01-06-2023, 08:59 PM
AN AMERICAN MUSLIM SPEAKS OUT
http://mujca.com/scholars.htm
“They try to deceive Allah and those who believe, but they only deceive themselves, and realize it not.” Qur’aan II:9
Below are selections from the book-in-progress The Myth of 9/11: An American Muslim Speaks Out by Kevin J. Barrett.
About the author
Kevin Barrett, a Muslim since 1992, has taught Islam, English, French, Arabic, Humanities, African Literature, American Civilization, and Folklore at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay Area, Paris, and Madison, Wisconsin. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in African Languages and Literature (Arabic). In November, 2004, Barrett co-founded MUJCA-NET, the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth. Barrett explains his decision to move from literature to activism by citing a story from Israel Shamir, the Israeli intellectual and MUJCA-NET endorser who moved from Russain literature to anglophone activism in response to Ariel Sharon’s outrages of 2001:
A Jewish folk tale relates the story of a mute child who had never said a word despite all the efforts of the doctors. Then one day, at the ripe age of ten, he dropped his spoon and cried out, "The soup is too salty!" His parents asked him in amazement why he had kept silent for years, and the child replied, "Until now, everything was all right.”
Since 9/11, the USA has not been all right. (Okay, it wasn’t perfect before—but on 9/11/01 we went from Weimar America to the Neocon Reich.) An African proverb from the Wolof people of Senegal states, “If you are lost, turn around and go back to the place where you went wrong. ”Ku xamul foo jëm, dellul fa nga jogewoon.” Literally, “If you don’t know where you’re going, go back where you came from.” (Thank you to Cherif Correa for calling my attention to this proverb.) For the USA, that place is 9/11/2001.
Bismillah ar-rahmân ar-rahîm.
Dedication: This book dedicated to my brothers and sisters—be they Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Hopis, or those of any other faith—of whatever kind—including faith in goodness, decency and justice—with the courage and integrity to stand up against our modern Pharaohs and demand 9/11 Truth.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The 9/11 Truth Honor Roll Part One: Myth as Big Lie
Chapter 1: Myth #1: “19 Muslim Hijackers”Chapter 2: Myth #2: “We Tried to Stop Them!”Chapter 3: Myth #3: “The Pentagon Was Hit by AA Flight 77”Chapter 4: Myth #4: “The Twin Towers Collapsed Because of the Plane Crashes and Fires”Chapter 5: Myth #5: “Let’s Roll!”Chapter 6: Myth #6: “My Pet Goat”Chapter 7: Myth #7: “After 9/11, Everything Changed—So We Went to War”
Part Two: Myth as Sacred Narrative
Chapter 8: 9/11 as Sacred StoryChapter 9: Mythic Heroes and VillainsChapter 10: The Mythic Rhythm: (In)security as Dramatic TensionChapter 11: TV and Cinema: Our Tribal HearthChapter 12: The Myth of DemocracyChapter 13: Myth, History, and Criticism
Chapter 14: Countermythologies and Truth Strategies: Can Storytelling Save the World?
Introduction: The 9/11 Truth Honor Roll
This book is not a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy fact.
No, I’m not talking about 9/11. I’m talking about the book.
The book you are about to read is a ticking time bomb. It is part of a massive global conspiracy of peace-loving truth terrorists who are on the verge of blowing the official myth of 9/11 to smithereens.
No, I’m not talking about Muslims. I’m talking about the 9/11 Truth Movement. I’m talking about brave people like Mike Ruppert, Nafeez Ahmad, Stan Goff, Gore Vidal, Barrie Zwicker, Michel Chossudovsky, Thierry Mayssan, Paul Thompson, Erick Hufschmid, Faiz Khan, Catherine Austin Fitts, David Griffin, Richard Falk, Jimmy Walters, Ellen Mariani, Sibel Edmunds, and of course the Jersey Girls—especially those whose need for truth is greater than their need for closure. I dedicate this book to them, to the many worthy others I haven't mentioned, and to their thousands of brave comrades.
These wonderful people come from a variety of religious and non-religious backgrounds. Though the media’s increasingly monolithic voice tells us that American Christians accept the myth of 9/11 and support Bush’s neocon oil crusade in the Middle East, it turns out that Christians are overrepresented on our 9/11 Truth honor roll. When I began to round up endorsers for MUJCA-NET, the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, my earliest and strongest supporters were mostly Christians. Amazingly, as I was going around introducing myself as a Muslim who didn’t buy the official myth of 9/11, many Christians were listening to me and supporting me. I was impressed by their courage to stand up and demand the truth, whatever the consequences. Listen to Mike Ruppert, who comes from a Christian background. Ruppert was one of the earliest, bravest and most outspoken 9/11 truth-tellers.
“The question I am asked most frequently at my lectures is why I haven’t been killed yet. I have two answers. First, is it is not cost-effective, and the response would cause more problems than it would solve. I am not important enough to kill.
“Secondly, I will not die one minute before God has decided.” (Mike Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon, p.305)
Catherine Austin Fitts, like Mike Ruppert, is a Christian. She was an Assistant Secretary of Housing in the Bush I administration. It is her commitment and faith that led her to expose the oil-guns-drugs mob of corrupt spooks who currently rule America. She wrote a blistering public letter to Condi Rice charging Rice and the rest of the Bush II foreign policy mob with complicity in 9/11. Recently she came up with the idea of setting aside a time for universal prayer and meditation for 9/11 truth.
David Griffin, also a Christian, is one of the most respected theologians in America. The author more than twenty books on philosophy and theology, Griffin risked his life and reputation by publishing The New Pearl Harbor and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. Together, these two books present a solid prima facie case that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the Kean-Zelikow Commission’s 9/11 report is pure fiction: “As this book was going to press, I learned that The 9/11 Commission Report had been included among the finalists for the National Book Award. I would not have been shocked by this news except for the fact that the nomination was in the nonfiction category.” (David Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 291.) Griffin has been asked whether he worries about being killed. His reply (I am quoting from memory): “If they shoot me my book will shoot to the top of the bestseller lists, and if they leave me alone I’ll get to write my Summa Theologica in peace. It’s a win-win situation.” Though Griffin does not explicitly evoke God, he is a process theologian whose remarkable courage surely stems from his faith in the God-process.
