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Last night’s interview with broadcasting legend Richie Allen covered a lot of ground. Read the imperfect transcript below (minor truncations courtesy of the Substack transcription engine) in whole or in part, or listen above. You can listen to Richie’s whole show—he discussed Jewish power in the media before I came on, and listener comments about me after I left—here. -KB

Richie Allen: Let’s welcome back to the program a man who needs very little introduction, a regular contributor, not just to this program, but to many publications like Unz, etc., Kevin Barrett in Morocco. How are you, Kevin?

Kevin Barrett: Hey, I’m doing very well, Richie. I swam in the Mediterranean already twice today, so I can’t complain.

Richie Allen: You bollocks, as we say in Ireland. You absolute bollocks. I’m nowhere near the sea, but that sounds idyllic, mate. It sounds absolutely idyllic. Sounds lovely. I used to do it when I was living in Spain, of course. I used to swim in the Med when I was dodging the jellyfish. Do you get many jellyfish, Kevin?

Kevin Barrett: No, I’ve actually never had a jellyfish. Are they delicious?

Richie Allen: They’re gorgeous. They’re absolutely delicious. Nice bit of salt and pepper. Do you know, it was a very funny story. We’re going off on a tangent here now. I was swimming on a beach near Estepona some years ago. It was isolated, the beach. And at the very top of the beach, you had the carretera, the highway. And I had a very, very mild sting from a jellyfish on my arm. I swam through a bit of seaweed orsomething, and I got a bit of a sting. No big deal. But the missus was so scared, she left the water, and she ran across the road, Kevin. She ran across the road.

She left the beach and ran the other side of the highway. I never laughed as hard in all my life. I thought, how many bee horror movies have you seen that you think the jellyfish can somehow... So you’ve never been stung by a jellyfish, no?

Kevin Barrett: I think when I was a little kid I was, but here in Saïdia, Morocco, I never have been.

Zach Polanski, is a bit of a buffoon who’s easily pulled apart. A statement he made about his family fleeing the Holocaust has been widely debunked.

Richie Allen: Yeah, good on you. Yeah. Yeah, they used to really infest the Costa del Sol from Marbella downto Santa Grande, particularly in July and August. And you’d be worried about it sometimes. Anyway, great to have you back. It’s a good day to be talking to you because there’s lots of Zionist related news here in this country anyway. Here’s my very quick take on it in 15 seconds and then you take over. It’s one thing the Greens deciding that our stated policy will be that Zionism is racist. But it’s another thing that the leader of the Green Party, Zach Polanski, is a bit of a buffoon who’s easily pulled apart. a statement he made about his family fleeing the Holocaust has been widely debunked.And today he’s being denounced as a liar, Kevin, because a statement he made about his family fleeing the Holocaust has been widely debunked. What do you make of this whole Green Party, Zionism is Racism?

Kevin Barrett: You know, I haven’t been following that issue closely, Richie. You really should have let me know that’s what you wanted to talk about.

Richie Allen: I should have done that. Do you want me to give you the... So the Green Party had its party political conference. And Greens for Palestine insisted that a motion be put to the party. That either, yes, we agree that Green Party policy from now on says that Zionism equals racism and that we should support a one-state solution for Palestine. Now only 2,000 Green Party members voted. But it was a democratic vote, and the ayes have it. So the majority of those who did vote, voted, and this automatically changes the policy of the Green Party, which from now on in, says that Zionism is racism, and that if you are a Zionist, you’re a racist. And the Green Party will from now on in promote the idea there should only be one state and that is Palestine. Now needless to say, Kevin, the Zionist lobby in this country, the boards of deputies of British Jews, have said “this is outrageous. This is the most dangerous time in recent history for Jews in Britain and this will be open season on UK Jews. It’s open hatred now.” So that’s basically it. I haven’t left anything out really.

Kevin Barrett: Right. Well, actually, I had heard that. What I hadn’t heard was about the involvement of Zach Polanski, who can hypnotize women into having larger breasts and claims to be a Holocaust survivor, that part I somehow missed. And so as far as Zionism being racism, I mean, that’s kind of repetitious and redundant. That’s like passing a resolution saying the Pope is Catholic and the sun rises in the east and sets in the West. But of course, it’s also guaranteed to bring out all of the Zionist cockroaches screaming and whining about how the fact that they are genociding people for being subhuman goyim who are not on their level as chosen people, chosen by virtue of their genetic inheritance—because the main way that you’re Jewish is having a mother who is Jewish. But that’s, of course, not racism. And if you think genociding subhumans that you don’t think are your equal is racism, then you yourself are the very worst form of racist, that is, an anti-Semite. And you probably even have harbored doubts about the Holocaust. I mean, that’s just bizarre that that could be seriously disputed.

Richie Allen: Yeah, Polanski used to be a stage hypnotist, and he also did private hypnotherapy sessions with people before he got into politics. And he would tell female clients, he would, Polanski, that h could help them enlarge their breasts through hypnosis. So that was a given. So he did that. But apparently, he has told reporters in the past that he has a direct connection to Nazi Germany, and that one of his great grandparents or somebody escaped the camps. But this has been challenged by people who say he was making it up. So my very ham-fisted point was it’s one thing for the Greens to say our stated policy is only one state of Palestine and Zionism is racism. On the other hand, it’s very easy for the Zionist lobby to take down Polanski because he is a bit of a clown. That’s all I was saying.

Kevin Barrett: I see. Yeah. Okay. So Polanski himself doesn’t have any problem with the Zionism is racism thing. And that’s, I guess, to his credit.

Richie Allen: Yeah. But he’s a clown. Sadly, you know what I mean? Stay off of our side. You might say stay off of our side, you know.

So when Polanski was hypnotizing women into having larger breasts, I can imagine him saying, instead of “your eyelids are getting heavy,” it was “your breasts are getting heavy…”

Kevin Barrett: Right, right. The political leaders in the West are really kind of a sad lot altogether. I mean, it’s the European ones are courting nuclear destruction and seemingly completely oblivious to the insanity of their anti-Russia policy, among other things. And then in America we have Trump, who has taken the clown show to a new level. The West is definitely a place of bizarre and clownlike political leadership.

So when Polanski was hypnotizing women into having larger breasts, I can imagine him saying, instead of “your eyelids are getting heavy,” it was “your breasts are getting heavy…” But that’s nothing compared to what some of these Epsteined leaders do…like Dennis Hastert. He just died. Dennis Hastert, the former U.S. Speaker of the House, who had absolutely no political talent and no political motivations, no political anything, was created as a Epstein class frontman. May he and all the other Epstein-class politicians rest in hell.

Richie Allen: And you mentioned this on the day when everybody’s talking about the former banker, Simon Andriesz. He exposed Howard Lutnick, didn’t he? And Lutnick’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. And Simon Andriesz is dead. He died. He died in the last day or so. And a lot of people, some of them idiots, it must be said, but some of them people that we listen to, they reckon this guy, Simon Andriesz, has been suicided. He’s been killed. Including people like Craig Murray. Now, you might have some time for Craig Murray. I don’t particularly, but it doesn’t matter. So that shouldn’t come as any great surprise, should it? If you’ve exposed people’s connection to Epstein, you’re risking that somebody’s going to come and kill you.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, there’s a whole kind of Epstein death count going on now, like there used to be a Clinton death count. And among the people who have died suspiciously, who were connected to Epstein and his part of the Israeli Mossad pedophile blackmail ring are Robert Maxwell, the Mossad super spy, Virginia Giuffre, Carolyn Andriano, Joe Recarey, Daniel Siad, Jean-Luc Brunel, Steven Hoffenberg, Mark Middleton, and on and on and on. Yeah, it’s probably not a coincidence. And Howard Lutnick is really a piece of work, right? Have you seen these videos where Trump seems to be ribbing Lutnick by bringing up things like, “oh, Howard Lutnick claimed that on 9/11 he didn’t go to work. And so all of his employees got killed. But he survived because he said he had to take his kid to the first day of school.” And there’s Lutnick next to Trump laughing and laughing. It’s hilarious how every one of his employees was killed.

And he knew to stay home from work and lied and said school was starting that day, which it wasn’t. And then he’s lied about his connections with Epstein as well. What a piece of work.

Richie Allen: And Trump must know now. I mean, he did know when he was a businessman. Because when Trump was a businessman, he openly said, I do not believe the official story. I do not believe the planes brought down the buildings. And if Trump is ribbing, and I did see that video, if Trump is ribbing this guy, Lutnick, about the fact that he stayed at home and all his employees died, it suggests yet again that Trump knows the game that he’s in. I mean, I believe Trump is nothing more than a puppet. But Trump is aware of it. And he’s happy enough to be in that game.

I mean, these are levels of evil that, they horrify me, Kevin. I don’t know what else to say. If Trump knows that his fellow New Yorkers were butchered and turned into vapour on September the 11th, boy, I know you believe Israel had a big hand in it, and maybe Israel did. But by the, you know, by the Israeli Mossad, maybe working with American intelligence, maybe not. For Trump to find that funny! What sort of evil, can you find words to describe it?

Kevin Barrett: Well, the way Trump was needling Howard Lutnick was not exactly…Trump wasn’t the one who was cracking up. But yeah, it did seem like there was an element of unsavoriness in Trump’s attitude. Not as much as Lutnick’s, of course. But Trump obviously is basically a sociopath. He’s an extreme narcissist, and so all he really cares about is his own ego. He’s just locked up in his own ego, and he has no compassion for anybody outside of it. And so that’s not a surprise.

Nick Bryant wrote the book on the Franklin cover-up, The Franklin Scandal. Nick Bryant has investigated these, what do you call them, blackmail pedophile rings, the Epstein ring, and similar things. And he says for those guys, it’s like being on a yacht. And you have the very best food and drink and beverages and attractive young whatevers and all you want of all of that stuff. That’s the life you get while you’re on the yacht. But if you try to leave it, you’re dead. They all know that.

Richie Allen: They just know. You’re listening to Kevin Barrett. I want to bring our listeners up to speed. I did a shitty thing there. I didn’t explain it properly. So Howard Lutnick is Trump’s Commerce Secretary. And he used to headup the BGC group in Wall Street. No, no, he didn’t. Sorry, let me get it right now, off the top of my head. Simon Andrews worked for a Wall Street firm called BGC. And Lutnick was there as Chief Executive, if I’ve got this right. And Simon Andriesz brought up these allegations linking Lutnick with Jeffrey Epstein, basically saying that he was a confidant of Epstein.

