Thinking Outside the Box
Local nut Kevin Barrett taught the first day of his class on "the religion and culture of Islam."
"Barrett, a part-time lecturer, sparked controversy this summer for advocating the theory that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were an inside job, and for planning to teach the theory in his fall class on Islam. Since then, enrollment in the class has swelled to capacity, with some students signing up hungry to hear his views.
"'It induced me to take the class,' a molecular science major with a pierced eyebrow said of the controversy. 'I'm inclined to believe we killed our own people.'."
For those of you who don't follow current events in south-central Wisconsin: In addition to indulging in cranky Loose Change-inspired ranting about 9/11, Barrett has denied that Islamic terrorism even exists to any significant degree and that such phantoms are, of course, merely a pretext to wage a global war on Islam and its adherants.
But students don't seem to mind.
"Courtney Schiesher, a senior from Chicago, said Barrett was a lively lecturer. She said his personal views on the terrorist attacks do not sour her toward him.
"'If he thinks that far outside the box, he also has some other interesting ideas to provoke student discussion,' she said. 'I'm looking forward to attending the rest of the classes.'"
Barrett and his particular brand of screwiness was the subject of one of Cathy Young's Boston Globe columns a few months back.
"According to [University provost Patrick] Farrell, 'We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.' Would he use the same kind of reasoning to defend a Holocaust-denying course or a course in 'creation science'? When it comes to those issues, it is widely understood that even to open up an academic 'debate' about certain crackpot theories is to give them a legitimacy that will be corrosive to genuine scholarship. It is one thing to say that professors should not be penalized for whatever views they preach outside the classroom; it's quite another to say that they have the right to poison the well of the college curriculum.
"Mir Babar Basir, a recent University of Wisconsin graduate and former president of the Muslim Students Association, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that Barrett had many supporters, which was not surprising since 'Madison is fairly liberal.' But what exactly is 'liberal' about the belief in bizarre conspiracy theories? If one wants to promote tolerance toward Muslims and counter the stereotypes that equate all Islam with terrorism, denying the link between Islamic fanaticism and Sept. 11 is hardly the way to go about it."
Is Barrett a "liberal" scholar? Here's a passage from Barrett's website, taken from an essay about "Traditionalism."
"Besides reconnecting me with monotheism, the Traditionalists helped cure me of a certain kind of left-wing dogmatism based on unexamined faith in the eternal progress of free-thinking, secularized humanity, liberated from the obscurantist shackles of religion. Such naivete! On this point the neocons are right: the human being is a religious animal, and progress is an illusion. But they are wrong about religion also being an illusion, a tool for elite manipulation of the masses. Real religion—for example, the Islamic discursive tradition—is a valid body of knowledge, an approach to truth that works...When folks get fed up with the neocon lies... will have been starved for truth so long that they will be truly ravenous. They will hunger for truth, yearn for truth. They will be dying, both figuratively and literally starved for truth, craving it with an attachment deeper than their attachment to life."
Why did this passage pop into my head just now, only moments after completing a post that referenced Ahmadinejad's assault on "free-thinking, secularized" education, William Dembski's disdain for "secular scholarship" and David Horowitz's contempt for, well, higher education in general?
No reason, I guess...
posted by Handsome Dan @ 12:07 AM
6 Comments:
These 9/11 conspiracists just drive me crazy. They spend all their time talking about crazy theories of the government doing bad things when we have things like four year detention of US citizen Jose Padilla that are verified, undeniable facts. Call me crazy but their time might be better spent spreading the word about known, provable instances of underhanded activities than some sort of crazy conspiracies...
Why are these guys all college educated?
Just to prove C.S. Lewis right?