By now it should be clear that some of the smartest and bravest “truth terrorists” are Christians. This should not surprise us. We Muslims consider Christians, like Jews, to be our fellow People of the Book, and the Qur’ân tells us that many of them are on the path of salvation. Surely Christians like Fitts, Ruppert and Griffin are among them. The Qur’ân tells us that those Jews and Christians who believe and do good and righteous deeds are the best of creatures; while those who ungratefully reject God and God’s beautiful creation are the worst of creatures and will abide in the fires of hell (98:6-7). Jews and Christians who bravely pursue truth and justice are surely among the best of creatures; while those who long for the destruction of God’s beautiful creation in apocalyptic violence—thinking that they can “force the hand of God” and bring Jesus back if they only murder enough darker-skinned people—are among the worst of creatures and are surely on the path to perdition. Those Muslims who think the wholesale slaughter of innocents is justifiable “jihad” are their companions on the path of misguidance.
We have seen a number of prominent Christians on the 9/11 Truth honor roll. But where are the Muslims? Our honor-roll of 9/11 truth-tellers contains only two Muslim names: Nafeez Ahmed and Faiz Khan.
Ahmed wrote the first topnotch revisionist account of 9/11, The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked on September 11th, 2001. Ahmed’s book convinced Gore Vidal, America’s greatest historical writer and essayist, that 9/11 was an inside job (Gore Vidal, Dreaming War; and The Enemy Within). Like Griffin’s work, Ahmed’s is a scholarly, objective historical account, and makes no mention of the author’s religious affiliation or beliefs.
Imam Faiz Khan, M.D., the other Muslim name on our 9/11 Truth honor roll, has not written a book on 9/11. But Imam Khan is surely among the bravest men and women on our list. A 9/1l first responder, Imam Khan is a doctor at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and Associate Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Since the horrible events of September 11th, which he experienced firsthand as he treated the victims, Imam Khan has been tirelessly working for peace, interfaith understanding and 9/11 Truth. He has noted and deplored the reticence of Muslims on the 9/11 Truth issue:
"I have commented in various circles about the ghastly silence I have observed from the American Muslim "activist" sector regarding 9-11 truth. The silence stems from multifactorial reasons - certainly tact and fear is a legitimate reason for some within the American Muslim community to be silent and not rock the boat- but there is definitely a sub-sector within American Muslim activism whose neglect of this issue is bordering on malignancy."
Imam Khan raises a vitally important question: Why is the whole Muslim Umma not up in arms—figuratively, I mean—and screaming from the rooftops for 9/11 Truth? I think Imam Khan is on the right track when he answers “tact, fear, and malignancy.” Muslims tend to be polite and circumspect, especially when they are guests in somebody else’s house. The Qur’ân and the Prophet Muhammad (saas) teach us to use good words and avoid bad or injurious words. Most American Muslims still consider ourselves guests in the house of America. We are afraid that if we say to our non-Muslim fellow citizens, “Your government did this, not us” our words will be taken as a terrible insult.
The tact, as Imam Khan suggests, is augmented by fear. We are afraid that our fellow Americans will react to our “insult” by shipping us to a concentration camp at Guantanamo and torturing us. This fear is not unrealistic: A recent poll showed that nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans. In this Nazi-like climate, with thousands of our Muslim brothers and sisters being tortured, martyred and disapeared to secret concentration camps simply because they are Muslims, a discrete silence strikes many as the best policy. (Personally, I disagree. Silence and denial did not work for the Jews in 1930s Germany, and it won't work for American Muslims now.) have brought up the 9/11 Truth issue literally hundreds of times with fellow Muslims, and all but one of them have agreed that it was almost certainly an inside job. Then why not speak out? The answer I keep hearing is simple and ugly: “There is no more freedom of speech in America.” Over and over, my Muslim friends point out that when you are visited by the FBI—as a great many of them have been—you are threatened with arrest if you tell anyone, even your spouse, about the visit. You can be disappeared by the US government, taken to Guantanamo, denied access to a lawyer, denied due process, tortured, and executed by the direct order of high-ranking US officials, without anyone ever being told what happened to you. Is it so farfetched to suggest that this is exactly what might happen if you accuse those same top US officials of staging 9/11 and murdering 3000 people in a covert operation designed to trigger wars in the Middle East? Was not the real purpose of the wholesale shredding of the Constitution after 9/11 to instill precisely this fear in order to protect the real 9/11 criminals—the very people who wrote the “Patriot Act” ?
This kind of fear, understandable as it is, is indeed, in Imam Khan’s words, a “malignancy.” As Muslims, we are obliged to stand up for truth and justice. The sorry state of much of the Muslim world today is due to precisely this malignant fear of rising up to demand truth and justice. All across the Islamic world, tyrannous, corrupt rulers threaten their populations in exactly the same way the Bush Regime is threatening Americans. Muslims need to gather the courage to stand up for truth and justice wherever they live, including here in the USA.
Another kind of malignancy affects a relatively small proportion of the world’s Muslims, and an even smaller segment of American Muslims. Whereas the great majority of the world’s Muslims are inclined to believe that 9/11 was an inside job—89% of viewers according to an October, 2004 al-Jazeera poll—among the small minority that thinks “al-Qaida acted alone” are those who believe that the 9/11 attacks were justifiable. Of course, those who believe this are not all Muslim. One of my best friends, a very smart, committed political activist from Berkeley who happens to be Jewish, thinks that America got exactly what it deserved on 9/11. It was a magnificent blow against the empire on behalf of the oppressed people of the world, my friend says. He is so happy with the story of the “heroic al-Qaida attack” that he just doesn’t want to hear that it was an inside job. And he isn’t alone. A lot of other people feel that way too, and, let’s face it, many of them are Muslims.
That kind of thinking, like the craven fear that keeps most Muslims silent, is also a malignancy. The 9/11 attacks killed a fairly random cross-section of office workers from all national and religious backgrounds, including more than a hundred Muslims. As the Qur’ân says of the victims of female infantacide, a common pre-Islamic practice: On Judgment day, God will ask, For what sin were these people slain? What was the sin of living in the New York area and working in a particular office building? The random killing of innocents is an abomination. This means, of course, that all modern warfare is an abomination. (Since World War II, it has been the express policy of the US, Britain, Israel, and other nations to mass-murder civilians in order to destroy the morale and productive capacity of the “enemy”—remember the firebombings of Germany and Japan, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Operation Phoenix in Vietnam? Sharon’s razing of Rafah? The destruction of Falluja by US troops who were apparently ordered to shoot every man, woman and child, and shell every building?) Those who conduct modern wars are evil. All of those who planned and participated in the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq will answer for their actions on Judgment Day. So will those who perpetrated the 9/11 atrocities. Ultimately, I believe, history will show that the architects of 9/11, and the architects of the criminal Iraq and Afghan wars it triggered, were the same individuals. In the event that some of them were nominal Muslims—which is unlikely but not impossible—they will face the same judgment as the non-Muslim warmongers and killers of innocents. As Imam Khan writes:
"9-11 truth is an issue that unites the sincere and honest within all faith traditions, as it reflects simply a desire for truth, safety, and an accurate drawing of conflict lines that neccesarily do NOT coincide with religious parochialisms. The lines - Quranically speaking are between those who are willing to use zhulm (oppression and injustice) no matter how cleverly clothed in the guise of secular political policy or religious doctrine as a means to egoistic/materialistic ends - and those who will not stand for it." And we, as Muslims, must not stand for it. It is time for Muslims to get over their tact, fear and malignancies, and stand united as one Umma deploring the murder of innocents and demanding 9/11 truth. And it is time for non-Muslims of good will to join us.
