the attack. Last week, Congress voted a $40 billion appropriation to help New York. The Bush administration has pledged to cover all the costs of the massive cleanup.
"I've never seen anything comparable to what we've seen here today, the magnitude of it," said Lott, R-Miss. "It's so important that we come and see what we're dealing with."
Larry Silverstein, leader of a consortium that took over a 99-year, $3.2 billion lease on the complex in July, said Thursday he intends to rebuild - but not ``a carbon copy of what was." Instead, he may construct four 50-story buildings.
At least 30 people remained hospitalized at five Manhattan hospitals that saw the majority of patients following the attack.
Twenty Manhattan hospitals treated people that day, said Mary Johnson of the Greater New York Hospital Association. All in all, 83 hospitals in the five boroughs and the suburban counties of Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk treated 5,284 people, Johnson said. Of them, 418 were admitted.
Some residents were allowed into Battery Park City on Thursday for the first time since the attack. They were allowed just 15 minutes. Most emptied refrigerators of spoiled food and packed precious items into a suitcase or two.
When will they be allowed back to their homes?
"You can ask five different people, you get five different answers," said Jay Jaffe, 34, an equity trader who lugged some of his possessions through the rain.
September 21, 2001, New York Times, "Effort to ID Victims an Issue For Jews."
"The only people who benefited from 9/11 act of terror are the Jews. This is not the first time Israel and the Jews have done something like this in the name of someone else to further their own selfish needs. They have even resorted to killing their own people to win public sympathy and support, just like Hitler. This act is not beyond the capabilities and evil deeds of Israel. In this case it seems that it is clear to all that the Jews/Israel have most to gain and should be considered as a possible source behind this act."
Associated Press. "Effort to ID Victims an Issue for Jews."
The New York Times.
September 21, 2001, Pravda, Irina Malenko: 4,000 Israelis Working at the WTC Failed to Turn Up at Work on That Day, [16:49]
After it was announced that the WTC in New York had been attacked, the mass media of many countries, especially in Israel, hurried to avail themselves of the incident and declared mourning for 4,000 Israelis working in the towers of the World Trade Centre. All of a sudden, the Israeli workers stopped being talked about. It became clear later that they did not turn up at work that day when four passenger jets were hijacked in the USA and used in terrorist attacks. Nobody is talking about the Israelis being killed or wounded in the attack. According to Arab diplomatic sources cited by the Jordan newspaper Al-Wattan, the Israeli workers just did not appear at work that day, because they had taken a ⌠hint from Israeli secret police (Shabak). This fact caused concern among American officials who want to know how the Israelis knew of the attacks before they attacks were carried out and why the Israelis did not advice the US authorities about it?
Suspicions became even stronger after the Israeli newspaper Yadiot Akhranot came out with the news that Shabak allegedly prevented Premier Sharon from visiting New York (specifically, to the eastern part of the city) to attend a festival organized by Zionist groups to rally ⌠support for Israel. Akharon Berni, the newspaper’s commentator, raised this question, but did not get any answer. He even requested information as to what were the grounds of warning Mr. Sharon, and again he received no answer. Mr. Berni went on to say that Premier Sharon was very enthusiastic while making an address at the festival and asked the leadership of the host organization to persuade Shabak that there was nothing to worry about. The next day after Mr. Sharon’s secretary announced that his boss would not attend the festival, the WTC went tumbling down.
The Israeli newspaper Na-Arets, in its turn, says that the FBI arrested five Israelis when they were filming the smoking rubble from their office’s roof; those Israelis are being accused of enigmatic behaviour. It is also said that they were rejoicing and even sneering while filming.
September 21, 2001 [04:26 p.m. EDT] ABC News, Foreign Nationals Add to List of Missing in Terror Attack,
Citizens of 80 countries were among those lost in the World Trade Center tragedy. As the international community compiles names of suspected victims, the number of those missing has risen from 5,422 to 6,333.
New details of missing foreigners have pushed the number of people believed missing or dead in the rubble of the World Trade Center to 6,333 today as President Bush (news - web sites) urged prayers of support for the victims of the terror attacks.
The swelling number was largely due to new possible victim lists submitted from abroad, said New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (news - web sites) on Thursday.
Citizens of 80 countries were missing and presumed dead in the disaster, Bush said in his address to Congress on Thursday night. More than 130 were Israeli citizens and more than 250 were citizens of India, he said.
Rescue workers today struggled with thundershowers and had to temporarily halt their work early this morning as a lightning storm made it hazardous to work near shattered metal beams.
Although no one has been found alive since Sept. 12, the day after two hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center's twin towers, city officials were not officially transitioning their mission from a rescue to a recovery operation.
But during a radio address on WABC today, Giuliani admitted that few people, if any, were likely to be alive under the rubble of the World Trade Center.
"The chance of recovering anyone alive is very, very small," he said. "We're not going to recover significant numbers of people. We know that. We recognize that."
New York Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen told Reuters his workers had made an unofficial transition from a search for survivors to a search for human remains today.
"It's really happening in a normal kind of a transition that I think is acceptable to everybody and the best way for us to get this done," he said.
An 'Eerie Pompeii'
As emergency workers arrived at the site to replace the exhausted overnight crew on a grim, gray morning, the mood among workers was resolutely hopeful.
So far, 241 bodies have been recovered, but only 170 have been identified by the coroner's office. The dead include 37 police officers, 32 firefighters, two emergency medical technicians, two Port Authority employees and one New Jersey firefighter. The number of injured stands at 6,291.
Crews have removed 68,943 tons of debris from the site, but an estimated 1 million to 2 million tons remain, and officials have said it will take at least six months to clear it all.
For observers hoping for some sign of life under the rubble, the heavy equipment being brought in to clear the ruins of the twin towers today was another bleak sign of the dwindling chances of finding survivors.
The shopping level below the World Trade Center Plaza had escaped damage in some spots, some workers told ABCNEWS, but they described the deserted concourse as an "eerie Pompeii," referring to the ruins of a 79 A.D. Roman city.
Police detectives were investigating several incidents of looting in the concourse area under the World Trade Center complex today. Two people were arrested on allegations of looting a designer watch and jewelry store in the concourse level, police sources told ABCNEWS.
Horror and Diminishing Hopes
As rescue teams desperately search through the rubble that was once the World Trade Center, political leaders have been making their way to "ground zero" to get a firsthand look at the destruction wrought by America's worst terrorist attack.
On Thursday, Giuliani led Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. Charles Meerschaum, D-N.Y., along with 38 other U.S. senators, through the muck and wreckage. Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert is expected to visit the site later today.
"I'm from a part of the country that has been hit by hurricanes repeatedly," said Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. "But I must say, I've never seen anything comparable to what we have seen here today, the magnitude of it and the horror of it."
While maintaining hope, Giuliani in recent days has conceded the chances of finding any more survivors is growing increasingly slim.
But Earl said the remaining glimmer of hope keeps rescue workers going and prevents them from giving up.
"In earthquakes, they've pulled people out after 14 days, after two weeks, if someone's at a spot where there's some kind of availability of water, which is one way that the rain might help somebody if they're trapped in there," he said.
"Hopefully, there are signs of life, but realistically we're starting to lose hope for that," he said.
"But we're forcing ourselves to still hope. We know that it's still a possibility."
Weekend Memorial Moved to Yankee Stadium
As the rescue search continued, New York City firefighters and police officers mourned the loss of their missing colleagues.