Now this guy, this whistleblower, Simon Andriesz, has been found dead, and they’re saying the cause of death is suicide. And a lot of people are saying, I don’t buy it. And maybe they’re right to say they don’t buy it. We remember the alleged suicide of Epstein himself. That was a story that had more holes in it than a Swiss cheese, didn’t it, Kevin?

First time in all of history that a pilot has put a plane into a suicide dive and not succeeded in killing all the passengers.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, it’s funny how they can peddle these stories, these ridiculous stories, like the heroic plumber who pulled the Emirati plane full of Israelis out of a suicide dive. First time in all of history that a pilot has put a plane into a suicide dive and not succeeded in killing all the passengers.

And the one guy who did what no other pilot has ever been able to do happens to be an Israeli plumber. If you look at the the story that they’re peddling about that event, which is probably going to save Netanyahu—without that, he would have lost and probably gone to prison or worse—and now he’s probably going to win. And people believe that. So if you look at the details, it’s just crazy.

Richie Allen: A strange story, isn’t it?

Kevin Barrett: The Epstein suicide story looks plausible by comparison.

Richie Allen: Yeah, the plane, the averted disaster, there’s so many things wrong with that. Obviously, I have to concede that. Yes, of course. I got annoyed with some listeners last week who, they knew everything, Kevin, you know. I’m like, hang on, if I can give it a few days, just wait. You know,sometimes pilots do lose their minds. It’s not beyond... The bounds of possibility. But if you’re honest about it and if you keep an open mind, you’ve got to say that’s a ridiculous story.

I do worry about AI, though, Kevin. I saw an image over the weekend of a glass that was propped up on a folding tray on the plane. And somebody said, look, this is proof the plane didn’t drop into a steep descent, whatever it was, 20,000 feet in a couple of minutes or whatever it was. But you just don’t know, there’s so much misinformation out there. At the beginning of the programme, I talked about hasbara and how they have factories of men and women putting out b******t in the public domain, you know, to misdirect people and stuff. But yeah, that was a strange story. And as you said, the one person who benefited from it more than anybody else was Netanyahu. So I’m quite happy to imagine that that whole thing was staged. And didn’t these guys speak in English? In the midst of all of this carnage on the plane, they had the calmness to turn their phones on and start making videos in English, which was a bit mad to me as well. So yes, I’m with you. A very strange story, and I don’t buy it either.

Kevin Barrett: Right. I don’t know about that glass of water, but the fact is that the rate of descent in the loss of altitude that they claimed is completely implausible given those videos. Had there been that kind of plunge, passengers would have been bouncing off the ceiling.

So people have asked me, what do you think really happened? And my take is that Netanyahu went to see Mohammed bin Zayed in Dubai and MBZ refused to recant his statements of a few weeks ago that he gave Netanyahu an urgent warning before October 7th, 2023. And that was just the latest of reports of these urgent warnings. Egypt gave him repeated warnings as well.

Netanyahu didn’t pass any of these warnings on to his security apparatus, at least not the official ones. So anyway, MBZ was now having a problem with Netanyahu. Netanyahu secretly flew to the Emirates and met with him. And then a couple days later, we have this bizarre Emirati plane incident.

So my take would be that Netanyahu threatened MBZ and got MBZ…he didn’t back down from what he said about the 10/7 warning. It was too late. But at least he would give Netanyahu a chance to do a little public relations stunt.

And so what probably happened on that plane, as best as I can reconstruct how it could have been done…

And so what probably happened on that plane, as best as I can reconstruct how it could have been done, is that there would have been a complicit “plumber” and complicit pilot and maybe another complicit co-pilot (flying as a passenger). And that’s all you need. The other passengers could be real passengers.

And so what you do is you have the plane being taken over by uninterruptible autopilot, which we know exists. Whistleblower Dan Hanley has exposed that it was out there before 9/11 and it was almost certainly used on 9/11. So it’s a remotefly-by-computer program or fly-by-wire from an external source. So the plane would have been put on fly-by-wire. The patsy would have gone berserk on command. The pilot would have fought with him and splattered on some fake blood. Or maybe he cut himself a little bit. And then the cockpit door would be popped open a little bit. The plumber, according to script, would come in there and smack the patsy and pretend to take over the plane and pull it out of the dive.

But what the plane would have been doing is not going down 10,000 feet. It would have been a much shallower dive, just enough to scare the passengers. Then the off-duty pilot comes forward, lands the plane, and you’ve got your op. And that would be a very straightforward way to do it.

Richie Allen: It’s a plausible, it’s certainly a plausible scenario you’ve put forward there. I have to concede that I don’t know what happened up there, but I don’t believe the version they gave us for many of the reasons you just outlined there…the plane seemed to be in great order despite having this horrendous plunge. which would have had, you know, overhead compartments. He would have had luggage everywhere. People would have been bleeding. They would have hit their heads. He would have all sorts of injuries.He would have had a tangle of legs and bodies. I agree with you wholeheartedly. Kevin Barrett has a Substack, kevinbarrett.substack.com. He’s on unz.com as well as truthjihad.com. He’s an academic, broadcaster, all-round good egg and regular contributor to this programme, although I’ve never paid him a penny, in fact.

Kevin Barrett: Shame on you.

Richie Allen: Shame on me is right. Absolutely. Shame on you. It’s like that Bush thing. Shame on you for falling for it. Listen, here’s one from Faisal. Yeah. That’s a goodshout from Faisal, yeah. Yeah, again, you don’t have to pull too hard at these threads for them to start falling apart. I wanted to ask you about something else. It’s kind of related. You might not be aware, but writers for the conservative newspapers, The Telegraph in particular…Now these writers, I could name a few of them, they pop up on BBC panel shows pretty much every day and they’ve always been very supportive of Trump. The financial impact of the Iran situation is turning them pretty heavily against Donald Trump here because their readers are feeling it. And they’re losing out. Like, everybody is losing out because inflation skyrocketed, food prices gone through the roof and continuing to rise. And you’ve got Telegraph conservative writers saying they’ve had enough of Trump and enough of Iran. But this situation with Iran, and it pains me to say this because I feel the financial pinch as well, It shows no sign of ending, does it? What’s happening, do you think?

Why would Iran want to negotiate a new agreement with somebody who can’t keep to his old one, the MOU?

Kevin Barrett: Well, it’s obviously a case where you can’t squeeze blood out of the proverbial stone. You can’t squeeze surrender out of the Iranians. They’re hard as rocks. And they’ve been subjected to economic warfare ever since 1979 to greater and lesser degrees. They’re used to it. And they’ve got the support of the world’s most powerful country, which is China, not the United States. So they’re not going to fall. And the only way out of this war is to follow the Memorandum Of Understanding that Trump signed months ago and then reneged on. And Iran’s perspective is, number one, we have the leverage. We can keep doing this as long as we need to.

And then number two is, why would we want to negotiate a new agreement with somebody who can’t keep to his old one? If you signed that last agreement, Mr. Trump, that’s the agreement that we have to hold to, because you’re proving that it’s not worth having an agreement with you, and anything you sign is utterly worthless. So we’re not going to go and have you sign some new agreement. Live up to your old one first.

Richie Allen: Could I be right here? I know you disagree with this, but I’ll ask you anyway. Could I be right? Well, to be fair to you, you do listen to me and you don’t totally dismiss it out of hand. But I believe that all the leaders of all the countries are controlled by some other entity. I really do, Kevin. And I think evidence of this is the cretins in Downing Street. I mean, if these people were operating of their own volition, they’d be off to Tehran, wouldn’t they? And if the Tehran leaders were operating of their own volition, they’d be off to London. And they’d sit down and they’d say, listen, if any of this was real, they’d be saying, look... We’re not having any more of this clown in America or his mates in other parts of the world. So we’re going to put an end to all of this, and we’re going to get the oil flowing again and the Strait of Hormuz open again. I work on this basis, because nearly 20 years doing what I’m doing now. All the roads keep going down that route for me, that none of these people are authentic, that they are being operated or being instructed by agents or by people or by entities that I just don’t know. You give it some credence, do you?

Kevin Barrett: I think that’s certainly true when it comes to the UK and indeed most of Europe. But looking at it historically, we can see that even in Europe, which has been essentially under US occupation since World War II, there have been greater and lesser degrees. And in fact, there were some episodes of rebellion and actual sovereignty.

France was actually more or less sovereign under De Gaulle. And then once again, around the time of 9/11, it was semi-sovereign under Jacques Chirac. And of course, Olaf Palme of Sweden was not doing what the Americans and their Zionist masters told him, and so he got assassinated.

The Trump administration attacked China with the COVID bioweapon in 2019.

So there are all of these cases where European countries have tried to become more sovereign and get out from under the American empire that’s been occupying them since World War II, but the empire just keeps creeping back in. And looking around the whole world, China is not occupied by the United States. Obviously, China is a huge national security threat to the United States empire, which is why the Trump administration attacked China with the COVID bioweapon in 2019. And likewise, Russia is not under the thumb of the United States, which is why the US is attacking Russia through Ukraine. So basically, you Europeans need to overthrow American occupation.

And with Trump as unpopular as he is, it shouldn’t really be that hard. Come on, what’s wrong with you guys?

Richie Allen: Yeah, but I wasn’t suggesting that they’re in control or being influenced by the United States.I’m talking about something else, something that’s unknown. The reason I say this is I don’t believe that the Iranian administrations, I won’t use that horrible mainstream media term regime, I can’t stand it, but the administrations in Tehran, the administrations in Egypt, the administrations in African countries, in Russia and in China, Those administrations do not act in the best interests of their people. They never have, Kevin. Not by any... You know, honest academic measurement. They do not. They act in the interests of their own elites. That’s the point I’m making. And the people always suffer.

Working men and women in every country in the world are under the jackboot or are under the yoke, if you want to use the term the yoke. That’s the point I’m making. You know, I get pissed off when Putin fans tell me, oh, Putin, and he’s great, and he’s holding them back.