Part Two: The Sacred Story of 9/11
Part One of this book summarized some of the evidence that the official story of 9/11 is a myth in the popular sense: A story that is untrue. Part Two will argue that it is a myth in a deeper sense: A sacred narrative whose purpose is to inaugurate and legitimize a particular social order.
It is important to point out that this argument is not dependent on the argument presented in Part One. That is, you do not have to believe that the official story of 9/11 is false to accept that it is a myth in the deep, scholarly sense of “sacred legitimizing narrative of origins.” The scholarly approach to myth does not usually concern itself with whether a myth is true, false, or something else. Scholars of mythology, like those of literature, find such stories fascinating in part because they convey information in a way that is more powerfully profound and world-shaping than is possible in modes of discourse that foreground verifiable truth claims, such as scientific writing, journalism, non-fiction, biography, and historiography. (Those “non-fictional” forms, upon closer inspection, often turn out to be rich in mythography themselves, and it is usually the mythical element at least as much as the truth-value that is responsible for their appeal.)
Though we can analyze the official story of 9/11 as a myth without concerning ourselves about whether or to what extent it is true, that does not mean that, in the final analysis, the truth of the story does not matter. That way lies nihlism—whether the vicious and mendacious nihlism of the neocons, avatars of the Big Lie, or the less pernicious nihlism of certain postmoderns, who believe that truth is boring and passé. The truth does matter. Though the myth of 9/11 functions in about the same way whether 19 extremist Muslim hijackers actually did it, or whether they were framed by intelligence agents working for the US High Command, the question of whether and to what extent this myth was consciously authored, and by whom, is obviously relevant to its ultimate meaning. Roland Barthes, the first and greatest analyst of the mythologies of modern life, supposedly oversaw the death of the author. According to Barthes, the author’s intended meaning is irrelevant to the meaning of her text. Maybe that’s true for Finnegan’s Wake, but not for 9/11. If the myth of 9/11 is false, a fictional creation intended to inaugurate an era of an endless “war on terror,” the meaning that we draw from it, and the historical effect we create as we draw that meaning, will be quite different from what we would have drawn and done as true believers in an egregiously false myth.
Our analysis of the official story of 9/11 as a myth in the deep sense can also help us understand why so many people believe it, despite the existence of so much evidence against it. The official story in general, and the Kean-Zelikow novel in particular, is a terrific story. It is woven around a stunning mythic image, has an unbelievable cast of larger-than-life heroes and villains, hails its American audience by casting it on the side of the angels, exerts a strong yet subliminal sexual fascination, sustains itself through a powerful structural rhythm of tension (insecurity) and partial release, and forces itself upon us through repeated tellings around our modern tribal hearth until it is deeply engrained into our consciousness. Questioning it begins to feel like sacrilege. Thus Thierry Mayssan has argued that Americans have come to see 9/11 as a religious event, and that this aura of sacrality has blinded them to the obvious falsity of the official story.
In short, many Americans have accepted the official version of 9/11 simply because it is such a good story. And we love good stories, as every storyteller knows. Nobody wants to be awakened from the “storylistening trance,” that pleasurable state evoked by a well-crafted narrative. And if the awakening is a rude one—if the storyteller and his biggest heroes turn out to be vicious, cold-blooded murderers posing as our protectors, wielding the power of life and death over all of us with a murderous, cynical sneer—it may be a whole lot less painful to remain half-asleep, dreaming the pleasant dreams that flicker so evanescently from the televisual hearth.
The official story of 9/11 is not only a good story, but (on the surface, at least) it is a coherent one. The allegedly relevant facts are arranged in such a way that they appear to all fit together. Those who point out the existence of a massive body of evidence contradicting the official story cannot, if they are honest, produce an equally coherent counter-narrative to explain the event. They must admit that they don’t know whether there were any hijackings or not, whether occupied passenger planes or remotely-guided dummy planes hit the buildings, who the relevant actors were and exactly what they did, and so on. All the critics of the official version can do is make educated guesses. And educated guesses are not as appealing as a tightly-woven, thrilling narrative, with each of its threads apparently in place, and its myriad of loose ends concealed.
Our examination of the deep myth of 9/11 will explore the ways that it is such a good story. How do you enchant me, 9/11? Let me count the ways.
The core of the official 9/11 story is its central mythic image: The collapse of the Twin Towers. Who will ever forget the sight of those massive, looming monuments imploding into dust and collapsing at free-fall speed? And though the sight itself was unforgettable, even on a 19-inch television screen, the major TV networks, largely owned by defense contractors that would be lapping up 9/11’s trillion-dollar windfall, made absolutely sure we wouldn’t forget it, by running the same footage over...and over...and over. Cognitive psychologists tell us that the most effective way to transfer data into long-term memory is repetition, repetition, repetition. That is why the best way to learn a new acquaintance’s name is to use it several times in quick succession.
The images of planes hitting skyscrapers, and of skyscrapers collapsing, possess the kind of scope and power that makes them potent mythical icons. Humans have always dreamed of flight and trembled with fear and longing—look at Icarus. And the dream of trying to build a tower to the skies, and then watching it collapse into ruins, is to building things what the dream of Icarus is to flying. The collapsing tower dream is the core image of the Babel myth. In fact, the parallels between 9/11 and the Babel myth are rather stunning. In the story of the Tower of Babel, the tower-builders got their power from the gradual unification of humanity under a single language. On 9/11/01 the world was nearly united under single global language, English, the natural-language expression of the underlying techno-economic language of global capitalism. The triumph of anglo-style capitalist “democracy” was being forecast in all quarters. It would, according to the wildly and inexplicably popular nice-cop-neocon Francis Fukuyama, bring the “End of History.” In fact, Fukuyama claimed, history had already ended, we just didn’t realize it yet. The world was unified under the anglo-capitalist Tower of Babel that was destined to reach the stars. On 9/11/01, the towers collapsed and capitalist globalism collapsed with it. Rabid neocon nationalism—the mean cop complementing Fukuyama's nice cop—arose on the ruins of the towers, and in proclaiming an incipient American Empire, the Bush administration set the stage for the confusion of nationalistic tongues that increasingly drives the world toward chaos. Fukuyama’s report of history’s death turned out to have been greatly exaggerated.