City officials announced that a weekend memorial originally planned in New York's Central Park for fallen firefighters and police officers will instead be held at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx at 3 p.m. on Sunday. Giuliani said additional mourners might be able to gather at minor league baseball stadiums in Brooklyn, Staten Island and Newark, N.J.
Giuliani said the memorial in Central Park, which was expected to draw up to 1 million people, was canceled due to security concerns. The ceremony at Yankee Stadium will only allow 60,000 mourners.
'Hallowed Ground'
Rescue work meanwhile has continued at two other disaster sites.
At the Pentagon, where a hijacked airplane crashed into the west side of the building, virtually all debris removal has been completed.
FBI agents have begun to collect criminal evidence from the rubble. That process is expected to take another two or three weeks, after which the evidence will be taken to a nearby deposit site for a closer examination that could last a month or longer, an FBI official in Washington said today.
An investigation also is proceeding at the site where hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, killing all 44 people aboard after passengers on the plane apparently fought the hijackers.
FBI Director Robert Mueller — visiting the Shanksville, Pa., site with Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites) on Thursday — said the FBI still is analyzing the plane's cockpit voice recorder, but it was clear the passengers on-board did everything they could to stop the hijackers from crashing into any buildings and killing any innocent people on the ground.
"We believe those passengers on this jet were absolute heroes and their actions during this flight were heroic," Mueller said.
Ashcroft said the site where so many died felt like "hallowed ground," and vowed to catch and punish everyone involved in the terror attacks.
"We will identify the parties responsible," Ashcroft said, "and we will provide a basis for punishing parties and organizations whose mission it was to disrupt America's life of freedom and liberty."
ABCNEWS' Steve Scott and Jim Waggoner in New York contributed to this report.
September 22, 2001, pdastreet.forum, 4000 Israeli Employees in WTC Absent the Day of the Attack, [21:55:11]
[21:55:11 p.m.]
With the announcement of the attacks at the World Trade Center in New York, the international media, particularly the Israeli one, hurried to take advantage of the incident and started mourning 4000 Israelis who work at the two towers. Then suddenly, no one ever mentioned anything about those Israelis and later it became clear that they remarkably did not show up in their jobs the day the incident took place. No one talked about any Israeli being killed or wounded in the attacks. Arab diplomatic sources revealed to the al-Watan newspaper published in Oman that those Israelis remained absent that day based on hints from the Israeli General Security Apparatus, the Shabak, the fact which evoked unannounced suspicions on American officials who wanted to know how the Israeli government learned about the incident before it occurred, and the reasons why it refrained from informing the U.S authorities of the information it had. Suspicions had increased further after Israeli newspaper Yadiot Ahranot revealed that the Shabak prevented Israeli premier Ariel Sharon from traveling to New York and particularly to the city’s eastern coast to participate in a festival organized by the Zionist organizations in support of the "Israel". Aharon Bernie, the commentator at the newspaper, brought up the issue and came up with a negative conclusion, saying "no answer". He then asked about the clue behind the Shabak's position in preventing Sharon’s participation, and again without giving an answer. Bernie added that Sharon, who was delighted for having his speech on top of the festival agenda, asked the head of the organization to mediate and convince the Shabak to change its position, but his attempts were in vein. The next day after Sharon’s secretary officially announced that Sharon would not participate the incident took place. For its part, the Israeli Ha'aretz newspaper revealed that the FBI arrested five Israelis four hours after the attack on the Twin Towers while filming the smoking skyline from the roof of their company’s building. The FBI had arrested the five for "puzzling behavior". They are said to have been caught videotaping the disaster in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery. Muslims March in New York to Say "Islam Is Not Terrorism" Amid More Violence Against Them
Muslims March in New York to Say "Islam Is Not Terrorism" Amid More Violence Against Them Muslims in New York, a community fearing for its security since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, marched through the city center on Sunday to show their support for the United States and their rejection of terrorism and warmongers. Over 1,000 Americans of Arab, African and Pakistani origin marched peacefully through Brooklyn to the banks of the Hudson River, across from Manhattan and the still smoking ruins of the WTC, amid an alarming surge in attacks on Muslims. Bassam Amine, a chemist and director of Brooklyn's Muslim school said:
Marchers carried banners insisting "Terrorism isn't Islam," "Love and peace to New York" and—in response to President George W. Bush’s declaration of war on terrorists and countries accused of harboring them, starting with Afghanistan -- "Another war is not the answer”. The religious demonstration, which involved hundreds of candle-carrying women, some wearing the traditional headscarves, was led by a Muslim imam, a Greek priest and a Jewish rabbi. Less than 24 hours after the attacks Washington named Osama bin Laden, the Saudi extremist protected by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, as the suspected mastermind. Marchers were visibly alarmed at the prospect of massive, indiscriminate US retaliation against mainly Muslim countries simply because Washington deemed there were terrorists within their borders. Pakistani taxi driver Iqbar Safdar, who left his cab at home to join the march, said he had not dared leave the house for two days after the attacks. In the United States, there have been reports of shots and Molotov cocktails being directed at Texas mosques, rocks thrown through the windows of an Islamic bookstore in Virginia, shots fired through the windows of a store owned by Arab-Americans in San Antonio, Texas and countless menacing phone calls to Muslim associations across the country. Several schools for Muslim children have elected to remain closed. Today , the Council on American-Islamic Relations will hold a news conference in the nation's Capital to offer a reaction to two shooting deaths over the weekend. In the first shooting, on Saturday, a gunman killed the 45-year-old Sikh owner of gas station in Arizona. Family members of the victim believe he was killed because he looked "Middle Eastern". In the second incident a Pakistani Muslim store owner was shot and killed Saturday evening in Dallas, Texas. Danish police arrested a man as he was about to hurl petrol bombs at a Copenhagen mosque. Meanwhile, the Extra Bladet daily reported that 23 windows had been smashed Sunday by unknown persons at a pizzeria owned by Kurdish immigrants in the town of Dragoer, just outside the capital Copenhagen. Danish Foreign Minister Mogens Lykketoft on Monday denounced the incidents as attempts to incite violence against Muslims and equate terrorism with Islam.
http://www.manartv.com
September 25, 2001, USA Today, Rumor trackers are busier than ever, by Janet Kornblum,
Within three hours of the Sept. 11 attacks, David Emery — one of a handful of writers, editors, volunteers and computer professionals who track Net rumors — was reading his first attack-related e-mail. He never imagined the flood that was to follow. Nearly two weeks later, he's still getting some 200 e-mails a day, most related to the attack on the World Trade Center. "It's just been a steady stream," says Emery, of San Francisco, who writes the "Urban Legends and Folklore" page for About.com.
In fact, there are so many rumors that those who try to debunk (or verify) them are having trouble keeping up.
Barbara Mikkelson, who runs popular Net debunking site Snopes .com with her husband, David, has been working day and night from her Agoura Hills, Calif., home to deal with the rumors. They have even set up a special "Rumors of War" page. "It's been daunting," she says. "It's just one after another."
But she's not really complaining; it's a labor of love. Many of the professional Net-rumor sites spend most of their time debunking virus and hackscares. But often e-mails carry false (and seemingly harmless) rumors. Debunking them is "what we do for a good time," Mikkelson says.
The Mikkelsons, who also founded the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, aren't surprised by the recent wave. It's normal "in the wake of any huge tragedy and the beginning of any armed conflict."
Those who debunk Net rumors understand why they spread — it's a high-tech answer to a very primitive need. "Forever, human beings have sat around campfires and told scary stories," Emery says. And e-mail and the Web are today's common campfire. "It seems like you're more closely related to the story when it comes to you as a private e-mail, even if you don't know that person," Mikkelson says.
