John McHugo is chair of Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine.
Who reports the group’s “Members news”? Jenny Tonge.
Readers may recall that McHugo chaired an event in London last November where Bill and Kathleen Christison, an odd couple of former CIA officers, presented their new book, “Palestine in Pieces”. The event was backed by Daud Abdullah’s Middle East Monitor and the Cordoba Foundation, the political vehicle of British Islamist Anas al Tikriti. The Christisons were also hosted by Amnesty International UK when they were in London.
McHugo, on the left, Kathleen Christison, Anas al Tikriti, Daud Abdullah, Bill Christison and Oliver McTernan of “Forward Thinking” at the event
The audience. The man on the left in the front is South African Islamist thug and antisemite Achmad Cassiem.
Now McHugo has sung his praises (pdf, pp. 60-62) for the Christisons in Arches Quarterly, a publication of the Cordoba Foundation. They are so good that schools and universities should make their book “a basic text”:
The Israeli ‘new historians’ have shown that crucial elements of the Palestinian narrative of dispossession in 1947-9 were confirmed by Israeli archival sources. According to Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, when Likud was returned to power in Israel in 2001 orders were given that no trace of the influence of these new historians should remain in history text books used in schools. This is only one example of a whole culture of denial which extends beyond history to what Israel is doing in the occupied territories today. That is why Palestine in Pieces is so valuable. It is written in simple, clear English. The powerful photographs relate directly to the text. You can read it in a couple of hours, and it will make you understand the violence, pillage, and ‘memoricide’ that underpin Israel’s occupation, and how that occupation deprives Palestinian Muslims and Christians of their rights, possessions, dignity and sometimes even their lives. I hope it will become a basic text used in Sixth Form and University courses in this country, and that it will be equally successful in America.
Melanie Phillips and Michael Gove, by contrast, should be banished from the media. After quoting from a Times article written by Gove in 2002 and Gove’s book “Celsius 7/7”, McHugo says:
Until Gove withdraws these remarks, I suggest that, like Phillips, he is not a fit and proper person to write columns in a mainstream newspaper or to appear on the BBC.
How fit and proper are the Christisons? Well, Bill is a 9/11 troofer:
Let’s address the real issues here. Why is it important that we not let the so-called conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 be drowned out? After spending the better part of the last five years treating these theories with utmost skepticism, I have devoted serious time to actually studying them in recent months, and have also carefully watched several videos that are available on the subject. I have come to believe that significant parts of the 9/11 theories are true, and that therefore significant parts of the “official story” put out by the U.S. government and the 9/11 Commission are false. I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe. The items below highlight the major questions surrounding 9/11 but do not constitute a detailed recounting of the evidence available.
ONE: An airliner almost certainly did not hit The Pentagon. Hard physical evidence supports this conclusion; among other things, the hole in the Pentagon was considerably smaller than an airliner would create. The building was thus presumably hit by something smaller, possibly a missile, or a drone or, less possibly, a smaller manned aircraft. Absolutely no information is available on what happened to the original aircraft (American Airlines Flight 77), the crew, the “hijackers”, and the passengers. The “official story”, as it appeared in The 9/11 Commission Report simply says, “At 9:37:46, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, traveling at approximately 530 miles per hour. All on board, as well as many civilians and military personnel in the building, were killed.” This allows readers to assume that pieces of the aircraft and some bodies of passengers were found in the rubble of the crash, but information so far released by the government does not show that such evidence was in fact found. The story put out by the Pentagon is that the plane and its passengers were incinerated; yet video footage of offices in the Pentagon situated at the edge of the hole clearly shows office furniture undamaged. The size of the hole in the Pentagon wall still remains as valid evidence and so far seems irrefutable.
TWO: The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them. A plane did not hit Building 7 of the Center, which also collapsed. All three were most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings before 9/11. A substantial volume of evidence shows that typical residues and byproducts from such demolition charges were present in the three buildings after they collapsed. The quality of the research done on this subject is quite impressive.
…
At the Los Angeles meeting of the American Scholars’ Symposium, one of the main speakers, Webster Tarpley, summarized his own views on the events of 9/11. He emphasized that “neocon fascist madmen” had perpetrated the 9/11 “myth.” He went on to say, “The most important thing is that the 9/11 myth is the premise and the root of the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War and the coming attack on Iran. … We must … deprive [the myth’s perpetrators] of the ability to stampede and manipulate hundreds of millions of people [with their] … cynically planned terrorist events.”Let’s give Webster Tarpley and other mistakenly labeled conspiracists who have labored in the wilderness for so long three cheers.
Webster Tarpley is a nutter who has worked with Lyndon LaRouche. He sees troof everywhere. Did you know the undie bomber was a “patsy” of US intelligence?
On Israel, both Christisons write one poisonous piece after another. An example from Counterpunch:
We still tiptoe around putting a name to this phenomenon. We write articles about the neo-conservatives’ agenda on U.S.-Israeli relations and imply that in the neo-con universe there is little light between the two countries. We talk openly about the Israeli bias in the U.S. media. We make wry jokes about Congress being “Israeli-occupied territory.” Jason Vest in The Nation magazine reported forthrightly that some of the think tanks that hold sway over Bush administration thinking see no difference between U.S. and Israeli national security interests. But we never pronounce the particular words that best describe the real meaning of those observations and wry remarks. It’s time, however, that we say the words out loud and deal with what they really signify.
Dual loyalties. The issue we are dealing with in the Bush administration is dual loyalties — the double allegiance of those myriad officials at high and middle levels who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli interests, who baldly promote the supposed identity of interests between the United States and Israel, who spent their early careers giving policy advice to right-wing Israeli governments and now give the identical advice to a right-wing U.S. government, and who, one suspects, are so wrapped up in their concern for the fate of Israel that they honestly do not know whether their own passion about advancing the U.S. imperium is motivated primarily by America-first patriotism or is governed first and foremost by a desire to secure Israel’s safety and predominance in the Middle East through the advancement of the U.S. imperium.
You see, Zionism is racism, and the state of Israel is best eliminated, they say in another Counterpunch piece:
Realities are very different today, and a recognition of Zionism’s racist bases, as well as an understanding of the racist policies being played out in the occupied territories are essential if there is to be any hope at all of achieving a peaceful, just, and stable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The egg of Palestine has been permanently scrambled, and it is now increasingly the case that, as Zionism is recognized as the driving force in the occupied territories as well as inside Israel proper, pre-1967 Israel can no longer be considered in isolation. It can no longer be allowed simply to go its own way as a Jewish-majority state, a state in which the circumstances are “right” for ignoring Zionism’s fundamental racism.
In fact, Israel is like Nazi Germany:
A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential threat. Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its own existence. As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.
The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in Israel.
The Christisons’ diatribes are greatly appreciated by fans such as the Holocaust deniers at the “Institute for Historical Review” and KKK hater David Duke.
John McHugo wants the work of the Christisons to be taught in schools? He is not well.