It is one of history’s exquisite ironies that the presumable architects of 9/11 were trying to preserve the very empire they are so efficiently destroying. The US empire, and especially its Israeli outpost, were doomed in the medium-term anyway, with or without 9/11. Inexorable demographic and economic trends were working against them. The European Union was already bigger, both in population and GNP, than the United States, and Israel was losing its demographic race with the Palestinians it had always needed to ethnic-cleanse as a precondition for being an apartheid “Jewish state.” Peak oil was coming soon, and with it the empowerment of whoever controlled the remaining oil reserves—meaning the Arabs and Muslims, absent a US invasion and occupation of the oil-producing regions. Meanwhile, China was shaping up as the superpower of the second half of the 21st century. The neocons, through their think-tank PNAC, stated the obvious: The US had a limited window of opportunity to shape the international environment, and it had better take advantage of its unmatched military power, the only card in its hand, while it still could. But US military might would only be fully unleashed, the PNAC neocons wrote, after “some galvanizing event like a new Pearl Harbor.” Without this New Pearl Harbor, Americans would not make the necessary sacrifices—like accepting widespread poverty, unemployment, the destruction of Social Security and the limitation or even end of their Constitutional civil liberties—that would be necessary for the US to put all its eggs in the military basket, and then lob those eggs at every imaginable potential adversary. Unfortunately for the US empire, these neocon strategists had not understood the point Charles Kupchan makes so forcefully in The Vulnerability of Empire: Empires fall when they make stupid, rash decisions, and those bad decisions are almost always driven by the same psychological factor: A fear of homeland vulnerability. By killing 3000 Americans as they staged what was intended to be the inaugurating myth of the New American Century, the neocons spurred the US into a frenzy of pathological overextension, uniting the whole world (especially Muslims) against America. Instead of preserving US power, they virtually assured their own empire of a much earlier, more violent and complete demise than would have been the case had it merely faded slowly and wisely from its position as world hegemon.
Mythic associations make the images of the plane strikes and tower collapses gripping, stunning, unforgettable...and available to mythologizers to weave their webs of meaning around. The first meaning that has to be woven, if a powerful myth is to be created, is that of the creation or inauguration of a new era. The core mythic image represents the explosive transition from one epoch, one state of being or non-being, to another. It separates the time and space we know from an earlier condition of chaos, void, or nonexistence. The best-known creation myth in Western culture, of course, is Genesis:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
—Now the earth had been wild and waste,
darkness over the face of Ocean,
breath of God hovering over the face of the waters—
God said: Let there be light! And there was light.
God saw the light: that it was good.
God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light: Day! And the darkness he called: Night!
There was evening, there was morning: one day... (Everett Fox translation)
God goes on to separate waters from waters with a dome, creating heaven and seas; he separates the seas from land; life from non-living matter; man from woman; and so on. Note the pattern: One big moment of creation, the birth of somethingness (heaven and earth) out of nothingness, is followed by lesser acts of creation by division. In each case, something chaotic or amorphous is divided, resulting in two less-amorphous entities, one of which is better, being less chaotic or amorphous than the other. Chaos is broken into light and darkness (light is better); the waters are broken into above and below, and the above ones (heaven) are better; dry earth is divided from the seas, and dry earth is better; plant life appears from the earth (life is better than mere earth); animals appear (an improvement over plants); and finally humans are created in God’s own image, with men supposedly being better (less amorphous and chaotic) than women. This magnificent but self-aggrandizing myth is a monument to the human ego: The process of creation that led to ME consisted of cutting chaos in two, discarding the worse half, and keeping the better half, until finally I was created in the spit and image of God.
The Bible’s creation myth is clearly derived from earlier Middle Eastern creation myths. The one preserved in the Gilgamesh epic posits a somewhat more violent sundering of chaos, in the person of the oceanic female, and the bloody carving out of the domain of (aggressive male) order. That aggressive male ego is then held up as the tribal norm.
The core mythic image of 9/11, the destruction of the WTC, is more like the Gilgamesh/Sumerian versions of creation than the one in Genesis. For one thing, it is ultra-violent. Thousands of human bodies are smashed, pulverized, and exploded into pieces. But unlike the Sumerian version, in which the primordial chaos goddess is dismembered by the male warrior hero, here the sacrificial victim is ambiguously gendered. The Towers, of course, are phallic symbols, and the American audience is invited to view their destruction as a kind of symbolic castration. Yet this symbolic castration of America is linked to the “our women are threatened” motif, perhaps the most powerful single motivational myth available to those who wish to stimulate warlike behavior. The media propaganda machine works overtime cranking out portrayals of Arabs and Muslims as vile sexist villains who abuse, oppress, and sexually exploit women. Thus the destruction of the Towers is blamed on these dusky-hued sexist scoundrels who threaten womenfolk everywhere, and the image of the collapsing Towers made into a kind of rape. America, robbed of its two towering phalluses, is feminized, symbolically penetrated by gigantic, explosive airplanes ejaculating jet fuel, whose crews and passengers had already been penetrated by Arab-Muslim blades, box-cutters that had somehow penetrated airport security. The image of a nation vulnerable to penetration is heightened by the story about the alleged “19 hijackers” who supposedly snuck into the country to do the dastardly deed.
This violent, spectacular, sexually-charged image separates the forces of order, namely US, from the forces of chaos and evil, namely THEM—a primal sundering that repeats the pattern of all creation myths, which cleave before from after, good from evil, day from night, inaugurating the whole social reality which the myth-participants and their descendants subsequently experience. “If you are not with us,” George W. Bush famously warned, “you are against us.” This bifurcation of the world into light and dark, white (Americans) and dark (Ay-rabs and Nee-groes), pure unsullied Judeo-Christians and swarthy, sexually aggressive Muslims, repeats the pattern of earlier Euro-racist mythologizers, notably Aldolf Hitler. Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies, swarthy, sexually-aggressive Semites whose penetration of the pure white homeland would have to be stopped. The new, post-Reichstag Fire world would be one of endless aggressive war. Bush’s obsession with this idea of a whole new era of perpetual war, an era inaugurated by the destruction of an architectural monument, produced one of the most bizarre Presidential Freudian slips in history. In a story that should have been headlined, BUSH THREATENS SUBMARINE ATTACK ON CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY, Sidney Blumenthal described President Bush wandering beside the Arkansas River just after the opening ceremony of the Clinton Presidential Library:
http://mujca.com/scholars.htm
“They try to deceive Allah and those who believe, but they only deceive themselves, and realize it not.” Qur’aan II:9
Below are selections from the book-in-progress The Myth of 9/11: An American Muslim Speaks Out by Kevin J. Barrett.