Most people think there's no harm in forwarding an e-mail that maybe, possibly, could be true. But there is, Mikkelson says. "You're creating a growing culture of fear where everything is rumor and fear and people jumping out of the shadows."
Contributing: Jefferson Graham
Among rumors circulating via the Net related to the attacks:
• CNN used old footage to fake images of Palestinians dancing in the street after the terrorist attacks. False.
• The "devil's face" appeared in the smoke of the explosion. One can discern a face in photographs, but doctored versions of those photos have also been sent around.
• NASA wants people to light a candle for a satellite photo. False
• Some 4,000 Jews were warned in advance and stayed home from the Trade Center. False.
Source: Snopes.com
September, 28, 2001, CNN News, FBI probing 'threatening' message, firm says, by Daniel Sieberg,
- The FBI is looking into whether a warning sent to employees at an instant message company less than two hours before jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center was connected to the attacks, a company executive confirmed Friday.
Alex Diamandis, vice president for sales and marketing with Odigo Inc., said there was nothing specifically about the attacks in the message, but he said it was suspicious in nature,especially because of its timing.
"I would describe it as a threat, a warning," Diamandis said from New York.
Diamandis declined to comment further on the content of the message, citing the ongoing investigation.
Two employees at the Odigo office in Herzliyya, Israel, received the message at about 7 a.m. EDT on September 11, he said. After the attacks, the staff decided to scour the server logs in order to determine the source of the message, Diamandis said. Information was then passed on to Israeli authorities, who in turn passed it to the FBI.
The FBI did not confirm whether they have received any information from Odigo.
Odigo's New York office is located four blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, in an area that was blocked off for a short time following the attacks
October 5, 2001, Slate.com 4,000 Jews, 1 Lie, Tracking an Internet Hoax. by Bryan Curtis, [5:30 p.m. PT]
[Addendum, Oct. 7, 4 p.m. ET: Osama Bin Laden essentially claimed credit for the Sept. 11 attacks in a statement recorded before Sunday's strikes on Afghanistan. "America was hit by God in one of its softest spots," he said. "If it continues with this policy [against Iraq and the PLO], the sons of Islam will not stop their struggle."]
It is an article of faith in many Muslim countries that Israel was behind the attack on the World Trade Center, with many citing as their evidence a "news report" that 4,000 Israelis called in sick from their jobs at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. The allegation has now appeared on scores of Web sites and bulletin boards, has been reproduced in e-mails too numerous to count, and has run as fact in newspapers and news broadcasts in the Middle East. Where did this charge originate, and what path did it take around the world?
First, a question begs: Where did the precise figure of 4,000 Israelis come from? According to the Anti-Defamation League's Web site, on Sept. 11, the Israeli Embassy released a statement expressing concern about the 4,000 Israeli nationals living in New York City—few of whom actually worked in the World Trade Center. At press time, the embassy couldn't confirm this statement.
According to Nexis and the Google search engine, the first mention of Israeli involvement in the attacks came in a Sept. 17 report on Lebanon's Al-Manar Television. The Los Angeles Times reports that the terrorist group Hezbollah has free access to Al-Manar's airwaves, and the station's Web site claims that the station exists to "stage an effective psychological warfare with the Zionist enemy."
The next day at 6:26 a.m., the American Web site Information Times published an article headlined "4,000 Jews Did Not Go To Work At WTC On Sept. 11," and credited it to an "AL-MANAR Television Special Investigative Report." This was not the first time that Information Times had pointed the finger at Israel. The day after the attacks, it warned in an article that the "terrorist government of Israel … cannot be ruled out" as a suspect. Information Times purports to be edited by Syed Adeeb from the eighth floor of the National Press Club at 549 15th St. NW, Washington, DC, 20045. The Press Club says it has no such tenant and repeated messages sent to the e-mail address for Syed Abeed listed on the site bounce back as undeliverable. Directory assistance for Washington, D.C., has no listing for Information Times.
The "4,000 Jews" page is easily forwarded as e-mail, and this may explain the message's rapid dissemination.
The Information Times article makes three charges:
1) Citing the Jordanian newspaper Al-Watan, it alleges that "Israelis remained absent [on Sept. 11] based on hints from the Israeli General Security Apparatus, the Shabak." No media source except Al-Manar claims to have actually seen the editorial in Al-Watan, which the Jordanian Embassy's information bureau describes as an obscure newspaper with a low circulation. Al-Watan's source? Unnamed "Arab diplomatic sources." (A few newspapers called Al-Watan have Web sites—click here, here, and here to visit them—though none seem to be based in Jordan.)
2) Citing the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, it alleges that Israeli secret police prevented Prime Minister Ariel Sharon from traveling to New York City on Sept. 11.
3) Citing the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, it alleges that the FBI arrested five Israelis who were caught filming the WTC's smoking rubble from their office building roof. (They were being held on the charge of "puzzling behavior.")
No other media outlet that can be searched through Nexis or Google has confirmed the Information Times claims about Sharon and the five Israelis.
Within days, the story appeared in newspapers around the world. A remarkably similar version appeared under the byline of Irina Malenko in Russia's Pravda on Sept. 21. Pravda removed the article from its Web site a few hours after posting, calling it a "great and foolish mistake," but it can still be accessed here. On Sept. 21, the Chicago Tribune reported that a Pakistani paper, which it did not name, had published a similar account. In his Sept. 23 Slate "Dispatch" from Islamabad, Peter Maass reported that a local pro-Taliban politician repeated the 4,000 Jews claim at an anti-U.S. rally. On Sept. 26, Pakistan's Business Recorder printed the story about 4,000 Jews in language almost identical to the original Al-Manar article as a letter to the editor under the name "Hakeem." The same day, the New York Times reported that the allegation had appeared in a newsletter published by an Islamic charity and in lesson plans prepared by Egyptian middle-school teachers. On Oct. 4, the Chicago Tribune spotted the allegation in a Saudi paper, which it did not name. In the Oct. 8 issue of Time, Tim McGirk reported from Pakistan that the story had swept through the country's mosques and Urdu newspapers.
On Sept. 28, USA Today repeated the claim in the context that "Muslims the world over" had tried to pin the attack on Israel. USA Today did not explain the origin of the charge. The Village Voice did the same on Oct. 2. The hoax-debunking site Snopes.com assailed the story, as well. With the Web as a weapon, a lie spreads quickly and easily. With the Web as a corrective tool, the same lie becomes much easier to bat away.
October 24, 2001, ThisIsLondon.co.uk, Suspects 'caught crashes on camera',
Five men suspected of being involved in the attack on the World Trade Centre set up cameras to record the atrocity, it emerged today.
The men set up cameras on the west bank of the Hudson River, trained them on the twin towers to capture the attacks and apparently congratulated each other when the crashes occurred, the New York Times reported.
The five were under investigation by police in Union City, New Jersey, but it was unclear if any of them were in custody today.
The allegation came as police in New Jersey told the New York Times the hijackers who left from Newark airport on the flight which crashed in Pennsylvania had received aid from associates in the area.
The paper reported law officials said the team was "aided by confederates in Newark who were responsible for logistical support, including money, rental cars, credit cards and lodging".
And it emerged that FBI investigators believe each team of hijackers acted independently from each other but under orders from a supreme commander.
The conclusion was reached after evidence from the flights' passenger lists, payphone records, evidence taken from the rental car seized in Boston and the frantic phone calls made from the hijacked planes.