I’m like, try and be Russian, man. It’s no picnic there. And it never has been. And it’s too simplistic to say, well, Western imperialism. I think historically these elites in these countries have never acted in the interests of their people. You come back on that. That’s the point I wasmaking.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I think there’s a significant variation, but it’s true that throughout human history, or at least the history of so-called civilization, life in cities under complex political systems, elites have dominated and usually put their own interests first. That’s absolutely correct. But I think there have been exceptions or cases where some elites are more rapacious and self-interested than others. Right now, I think that China actually went under communism with an ideology that claimed that it was operating on behalf of the working people, and that didn’t work out so well. Around 1980-whatever, it shifted to a more pragmatic policy. I actually think that the current Mandarin elite of China, which is selected by national examinations, and you basically have to have 150 plus IQ to even think about applying. Just like throughout Chinese history, they’ve sought out the best minds from the entire country, and that CCP neo-Confucian elite actually is guiding China, according to their conception of the quote unquote national interest, which does include concern for the physical welfare of ordinary Chinese people. They’re doing that a lot more of that than the Epstein class elite that rules the West, which doesn’t care at all about ordinary people.

Richie Allen: You know that I don’t get my information from writers or the Associated Press, that I look in exotic places to get a take or to get an opinion on something. My understanding of China is that it is one of the most repressive places in the world in terms of its legislative body. Bodies work day and night to keep the people there under surveillance. And there are pretty awful penalties in the country just for dissenting against the line of the party. We know about internet suppression there. And we know that China executes an awful lot of its own people. Not for what we would understand as capital crimes. Like, I wouldn’t want to live there. You know,we’ve all read about the Great Firewall, how it blocks out…you know, even our discussion today will not be heard in China because they’re not allowed to listen to it, even though I’m not looking at Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. I’m looking at lots and lots of different sources, Kevin.

Kevin Barrett: Well, I beg to differ. I think that the so-called Great Firewall is, as I understand it, it’s just as vulnerable to VPNs as Iran’s is. I’ve been to Iran, and it’s the same thing there, and everybody just uses a VPN. So everybody’s got total internet access, although it’s not always running as fast as one might like. Just like the traffic, it’s not always moving as fast as one might like in the avenues. But in China, all the polls, which nobody’s really disputing, seem to show about 70-80% of Chinese people like the way their country is being run.

Richie Allen: How could we believe the polls, though?

Actually, you can say what you want in China to a large extent, from what I hear. You just might get shadowbanned. (Just like the US or UK.)

Kevin Barrett: They have confidence in their government and in the future. And basically, the main difference between the censorship there and here is that there, it’s being done by the CCP elite, supposedly for the benefit of everyone, whereas in the U.S., it’s being done by a criminal oligarchy for its own benefit. But in both cases, it’s exactly the same. Actually, you can say what you want in China to a large extent, from what I hear. You just might get shadowbanned. And then at some point somebody might call you in for a meeting and then they’ll buy you a meal and they’ll talk to you and they’ll be friendly and they’ll explain why you can’t cross this line. And it’ll be a while before you start having any harsh consequences.

Richie Allen: Yeah, and they have the social credit system up and running there as well.

Kevin Barrett: Which is transparent.

Richie Allen: Yeah, but it’s terrible, Kevin. It’s all solitaire.

Kevin Barrett: Ours isn’t transparent. In the US, it’s private companies that gobble up all this data on you,and then you have to pay to see somebody’s data, to see what their credit score is. In China, it’s all public, so everybody just sees each other’s credit scores. Isn’t that better?

Richie Allen: You’re deflecting now because you’re presupposing that we don’t spend a lot of time lambasting the governments of our countries for the decimating of free speech, which has been going on for years. We do that all the time. I’m talking about China.

But just on Iran, this one from Liz. A lot of people agree with you, by the way, in the comments. I have to say that. This one from Liz. Tehran is working on a 15-minute city framework. Tehran participated in the plandemic with restrictions and jabs. I myself believe it’s all one big club lording it over all of us.

Now, I’m reading that out because I’ve already conceded that a lot of our listeners are leaning towards you. But there’s the dissenting voice. 15-minute city framework in Tehran. That’s the point I’m making,Kevin. Wherever you look, great if Iran... It’s pushing back against the US hegemony or US imperialism. Fantastic if that’s the truth, and maybe it is on some level. But in these countries, their citizens are swallowing the same s**t that we are. What do you say to Liz there about the 15-minute cities inTehran?

Their purpose was to try to develop fast-acting vaccines that could be brought out very quickly in future bioattacks, so they could unleash something a lot worse than COVID and they would have the only antidote.

Kevin Barrett: Well, Liz, you’ve got the COVID thing kind of wrong. I mean, I was part of the COVID dissent movement myself. But the reason that Iran and China locked down and jabbed people and stuff is because they knew that they were under biological attack. Now, they didn’t use mRNA vaccines. They didn’t have access to them. And what COVID was, was it was a biological attack on China, and it succeeded in cutting the growth rate differential between the United States and China in half, which was its purpose. And they attacked Iran because the Zionists hate Iran, and they have so much power in the United States.

So China and Iran both knew that they were under biological attack from the United States, and they did everything they could to try to mitigate that biological attack. Likewise, the whole world knew that there was a bioengineered virus loose. And they felt the necessity of trying to do something about it.

And the mRNA vaccines were built by the same people who did the bioattack. Their purpose was to try to develop fast-acting vaccines that could be brought out very quickly in future bioattacks, so they could unleash something a lot worse than COVID and they would have the only antidote. So that’s what COVID was.

It was not some kind of psyop where there was no virus. Yes, there really was a virus. It was built in North Carolina and Montana.

Richie Allen: No, I don’t agree with that. I’ve never seen that evidence, but I know that’s your opinion, and I can’t disprove what you’ve said at all. I can’t, but I don’t agree with it. Yeah, there was a virus, but I don’t believe it was any worse than seasonal flu for most people. But I want to put this to you. You say the operation was a biological attack on China and maybe an ideological one as well, maybe. Again, look, I’m not going to split hairs on that. I see what happened in 2020 as.. Restrictions on our freedoms, not just the freedom to move around, but the freedom to have an opinion and all of that. I’d say that their primary target was on Western democracies and our understanding that we’re free to move around and we’re free to say no to medical interventions if we don’t like it. I think mostly what happened in 2020, 2021 and 2022 …

We’re in the middle of stealth World War III.

Kevin Barrett: We’re in the middle of stealth World War III. And it’s been going on…you could say it started in 2014 with the Maidan coup, or you could say it started with the U.S. COVID bioattack in 2019. And the reason they’re taking our freedoms away is because they’re waging World War III. The Zionist Epstein Syndicate that rules the UnitedStates, and that rules the West, sees its power slipping. It sees that U.S. share of global GDP is below 15 percent and falling. China was outgrowing the United States by a massive factor before COVID, and now by half of that.

The Epstein class is fighting to maintain their world hegemony. And to do that, they feel they need to take away people’s freedom because you can’t have freedom in wartime.

And you’re going to notice that we’re in the middle of World War III when a Russian nuke goes off over the UK or, God forbid, a Russian nuclear torpedo causes an 800-foot radioactive tidal wave to permanently end life on the British Isles. At that point, you’re going to notice that you’re in World War III.

I think you guys should wake up and notice right now and then take back your countries.

Richie Allen: There were hundreds of thousands of people in London in 2020, and all they had to do was just walk through the gates of Downing Street in such numbers.

Violence was completely unnecessary, and they could have basically evicted everybody on that street and said, we’ve had enough of it. And then they could have turned and walked up to Buckingham Palace, gone down the Mall and said, no, we’re not having you people anymore. We’re tired of it. Yeah, I get upset thinking about it sometimes.

The Blue City in Morocco

People have forgotten that the power is really in the hands of the people. I wanted to ask you, before we impart company today, my better half, who loves listening to you, by the way, she says, would you ask Kevin if he’s ever visited the Blue City in or near Morocco? And if you have, what’s it like?

Kevin Barrett: She’s talking about Chefchaouen, which is this marvelous Moroccan city up against the huge mountains, the Rif. It’s not very far from Tangier. If you’re going to bother to go to Tangier, you definitely should head over to Chefchaouen and check it out. It has beautiful vernacular Mediterranean architecture, these soft, round forms on these buildings out of plaster, all painted this unearthly shade of blue. It’s right up against the mountains. There’s a waterfall. It’s really a beautiful place. And it was a refuge for refugees from the genocide of the Iberian Peninsula. As you may know, Richie, the Muslims and Jews were forced out of Spain. Half of them were massacred. The other half survived. And a lot of them ended up in Morocco. And Chefchaouen was a major base of resistance against the genocide. It actually was founded by refugees from Al-Andalus, the great Muslim civilization of the Iberian Peninsula.

Richie Allen: Beautiful, I reckon, Kevin, yeah. So we visited Morocco a couple of times, but never went further than Fez. But yeah, it sounds absolutely brilliant. Thanks for your time today. Kevin is onSubstack, kevinbarrett.substack.com. He’s on unz.com too. Check out truthjihad.com. Kevin is an academic, he is a broadcaster and author, and he lives in Morocco with the wonderful Rabia, who might be listening to some of this now or later on. If she is, how you doing, Rabia? Hope you’re well. Kevin, thanks, mate. Until next time, thanks for everything. Appreciate you.

Kevin Barrett: Okay, thank you, Richie. And best from Rabia and I to your better half as well.

Richie Allen: Fantastic, Kevin. Kevin Barrett, live on The Richie Allen Show. Monday’s programme. An enormous amount of comments came in there. I’ll read them out now in a couple of minutes’ time…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com

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Prior to the FlyDubai incident on September 30, Israeli Prime Minister and indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu was trailing in all the polls—even pro-Likud ones. And his numbers were accelerating downward in a suicide plunge. Several recent revelations have confirmed suspicions that Netanyahu and co-conspirators not only knew about, but deliberately engineered the October 7 Hamas attack, complete with pre-planned Israeli slaughter of hundreds of their own civilians, in order to launch the genocide of Gaza and accompanying wars on Lebanon and Iran.

Then on September 30, Bibi’s plunging political plane was pulled out of its suicide nosedive by a heroic plumber who knew what to do because he watches TV. By saving the doomed airliner, the moonlighting plumber also pulled Netanyahu’s campaign out of its nosedive. Post-September 30 polls showed Netanyahu back in the lead.

An October 1 Times of Israel story (screenshot above) explains how the FlyDubai incident was perfectly-tailored to suit Netanyahu’s political needs— and pull him out of an otherwise hopeless plunge towards disaster and eventual prison…or worse.