One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying "We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]". Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I've ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four "pilots" among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake "pilot" of the bunch. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports. These "hijackers" somehow managed to board all four airliners with their tickets, yet not even ONE got his name on any of the flight manifests. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn't work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn't work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won't let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you "aren't supposed to think about". Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name, more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn't respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn't happen, not even close. Somehow these "hijackers" must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that is not at all like a jumbo jet, but didn't have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were "supposed to see". Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these "hijackers" wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more fortuitous for the Pentagon, the side that was hit had just before 9/11 been structurally reinforced to prevent a large fire there from spreading elsewhere in the building. Awful nice of them to pick that part to hit, huh? Then the airliner vaporized itself into nothing but tiny unidentifiable pieces no bigger than a fist, unlike the crash of a real airliner when you will be able to see at least some identifiable parts, like crumpled wings, broken tail section etc. Why, Hani Hanjour the terrible pilot flew that airliner so good that even though he hit the Pentagon on the ground floor the engines didn't even drag the ground!! Imagine that!! Though the airliner vaporized itself on impact it only made a tiny 16 foot hole in the building. Amazing. Meanwhile, though the planes hitting the Twin Towers caused fires small enough for the firefighters to be heard on their radios saying "We just need 2 hoses and we can knock this fire down" attesting to the small size of it, somehow they must have used magical powers from beyond the grave to make this morph into a raging inferno capable of making the steel on all forty-seven main support columns (not to mention the over 100 smaller support columns) soften and buckle, then all fail at once. Hmmm. Then still more magic was used to make the building totally defy physics as well as common sense in having the uppermost floors pass through the remainder of the building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly, as falling through air, a feat that without magic could only be done with explosives. Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner. Incredible. Not to mention the fact that both collapsed at a uniform rate too, not slowing down, which also defies physics because as the uppermost floors crash into and through each successive floor beneath them they would shed more and more energy each time, thus slowing itself down. Common sense tells you this is not possible without either the hijackers' magical powers or explosives. To emphasize their telekinetic prowess, later in the day they made a third building, WTC # 7, collapse also at freefall rate though no plane or any major debris hit it. Amazing guys these magical hijackers. But we know it had to be "Muslim hijackers" the conspiracy theorist will tell you because (now don't laugh) one of their passports was "found" a couple days later near Ground Zero, miraculously "surviving" the fire that we were told incinerated planes, passengers and black boxes, and also "survived" the collapse of the building it was in. When common sense tells you if that were true then they should start making buildings and airliners out of heavy paper and plastic so as to be "indestructable" like that magic passport. The hijackers even used their magical powers to bring at least seven of their number back to life, to appear at american embassies outraged at being blamed for 9/11!! BBC reported on that and it is still online. Nevertheless, they also used magical powers to make the american government look like it was covering something up in the aftermath of this, what with the hasty removal of the steel debris and having it driven to ports in trucks with GPS locators on them, to be shipped overseas to China and India to be melted down. When common sense again tells you that this is paradoxical in that if the steel was so unimportant that they didn't bother saving some for analysis but so important as to require GPS locators on the trucks with one driver losing his job because he stopped to get lunch. Hmmmm. Yes, this whole story smacks of the utmost idiocy and fantastical far-fetched lying, but it is amazingly enough what some people believe. Even now, five years later, the provably false fairy tale of the "nineteen hijackers" is heard repeated again and again, and is accepted without question by so many Americans. Which is itself a testament to the innate psychological cowardice of the American sheeple, i mean people, and their abject willingness to believe something, ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous in order to avoid facing a scary uncomfortable truth. Time to wake up America.
Hey Wisconsites! Long time no see. Too bad about the goron above here posting several feet of paranoid gibberish (hey what do I know, I'm just SHEEPLE), but here's a recommended antidote to such nonsense...
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/
The recipe I am going to share with you today is about 350 years old! A great favourite from the Cape where the first brandy from Cape grapes were distilled in 1672! We have come a very long way since then when it comes to the quality of our brandy, but still, Cape Brandy Pudding remains an old time favourite :) Growing up in South Africa is great fun with all the recipes your mother makes and teaches you during your younger years!
Reading this post and the following comments was an enlightening experience. It was nice to know the different viewpoints.
This is Ibrahim from Israeli Uncensored News
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