It was the commander who selected the flights to be hijacked and orchestrated the attacks to occur at about the same time.
But the man has not been publicly identified by investigators, the New York Times reported. His whereabouts are currently unknown.
www.manartv.com.
They are puzzling me. So much is written and there is so much speculation about who is responsible for the attacks on 11/9, that it is interesting to know that it is not sure if it were Muslims who carried out the attack. So it's good to be very careful to convict the Arab and Muslim community for this attack, without any proof.
And, by the way: the story of CNN: "CNN USING 1991 FOOTAGE of celebrating Palestinians to manipulate you" by the Brazilian student can not be confirmed, so it probably isn't true. I'm sorry for that.
Dirk Adriaensens. Former US Air force Pilots Behind WTC, Pentagon Attacks: Iranian Daily
The Iranian Kayhan evening newspaper revealed that the perpetrators of Tuesday's attacks in New York and Washington were former pilots in the US Air Force, and that hijacking in fact did not take place but was used to cover the real scenario of the incidents. Kayhan cited from American reports that the pilots' not using the alarm button, usually used in emergency or danger circumstances, is still considered one of the most obscure clues in this case. This indicates, according to the newspaper, that the four pilots carried out the suicide operation in purpose, and that the hijacking story is not correct. The report disclosed that three of those pilots were former Vietnam veterans, while the brother of the fourth died in that war. The report listed the names of the pilots as follows: Charles Berlingame, Flight 77’s pilot. He ploughed his plane into Pentagon where he worked for several years. Jason Dahil, Flight 93's pilots. His plane was shot down over Pennsylvania. His brother (Kenneth) killed in Vietnam in 1971 at an age of 20 years. Joe Agotawski, Flight 11's pilot. He ploughed into the World Trade Center’s first tower. Victor Sarasini, Flight 75's pilot. He ploughed into the second tower. The newspaper referred to the clear contradiction in the information disclosed by the two airline companies, American Airlines and United Airlines, and the one disclosed by the FBI. Three days after the incident, the FBI issued a list of the passengers' names including the names of the 19 alleged Arabs whose names were not in the companies' list issued a day after the incident. However, Kayhan stopped at journalistic reports that indicated no trails of a plane being crashed at the Pentagon. Also it focused on the fourth plane that was shot down by US warplanes in Pennsylvania and that the pilot did not plough the plane by himself in defiance to hijackers' request to head to a populated area. The newspaper based its information on what the French Agency mentioned that pieces of the plane were found four miles away from crash site, which means the plane was blown out in the sky by missiles fired from US warplanes, according to the newspaper.
Second Saudi Named by FBI as one of the Hijackers Is Alive, Well
A Saudi pilot named by Washington as one of the suspects in last week's plane bombings is alive and well and living in Tunisia. The London-based Asharq al-Awsat paper said on Tuesday that Said Hussein al-Ghamdi has been in Tunisia for nine months training with colleagues from state carrier Saudi Arabian Airlines. It said he had seen his own photo on CNN after being fingered by the United States as a suspect in the September 11 attacks. US officials said he was believed to have hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. The FBI said it had gotten his photo from a flight school where he supposedly trained in Florida. Asharq al-Awsat said al-Ghamdi has twice visited the United States- studying there for a year beginning in October 1998, and for around six weeks after August 2000. The paper published an interview Monday with another alleged Saudi suspect, Abdelaziz al-Omari, who said he too is alive and well, and that he was an engineer who had no idea how to fly a plane. Al-Omari said his passport was stolen in the United States in 1995. In the wake of this arbitrary accusations, US Attorney General John Ashcroft has warned that a support network for the hijackers could still be in the country. Ashcroft said he and FBI Director Robert Mueller had also met with congressional leaders over the past two days to finalize a comprehensive package of legislative measures that would make it easier to spy on terrorist suspects. Meanwhile, more than 170 people are wanted for questioning. An FBI official said those people may have information that could be helpful to the investigation, but he hastened to add that those on the list were not considered suspects. Agents have searched hotels, motels and apartment complexes nationwide for clues, following up on leads received since the crashes. Warrants have also been issued in the United States for two more potential material witnesses. The probe has expanded internationally, with law enforcement looking into possible links to a network believed to be masterminded by Saudi-born Osama bin Laden- named by Washington as the prime suspect in the onslaught. Nineteen homes have been searched in Germany for clues on the activities of three foreign students whose names appeared on the passenger lists of the planes: Mohammed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi, and Ziad Amir Jarrah. Bild newspaper meanwhile reported that there was a worldwide hunt for Said Bahaji, born in Germany of Moroccan descent and holding German citizenship, alleging that he disappeared from Hamburg shortly before the attacks. According to the newspaper, he had either gone to ground in Pakistan or died in the plane that crashed near Pittsburgh, but his wife, says he is in Pakistan. In Britain, the Daily Mail newspaper reported on Tuesday that at least five of the 19 men who hijacked the four airliners had lived in Britain for a time. The Mail said FBI agents are also questioning Mufti Mohammed Khan, who was held at London’s Heathrow Airport coming from New York hours after the attacks. A 33-year-old man of of Franco-Algerian origin, Habib Zacaria Moussaoui, who is currently being held in the United States, also spent time in Britain. According to the Mail, French police link Moussaoui to Osama bin Laden. And in Tokyo, a report said Tuesday that Japanese authorities are on the lookout for 19 men who may have entered the country in early September. Spokesmen from the foreign ministry and national police agency would not comment on the reports nor confirm whether an investigation was underway.
4000 Israeli Employees in WTC Absent the Day of the Attack
With the announcement of the attacks at the World Trade Center in New York, the international media, particularly the Israeli one, hurried to take advantage of the incident and started mourning 4000 Israelis who work at the two towers. Then suddenly, no one ever mentioned anything about those Israelis and later it became clear that they remarkably did not show up in their jobs the day the incident took place. No one talked about any Israeli being killed or wounded in the attacks. Arab diplomatic sources revealed to the Jordanian al-Watan newspaper that those Israelis remained absent that day based on hints from the Israeli General Security Apparatus, the Shabak, the fact which evoked unannounced suspicions on American officials who wanted to know how the Israeli government learned about the incident before it occurred, and the reasons why it refrained from informing the U.S authorities of the information it had. Suspicions had increased further after Israeli newspaper Yadiot Ahranot revealed that the Shabak prevented Israeli premier Ariel Sharon from traveling to New York and particularly to the city's eastern coast to participate in a festival organized by the Zionist organizations in support of the "Israel". Aharon Bernie, the commentator at the newspaper, brought up the issue and came up with a negative conclusion, saying “no answer”. He then asked about the clue behind the Shabak's position in preventing Sharon's participation, and again without giving an answer. Bernie added that Sharon, who was delighted for having his speech on top of the festival agenda, asked the head of the organization to mediate and convince the Shabak to change its position, but his attempts were in vein. The next day after Sharon’s secretary officially announced that Sharon would not participate the incident took place. For its part, the Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper revealed that the FBI arrested five Israelis four hours after the attack on the Twin Towers while filming the smoking skyline from the roof of their company’s building. The FBI had arrested the five for "puzzling behavior". They are said to have been caught videotaping the disaster in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery.