About the author
Kevin Barrett, a Muslim since 1992, has taught Islam, English, French, Arabic, Humanities, African Literature, American Civilization, and Folklore at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay Area, Paris, and Madison, Wisconsin. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in African Languages and Literature (Arabic). In November, 2004, Barrett co-founded MUJCA-NET, the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth. Barrett explains his decision to move from literature to activism by citing a story from Israel Shamir, the Israeli intellectual and MUJCA-NET endorser who moved from Russain literature to anglophone activism in response to Ariel Sharon’s outrages of 2001:
A Jewish folk tale relates the story of a mute child who had never said a word despite all the efforts of the doctors. Then one day, at the ripe age of ten, he dropped his spoon and cried out, "The soup is too salty!" His parents asked him in amazement why he had kept silent for years, and the child replied, "Until now, everything was all right.”
Since 9/11, the USA has not been all right. (Okay, it wasn’t perfect before—but on 9/11/01 we went from Weimar America to the Neocon Reich.) An African proverb from the Wolof people of Senegal states, “If you are lost, turn around and go back to the place where you went wrong. ”Ku xamul foo jëm, dellul fa nga jogewoon.” Literally, “If you don’t know where you’re going, go back where you came from.” (Thank you to Cherif Correa for calling my attention to this proverb.) For the USA, that place is 9/11/2001.
Bismillah ar-rahmân ar-rahîm.
Dedication: This book dedicated to my brothers and sisters—be they Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Hopis, or those of any other faith—of whatever kind—including faith in goodness, decency and justice—with the courage and integrity to stand up against our modern Pharaohs and demand 9/11 Truth.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The 9/11 Truth Honor Roll Part One: Myth as Big Lie
Chapter 1: Myth #1: “19 Muslim Hijackers”Chapter 2: Myth #2: “We Tried to Stop Them!”Chapter 3: Myth #3: “The Pentagon Was Hit by AA Flight 77”Chapter 4: Myth #4: “The Twin Towers Collapsed Because of the Plane Crashes and Fires”Chapter 5: Myth #5: “Let’s Roll!”Chapter 6: Myth #6: “My Pet Goat”Chapter 7: Myth #7: “After 9/11, Everything Changed—So We Went to War”
Part Two: Myth as Sacred Narrative
Chapter 8: 9/11 as Sacred StoryChapter 9: Mythic Heroes and VillainsChapter 10: The Mythic Rhythm: (In)security as Dramatic TensionChapter 11: TV and Cinema: Our Tribal HearthChapter 12: The Myth of DemocracyChapter 13: Myth, History, and Criticism
Chapter 14: Countermythologies and Truth Strategies: Can Storytelling Save the World?
Introduction: The 9/11 Truth Honor Roll
This book is not a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy fact.
No, I’m not talking about 9/11. I’m talking about the book.
The book you are about to read is a ticking time bomb. It is part of a massive global conspiracy of peace-loving truth terrorists who are on the verge of blowing the official myth of 9/11 to smithereens.
No, I’m not talking about Muslims. I’m talking about the 9/11 Truth Movement. I’m talking about brave people like Mike Ruppert, Nafeez Ahmad, Stan Goff, Gore Vidal, Barrie Zwicker, Michel Chossudovsky, Thierry Mayssan, Paul Thompson, Erick Hufschmid, Faiz Khan, Catherine Austin Fitts, David Griffin, Richard Falk, Jimmy Walters, Ellen Mariani, Sibel Edmunds, and of course the Jersey Girls—especially those whose need for truth is greater than their need for closure. I dedicate this book to them, to the many worthy others I haven't mentioned, and to their thousands of brave comrades.
These wonderful people come from a variety of religious and non-religious backgrounds. Though the media’s increasingly monolithic voice tells us that American Christians accept the myth of 9/11 and support Bush’s neocon oil crusade in the Middle East, it turns out that Christians are overrepresented on our 9/11 Truth honor roll. When I began to round up endorsers for MUJCA-NET, the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, my earliest and strongest supporters were mostly Christians. Amazingly, as I was going around introducing myself as a Muslim who didn’t buy the official myth of 9/11, many Christians were listening to me and supporting me. I was impressed by their courage to stand up and demand the truth, whatever the consequences. Listen to Mike Ruppert, who comes from a Christian background. Ruppert was one of the earliest, bravest and most outspoken 9/11 truth-tellers.
“The question I am asked most frequently at my lectures is why I haven’t been killed yet. I have two answers. First, is it is not cost-effective, and the response would cause more problems than it would solve. I am not important enough to kill.
“Secondly, I will not die one minute before God has decided.” (Mike Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon, p.305)
Catherine Austin Fitts, like Mike Ruppert, is a Christian. She was an Assistant Secretary of Housing in the Bush I administration. It is her commitment and faith that led her to expose the oil-guns-drugs mob of corrupt spooks who currently rule America. She wrote a blistering public letter to Condi Rice charging Rice and the rest of the Bush II foreign policy mob with complicity in 9/11. Recently she came up with the idea of setting aside a time for universal prayer and meditation for 9/11 truth.
David Griffin, also a Christian, is one of the most respected theologians in America. The author more than twenty books on philosophy and theology, Griffin risked his life and reputation by publishing The New Pearl Harbor and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. Together, these two books present a solid prima facie case that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the Kean-Zelikow Commission’s 9/11 report is pure fiction: “As this book was going to press, I learned that The 9/11 Commission Report had been included among the finalists for the National Book Award. I would not have been shocked by this news except for the fact that the nomination was in the nonfiction category.” (David Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 291.) Griffin has been asked whether he worries about being killed. His reply (I am quoting from memory): “If they shoot me my book will shoot to the top of the bestseller lists, and if they leave me alone I’ll get to write my Summa Theologica in peace. It’s a win-win situation.” Though Griffin does not explicitly evoke God, he is a process theologian whose remarkable courage surely stems from his faith in the God-process.