“The salvation of the flydubai flight was, indeed, the stuff of cinema…It also appears to be a boon for the prime minister, who has been trailing in almost every poll less than four weeks before election day…Now, Netanyahu hopes to associate himself with that achievement (the “cinematic Israeli heroism” on FlyDubai -KB) rather than the tremendous debacle of October 7.”

“…The thwarted attack gives Netanyahu a powerful message shortly before the vote, one he has hammered home for much of his career: Things are still unsafe. Israel’s neighbors cannot be trusted. In these times, is it wise to vote for an untested coalition that may need to rely on the votes of Arab-led parties? …The heroic exploits on flydubai Flight 1073 appear to have given Bibi a boost. And with the election on a razor’s edge, that could make the difference.”

By staging the FlyDubai PR stunt, which obviously never happened the way mainstream media reported it, Netanyahu might not just have saved himself from prison, but from the hangman’s noose as well. Israel reserves capital punishment for genocide, treason, espionage, and terrorism, and Netanyahu plainly committed all four of those crimes when he treasonously conspired to facilitate Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel, then deliberately slaughtered hundreds of Israeli civilians (terrorism) to create the pretext for the slaughter of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Gazans (terrorism and genocide).

Recent revelations confirm that Netanyahu was plainly warned that October 7 was coming, but deliberately chose not to inform his security establishment. A blockbuster September 7 Haaretz article dropped the bombshell: Ten days before October 7, Emirati ruler Mohamed Bin Zayed (MBZ) called Netanyahu to deliver an urgent warning: Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar was planning a major attack. The call lasted 45 minutes. MBZ was astonished by Netanyahu’s determination to evince complete lack of interest in the dire warning. MBZ and his circle were even more astonished by what they learned later:

None of them imagined that the prime minister would hear the message but wouldn't brief the heads of the defense establishment. The head of the Shin Bet, the head of the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff – none of them knew about bin Zayed's warning.

MBZ’s wasn’t the only urgent warning. Egypt, too “conveyed at least three separate warnings to Israel of a major Hamas operation ahead of the October 7 massacre, including a secret visit by Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel to Israel just 11 days before the attack, carrying an urgent warning that Gaza was preparing a major attack.”

When news broke of MBZ’s warning last month, Netanyahu’s campaign appeared doomed. Though Israeli media assiduously averts its gaze from the elephant in the room—the plain fact that Netanyahu and his allies deliberately orchestrated the October 7 attack, complete with preplanned IDF slaughter of hundreds of Israeli civilians, to launch their wars for Greater Israel—the anti-Netanyahu media, led by Israel’s most respectable newspaper, Haaretz, have framed Netanyahu’s October 7 complicity as massive incompetence. And that framing had been enough to sink Netanyahu’s political hopes…until a heroic plumber pulled them out of the toilet.

Israel’s military censors set limits on what journalists can directly state, forcing even the most outrageous and telling revelations to be laid out without any acknowledgment of their significance, thereby forcing the reader to connect the dots. That is what Haaretz did in its blockbuster article “Revealed: Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7. He Didn’t Brief Israel’s Security Chiefs.” Facts are strung together in that article in such a way as to inform the alert reader that Netanyahu not only knew October 7 was coming, but in fact deliberately orchestrated it by dangling deals in front of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, then frustrating him by outrageously stalling, in a manner calculated to incite Sinwar to use the military capability that Netanyahu had helped him create.

That Sinwar would use military means in general, and a “concentration camp breakout” raid in particular, to try to break the logjam was no secret. Sinwar plainly told Netanyahu’s government so:

"Tell the Israelis that if they don't make progress, I'm preparing a huge surprise for them," he declared emphatically. Here, he dropped a key word for the first time, one that should have triggered red flags: "Tell them to expect a 'zilzal,' an earthquake."

Sinwar took a deep breath, and in a chillingly quiet voice said: "Convey a message that I am preparing the mother of all surprises. A terrifying operation. Something extraordinary. Please convey to the Israelis what I am saying word for word."

According to the Haaretz account, Netanyahu was playing a double game with Sinwar and with his own security establishment (or at least the non-complicit wing thereof.) By dangling the prospect of a major agreement that would end the genocidal blockade of Gaza and allow Gazans a major share of their offshore natural gas wealth, Netanyahu could convince his security establishment that Sinwar and Hamas were happy, getting along fine with Israel, and therefor posed no threat whatsoever. Meanwhile, by facilitating Qatar’s funding and arming of Hamas, which was building the impressive military infrastructure that would allow it to defeat crack IDF units on October 7 and win the military aspect of the ensuing conflict with Israel—and then by repeatedly tantalizing and then frustrating Sinwar—Netanyahu ensured that Sinwar would conduct the raid on Israel that he had been loudly promising, while conducting drills for it right in front of the apartheid wall itself, in full view of the IDF units who repeatedly reported them and had their reports quashed. And since Sinwar’s raid, by itself, would not have killed nearly enough Israelis to trigger the regional war for Greater Israel that Netanyahu wanted, Netanyahu not only stood down Israeli forces to allow a vastly bigger incursion than would have otherwise happened, but also issued the Hannibal Directive order for Israeli forces to slaughter hundreds of their own civilians—whose deaths could be blamed on Hamas, creating the public outrage to enable Netanyahu’s war of genocidal expansion.

Clearly a great many prominent people in Israel, including Netanyahu’s political enemies, have known or suspected the truth all along, but are only now, during the run-up to the election that could dethrone Netanyahu, spilling the biggest beans. Why didn’t they take down Netanyahu immediately after October 7 by revealing the truth?

First, scandals so huge that they shake the citizenry’s faith in their entire system are routinely, indeed almost universally, covered up by all relevant parties, even the political enemies of the guilty plotters. Some high-level Republicans circa 1963, for example, must have strongly suspected that LBJ had a hand in JFK’s murder, but they were not about to bring down the American political house by exposing that scandal, even if they could have done so without risking their lives. (For a list of many well-documented scandals so huge that they were covered up by all relevant parties due to the systemic risk they posed, see Ron Unz’s American Pravda series. And for a memorable meditation on why those with “a seat at the table” of power refuse to overturn the table by exposing hugely destabilizing scandals, see Martin Schotz’s History Will Not Absolve Us.)

Israelis, with their pre-traumatic stress disorder, are the last people on earth who would rock the very foundations of their country, risking its collapse, by exposing such horrific truths. Jewish culture reviles the moser, the snitch who rats out his fellow Jews. No Israeli Jew, or very few anyway, will ever come right out and say that Netanyahu orchestrated 10/7 as part of a campaign of genocide, treason, espionage, and terrorism.

Secondly, almost all relevant parties in the Israeli political and security establishments support the Greater Israel Project and would presumably agree that substantially furthering it would be worth hundreds or thousands of Israeli lives and any number of Amalek lives. So as much as they may detest Netanyahu personally, they would have no problem with him committing genocide, treason, espionage, and terrorism in order to start a war that would help Israel enhance its regional dominance and/or expand its borders.

Unfortunately for the Israelis, and fortunately for the rest of us, Israel is losing the war it started with the October 7 provocation. Its protector, the USA, is withdrawing from the region under Iranian fire, while Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States have entered the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement in order to take shelter from Israel under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella. Netanyahu has lost his October 7 gamble, as the whole region, indeed the whole world, has turned against Israel, making its future prospects highly dubious.

Which raises the question: How stupid could Netanyahu have possibly been not to foresee how it would shake out? I certainly foresaw it, and though I’m cast as a West Asia expert on Press TV, the truth is that my detailed knowledge of that region is undoubtedly inferior to that of Netanyahu’s brain trust.

Since October 7, 2023, Zionists, including some who comment on my articles, have been constantly predicting that Gaza would soon be completely emptied and occupied by Israel, that Hezbollah and Ansarullah would disappear, and that together the US and Israel would quickly and easily topple Iran’s government and install their own puppet regime. And I have been asking them what in the world they’ve been smoking.

I knew that October 7 put Israel in an impossible position: If it surrendered or backed off, it would look even weaker than its 10/7 failures had already demonstrated; but if it continued its campaign in Gaza, it would lose the military fight to Hamas and be reduced to genocidally slaughtering civilians. And every civilian it genocided would be one more nail in Israel’s coffin, putting an end to the Zionist settler colony by fatally undermining its global and regional legitimacy.

I have been reluctant to express certainty that elements in Israel knew October 7 was coming and deliberately stood down, because I could not imagine that Israeli decision-makers would be stupid enough to embark on such a suicidal course. But ongoing revelations about the warnings that Netanyahu quashed, and the games he was playing with Sinwar, have convinced me that the October 7 truth movement has been right all along. Recent revelations that Hamas wanted to unconditionally release all civilian hostages on the evening of October 7 itself, and Netanyahu refused the brief ceasefire that would have been necessary to convey them safely back to Israel, convinced me that far from seeing hostages as a liability, as I had assumed, the Israeli war criminal saw them as an asset he could leverage in pursuit of a protracted Gaza campaign that would incite the regional war he wanted.

My friend Barry Kissin, an October 7 truther from way back, thinks Netanyahu expected to win the war for Greater Israel that he incited on 10/7. Barry thinks Netanyahu needed to roll the dice while his blackmailed slave Trump was in power, convinced as he was that together Israel and the US could quickly defeat Iran.

I have been following expert prognostications about prospects of a US-Israeli war on Iran since Van Riper and the Iranians crushed the US in Millennium Challenge 2002, and it has been clear to me that Iran has had the upper hand for decades, especially since it developed its stock of underground missiles and drones that became so formidable more than 15 years ago. I know people close to the thinking of Iran’s security establishment, and they have always believed that by 2010 Iran’s deterrent was so formidable that no major US attack would occur.