Israeli Mossad May Lie Behind Attacks on US:
Syrian Daily
A Syrian ath-Thawra paper on Wednesday cast doubts over the involvement of Osama bin Laden in the September 11 attacks on the United States, saying "Israel’s" secret service Mossad was a more likely culprit. Ath-Thawra said, “Why not suspect Mossad of having sought to shake the United States and the world, upon directives from Ariel Sharon who wants to divert attention away from his aggressive plot, and link the attacks to the Arabs, the Muslims, and Osama bin Laden”. “If Osama bin Laden really had at his disposal such fantastic capabilities, sophisticated electronic talents and a meticulous organization, as the Americans claim, he would have directed all that against Israel for the simple reason that it is closer," the paper argued.
OCTOBER 8, 2001, VOL.158 NO.14
October 8, 2001, Time Magazine, Waiting Games, War is nigh, and on the border with Afghanistan people can only wait, worry--and surf the Net, by Tim McGirk,
Islamabad, Pakistan My first stop is the Afghan embassy where I, along with 800 other journalists, submit visa application forms for Kabul. We're told to check back in two weeks--i.e., forget about it. The only reason the Taliban might let hordes of journalists in is to use them as human shields against a U.S. attack. An ominous thought.
Peshawar On the road down from the Khyber Pass, TIME photographer John Stanmeyer jumps out of our car to take pictures of Pakistani soldiers marching to an old British fort on a craggy hilltop. A narrow-faced man from Pakistani military intelligence (ISI) happens to drive by in a pickup truck and accuses Stanmeyer of being a spy. The two of us are quickly taken to the fort for interrogation. An army officer intercedes and gains our release two hours later; he gestures apologetically at the ISI man, who is fuming over our good luck. The officer cautions: "You know, this intelligence man is quite ignorant--but dangerous. He could have taken you away and done great harm to you. Nobody would have known until it was too late."
Tribal Territory Since we're not allowed to reach the Afghan border, we decide to head north to Shakot, a village that makes guns--anything from a Kalashnikov AK-47 ($120) to Russian pistols ($80). They also sell a mind-sizzling hashish, and puff away while tooling the guns. "If it's complicated work, the hashish makes it easier," grins one gunsmith between tokes. He sells a lot of AK-47s to Afghans and local Pakistanis. "A gun is a man's jewelry," he relates, and assures us that the tribesmen on the Pakistani side--to a man--will join their Taliban brothers if America dares to attack.
That night, I set out to check my e-mails in Peshawar's old bazaar. The only Internet place is up a dark, winding stairway, past a group of Koranic students weaving mats for the wall of a mosque. At the Internet shop, my driver Raza unabashedly dashes from machine to machine, staring wide-eyed. "Mr. Tim," he pleads, "can you give me computer lesson?" Impressed by his new enthusiasm for technology, I agree. Then I glance over at the other Net aficionados. They're teenagers, wearing baggy salwar kameez outfits and prayer caps, and all of them are staring at porn sites.
Back in Peshawar Still no journalists are allowed up the Khyber Pass. I stroll through the old bazaar, past the street of songbirds and goldsmiths, and end up at a mosque where I'm invited inside to talk to the Imam. He assures me that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were carried out by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. But, I protest, the hijackers were mainly Saudis. "Ah," he says triumphantly. "How can you explain that all 4,000 Israelis working at the World Trade Center that morning were mysteriously absent from work?" I try explaining that the idea is ludicrous, that there weren't 4,000 Israelis employed at the World Trade Center, and that many Jews died along with Muslims and Christians. But this incendiary piece of misinformation has been circulated in the mosques and Urdu newspapers for days, steeling the local resolve to defend bin Laden as Islam's hero. One earnest youth tells me that when he joins the jihad against America, he'll rim his eyes with kohl so that the maidens in martyr's paradise will find him more handsome. This nutty zealousness rattles me; I start telling people in the bazaar that I'm a Spanish national.
Quetta Miraculously, I get permission to travel to Chaman, the last Pakistani outpost before Afghanistan. The border is no more than a chain. Rafiq Ahmed, a mustached Pakistani youth in his mid-twenties, hovers uncertainly, unsure whether he wants to cross into Afghanistan. "My elder brother left home to join the Taliban," Rafiq says. "I must find him and bring him back home before he is killed." But Rafiq has fears about his quest. He's worried he'll be beaten by the Taliban for not having a beard, or dragooned into fighting for them. Swallowing hard, he finally crosses.
I ask a border guard if he would arrest bin Laden if he tried to slip into Pakistan. "Of course," he laughed. "It would be a great service. That way, there would be no fighting between America and the Afghans." On the road back to Quetta, we pass a Koranic school where kids have constructed a row of toy antiaircraft guns to take shots at imaginary U.S. warplanes flying out of the desert sunset. I hope the border guard gets lucky: it might allow those schoolkids to grow up without training their sights on real U.S. fighter jets.
Widespread Panic Hits the Radio
And the Banned Play On
by Douglas Wolk
September 26 - October 2, 2001, Village Voice,
If you've been keeping tabs on your e-mail, perhaps you've gotten word of some disturbing questions the mass media haven't addressed about the fallout from the recent terrorist attacks. Is it true, for instance, that Osama bin Laden profits directly from sales of gum arabic, a food additive? Or that radio DJs are forbidden to play more than 150 popular songs now? Or that employees of the National Council of Compensation Insurance are banned from displaying American flags? Or perhaps that 4000 Jews were warned in advance to stay home from their World Trade Center jobs on September 11?
Wrong, wrong, initially right but not anymore, and oh come on, respectively. These and around 20 other rumors about the attacks are addressed on Snopes.com, an urban-legends site that specializes in debunking practically anything attributed to a friend of a friend. Snopes currently has a special page devoted to attack-related legends and hearsay. Turns out that widely circulated editorial by a Canadian who wants to know why everyone keeps dogpiling on good-neighbor-to-the-world America was written by Gordon Sinclair back in 1973, when there was less incentive to dogpile.
There are more damaging rumors afoot, too. On September 13, Márcio A.V. Carvalho, a student at State University of Campinas in Brazil, sent a message to a mailing list saying that a teacher of his had seen CNN's footage of Palestinians celebrating the attack in the streets and recognized it as recycled from a Gulf War-era broadcast. He noted the next day that the teacher had only thought the footage was recycled; others pointed out that it included posters of Bin Laden, then little known, and recent-model cars. But by then it was too late. The film was real, in fact, but plenty of people were willing to take it on faith that TV news routinely lies to them, and this time had merely been caught in the act. None of the excited forwarders of the "CNN hoax" that I've seen addressed why CNN would have deliberately lied in this case. They're less shocked (or even inquisitive) than bitterly resigned, as if they're simply expecting to be screwed by media forces beyond their control.
The same is true of the widespread rumor concerning Clear Channel Communications, the biggest American radio conglomerate (with well over 1100 U.S. radio stations). The word was that after the attack, higher-ups at Clear Channel distributed a list of about 150 songs banned from airplay—everything from "Walk Like an Egyptian" to "Peace Train" to "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," not to mention the entire catalog of Rage Against the Machine. "Clearly, Corporate Amerika does not believe in catharsis," wrote one indignant friend above the copy she forwarded.
Corporate Amerika, as it turns out, doesn't care much one way or the other about catharsis. A Clear Channel press release denied there was a ban; as The New York Times reported on the 19th, the list did originate within the company, but as a more or less casual suggestion on its internal e-mail network, not as a formal edict. And it doesn't seem to have affected actual programming much, even on New York's Clear Channel stations. Wayne Mayo, music director of WTJM ("Jammin' 105"), says he never actually saw the list; the station didn't play "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" or "Another One Bites the Dust" for a few days, but that was it. WLTW ("Lite FM") program director Jim Ryan says he told DJs to use their common sense: "Do you play 'Only the Good Die Young'? No! But the song was never banned, and we're playing it again now, because it tests popular with our audience."