By now it should be clear that some of the smartest and bravest “truth terrorists” are Christians. This should not surprise us. We Muslims consider Christians, like Jews, to be our fellow People of the Book, and the Qur’ân tells us that many of them are on the path of salvation. Surely Christians like Fitts, Ruppert and Griffin are among them. The Qur’ân tells us that those Jews and Christians who believe and do good and righteous deeds are the best of creatures; while those who ungratefully reject God and God’s beautiful creation are the worst of creatures and will abide in the fires of hell (98:6-7). Jews and Christians who bravely pursue truth and justice are surely among the best of creatures; while those who long for the destruction of God’s beautiful creation in apocalyptic violence—thinking that they can “force the hand of God” and bring Jesus back if they only murder enough darker-skinned people—are among the worst of creatures and are surely on the path to perdition. Those Muslims who think the wholesale slaughter of innocents is justifiable “jihad” are their companions on the path of misguidance.
We have seen a number of prominent Christians on the 9/11 Truth honor roll. But where are the Muslims? Our honor-roll of 9/11 truth-tellers contains only two Muslim names: Nafeez Ahmed and Faiz Khan.
Ahmed wrote the first topnotch revisionist account of 9/11, The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked on September 11th, 2001. Ahmed’s book convinced Gore Vidal, America’s greatest historical writer and essayist, that 9/11 was an inside job (Gore Vidal, Dreaming War; and The Enemy Within). Like Griffin’s work, Ahmed’s is a scholarly, objective historical account, and makes no mention of the author’s religious affiliation or beliefs.
Imam Faiz Khan, M.D., the other Muslim name on our 9/11 Truth honor roll, has not written a book on 9/11. But Imam Khan is surely among the bravest men and women on our list. A 9/1l first responder, Imam Khan is a doctor at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and Associate Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Since the horrible events of September 11th, which he experienced firsthand as he treated the victims, Imam Khan has been tirelessly working for peace, interfaith understanding and 9/11 Truth. He has noted and deplored the reticence of Muslims on the 9/11 Truth issue:
"I have commented in various circles about the ghastly silence I have observed from the American Muslim "activist" sector regarding 9-11 truth. The silence stems from multifactorial reasons - certainly tact and fear is a legitimate reason for some within the American Muslim community to be silent and not rock the boat- but there is definitely a sub-sector within American Muslim activism whose neglect of this issue is bordering on malignancy."
Imam Khan raises a vitally important question: Why is the whole Muslim Umma not up in arms—figuratively, I mean—and screaming from the rooftops for 9/11 Truth? I think Imam Khan is on the right track when he answers “tact, fear, and malignancy.” Muslims tend to be polite and circumspect, especially when they are guests in somebody else’s house. The Qur’ân and the Prophet Muhammad (saas) teach us to use good words and avoid bad or injurious words. Most American Muslims still consider ourselves guests in the house of America. We are afraid that if we say to our non-Muslim fellow citizens, “Your government did this, not us” our words will be taken as a terrible insult.
The tact, as Imam Khan suggests, is augmented by fear. We are afraid that our fellow Americans will react to our “insult” by shipping us to a concentration camp at Guantanamo and torturing us. This fear is not unrealistic: A recent poll showed that nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans. In this Nazi-like climate, with thousands of our Muslim brothers and sisters being tortured, martyred and disapeared to secret concentration camps simply because they are Muslims, a discrete silence strikes many as the best policy. (Personally, I disagree. Silence and denial did not work for the Jews in 1930s Germany, and it won't work for American Muslims now.) have brought up the 9/11 Truth issue literally hundreds of times with fellow Muslims, and all but one of them have agreed that it was almost certainly an inside job. Then why not speak out? The answer I keep hearing is simple and ugly: “There is no more freedom of speech in America.” Over and over, my Muslim friends point out that when you are visited by the FBI—as a great many of them have been—you are threatened with arrest if you tell anyone, even your spouse, about the visit. You can be disappeared by the US government, taken to Guantanamo, denied access to a lawyer, denied due process, tortured, and executed by the direct order of high-ranking US officials, without anyone ever being told what happened to you. Is it so farfetched to suggest that this is exactly what might happen if you accuse those same top US officials of staging 9/11 and murdering 3000 people in a covert operation designed to trigger wars in the Middle East? Was not the real purpose of the wholesale shredding of the Constitution after 9/11 to instill precisely this fear in order to protect the real 9/11 criminals—the very people who wrote the “Patriot Act” ?
This kind of fear, understandable as it is, is indeed, in Imam Khan’s words, a “malignancy.” As Muslims, we are obliged to stand up for truth and justice. The sorry state of much of the Muslim world today is due to precisely this malignant fear of rising up to demand truth and justice. All across the Islamic world, tyrannous, corrupt rulers threaten their populations in exactly the same way the Bush Regime is threatening Americans. Muslims need to gather the courage to stand up for truth and justice wherever they live, including here in the USA.
Another kind of malignancy affects a relatively small proportion of the world’s Muslims, and an even smaller segment of American Muslims. Whereas the great majority of the world’s Muslims are inclined to believe that 9/11 was an inside job—89% of viewers according to an October, 2004 al-Jazeera poll—among the small minority that thinks “al-Qaida acted alone” are those who believe that the 9/11 attacks were justifiable. Of course, those who believe this are not all Muslim. One of my best friends, a very smart, committed political activist from Berkeley who happens to be Jewish, thinks that America got exactly what it deserved on 9/11. It was a magnificent blow against the empire on behalf of the oppressed people of the world, my friend says. He is so happy with the story of the “heroic al-Qaida attack” that he just doesn’t want to hear that it was an inside job. And he isn’t alone. A lot of other people feel that way too, and, let’s face it, many of them are Muslims.
That kind of thinking, like the craven fear that keeps most Muslims silent, is also a malignancy. The 9/11 attacks killed a fairly random cross-section of office workers from all national and religious backgrounds, including more than a hundred Muslims. As the Qur’ân says of the victims of female infantacide, a common pre-Islamic practice: On Judgment day, God will ask, For what sin were these people slain? What was the sin of living in the New York area and working in a particular office building? The random killing of innocents is an abomination. This means, of course, that all modern warfare is an abomination. (Since World War II, it has been the express policy of the US, Britain, Israel, and other nations to mass-murder civilians in order to destroy the morale and productive capacity of the “enemy”—remember the firebombings of Germany and Japan, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Operation Phoenix in Vietnam? Sharon’s razing of Rafah? The destruction of Falluja by US troops who were apparently ordered to shoot every man, woman and child, and shell every building?) Those who conduct modern wars are evil. All of those who planned and participated in the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq will answer for their actions on Judgment Day. So will those who perpetrated the 9/11 atrocities. Ultimately, I believe, history will show that the architects of 9/11, and the architects of the criminal Iraq and Afghan wars it triggered, were the same individuals. In the event that some of them were nominal Muslims—which is unlikely but not impossible—they will face the same judgment as the non-Muslim warmongers and killers of innocents. As Imam Khan writes:
"9-11 truth is an issue that unites the sincere and honest within all faith traditions, as it reflects simply a desire for truth, safety, and an accurate drawing of conflict lines that neccesarily do NOT coincide with religious parochialisms. The lines - Quranically speaking are between those who are willing to use zhulm (oppression and injustice) no matter how cleverly clothed in the guise of secular political policy or religious doctrine as a means to egoistic/materialistic ends - and those who will not stand for it." And we, as Muslims, must not stand for it. It is time for Muslims to get over their tact, fear and malignancies, and stand united as one Umma deploring the murder of innocents and demanding 9/11 truth. And it is time for non-Muslims of good will to join us.