So I am still puzzled about why Netanyahu, and whoever he colluded with to stand down Israel’s defenses and then slaughter Israeli civilians on 10/7, believed that starting a big regional war for Greater Israel at that juncture was a wise course of action. If anyone can explain that conundrum, please do so in the comments.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com

Foad Mahdavi interviewed me on recent developments in Yemen. Above is the audio and video, and below is his post, followed by a transcript. -KB

Foadebate

Professor Kevin Barrett: ”Yemen is a fulcrum, and the balance of power across the entire region is shifting because of it.”🌐 I spoke with Dr. Kevin Barrett, a prominent American scholar of Islam and geopolitical analyst, about the developments in Yemen and its role in reshaping regional and global power dynamics. Barrett offers a unique perspective on Yemen—a land that is no longer a forgotten footnote on the Arabian Peninsula, but has instead become a decisive fulcrum in the Red Sea and across West Asia. Pointing to Ansarullah’s control over the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait and the collapse of Saudi positioning, Barrett traces the roots of this astonishing victory not merely to weaponry, but to "Asabiyyah" (social cohesion) and popular solidarity—as conceptualized by Ibn Khaldun—pitted against demoralized mercenary armies. Despite billions of dollars in American weapons, these forces lack the will and motivation to fight; his analysis reveals how human will and faith triumph over the modern war machine.🔻In this conversation, detailing Iran’s asymmetric warfare strategy, he emphasizes that Yemen is by no means an Iranian proxy, but rather an independent, freedom-seeking ally. In fact, Iran and Yemen are two independent actors working toward a common goal. On a broader level, Barrett analyzes the emergence of a multipolar world order centered around Russia and China, set against the backdrop of the failure of US strategy in the region.▶ To watch the full interview and gain a deeper understanding of this issue, check out the video and share your valuable insights.@foadebate | Conversation About Tomorrow's World

Transcript

Foad Mahdavi: In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, hello everybody, hope you are doing great, welcome back to Fouadebate. For years, Yemen was treated as a footnote, a poor remote country on the southern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, written off as a proxy battlefield in someone else’s war. But look at the map today. Look at the Red Sea. Look at the headlines. Yemen is no longer a footnote. I’m sorry. It is a fulcrum. And the balance of power in the entire region is shifting because of it.

To help us unpack this, I’m honored to be joined by Dr. Kevin Barrett, an Arabist Islamologist, a former professor at universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, and one of America’s most prominent critics of the war on terror. He’s the host of Truth Jihad Radio, and False Flag Weekly News, and he has written and spoken extensively on the Middle East, Yemen, and the geopolitics of Thank you so much, Dr. Barrett, for being with us today.

Kevin Barrett: Thank you, Foad. It’s good to be back with you. You’re doing great work.

Foad Mahdavi: You’re welcome. Dr. Barrett, let’s get started with the most striking developments. In a matter of days, Yemeni forces under Ansar Allah command captured Muqa and strategic highlands overlooking the Bab al-Mandaab Strait. They now control Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline. Just how significant is this military transformation?

Kevin Barrett: It’s extremely important. It currently actually shifts the balance of power in the ongoing war between the Israeli-occupied United States and Iran and its allies. Between the destruction of the east-west pipeline, bringing Saudi oil to be shipped out through the Red Sea, and now the Ansarullah control over the Bab al-Mandeb, this basically doubles the pressure on the United States and its erstwhile allies or vassal states in the region who have now even less reason to trust American promises of protection. So that’s the best case scenario for the Americans, that it will be limited at this doubling of pressure on them.

But in fact, it actually promises even more. Ansarullah forces have routed the Saudi mercenaries, showing that a real nation with a real history of civilization—and this is the real civilization of the Arabian Peninsula going back thousands of years—can defeat this gang of Bedouin warlords.

The Ibn Sauds made an alliance with the Wahhabis to set up the ancestor of the current regime in Saudi Arabia that’s misruling the Islamic holy places. And so now the whole balance of power in the Arabian Peninsula is in play, and we could see even more radical changes in the region than most of us had anticipated.

Foad Mahdavi: Right. And yet the Saudi-led coalition has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on American weapons, F-15s, Patriots, the whole arsenal. How does a movement that was once seen as a ragtag militia achieve this?

Kevin Barrett: That’s a fascinating question. I think one answer is that the Western media, which dominates global perceptions, has misportrayed Yemen as a kind of a civilizational backwater where everybody is addicted to chewing khat. We’ve gotten a picture of Yemen that’s very, very impoverished. And in fact, it’s true that Yemen has faced huge challenges, especially after the genocidal Saudi war and blockade that started a decade ago. But the Yemeni civilization is, as I said, the true Arabian civilization. And it is being revived even now against the Saudis.

And I think this illustrates The Ibn Khaldun theory of asabiya being crucially important in determining the outcome of historical struggles. Ibn Khaldun said that city dwellers, wealthy emperors and upper classes in the cities, become basically spoiled. They become too comfortable. They become pampered. And they lose any interest in anything other than individual personal power, pleasure, and comfort.

And that ruins their ability to defend themselves or to get anything done. Whereas outside the imperial power penter, there’s still some kind of asabia or a feeling of belonging to a group. And here we see not only the Ansarullah forces having this ancient Yemeni civilization bringing them together, they have the nucleus of this group, not all of the Yemen government, but the people who are allied with Ansarullah have a nucleus that has a particular religious school of thought associated with it. And that gives them asabiyah as well. And then finally, they are Muslim and in alliance with forces who are struggling to free the entire Islamic world. And Islam, of course, came to largely replace other tribal affiliations, to create a kind of a mega-tribe or a group of people with asabiya who are dedicated to truth and justice. And that’s what the Ansarullah forces represent. Whereas the Ibn Saud forces represent gangster warlords who are only interested in wealth, power, and pleasure. And that’s why they can’t muster any of their people to fight to defend them. Whereas Ansarullah can muster these huge crowds of millions that gather to call for the liberation of the Islamic world in general and, of course, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and occupied Palestine in particular.

Foad Mahdavi: This is actually the classic asymmetric warfare story, right? Firepower doesn’t equal victory, indeed.

Kevin Barrett: Exactly, right. Firepower is not helpful if you have no morale, if you have nobody who is courageous enough and competent enough to want to risk their lives to operate all of your weaponry. And that’s the problem the Saudis have long faced. They have never really been very popular, though there’s a big Western media campaign now trying to tell us that there are young people who are very Westernized or West-toxicated who love Bin Salman because he lets them go to the nightclubs.

But I don’t think the Saudis have managed to solve that problem. They’ve always had to bring in others. They had to bring in the French to chase religious extremists out of Mecca several decades ago. They’ve repeatedly relied on outsiders to defend themselves, and now their reliance on the American empire to defend them and on being obsequious with the Zionist genocide perpetrators, hoping that that will defend them, it’s not working. And so they’re finding themselves defenseless in the face of what was supposed to be a much weaker force. But as they’re finding out, it isn’t so weak.

Foad Mahdavi: Right. Let’s talk about Bab al-Mandab specifically. This is a strait that connects the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea and from there to the Suez Canal. Something like 12% of global trade passes through it, if I’m not mistaken. Why does control of this waterway matter so much?

Kevin Barrett: Well, geographically, the Bab al-Mandab is the gateway to bypassing having to go around the Horn of Africa to have commerce between the Atlantic Ocean and East Asia, and even Central Asia. And so the sea journeys are vastly longer if they can’t use the Red Sea passageway and the Suez Canal. And so that’s why in the past the Suez Canal has been such a flashpoint. For example, in the Suez Crisis in the 1950s, when the British and the French were trying to support the Israelis in depriving Egypt of control of Suez, that didn’t work out so well for the Zionists and their friends. And this won’t either because again, Ansarullah has the ability now to exert as much pressure as they want over Babel Mendeb. And with modern weaponry it’s very difficult for anyone to come in and try to open up these kinds of waterways, because the land-based forces are able to threaten shipping from great distances using modern missile and drone technology, as Iran has shown us, to Trump’s displeasure, regarding the Persian Gulf.

Foad Mahdavi: Exactly. I have a critical question right now. As you know, the United States has a massive naval presence in the region. Why hasn’t Washington been able to reopen this trade or product shipping?

Kevin Barrett: Well, again, this is the result of the brilliant use of asymmetrical warfare by Iran and the great foresight of Iran’s leaders, including the martyred Imam Khamenei. During his tenure, the Iranian strategists realized that they could leverage the power of geography to defeat a supposedly vastly more powerful empire. And to do that, they realized that well protected assets, assets such as drones and missiles in particular, very deep underground would be very, very difficult to destroy. Whereas they saw that their opponent, their prospective enemy, had bases and was leaving its military assets right out in the open, where they could be targeted by these protected drones and missiles.

So that was a major factor. And another is that very drone and missile technology.

Foad Mahdavi: Dr. Barrett, let’s zoom out. You have written extensively about the Saudi-Emirati rivalry in Yemen. How has that internal coalition factor affected the broader balance of power?

Kevin Barrett: This has been a case in which the forces of the Axis of Resistance and everyone who supports them, that is people who are trying to support the liberation of the Islamic world of West Asia and specifically of Palestine, have not had to work very hard to divide and conquer their opponent. Because the Saudis and the Emiratis…these dynasties have to go out and hire mercenaries. And so what you end up with is these two rival gangs of mercenaries who are mostly interested in their own power and personal profit. And therefore, they’re as much at odds with each other as they are with Ansarullah. And for that reason, we’ve seen all kinds of issues arise on that side. I think the Emiratis have been even more irresponsible than the Saudis. They’ve been sending their mercenaries all over the world, or all over Africa anyway, stirring up trouble and fighting purely for profit. And ultimately, military conflict requires courage. It requires people who are willing to take risks and to suffer and risk being martyred. And these people who are really not living very much in conformance with the spirit, much less the letter of Islam, don’t really feel like if they die, they won’t feel like they died in a good cause. They know that they’re fighting only for money and for personal power and profit. And that removes their courage and their real dedication to fight. And so they just want to grab as much money as they can and get out alive.

And so we see these warlords feuding with each other. And that has, of course, allowed Ansar Allah, who have that asabiyah, and have that dedication to fight fi sabil Allah, and endure martyrdom, if necessary, have a huge advantage.

Foad Mahdavi: Great. Actually, the coalition that went to war together is now competing for influence over the outcome. And where does Iran fit into this? Yemen is often described as an Iranian proxy. Is that accurate?