The noteworthy thing about the Clear Channel list isn't so much its curious inclusions and omissions ("What a Wonderful World" but not "Killing an Arab"?) as what its existence says about etiquette and art in a situation without precedent. Nobody has a clear sense of what's appropriate right now, and they're overcompensating. Sports announcers are trying to avoid military language—no blitzes or shotguns, no NASCAR war wagon. The New Yorker went without gag cartoons for a week. The gestures are well-intentioned in both cases, but counterproductive: Sports without the metaphor of conflict doesn't leave much, and skipping punchlines doesn't help. Likewise, the Clear Channel list proscribes whatever might serve as a reminder of reality: songs that allude to fire ("Disco Inferno"), flying ("Jet Airliner"), jumping (Van Halen's "Jump," but not the Pointer Sisters' or Kriss Kross's), Tuesdays ("Ruby Tuesday"), New York ("On Broadway"), absence ("Black Is Black"), death ("Mack the Knife"), and life going on ("Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"). Musical aggression is suspect—Alien Ant Farm's growly cover of "Smooth Criminal" is on the list, but not Michael Jackson's original. And left politics are out altogether, even in manifestations as blameless as the Youngbloods' "Get Together." Hence the blanket dismissal of RATM (they're loud, too), and the bizarre presence of John Lennon's "Imagine."
Strangely enough, "Imagine" isn't just potentially inappropriate, it's multifariously appropriate: Neil Young performed it on last Friday's celebrity telethon, and at least one Midwestern station has been airing Lennon's recording peppered with bits of Bush's first post-attack speech. The electronic panic over the Clear Channel list shows the need Americans do have for catharsis—the need to experience art about fire and death and jumping and Tuesdays, especially now. It's also a distraction from the real threat to liberty at hand. "Enter Sandman" and "Spirit in the Sky" grab people's attention in a way that technical talk about wiretapping and search-and-seizure laws doesn't. The idea of the government monitoring your e-mail somehow isn't as immediately upsetting as the thought of Rage banned from the radio. The rights we may be about to lose are a lot subtler than the songs we never lost anyway.
November 25, 2001, Action Report Online, Evidence of Mossad Treachery in the WTC, by Ed Toner:
Let's look at the hard evidence indicating the Mossad had foreknowledge of the September 11 attack. The day after the attack on the World Trade Center, the Jerusalem Post, the most respected and famous Israeli newspaper in the world,reported that 4,000 Israelis were missing in the attack on the WTC.
The Jerusalem Post (08:15 - Wed) Thousands of Israelis missing near WTC, Pentagon Wednesday September 12, 2001 The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack.The list is made up of people who have not yet made contact with friends or family, Army Radio reported.
Telephone connections between Israel and the New York City and Washington, D.C. areas has been sporadic and unreliable since the multiple attacks yesterday.
Ten thousand people are estimated to have been killed in the New York attacks and another 800 in Washington.
Several hundred also went down with the hijacked planes.
The Foreign Ministry compiled the number from Israeli relatives who in the first few hours after the attack, contacted the Israeli Foreign Ministry and gave the names of Israeli friends and relatives who worked in the WTC or who had business scheduled in it or its adjacent structures.
Even without seeing the article in the Jerusalem Post, logic alone would tell you that there would be many hundreds, if not thousands of Israelis in the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks.
The international Jewish involvement in banking and finance is legendary. Two of the richest firms in New York are Goldman-Sachs and the Solomon Brothers; and both firms have offices in the Twin Towers.
Many executives in these firms regularly commute back and forth to Israel.
New York is the center of world wide Jewish financial power and the World Trade Center is at its epicenter.
One would expect the Israeli death toll to be catastrophic. The Jerusalem Post certainly thought so on September 12, 2001.
Here is the beginning of its article:
Thousands of Israelis missing near WTC, Pentagon.
The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack. [...]
When George Bush made his speech before Congress, it turns out that he made a significant error other than saying that the WTC attackers did it because they "hated freedom," Bush made a point of saying that in addition to thousands of Americans, 130 Israelis died in the WTC.
The implication was to say that Israel shared in our suffering, and that we and Israel are in this thing together.
Upon hearing the number of 130 Israeli dead, it seemed suspiciously low to me.
If 4,000 Israelis were at the WTC and the WTC death toll was about 4,500 (about 10 percent of the 45,000 people normally in the buildings at that time), the Israeli toll should have probably been between 300 and 500.
130 deaths would have been unusually low. As a place for doing business and for employment, the world Trade Center was not a huge MacDonalds; it housed tens of thousands of highly paid, high tech and high level jobs and executive positions.
They were primarily international finance, trade, banking and brokerage firms.
These are the kinds of businesses where Israelis are traditionally over-represented.
I asked myself how there could be only 130 Israelis dead, while there were an estimated 199 dead from Columbia and 428 from the Philippines? In previous articles I wrote on the September 11 terror, I did not allude to these suspicions because I have always taken pride in not writing anything I could not firmly substantiate.
But, while researching this article on Israeli terrorism against Palestine and America, I discovered the most surprising fact I have ever run across in all my years of research and writing.
I discovered a simple fact that has enormous ramifications in regard to the September terror attack.
Thousands of Israelis missing near WTC, Pentagon.
The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack. [...]
When George Bush made his speech before Congress, it turns out that he made a significant error other than saying that the WTC attackers did it because they "hated freedom," Bush made a point of saying that in addition to thousands of Americans, 130 Israelis died in the WTC.
The implication was to say that Israel shared in our suffering, and that we and Israel are in this thing together.
Upon hearing the number of 130 Israeli dead, it seemed suspiciously low to me.
If 4,000 Israelis were at the WTC and the WTC death toll was about 4,500 (about 10 percent of the 45,000 people normally in the buildings at that time), the Israeli toll should have probably been between 300 and 500.
130 deaths would have been unusually low. As a place for doing business and for employment, the world Trade Center was not a huge MacDonalds; it housed tens of thousands of highly paid, high tech and high level jobs and executive positions.
They were primarily international finance, trade, banking and brokerage firms.
These are the kinds of businesses where Israelis are traditionally over-represented.
I asked myself how there could be only 130 Israelis dead, while there were an estimated 199 dead from Columbia and 428 from the Philippines? In previous articles I wrote on the September 11 terror, I did not allude to these suspicions because I have always taken pride in not writing anything I could not firmly substantiate.
But, while researching this article on Israeli terrorism against Palestine and America, I discovered the most surprising fact I have ever run across in all my years of research and writing.
I discovered a simple fact that has enormous ramifications in regard to the September terror attack.
After searching through dozens of articles trying to track down the true Israeli death toll, I finally found a New York Times piece that clarified the precise number of Israelis who died in the World Trade Center attack.
Of the 130 Israelis President Bush claimed had died in the World Trade Center, it turned out that 129 of them were still alive. Only one Israeli had actually died in the catastrophe of the World Trade Center.I was incredulous.
"Good God," I said out loud to myself, "only one Israeli!" Here is the pertinent excerpt from the NY Times:
But interviews with many consulate officials Friday suggested that the lists of people they were collecting varied widely in their usefulness.There were, in fact, only three Israelis who had been confirmed as dead: two on the planes and another who had been visiting the towers on business and who was identified and buried. (New York Times, Sept. 22)
For example, the city had somehow received reports of many Israelis feared missing at the site, and President Bush in his address to the country on Thursday night mentioned that about 130 Israelis had died in the attacks.But Friday, Alon Pinkas, Israel's consul general here, said that lists of the missing included reports from people who had called in because, for instance, relatives in New York had not returned their phone calls from Israel.