Part Two: The Sacred Story of 9/11
Part One of this book summarized some of the evidence that the official story of 9/11 is a myth in the popular sense: A story that is untrue. Part Two will argue that it is a myth in a deeper sense: A sacred narrative whose purpose is to inaugurate and legitimize a particular social order.
It is important to point out that this argument is not dependent on the argument presented in Part One. That is, you do not have to believe that the official story of 9/11 is false to accept that it is a myth in the deep, scholarly sense of “sacred legitimizing narrative of origins.” The scholarly approach to myth does not usually concern itself with whether a myth is true, false, or something else. Scholars of mythology, like those of literature, find such stories fascinating in part because they convey information in a way that is more powerfully profound and world-shaping than is possible in modes of discourse that foreground verifiable truth claims, such as scientific writing, journalism, non-fiction, biography, and historiography. (Those “non-fictional” forms, upon closer inspection, often turn out to be rich in mythography themselves, and it is usually the mythical element at least as much as the truth-value that is responsible for their appeal.)
Though we can analyze the official story of 9/11 as a myth without concerning ourselves about whether or to what extent it is true, that does not mean that, in the final analysis, the truth of the story does not matter. That way lies nihlism—whether the vicious and mendacious nihlism of the neocons, avatars of the Big Lie, or the less pernicious nihlism of certain postmoderns, who believe that truth is boring and passé. The truth does matter. Though the myth of 9/11 functions in about the same way whether 19 extremist Muslim hijackers actually did it, or whether they were framed by intelligence agents working for the US High Command, the question of whether and to what extent this myth was consciously authored, and by whom, is obviously relevant to its ultimate meaning. Roland Barthes, the first and greatest analyst of the mythologies of modern life, supposedly oversaw the death of the author. According to Barthes, the author’s intended meaning is irrelevant to the meaning of her text. Maybe that’s true for Finnegan’s Wake, but not for 9/11. If the myth of 9/11 is false, a fictional creation intended to inaugurate an era of an endless “war on terror,” the meaning that we draw from it, and the historical effect we create as we draw that meaning, will be quite different from what we would have drawn and done as true believers in an egregiously false myth.
Our analysis of the official story of 9/11 as a myth in the deep sense can also help us understand why so many people believe it, despite the existence of so much evidence against it. The official story in general, and the Kean-Zelikow novel in particular, is a terrific story. It is woven around a stunning mythic image, has an unbelievable cast of larger-than-life heroes and villains, hails its American audience by casting it on the side of the angels, exerts a strong yet subliminal sexual fascination, sustains itself through a powerful structural rhythm of tension (insecurity) and partial release, and forces itself upon us through repeated tellings around our modern tribal hearth until it is deeply engrained into our consciousness. Questioning it begins to feel like sacrilege. Thus Thierry Mayssan has argued that Americans have come to see 9/11 as a religious event, and that this aura of sacrality has blinded them to the obvious falsity of the official story.
In short, many Americans have accepted the official version of 9/11 simply because it is such a good story. And we love good stories, as every storyteller knows. Nobody wants to be awakened from the “storylistening trance,” that pleasurable state evoked by a well-crafted narrative. And if the awakening is a rude one—if the storyteller and his biggest heroes turn out to be vicious, cold-blooded murderers posing as our protectors, wielding the power of life and death over all of us with a murderous, cynical sneer—it may be a whole lot less painful to remain half-asleep, dreaming the pleasant dreams that flicker so evanescently from the televisual hearth.
The official story of 9/11 is not only a good story, but (on the surface, at least) it is a coherent one. The allegedly relevant facts are arranged in such a way that they appear to all fit together. Those who point out the existence of a massive body of evidence contradicting the official story cannot, if they are honest, produce an equally coherent counter-narrative to explain the event. They must admit that they don’t know whether there were any hijackings or not, whether occupied passenger planes or remotely-guided dummy planes hit the buildings, who the relevant actors were and exactly what they did, and so on. All the critics of the official version can do is make educated guesses. And educated guesses are not as appealing as a tightly-woven, thrilling narrative, with each of its threads apparently in place, and its myriad of loose ends concealed.
Our examination of the deep myth of 9/11 will explore the ways that it is such a good story. How do you enchant me, 9/11? Let me count the ways.
The core of the official 9/11 story is its central mythic image: The collapse of the Twin Towers. Who will ever forget the sight of those massive, looming monuments imploding into dust and collapsing at free-fall speed? And though the sight itself was unforgettable, even on a 19-inch television screen, the major TV networks, largely owned by defense contractors that would be lapping up 9/11’s trillion-dollar windfall, made absolutely sure we wouldn’t forget it, by running the same footage over...and over...and over. Cognitive psychologists tell us that the most effective way to transfer data into long-term memory is repetition, repetition, repetition. That is why the best way to learn a new acquaintance’s name is to use it several times in quick succession.
The images of planes hitting skyscrapers, and of skyscrapers collapsing, possess the kind of scope and power that makes them potent mythical icons. Humans have always dreamed of flight and trembled with fear and longing—look at Icarus. And the dream of trying to build a tower to the skies, and then watching it collapse into ruins, is to building things what the dream of Icarus is to flying. The collapsing tower dream is the core image of the Babel myth. In fact, the parallels between 9/11 and the Babel myth are rather stunning. In the story of the Tower of Babel, the tower-builders got their power from the gradual unification of humanity under a single language. On 9/11/01 the world was nearly united under single global language, English, the natural-language expression of the underlying techno-economic language of global capitalism. The triumph of anglo-style capitalist “democracy” was being forecast in all quarters. It would, according to the wildly and inexplicably popular nice-cop-neocon Francis Fukuyama, bring the “End of History.” In fact, Fukuyama claimed, history had already ended, we just didn’t realize it yet. The world was unified under the anglo-capitalist Tower of Babel that was destined to reach the stars. On 9/11/01, the towers collapsed and capitalist globalism collapsed with it. Rabid neocon nationalism—the mean cop complementing Fukuyama's nice cop—arose on the ruins of the towers, and in proclaiming an incipient American Empire, the Bush administration set the stage for the confusion of nationalistic tongues that increasingly drives the world toward chaos. Fukuyama’s report of history’s death turned out to have been greatly exaggerated.