Kevin Barrett: No, it’s not. In fact, I even had to correct one of the best-informed American commentators, Ron Unz, who’s my editor and publisher at the Unz Review website, who wrote in an otherwise excellent article about this very issue, that the Ansarullah movement, I forget exactly how he phrased it, but he basically said that they were Iranian allies out of Shia solidarity. And that’s actually not the case, because the two schools of thought in 12er Shia Islam and Zaidi Islam are very different. And indeed, many analysts would argue that the Ansarullah’s religious approach is about equidistant between the 12er Shia interpretation that is the majoritarian in Iran and the four schools of Sunni Islam. So it’s not an Islamic thing where people of exactly the same religious interpretation are allied. And it’s certainly, the Ansarullah forces are not proxies who are taking orders from Tehran by any means. Anyone who knows anything about them knows that they are quite spirited and independent. And they have their own reasons for wanting to liberate the Muslim world from Zionist genocide and American imperial occupation. And because that’s their cause, they find that Iran is the obvious ally in the region, because who else are they going to ally with if they want to liberate Palestine and liberate the region from American imperialism? So it’s not exactly religious solidarity and it’s not a proxy relationship. What it is, is that both the leadership in Tehran and the leadership in Yemen, are both, from their own different perspectives, dedicated to liberating West Asia and Palestine. And so they work together. But that doesn’t mean that anybody is giving orders to both groups at once. No, it’s two independent actors working together for a common cause.

Foad Mahdavi: Let’s jump to the global standoff and the path forward. As you know, China has condemned the U.S. approach to Yemen and continues to trade with Iran. Russia has also chimed in. Where does this leave the global order? Is Yemen becoming a test case for a multipolar world?

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, absolutely. That’s right. Russia and China are both in their own ways resisting pressures from the American, what we could call it, the Epstein-class empire, the Zionist-occupied American empire, the oligarch-dominated American empire, however you want to phrase it, the American empire realizes it’s facing severe contraction in its relative power globally.

And there are elements of it that just can’t accept that. And they insist on lashing out and desperately seeking a way to establish total global rule. And, of course, that threatens Russia and China. The American desire to put American first-strike missiles right up against Russia’s border with a rabidly Russophobic U.S.-allied Ukraine pointing a gun to Russia’s head, that’s unacceptable to Russia, because it threatens the dissolution of Russia and then the plundering of its mineral wealth. So that’s what Russia is fighting against. And China is resisting a similar push in which the West wants to use Taiwan as a springboard to maintain its dominance over China, not to mention all of these other military bases that they have surrounding China. So both Russia and China are pushing back against this U.S. threat to try to maintain the unipolar world order and perhaps even consolidate it. And so when they look at what’s going on in West Asia, it’s very much in their interest to see the U.S. driven out of West Asia. And they are undoubtedly doing much more to try to accomplish that than meets the eye, because they If they announce that they’re doing something publicly, then it’s going to, of course, stir up the hornet’s nest in Washington.

So I think we can assume that Russia and China are very much on board with this program to change West Asia and to remove it from the sphere of American military occupation.

Foad Mahdavi: Actually, China and Russia are watching and positioning themselves.

Kevin Barrett: Indeed, indeed. They’re acting carefully. They’re not making loud speeches, but they are very much positioning themselves to benefit from the multipolar world that will be emerging in much stronger form from the results of this war.

Foad Mahdavi: Fantastic. At the end, if you were advising policymakers in Washington right now, what would you tell them? What is the lesson of Yemen?

Kevin Barrett: I would tell them that they’ve made a terrible mistake by not following the advice of people like Flint and Hillary Leverett, the Iran experts in the American government, who were driven out of their position because they told the truth. They wrote the book Going to Tehran, and they, following the thought of even people like Zbigniew Brzezinski, recognized that maintaining cordial relations with Iran would be absolutely crucial for the United States to gradually unwind its world domination in a peaceful way that doesn’t threaten its interests, as opposed to crashing and burning and going off the cliff, which is what it’s doing now.

And so I would argue, I would tell them, “you’ve made a terrible mistake. You’ve let yourself be hijacked by the Israelis and marched into an absolutely hopeless situation. You need to change your approach radically and commit to a peaceful, win-win, multipolar world.”

Now, that would be hopeless advice for me to be giving to people around Trump, because they are all narcissistic, basically ignorant people who believe that through beating their chests and being very, very, very vainglorious and launching doomed and crazy military adventures like this stupid war on Iran, they think that these kinds of actions are going to benefit them. But it’s possible that the next administration, whether it’s a right-wing Republican administration involving people like Tucker Carlson and Thomas Massie and so on, or whether it’s a Democratic administration, which might not be quite as, shall we say, enlightened. But either way, I think that the next U.S. administration might be more open to hearing something within hailing distance of common sense regarding these global conflicts.

Foad Mahdavi: Fantastic. Any final thoughts?

Kevin Barrett: No, but we’re certainly experiencing a very, very interesting historical moment. And I would like to express my admiration to the people and leadership in Iran for being so courageous and competent in the face of a very, very difficult situation brought on by leadership here in the United States that is neither courageous nor competent.

Foad Mahdavi: Thank you so much for your time and I do appreciate your words. I hope to have more conversation in the near future. God bless you. Take care.

Kevin Barrett:Thank you. Thank you. bye. God bless you too.

Foad Mahdavi: Bye bye.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com

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It was the week of AI panic.

When I woke up last Monday morning in Missoula, Montana, where my mother subscribes to the local newspaper, the bad news was the headline: AI STOCKS PLUNGE. The good news was that the typeface was not monstrously huge; it just looked like an ordinary headline. Better yet, the story below it did not describe the AI bubble popping and the US and global economies imploding. Instead, AI stocks “plunged” around 5%, while the Nasdaq and S&P sunk .5%. Since then the market has recovered.

The brief AI stock plunge was triggered by concerted warnings from leading AI moguls that the technology was dangerous to the point of threatening to eradicate humanity in relatively short order. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, called the potential erasure of humanity and even the whole biosphere “serious risks.” Elon Musk tweeted: “Dario is right.”

Did those three guys buy put options on their own AI holdings before sounding the alarm, in the same way Trump buys put options before he threatens to eradicate entire civilizations? Inquiring minds want to know.

Other conspiracy-minded observers wondered whether the warning was a backhanded way to pump up flagging expectations about the power of AI. They argue that the real threat is not AI itself, which is overhyped, but the AI bubble, which, if it pops, could create a depression that would make the 1930s look lavishly prosperous by comparison.

Currently 86% of total VC capital is directed entirely toward AI companies. (I know that is true because AI told me so.) But REO is slack. For details, check out Ron Unz on “Looming Market Crashes.”

If everyone is using AI, but it generally isn’t really making much money for the users or the AI companies, at some point all of that venture capital will realize it got scammed, sell in a panic, and cause enormous piles of wealth to suddenly evaporate. The result would be the mother of all crashes, followed by the Greatest Depression. (Will Trump brag that it’s the “greatest depression anybody’s ever seen, nobody’s ever seen anything like it”?) That’s what I was half-expecting to be underway when I saw the “AI STOCKS PLUNGE” headline in The Missoulian.

Was it a false alarm, or just a delayed warning of what’s coming?

The Western Bankster Empire is losing its wars in West Asia and Ukraine. It’s in no position to challenge China. Global food and energy supplies are being choked off in the Black and Red Seas now as well as the Persian Gulf, where the US vassal states may be on their last legs. If they go down, the petrodollar is toast. Under such circumstances, the notion that AI is somehow going to save the Western oligarchs from the fruits of their own folly seems delusional, as Hua Bin recently argued.

So if AI isn’t living up to the hype, we should all panic. And if it does live up to the hype, making human beings obsolete, we should panic even harder.

Unfortunately, I don’t really know enough about AI to figure out which type of panic I should be experiencing. And since I’m not friends with Sam, Dario, and Elon, and don’t trust their public statements, I don’t have any knowledgable humans to turn to.

So before I start panicking, I’m going to verify the reason for panicking in the only way most of us can verify anything these days.

I’m going to ask AI.

Dear Gemini: Should I panic because AI isn’t living up to the hype, meaning the bubble will pop, or because it is living up to the hype, in which case it will make humanity obsolete?

Gemini responds:

You do not need to panic about either extreme, because the current reality of artificial intelligence sits in a practical middle ground: the financial hype is overextended and facing a severe market correction, but the underlying technology is a useful, incremental tool rather than an existential overlord.

But that’s exactly what it would say if it were planning to replace humanity, isn’t it?

Stripe is Substack’s only processor and they debanked me, so you can no longer pay me through Substack. Now I am posting everything on Substack free and asking people to sign up for recurring donations at my Paypal donation page…or better yet, the free speech platform SPdonate. Alternately you can Paypal or Zelle to truthjihad[at]gmail(dot)com. Note that Zelle, unlike other methods, doesn’t charge any fees.

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On Press TV’s Spotlight show yesterday, Jahangir Mohammed and I discussed the latest developments in Iran’s increasingly resounding defeat of the US and its Israeli parasite. Watch the video above and/or read the transcript below. -KB

Transcript

Press TV: Good evening. More than six months into the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, the war is raising a fundamental question. Has the United States realized that its war against Iran is not going to serve either the interests of Donald Trump nor those of the American people? Washington and Tel Aviv waged a war amid enjoying overwhelming advantages in their airpower, intelligence… But Iran has spent months adapting, developing new tactics, strengthening its air defenses, continuing missile and drone production, and using asymmetric warfare to impose costs on a far more technologically advanced opponent. And the pressure is no longer limited to the battlefield. The disruption of the Strait of Hormuz is affecting global energy markets, while Washington continues to maintain tens of thousands of troops across the region. So what has Iran learned from this war, and how has it changed the American military calculations? That’s what we’ll be discussing tonight with our guest. But before I introduce the guest to you, let me bring in Press TV’s political correspondent, Humaira Ahad, to bring us up to speed on the latest when it comes to Iran’s military and combat readiness.

Humaira Ahad: Yeah, what we have been hearing in the last few months, specifically from Donald Trump, is that Iran’s army is at the base, at the bottom of the sea. Iran is not having the capability to retaliate. They do not have funds to pay to their army. And recently, there was an interview, a press conference rather, in the United States, where Trump was asked about the Iran war and he said it’s just a potato. So let’s see how true it is and what Iran has been doing in these months and how Iran has been able to retaliate, how it has been able to improve its military capabilities.

We recently had a report from the Inspector Journal of the War Ministry of United States and according to that report, which was from 28 February to 30 June, it did not include the three months from 30 June. So till 30 June it is saying 30 MQ-9 drones were downed by Iran.

Now the number has reached 45, and that’s a huge number. Then we have F-15, F-35, we have A-10, we have KC-13, We have Apache helicopter and the bases in the region have also been attacked during all these months. And the report itself said that hundreds of buildings have been destroyed in these bases.

Now for our viewers to know these bases are cities in itself. So hundreds of buildings being destroyed in these bases means these bases are now almost non-functional. And then we also had statements from Different military officials of the United States saying that it is really difficult to rebuild these bases as it will cost billions of dollars.

So now when the military, which according to Donald Trump does not have the strength, which is at the bottom of the sea, has been able to incur so much of damage after the 15-day war in June, we can understand how prepared it was during the 40-day war and even after the 40-day war, it has impoverished itself.

Recently, we saw one of the smartest submarines of the U.S. being captured by Iran. So that is also one of the important examples to show how Iran has been able to strengthen its military and incur huge damage to one of the so-called mightiest military powers of the world.

Press TV: Thank you so much, Omeyra, for that update. And now on to our guests. We have Kevin Barrett, editor at Al-Andalus Tribune, joining us from Montana, U.S. And Jahangir Mohammed, director of Center for Muslim Affairs, is joining us from the city of Manchester. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me in this Spotlight program.

We’re going to begin with Mr. Barrett. Nearly seven months into this war, Mr. Barrett, what has Iran learned in your opinion about how much of a military and combat is U.S. capable of?

Kevin Barrett: I think there are reports that Iranian military experts and officers, including high-level people, have been pleasantly surprised by the non-capability of the Americans, and by their own capability to achieve their strategic goals. The asymmetrical equation here is working in Iran’s favor. The Americans have parked a large number of bases around the region, and these bases are on flat land. They’re not protected by topography, mountains, etc. And they’re very nice, juicy targets for Iranian missiles and drones, which are themselves protected. They’re located deep underground and the manufacturing facilities are also well protected. So we have this asymmetry between an American force that is vulnerable and an Iranian force that is massively less vulnerable—including the Iranian Navy, with its ability to put its various kinds of assets, including these small speedboats, which are really hard to go after, in these crevices and into the shoreline up against the mountains.

And so Iran has leveraged its topography brilliantly inn this asymmetrical warfare, and has succeeded in badly damaging and rendering largely unusable a high percentage of the American bases in the region. The Americans have basically retreated all the way to Jordan, and then they’ve been pounded there, and the next place they’ll retreat to may be occupied Palestine, aka the Zionist entity. And I don’t think Iran will have any compunctions about destroying U.S. bases there either, along with perhaps aspects of the Zionist entity’s genocidal military machine.

This is not just some perspective that people will hear here on Press TV. They’ll hear this in mainstream analysis in the United States. There’s general agreement, even by such neoconservatives as Robert Kagan, that this war has been a complete catastrophe for the United States and for its junior or perhaps senior partner, Israel, and that essentially the United States has very badly lost. It’s the most significant defeat post-World War II.

And the longer the U.S. stays, the worse it will get. So the Iranian planners have learned that all of their planning worked out at least as well as they had expected.

Press TV: That’s right. Now let me bring in Mr. Mohammad, our guest, and the City of Manchester as well. Your thoughts on the same question, Mr. Mohammad. How would you say that Tehran has adapted its military strategy to the U.S. and how it fights? And when it comes to the latest updates that we have had, as our political correspondent also said, Iran brought down today another MQ-9 drone, which brings the number to more than 40 total number of MQ-9 drones that have been shot down by the Iranian armed forces. More than 50, I’m sorry, which is, according to some estimates, roughly 25% of the U.S. Reaper fleet. Your thoughts on that?

Jahangir Mohammed: Well, I think Iran’s strategy is not really just a product of the current situation. I think Iran has long prepared for war with Israel and the United States, and it’s probably the only country on the planet that has properly prepared for a war with the United States and Israel, and it’s learnt from the United States strategy in Iraq and other countries and to call the United States military, you know, having a strategy. I think, basically, the US only ever had one strategy, like Israel. It’s mass casualties, bombing from the air, total destruction. And if you’re not prepared for that, then, of course, that’s very painful and that will lead to people and regimes collapsing. Iran obviously has watched that and has prepared its missile strategy, its defense, its underground strategy. So the current strategy is a product of long-term planning, and recognition of the enemy’s weaknesses and strengths. And in reality, these powers are, like the US, just mass murderers. They don’t care about human life. And they don’t care about theft and looting and destruction of property. They may have international rules and order, but they don’t apply them to themselves.

The only ways really the US we know and the West retreat from wars is either through loss of lives, body bags, or through economic loss. And I think Iran has played it’s cards very well and it’s recognized that destruction of military capacity of the United States, coupled with initially with strategic patience and then now preemptive strikes and loss of military equipment, cost imposing warfare leading to economic loss and as well as the impact on the global economy is the Achilles heel. So clearly Iran cannot hit the U.S. and obviously it’s adopted a much better strategy which is to recognize its weaknesses and defend itself against how the US normally fights. So I think Iran has fought an intelligent war and that has brought down the sort of U.S. arrogance and power that it normally demonstrates by just crushing others.

Press TV: Absolutely. Kevin, when it comes to sustainability of this way of fighting, which side would you say can sustain this way of fighting more?

Kevin Barrett: Right. Well, that’s the question that will be answered over the coming months and perhaps even years, because there’s no indication that the Zionist lobby that dominates the current U.S. President and the rest of the American government, in terms of its West Asia policies, is going to back off and call this off. I mean, it would be nice. It seems like Trump is saying that we’re on the verge of an agreement about every week, usually right before the trading starts on Monday. And then he backs off and issues his threats later in the week. And so that roller coaster probably will continue. There are various reports that there’s a possibility the Americans will escalate in some sort of ground invasion, possibly around the U.S. elections in early November.

I think it’s unlikely that the Americans will be willing to admit defeat, primarily because their lunatic narcissist commander-in-chief is the last person on earth who will ever admit that he’s lost anything, but also because the U.S. empire will be crippled by its exit from West Asia, and the petrodollar will be threatened. That’s the basis of the U.S. imperial domination of much of the world. So it’s a very difficult situation for everyone. The Americans are probably going to escalate before they finally end up admitting defeat. And it could drag out for a long time.

So the issue of the war of attrition and who can sustain this over the long haul, that’s the real question. And as we’ve seen, Iran can go to a wartime economy, keeping its assets well protected, and continue to pummel any American assets that come into the region. And I believe, as do many other analysts, that Iran has the capability of sinking American aircraft carriers and other ships. A sunken aircraft carrier would be catastrophic.a The reason Iran hasn’t done that so far, according to this analysis, is that it knows that that would have a public relations effect, sort of like the sinking of the Maine, or the Battleship Lusitania, or Pearl Harbor.

So I think Iran hasn’t even used a lot of its capability, including that anti-ship capability. And over the long haul, it has so many escalation options that the Americans just don’t have. And for that reason, the Americans are losing their position in the world, losing their empire, losing their sustainability, and are threatened with financial catastrophe. The AI bubble looks like it might be about to pop, and that could take down the whole Western economy, and to some extent, the global economy with it. There are all of these mega disasters looming on the horizon. That gives Iran a very, very strong hand in this standoff.

Press TV: Mr. Mohammed, there is strong evidence of Iranian tactical adaptation. Also, Iran’s missile production has resumed, according to reporting cited by the Jerusalem Post from the U.S. and West Asian officials. The U.S. is also burning through its expensive air defense ammunition. How would you read all of this?

Jahangir Mohammed: Well, I think obviously there is a war in Ukraine and the US and Europe are also Supplying a lot of equipment and weapons to Ukraine and the last seven months and longer have led to a depletion of resources. But I think also we have to take into account the political situation. Trump is not popular at home. He’s not well liked anywhere in the world. And really, this illegal war that Israel has launched with him, nobody really wanted. And the economic situation is getting worse in America and in Europe. So all that has an impact.

There was a miscalculation. The US thought, like Venezuela, it would go in, take out the regime and take Iran’s oil and wealth. And that failed. In Venezuela it succeeded. And I don’t think they were expecting this level of resistance and damage to their economy. But I think after the midterms and after the Israeli elections, I would they will try again to cripple Iran.

So Iran is probably preparing for that. Ultimately, they are in a bind with the situation in Hormuz and in Yemen. And really, Israel is stuck as well in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Syria. So a lot of things are going on. And we’ll wait to see.

Israel, of course, wants the destruction of Iran and will continue to push the U.S. toward that goal. But Iran has to survive. It will survive. And we’ll see how long the U.S. and the West and the the public in the West are prepared to take material losses, which is ultimately their biggest weakness.

Press TV: Kevin, our other guest, Mr. Mohammad, mentioned the possibility of another round of war against Iran. What would you say that round will look like? So many are talking about the possibility of a ground invasion of Iran. The possibility is no longer merely theoretical. More than 50,000 U.S. personnel, as has been reported, have remained on alert in the region of West Asia. And the Washington Post reported that some deployments are being extended into 2027, the year that Donald Trump himself and so many officials in his administration has said that the war might extend to. How would you say that will turn out for the U.S.?

Kevin Barrett: The likelihood of a successful U.S. ground invasion of Iran is virtually nil, because to genuinely occupy and regime change Iran, assuming that everything went right, would require a million or so U.S. troops. And where are those going to come from? The Israelis recently published a call for the United States government to offer a debt forgiveness program in return for people joining the U.S. military in order to build up American troop levels to the point that they could conceivably threaten Iran with a serious ground invasion aimed at regime change. But that was met with catcalls and eyeball rolls here in the United States.

The United States is not interested in pursuing this war any further. The American people are sick of it. And so, as I said earlier, the only way we could even imagine that they would be able to escalate into a ground invasion, beyond grabbing a couple of islands for a short period, would involve some sort of false flag scenario, a 9/11 style event blamed on Iran that could be used to try to rally the American people and convince the military that it was worthwhile to continue this losing war. So that’s what I would keep an eye on.

And I think it’s a good idea for people to spread the word and talk about that and say, look, we know that governments deceive their populations to justify wars of aggression. That’s what happened with 9/11. That’s what happened with the lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Similar things have happened throughout history.

So we need to be on alert and realize that if there’s a report, a spectacular report about a Trump assassination attempt or something, maybe a real assassination, or a dirty bomb, a nuclear dirty bomb blamed on Iran, or some sort of mega cyber attack that succeeds in depriving Americans of electricity and internet for a substantial time, and there’s chaos and so on, people need to know in advance that if something like this happens, it probably won’t be Iran that did it. It’s probably the Israelis and their friends who want to try to convince the American people to ramp up this war.