The very low death toll of 130 suggested that a number of Israelis at the Trade Center had been warned before the attack.
When I found out the truth that only one Israeli had died, there could be no doubt that there had been a prior warning for many Israelis.
Having only one Israeli casualty among the 4,500 dead at the WTC is simply a statistical impossibility.
Even if the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Jerusalem Post had grossly overestimated the number of Israelis in the World Trade Center by 3,000 (400 percent), there still should have still been one thousand Israelis there at the time of the attacks.
Again, even if only a few hundred Israelis were present at the time of the attack, only one Israeli death occurring there is statistically absurd.
Either September 11 had to be a big Israeli holiday, or a number of Israeli citizens had some advance warning of the impending attack.
The fact is that no Israeli or Jewish holiday falls on September 11. Prior Warning to Israelis.
The next thing I researched was to see if there were any confirmed warnings to Israelis prior to the attack.
I quickly found an article in Newsbytes, a news service of the Washington Post, titled "Instant Messages To Israel Warned Of WTC Attack." The Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, also confirmed the prior warnings to Israel and confirmed that the FBI is investigating the warnings.
The articles detailed that an Israeli messaging firm, Odigo, with offices in both the World Trade Center and in Israel, received a number of warnings just two hours before the attack. [...]
Now, who would have warned Israelis of the impending attack, if not Israel's Mossad?
October 15, 2001, The New Republic, JERUSALEM DISPATCH. Holy Terror, by Yossi Klein Halevi,
The destruction of the World Trade Center has partially rehabilitated, if only by default, the Zionist promise of safe refuge for the Jewish people.
In the last year, it had become a much-noted irony that Israel was the country where a Jew was most likely to be killed for being a Jew.
For many, the United States had beckoned as the real Jewish refuge; in a poll taken just before the bin Laden attacks, 37 percent of Israelis said their friends or relatives were discussing emigration.
That probably changed on September 11.
I was among the thousands of Israelis who crowded Kennedy Airport on the weekend after the attack, desperate to find a flight to Tel Aviv.
"At least we're going back where it's safe," people joked.
Everyone seemed to have a story about an Israeli living in New York who just barely escaped the devastation.
If this could happen in Manhattan, the reasoning went, you might as well take your chances at home."
November 21, 2001, New York Times, Toll From Attack at Trade Center Is Down Sharply, by Eric Lipton,
THE official count of the dead and missing in the attack on the World Trade Center has fallen sharply in the last few weeks to below 3,900, a total that is nearly 3,000 fewer than the number city officials, in the first weeks after the towers fell, feared had perished.
City officials said yesterday that the trade center tally, which dropped by at least 200 over the last weekend alone, could continue to fall, perhaps to 3,000, as duplications and errors are resolved. Unofficial compilations by news organizations, usin information from companies, the airlines and other sources, so far have reached no higher than 2,950.
The culling of the official list of those killed in the twin towers and on the hijacked airplanes has been proceeding quietly since late September, when the estimated toll reached its high of about 6,500. But this process has taken place largely out of public view, with everyone from world leaders to military officials to newspaper columnists and talk show hosts continuing to believe and assert that 5,000 to 6,000 people died in the attacks on the towers and the Pentagon and aboard the airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania.
In the last several weeks, in speeches and interviews, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have cited the loss of 5,000 or more people in the attacks.Don Imus, the radio talk show host, put the number for the trade center alone at 6,000 during a television interview on Saturday. But for weeks, if one used the city's own numbers for the dead and missing in the collapse of the towers, it has been clear that such numbers were wrong. Using the figure released yesterday, the death toll for all three attacks could not be higher than 4,142, and could fall to 3,245 as the city's revisions continue. Either figure would be greater than the total number of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor, 2,400.
"Thank God so many of these people are alive and well," said Charles V. Campisi, the chief of the New York Police Department's Internal Affairs Bureau, which is supervising the count.
A State Department official in Washington said he was unaware that the number of dead or missing in the trade center attack had decreased so markedly. He said he would bring up the matter with the secretary of state's staff and the press secretary.What is important, he added, is that a still-horrific number of people died on Sept. 11. "It is not to obfuscate or create any more sympathy, because regardless of whether or not it is 3,900 or 5,000, the magnitude and severity of the events on Sept. 11th are clear," said the official, who asked not to be identified because his comments had not been cleared with the department.
The final numbers of those killed in the Pentagon attack and the crash in Pennsylvania have been known for weeks: 189 died at the Pentagon, including 64 on American Airlines Flight 77; and 44 died on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed outside Pittsburgh. But the city's numbers have been in considerable flux since the first days after the attacks.
Yesterday, city officials said the continued large declines in the list of presumed dead were largely a result of identifying people whose names had been registered as missing in the days after the attack, but who in fact survived or were not even in New York that day.
In many other cases, individuals who died in the attack have been listed more than once, like a woman who until yesterday was in the city's database under her maiden name and her married name, Chief Campisi said. Dozens of names have also dropped off as foreign consulates reduced claims of the number of people from their countries who they once believed might have been at the trade center at the time of the attack.
The foreign consulates still list a couple of hundred of their citizens as missing in the trade center attack, and city officials said that this was one area in particular that could lead to further reductions in the total.
As of yesterday, there was some confusion among city and police officials about what the actual city count was. Police officials, who have been working with the city's medical examiner's office and the state courts to improve the accuracy of the list, said they believed the current number of dead and missing to be 3,702.
But the mayor's office put the number at 3,899 and said that the process of incorporating the information from the courts and the medical examiner's office was not yet finished. Nonetheless, the mayor's figure still represented a drop of several hundred from late last week.
City officials would not estimate when they expect to be finished refining the list of missing and dead. "We are closing in on it," Chief Campisi said. An official with the city's Law Department who has been coordinating death certificate applications on behalf of victims' families said she expected the final number of dead at the trade center to be between 3,000 and 3,700."The bottom line here is that it seems as if there are fewer people dead than we originally thought," said Florence A. Hutner, senior counsel at the department.
Researchers and scholars, news organizations and charity officials have all spoken of the fundamental need to establish as accurate a figure as possible for the number of people killed.
While most people understood that the city's list of the dead and missing was a work in progress, the knowledge that the toll was going to wind up substantially lower than once feared has been slow to take hold in the public consciousness.General Myers has repeatedly cited the 5,000-dead number during briefings on the action in Afghanistan, and Secretary Powell mentioned it on Monday during a speech on the Middle East in Louisville, Ky.
"It is 69 days since Sept. 11th, when cold-blooded terrorists turned civilian airlines into flying bombs and used them to kill 5,000 innocent people," he said. "That's four or five times the number of people who are assembled here today."
Mr. Imus, in an appearance Saturday on CNN's Larry King Live, asserted that "these idiots, these terrorists, flew an airplane into the World Trade Center and killed 6,000 people."
Armstrong Williams, the radio show host, and Chris Matthews, the CNBC talk show host, have used similar numbers in the last week.
Chief Campisi would not comment on the numbers being cited elsewhere, but was committed to reaching a reliable final figure for the city, and the history books. "I would love to finish today, sure," he said, "but we'll do this until we're confident we have the numbers right."