It is one of history’s exquisite ironies that the presumable architects of 9/11 were trying to preserve the very empire they are so efficiently destroying. The US empire, and especially its Israeli outpost, were doomed in the medium-term anyway, with or without 9/11. Inexorable demographic and economic trends were working against them. The European Union was already bigger, both in population and GNP, than the United States, and Israel was losing its demographic race with the Palestinians it had always needed to ethnic-cleanse as a precondition for being an apartheid “Jewish state.” Peak oil was coming soon, and with it the empowerment of whoever controlled the remaining oil reserves—meaning the Arabs and Muslims, absent a US invasion and occupation of the oil-producing regions. Meanwhile, China was shaping up as the superpower of the second half of the 21st century. The neocons, through their think-tank PNAC, stated the obvious: The US had a limited window of opportunity to shape the international environment, and it had better take advantage of its unmatched military power, the only card in its hand, while it still could. But US military might would only be fully unleashed, the PNAC neocons wrote, after “some galvanizing event like a new Pearl Harbor.” Without this New Pearl Harbor, Americans would not make the necessary sacrifices—like accepting widespread poverty, unemployment, the destruction of Social Security and the limitation or even end of their Constitutional civil liberties—that would be necessary for the US to put all its eggs in the military basket, and then lob those eggs at every imaginable potential adversary. Unfortunately for the US empire, these neocon strategists had not understood the point Charles Kupchan makes so forcefully in The Vulnerability of Empire: Empires fall when they make stupid, rash decisions, and those bad decisions are almost always driven by the same psychological factor: A fear of homeland vulnerability. By killing 3000 Americans as they staged what was intended to be the inaugurating myth of the New American Century, the neocons spurred the US into a frenzy of pathological overextension, uniting the whole world (especially Muslims) against America. Instead of preserving US power, they virtually assured their own empire of a much earlier, more violent and complete demise than would have been the case had it merely faded slowly and wisely from its position as world hegemon.
Mythic associations make the images of the plane strikes and tower collapses gripping, stunning, unforgettable...and available to mythologizers to weave their webs of meaning around. The first meaning that has to be woven, if a powerful myth is to be created, is that of the creation or inauguration of a new era. The core mythic image represents the explosive transition from one epoch, one state of being or non-being, to another. It separates the time and space we know from an earlier condition of chaos, void, or nonexistence. The best-known creation myth in Western culture, of course, is Genesis:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
—Now the earth had been wild and waste,
darkness over the face of Ocean,
breath of God hovering over the face of the waters—
God said: Let there be light! And there was light.
God saw the light: that it was good.
God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light: Day! And the darkness he called: Night!
There was evening, there was morning: one day... (Everett Fox translation)
God goes on to separate waters from waters with a dome, creating heaven and seas; he separates the seas from land; life from non-living matter; man from woman; and so on. Note the pattern: One big moment of creation, the birth of somethingness (heaven and earth) out of nothingness, is followed by lesser acts of creation by division. In each case, something chaotic or amorphous is divided, resulting in two less-amorphous entities, one of which is better, being less chaotic or amorphous than the other. Chaos is broken into light and darkness (light is better); the waters are broken into above and below, and the above ones (heaven) are better; dry earth is divided from the seas, and dry earth is better; plant life appears from the earth (life is better than mere earth); animals appear (an improvement over plants); and finally humans are created in God’s own image, with men supposedly being better (less amorphous and chaotic) than women. This magnificent but self-aggrandizing myth is a monument to the human ego: The process of creation that led to ME consisted of cutting chaos in two, discarding the worse half, and keeping the better half, until finally I was created in the spit and image of God.
The Bible’s creation myth is clearly derived from earlier Middle Eastern creation myths. The one preserved in the Gilgamesh epic posits a somewhat more violent sundering of chaos, in the person of the oceanic female, and the bloody carving out of the domain of (aggressive male) order. That aggressive male ego is then held up as the tribal norm.
The core mythic image of 9/11, the destruction of the WTC, is more like the Gilgamesh/Sumerian versions of creation than the one in Genesis. For one thing, it is ultra-violent. Thousands of human bodies are smashed, pulverized, and exploded into pieces. But unlike the Sumerian version, in which the primordial chaos goddess is dismembered by the male warrior hero, here the sacrificial victim is ambiguously gendered. The Towers, of course, are phallic symbols, and the American audience is invited to view their destruction as a kind of symbolic castration. Yet this symbolic castration of America is linked to the “our women are threatened” motif, perhaps the most powerful single motivational myth available to those who wish to stimulate warlike behavior. The media propaganda machine works overtime cranking out portrayals of Arabs and Muslims as vile sexist villains who abuse, oppress, and sexually exploit women. Thus the destruction of the Towers is blamed on these dusky-hued sexist scoundrels who threaten womenfolk everywhere, and the image of the collapsing Towers made into a kind of rape. America, robbed of its two towering phalluses, is feminized, symbolically penetrated by gigantic, explosive airplanes ejaculating jet fuel, whose crews and passengers had already been penetrated by Arab-Muslim blades, box-cutters that had somehow penetrated airport security. The image of a nation vulnerable to penetration is heightened by the story about the alleged “19 hijackers” who supposedly snuck into the country to do the dastardly deed.
This violent, spectacular, sexually-charged image separates the forces of order, namely US, from the forces of chaos and evil, namely THEM—a primal sundering that repeats the pattern of all creation myths, which cleave before from after, good from evil, day from night, inaugurating the whole social reality which the myth-participants and their descendants subsequently experience. “If you are not with us,” George W. Bush famously warned, “you are against us.” This bifurcation of the world into light and dark, white (Americans) and dark (Ay-rabs and Nee-groes), pure unsullied Judeo-Christians and swarthy, sexually aggressive Muslims, repeats the pattern of earlier Euro-racist mythologizers, notably Aldolf Hitler. Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies, swarthy, sexually-aggressive Semites whose penetration of the pure white homeland would have to be stopped. The new, post-Reichstag Fire world would be one of endless aggressive war. Bush’s obsession with this idea of a whole new era of perpetual war, an era inaugurated by the destruction of an architectural monument, produced one of the most bizarre Presidential Freudian slips in history. In a story that should have been headlined, BUSH THREATENS SUBMARINE ATTACK ON CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY, Sidney Blumenthal described President Bush wandering beside the Arkansas River just after the opening ceremony of the Clinton Presidential Library: