Islam and 9-11 - conspiracy bollocks

Conspiracy theorists claim this photo "proves" the 9/11 attacks were a U.S. military operation. (Photograph by Rob Howard)

Recently had dinner with Kevin and a few other old school friends. Inevitably the conversation got round to Islam and Kevin happened to mention that the official explanation of the 9-11 terrorist outrages were bunkum. The whole thing was very suspicious, apparently. He mentioned the BBC reporter who said Building 7 had collapsed before it actually was seen to do so. He also suggested that the buildings fell because of controlled demolition.
So shocked were we that our old school friend should have travelled so far down the Yellow Brick Road, that someone at the table misinterpreted what Kevin was saying and suggested that it was amazing what people swallowed nowadays...Anyway, this has started another protracted debate in which Kevin asked me to watch Loose Change, the conspiracy film which claims that Bush et al deliberately killed their own citizens in some sort of bizarre false flag operation. Here's my response:
Hope you've had time to read my first response. Herewith the 2nd instalment. It's a bit long but I trust you'll find the time to read it all. I think it important you see there is a rational explanation for all of the unexplained happenings, coincidences and specious arguments with which you appear to be obsessed and which seem to feed your belief that the Islamic world is the innocent victim of some sinister, Zionist led, conspiracy.

You claim your views on 9-11 are not extreme by suggesting that they are shared by a large minority. A large minority of Americans believe that aliens have contacted their government (and a slightly smaller but still significant minority believe they've been abducted and anally probed) but that doesn’t make their ideas any less wacko ...does it? The majority of South African whites supported apartheid, but I’d call that policy pretty extreme. A large proportion of Germans thought the idea of the Third Reich dominating Europe for a thousand years was something worth fighting for. You get the idea.

Anyway, I looked up Loose Change and researched their claims.
I found out that it's now pretty much a by-word for sloppy, amateurish journalism. The two students who put it together (originally as a piece of fiction) have since distanced themselves from a lot of its content.
Try visiting this site  for a point by point rebuttal of all the "facts" contained in it.
Or, you might like to try this site that examines all three Loose Change films and systematically debunks every single misunderstanding, half-truth and lie.
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Or you may prefer this critique since it is by a member of the 9-11 Truth Movement itself:  In other words, the film you asked me to watch and which has apparently convinced you that Islamist terrorists were not responsible for the death of thousands of innocents on 9-11 is now seen as an embarrassment by the very people who think there's something fishy about the official explanation.

Perhaps you'll concede that Loose Change is now pretty much discredited but maintain there are still questions to answer. I suggest you look at this site:  It's from Popular Mechanics magazine - not renowned for having any particular axe to grind but apparently does have a very solid reputation for good technical journalism. Not a reputation it would risk, presumably, unless it was pretty sure of its facts. It very calmly and dispassionately debunks all the major Truther points.

Finally, you could, for comparative purposes, visit this Islamic site. Note the title: It wasn’t Muslims... . Have a look at the bottom link. The one labeled International Jewry.
Is there, perhaps, a leitmotif emerging here?

But to save you time I’ll let George Monbiot, the Guardian journalist not known for being a great supporter of the US or Zionists, give us a summary of the first film:

The Pentagon, the film maintains, was not hit by a commercial airliner. There was “no discernable trace” of a plane found in the wreckage, and the entrance and exit holes in the building were far too small. It was hit by a Cruise missile. The twin towers were brought down by means of “a carefully planned controlled demolition”. You can see the small puffs of smoke caused by explosives just below the cascading sections. All other hypotheses are implausible: the fire was not hot enough to melt steel and the towers fell too quickly. Building 7 was destroyed by the same means a few hours later.Flight 93 did not crash, but was redirected to Cleveland Airport, where the passengers were taken into a NASA building and never seen again. Their voices had been cloned by the Los Alamos laboratories and used to make fake calls to their relatives. The footage of Osama Bin Laden, claiming responsibility for the attacks, was faked. The US government carried out this great crime for four reasons: to help Larry Silverstein, who leased the towers, to collect his insurance money; to assist insider traders betting on falling airline stocks; to steal the gold in the basement; and to grant George Bush new executive powers, so that he could carry out his plans for world domination.
Are you sure you're comfortable to be among the “sizable minority” that subscribes to this nonsense?

Interestingly Monbiot wrote another article two weeks later on the same topic after receiving a record number of comments. Here's an extract:

I believe that George Bush is surrounded by some of the most scheming, devious, ruthless men to have found their way into government since the days of the Borgias. I believe that they were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by Al Qaeda, and that they have sought to disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents. I believe, too, that the Bush government seized the opportunity provided by the attacks to pursue a long-standing plan to invade Iraq and reshape the Middle East, knowing full well that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush deliberately misled the American people about the links between 9/11 and Iraq and about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He is responsible for the murder of many tens of thousands of Iraqis.
But none of this is sufficient. To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile, while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the Twin Towers with explosives without attracting attention, and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly-timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes, and induce them all to kept their mouths shut, for ever.
In other words, you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful, despite the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam Hussein was responsible. You must believe that the impression of cackhandedness and incompetence they have managed to project since taking office is a front. Otherwise you are a traitor and a spy.
[...] Like the millenarian fantasies which helped to destroy the Levellers as a political force in the mid-17th century, this crazy distraction presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional movements. If I were Bush or Blair, nothing would please me more than to see my opponents making idiots of themselves, while devoting their lives to chasing a phantom. But as a controlled asset of the New World Order, I would say that, wouldn’t I? It’s all part of the plot.

I couldn't have put it better myself.

(I also remember you being convinced Building 7's collapse was somehow suspicious as there was "little damage". Please see here for a clear explanation as to how and why it collapsed and how in fact there was a huge amount of damage.)

In conclusion, many Muslims the world-over praised the mastermind behind the terrorist attack on New York in 2011. They obviously believed and were proud of the fact that Islamists were responsible. Other, more moderate and educated Muslims like yourself, rather than accepting that there were some lunatic fringe elements in their religion who needed to be sought out and dealt with, instead denied that their religion could possibly be involved and started to blame...who else but the pesky Jews.

Is there anything in that summary you can disagree with?

So why do so many Muslims not accept the obvious explanation that 9/11 was collateral damage in a civil war within the world of political Islam? On one side there are those, like Bin Laden, who wanted to install Taliban-style theocracies from Indonesia to Morocco. On the other side there is a silent majority of Muslims who are prepared to deal with the West, who do not see the Taliban as a workable model for modern Islamic states, and who reject violence. Bin Laden adopted a war against “the far enemy” in order to hasten the demise of the “near enemy” regimes in the middle east. And he used 9/11 to advance that cause.

Why look for conspiracies? Why not accept that bin Laden and his fundamentalist Muslim cronies did it? Searching for excuses and scapegoats doesn't help anyone.

Looking forward to your response.

PS One final question on the controlled demolition theory - You notice how the towers collapsed from the top ... from the point of impact. So how did those clever FBI/CIA/Mossad boffins know to plant their explosives at exactly the place where the planes were going to impact...?