September 28, 2001, Washington Post / Newsbytes, Instant Messages To Israel Warned Of WTC Attack By Brian McWilliams,
NEW YORK -- OFFICIALS at instant-messaging firm Odigo confirmed today that two employees received text messages warning of an attack on the World Trade Center two hours before terrorists crashed planes into the New York landmarks. Citing a pending investigation by law enforcement, the company declined to reveal the exact contents of the message or to identify the sender.
But Alex Diamandis, vice president of sales and marketing, confirmed that workers in Odigo's research and development and international sales office in Israel received a warning from another Odigo user approximately two hours prior to the first attack. Diamandis said the sender of the instant message was not personally known to the Odigo employees. Even though the company usually protects the privacy of users, the employees recorded the Internet protocol address of the message's sender to facilitate his or her identification.
Soon after the terrorist attacks on New York, the Odigo employees notified their management, who contacted Israeli security services. In turn, the FBI was informed of the instant message warning. FBI officials were not immediately available for comment today. The Odigo service includes a feature called People Finder that allows users to seek out and contact others based on certain interests or demographics. Diamandis said it was possible that the attack warning was broadcast to other Odigo members, but the company has not received reports of other recipients of the message.
In addition to operating its own messaging service network, Odigo has licensed its technology to over 100 service providers, portals, wireless carriers, and corporations, according to the company. Odigo is online at http://www.odigo.com.
November 23, 2001
From: Robert Reis
Odd but true
TODAY a person -- who was very angry with me for observing that the Newsday site listing all victims at World Trade Center did not include the anticipated percentage of names of people of the Jewish heritage -- approached me and said I was an evil person full of .... because he had gone to the CNN list and found 35 -- 40 % Jewish names.
He asked sarcastically "Aren't Horowitz and Rubenstein Jewish enough for you?"
I went to CNN and could not find such a list. I went to ABC News.com and searched their list. No Horowitz and no Rubenstein. I went to Newsday list and found no Horowitz and no Rubenstein. I went to elbnet.com and did a victim search. No Horowitz and no Rubenstein.
Robert Reis
P.S.There were two "REIS" victims in WTC
Full transcript of bin Ladin's speech
Monday 01 November 2004, 16:01 Makka Time, 13:01 GMT
english.aljazeera.net
Israel Matzav, Debbie does shul
Debbie Wasserman Schultz's partisan politics and openness to discussion have brought about the end of a 70-year family relationship between a North Miami Beach synagogue and one of its most respected members (Hat Tip: Bad Blue).September 11, 2007 2:26 P.M., National Review Online, The Jews Knew? Remembering the Jewish victims of September 11, by Anne Morse,
There is something about growing up in the Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories (in my case, for example, that the Mafia/Castro/ CIA really killed President Kennedy) that turns one off to conspiracy theories for life.
It's deeply frustrating that sometimes, no matter how great the evidence to the contrary, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, rumors, and myths just won't go away.
Take, for instance, two of the earliest and most insidious rumors to begin circulating about the September 11 terror attacks: That President Bush had prior knowledge of the attacks, and that Israel secretly warned Jews to stay home that Tuesday, to avoid being killed in the attacks — all supposedly orchestrated by Israel.
Of course, in order to subscribe to this myth, we would have to ignore the fact that Osama bin Laden has taken gleeful personal responsibility for the attacks (and presumably he didn’t feel particularly compelled to warn President Bush beforehand).
So then, when and where did this myth begin? Just four days after the attacks Syria’s government-owned newspaper, Al Thawra, claimed that "four thousand Jews were absent from their day of work on the day of the explosions.” As the U.S. Department of State explains:
The 4,000 figure apparently came from an article entitled "Hundreds of Israelis missing in WTC attack” which appeared in the September 12th internet edition of the Jerusalem Post. It stated, “The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attacks.”
Unknown conspiracy theorists apparently seized upon the 4,000 figure, transforming it into the false claim that 4,000 Jews did not report for work at the World Trade Center on September 11.
The tragic truth is that some 10-to 15-percent of the 2,071 victims of the World Trade Center attacks were Jewish — not surprising, given that the population of New York City is approximately 12-percent Jewish. According to information gathered by the New York Times and the Medical Examiner’s Office records, and reported by Jewish Week, "There were at least 400 victims either confirmed or strongly believed to be Jewish."
Their stories are heartbreaking. Some, like Marina Romanova Gertsberg, an immigrant from Ukraine, had begun working at the World Trade Center just days before the attacks; others, like 25-year-old Monica Goldstein, were about to marry their sweethearts. Still others, like 36-year-old Eric Sand, had recently become parents. At least two Jewish fathers perished along with their sons. One victim, Arlene Eva Fried, was the daughter of Holocaust survivors.
In an effort to repudiate the myth of Jews staying home on 9/11, the State Department has listed the biographies of 76 of the Jewish victims of the World Trade Center attacks. Among them is Joshua Birnbaum, a 24-year old assistant bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald. “Josh’s smile always managed to light up the faces of those with whom he surrounded himself. He had a special charm,” recalls Birnbaum's best friend, Leehe Matalon.
Twenty-seven-year-old Shari Anne Kandell, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee, was a theater buff who is remembered by her family and friends for her selflessness.
Aaron Jacobs, a vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald, had backpacked through Europe and taught job skills to welfare recipients; at the time of his death, he was planning to marry Jeannine McAteer.
Andrew Kates, age 37, was a marathoner who loved spending time with his wife, Emily Terry, and his three children: Hannah, 5, Lucy, 3, and Henry, 1 — little ones who loved climbing into bed with their parents on Saturday mornings.
Karen Klitzman, 38, had, according to her twin sister Donna, taught English in Macao and China before going to work for Cantor Fitzgerald. Alan Lederman, 43, once climbed Mount Whitney. He died while trying to help two frightened women to escape the south tower.
Nancy Morgenstern, 32, was an Orthodox Jew who brought along along on cycling trips. A colleague described Morgenstern as "one of the most thoughtful, disciplined, funny, crazy, independent women I ever knew."
Thirty-nine-year-old Michael Rothberg enjoyed skiing, jogging, and boating; he once took part in a bike-a-thon to raise money for a friend who had cancer. Ronald Ruben, a vice president at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, spent his first holiday bonus at a toy store, later delivering the toys to hospitalized children.
Attorney Andrew Zucker, who helped others escape the 78th floor of the south tower, left behind a pregnant wife. Lawrence Polatsch was a colorful character whose friends recall that he crashed the wedding of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas. He was planning his own wedding at the time of his death.
So were Joshua Rosenblum and Gina Hawryluk, colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald. On September 11, Hawryluk stayed home to complete plans for their September 15 nuptials; Rosenblum went to work as usual. His memorial service took place at Temple Beth El in Cedarhurst, New York.
And the list includes many, many more stories of Jewish victims whose memories are cherished by their families and friends. As Matthias Kuntzel notes in the Weekly Standard, the 9/11 terrorists chose New York City as a target, in part because so many Jews live there. Mohamad Atta, who flew the jet that struck the north tower, "was convinced that the Jews were striving for world domination and considered New York City the Center of world Jewry, which was, in his opinion, Enemy No. 1." He and his fellow terrorists succeeded in murdering at least 400 of them — which makes it especially ironic that some continue to insist that Israel was responsible for the attacks, and that Jews stayed home that day.
Along with all of the other victims on September 11, the many Jewish victims deserve to be fully recognized, mourned — and remembered.
Anne Morse is a writer living in Maryland.
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