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Research grant to fund conspiracy theories? University of Lethbridge student awarded $7,714 to investigate
war on terror 'truth', Maclean's (26 November 2010), http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/researchgrant-to-fund-conspiracy-theories/.]
Michael Keefer
Professor Hall and Joshua Blakeney had expressed vocal doubts about the veracity of
that government version of history, and secondly because Blakeney's research
proposal indicated that his and Professor Hall's interest in debates and controversies
concerning the originating events of the GWOT had been stimulated by the
scholarship of a number of academics including professors David Ray Griffin, John
McMurtry, Michel Chossudovsky, Graeme MacQueen, Michael Keefer, Peter Dale
Scott, Stephen Jones, Niels Harrit, and Nafeez Ahmed. These names, Kay remarked,
effectively constitute a who's-who of the most influential Canadian,
American and British 9/11 Truth conspiracy theorists. [....]
In other words, the University of Lethbridgeand, through the
province of Alberta's funding arrangements, the taxpayers of
Albertaare paying a British graduate student $7,714 to pursue his
conspiracy theory that the 9/11 attacks were staged by Washington.
Does anyone else see a problem with that?2
I would have liked to post a comment on the National Post website, indicating
that I saw two problems with Jonathan Kay's own columnthe first being a transparent
McCarthyism, and another more serious one being a matter of intellectual dishonesty.
That might seem a severe judgment, but Kay interviewed me at length in 2009
for his Truthers book. Knowing him to have had a scientific education, I gave him
detailed guidance during that interview and in follow-up correspondence as to the
scientific studies and the physical, chemical, and materials-science evidence that
underlies my own rejection of the government narrative of the three World Trade
Center skyscraper collapses on 9/11. One would not guess from Kay's book, or from
anything else he's written on the subject, that such information as this existed.
It would be absurd to demand that others automatically assent to my own
interpretations of such matters. But I do observe that Jonathan Kay knows very well that
scepticism about the government narrative of 9/11 is supported by a substantial body of
unchallenged peer-reviewed scientific evidence, some of it published by Stephen Jones
and Niels Harrit. He should also know, if he has read any of the books on 9/11 by David
Ray Griffin, Michel Chossudovsky, Peter Dale Scott, and Nafeez Ahmed, as well as
essays by John McMurtry, Graeme MacQueen, and others, that a large amount of other
evidence points in the same direction. For him to give no hint of this, while smearing as
2 Kay, University of Lethbridge pays student $7,714.
conspiracy theorists the scientists and scholars who have helped to assemble and to
analyze this evidence, is dishonest.
I am not writing out of any animus over my own treatment in Jonathan Kay's
book. Aside from his suppression of serious evidence with which I know him to have
been acquainted, my only objection to the three pages he devoted to me in the first
chapter of Among the Truthers would be that he gave readers an inflated impression of
my academic reputation as a scholar of Renaissance literature and early modern
philosophy.
I would have liked to raise a parallel objection to being included among a list of
influential 9/11 sceptics in Kay's November 25th article: I am indeed a 9/11 sceptic,
but the characterization influential is in my estimation untrue. (In this case, to be fair,
the error was Joshua Blakeney's: Kay merely quoted and commented on his list.)
However, I was unable to post a response to Kay's article on the National Post website.
Since no comments of any kind appear under the article in question, I suppose that the
comments function must have been deliberately disabled.
Kay's stirring of the pot was quickly taken up in Maclean's magazine by Robyn
Urback, who on the next day, November 26, 2010, published a short article whose title
ends with a question mark: Research grant to fund conspiracy theories? 3 Perhaps she
hoped the grant would be withdrawn.
Urback's trajectory in this piece is interesting. To her mind, the lunacy of using
tax dollars to fund conspiracy theories was readily apparent. But unexpectedly, she
deviated into what looked like a defense of academic freedom, writing that the
expectation of graduate research is that it challenges the status quo and seeks to break
through conventional belief. Though feeling little faith that Blakeney's MA thesis
could amount to more than 9/11 jabber, she proposed that academic freedom would
be compromised if taxpayers could suddenly decide which theses were worth their
dollar. But then another swerve took her to her real goal:
Indeed, I think the outrage is warranted [...], but if anything, this
situation just reinforces the need to establish a fully private postsecondary education system.4
3 Robyn Urback, Research grant to fund conspiracy theories? University of Lethbridge student
awarded $7,714 [to] investigate war on terror 'truth', Maclean's (26 November 2010),
http://www.maclans.ca/education/university/research-grant-to-fund-conspiracy-theories/.
4 Ibid.
top to bottom, untrue. The key evidence adduced by the 9/11 Commission Report was all
based upon torture, and the pseudo-scientific explanations of the destruction of the Twin
Towers and World Trade Center 7 that were offered by the US government's National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been refuted by independent
scientific studies that show the buildings were brought down by explosive demolition.
I am a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada. In early October of this
year, I stood on the College's parade square with several hundred other ex-cadets,
including more than fifty from the class in which I graduated forty years ago, and
watched as two currently serving officer cadets were presented with awards given to
them by the bereaved familiesparents, widows, and small childrenof two RMC
graduates recently killed in Afghanistan. I grieved then for the loss of those young lives,
and I grieve now.
I do not want to see any more young Canadians killed or maimed in a war that is
grounded in a pack of lies about the events of 9/11.
How then would I describe the behaviour of those, whether journalists or fellow
citizens, who seek to obstruct, through mockery or through threats of de-funding, the
honest research of scholars in Canadian universities into what happened on 9/11, and
into the ways in which the events of that day have been so thoroughly obfuscated?
I have one word to describe that mockery, and those threats. They are
contemptible.
George,
I'm sorryI forgot to mention that the six studies I mentioned are all available
online: Google will fetch them for you in an instant. Do please read them and form your
own opinion of their significance.