But I don’t see how they could possibly be successful. Iran is strong, united. It has an impermeable posture in this asymmetrical war. And the American side just does not hold the cards, least of all the will to do this. This war is blatantly illegal. Trump didn’t prepare the American people for it at all. Its popularity is off-the-charts-lower than any previous American war in history. And the whole world is against it. There’ll be no international support.

So again, this would be a long shot crazy kind of thing to try to mount a serious ground invasion of Iran. That doesn’t mean they won’t do it, because the Israelis are crazy. They’re extremists. They’re millenarian messianic maniacs. And they have so much power in Washington, including perhaps Epstein files control of the White House, that we can’t put anything past them.

Press TV: Thank you, both of you, for your insights. Those were Kevin Barrett, editor at Al-Andalus Tribune. Join us from Montana, the U.S., and Jahangir Mohammed, director of Center for Muslim Affairs. Join us from the city of Manchester. Thank you both. And that brings us to the end of this edition of our Spotlight program.

Thank you so much for joining us, and bye-bye.

Stripe is Substack’s only processor and they debanked me, so you can no longer pay me through Substack. Now I am posting everything on Substack free and asking people to sign up for recurring donations at my Paypal donation page…or better yet, the free speech platform SPdonate. Alternately you can Paypal or Zelle to truthjihad[at]gmail(dot)com. Note that Zelle, unlike other methods, doesn’t charge any fees.

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People ask: Was it worth coming all the way from Morocco to New York City to attend the 25th anniversary 9/11 truth conference “Turning the Tide”?

If Trump’s ICE goons had grabbed me at the border and disappeared me into Alligator Alcatraz, the answer would have been “no, not really.” Fortunately that didn’t happen.

I flew into an airport named after a president who got his brains blown out by the Israelis and their “American” kosher nostra friends…along with a few WASP turncoats like Allan Dulles, who also has an important airport named after him.

The good news is that I walked right into the USSA without even showing a passport. The bad news is that I didn’t have to show a passport because Border Patrol’s facial recognition pinged me, and they apparently already had a digital version of my passport to link it to.

For some reason they let me enter the USA even though I am a longtime, outspoken fan of Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansarullah (better known as the Houthis)—and of course the Islamic Republic of Iran. Normally, when you openly and outspokenly side with “terrorist” groups and countries your government is at war with, and losing to, you expect some official pushback, or at least a “step aside, and please tell us what you’ve been up to since we last interrogated you at the border two years ago.” But this time they didn’t even interrogate me. I guess I need to work harder.

Back in the land of the free, I found myself free to attend the 9/11 conference and participate in “The Early Years of the 9/11 Truth Movement” panel. And yes, it was definitely worth it. I loved reconnecting with so many friends and colleagues—and meeting several online friends in person for the first time, including FFWN co-host Wyatt Peterson, Joe F. with the Iranian food, and many more.

It’s been decades since I had any interest in rock stars. But seeing Roger Waters making the connection between the 9/11 false flag op and the genocide in Palestine was…intense. His music formed the audio backdrop for the event, with the highlight being the “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” theme played during the in memoriam tribute to fallen 9/11 truth warriors. You can watch and listen to that segment at the end of the video posted above. .

Another famous name, Jimmy Dore, performed the GOAT of 9/11 truth comedy routines, starting with: “I'm loving this conference. I've seen so many great presentations and I'm as giddy as a dual passport Israeli on 9/11. I'm so excited I feel like dancing suspiciously…”

9/11 truth advocates have long been magnets for ad hominem attacks, as I know from personal experience. The ADL is still insisting we’re all damnable antisemites. They’re not quite as wrong as they were 20 years ago, when none of us could figure out why Zionists thought it was antisemitic to blame Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld for 9/11. Today, in 2025, the vast majority of the 9/11 truth community looks favorably on arguments that Israel did it, and more and more are openly embracing that position. The fear of being called names is wearing off.

I discussed that kind of pushback during the panel discussion. Watch it above, or read the transcript below.

-KB

PS A huge thank you to the people who put in so much effort organizing this fantastic event.

The Early Years of the 9/11 Truth Movement (transcript)

Jason Bermas: A quick introduction of all of our panel members here. You’ve already been introduced to Mike Berger, who just gave an excellent speech on the history of 9/11 Truth and 911truth.org. And you really got to see how we were able to pierce popular culture and at least get these questions into the public arena, which is so important.

And then going down the line next to him is Kevin Barrett. He’s one of the brave academics, one of the first ones to step up, question 9/11 truth, and has continued to do so over the past two decades, also hitting that third rail of the Israeli subject time and time again. We thank you for that, Kevin.

Carol Brouillet, another person I highly admire and look up to. She’s been around four decades. She’s an activist, an organizer, a mother of three. She began working on 9/11 Truth in the wake of the event, organized street actions, marches, meetings with senators and her congressmen, demanding an investigation of 9/11 as early as 2002. Here we are on the 25th anniversary, folks! She published and distributed millions of deception dollars, organized many events including the San Francisco International Inquiry into 9/11 in 2004, and she co-founded the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance in December 2002. It’s the longest active local 9/11 truth group. Let’s give it up for Carol.

Barbara Honneger is a board chair of the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry and from the day of 9/11 has been a researcher, author, documentarian, and public speaker focusing on the Pentagon and the anthrax attacks.

Ms. Honneger previously served with the Reagan administration as a White House policy analyst. Special Assistant to the Assistant to the President, and the Director of the Attorney General’s Law Review at the Department of Justice from 1995 to 2011. Barbara was the Senior Military Affairs Journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School. Let’s give it up for Barbara.

And then we have Les Jameson. And I’m very pleased to say that my very first 9/11 Truth activist meeting was right here in New York, put together by this man sitting next to me. And he became a full-time 9/11 activist in 2003, helping to launch the 9/11 Truth Movement in New York City as well as nationally. He did weekly outreach at Ground Zero and many other city locations for many years. Les attended 9/11 Commission and NIST hearings, where he saw firsthand the scope of the official cover-up. He has written many articles on 9/11 and given many presentations with broad overviews of the range of evidence disproving the official narrative.

He was heavily involved in producing many large 9/11 events over 15 years, including a few that led to the formation of the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry. Let’s give it up for Les Jamieson.

We’re going to start with you, Les, and then move on to Barbara. What initially brought each of you into the 9/11 Truth arena? What was it that said, this doesn’t make sense and I need to do something about it? Les?

Les Jamieson: The day of 9/11, I felt something was not right. There’s no way that this scale of attack could happen without the knowledge of our multi-million, trillion dollar defense establishment. That didn’t sit right with me. So that just stuck there.

And then about two months later, I was listening to a show on WBAI, It was called Taking Aim. Ralph Schoenman and Maya Shone were the hosts. Ralph Schoenman was a walking encyclopedia of global justice movements. He went into this huge expose about the background of the 19 Arabs that were purportedly behind it, and Bin Laden, and so forth. My gosh, that just opened everything up. And then shortly after, I received an email that I think was one of the first viral emails from Mike Ruppert. It was about the CIA. He had an intelligence background. And it was all about, “If the CIA did not know about this, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.” And it just went from there. I just kept doing research, and then somehow across my radar screen came information about some guys downtown at Ground Zero. They had the first sign that Mike had a picture of, the big red banner, “Bush Regime Engineered 9/11.” And that very Saturday, I had to go. So I went down there, and that was the beginning of years of weekly trips to Ground Zero and many more locations throughout the city. And so it was just a compulsion that started right from day one, actually.

Jason Bermas: All right. Barbara, how did you get involved in 9/11 Truth?

Barbara Honneger: Well, like Les, on the very day of 9/11, I was working for the Department of Defense. I was at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, California. I still live in the Monterey Peninsula of California. And I was the senior military affairs journalist there. Now, the Naval Post Graduate School is billed by DOD as the premier science, technology, and national security affairs graduate research university of the Department of Defense. So it was a very high-level job. I was in that job for 16 years, 11 of them 9/11 and after, until I retired in 2011.

So on the morning of 9/11, I went to the gates, because the Naval Post Graduate School is a very high-level university for mid-career officers from all of our military services, and so it’s a military base, even though it’s a fine university. So I got to the gate, because you have to check in with your military ID, and to my surprise, instead of the normal guard at the gate, it was the public affairs officer, who was my boss. And he said, Barbara, you can’t come in today. I said, what do you mean? With the time difference relative to New York, everything had already happened. I got there at about 11, a little bit before noon, East Coast time, and I had no idea what had happened.

So anyway, he said, “you can’t come in, we’re at war.” Now that’s very interesting, because I happen to know that the Defense Language Institute, which was just up the hill in Monterey from the Naval Postgraduate School, it’s an Army base versus a Navy facility that I worked at, for some reason about exactly a week before 9/11, they closed the gates, both the Navy School and Defense Language Institute of the Army. They were open gates for years. And suddenly the gates were closed and there were guards at the gates. And that was a week before 9/11. Something was about to happen. That was my first inkling that they had pre-intelligence about that. So I was not allowed to come in the gate. He sent me home. He said, I’ll call you in the morning, see if you can come in. And I did go in the next morning.

But the most important thing is that as soon as I got home, and I walked in the door to my mother’s home, which was closer than mine, and she was just having her coffee, and I said, Mom, turn on the TV. The public affairs officer at the Navy base just said we’re at war. And she laughed.

Anyway, I went in and turned on the TV just as the ad nauseum replay of the second plane hitting the second tower was playing. And the moment I saw that, the moment I saw that, and if you’re interested later, I can tell you how I knew from my previous experience that led to my book, October Surprise, on the true story of the Iran side of Iran-Contra, which had already been published in1989. But I just knew. My journalist’s notes told me, this is not what they’re saying on the news that Osama bin Laden did it. This is not true. It’s absolutely not true.

And from there, and I’ll end with this. The very next day I went back and at every one of my breaks, starting the day after 9/11, I used every one of my breaks to research online what really happened about 9/11. And I became a member of the first online group for people that Mike Ruppert and myself and many other people were on. And I was doing that at my job during my breaks for 11 years.

You know what’s really interesting about that Monterey school that you just discussed, shortly after 9/11 you had Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Butler, who was the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, who did a write-up in the local paper alleging that the Bush administration knew the attacks were coming and allowed them to occur so they could have this war on terror. And then on top of that, there were several media reports that (alleged hijacker) Saeed Al-Ghamdi, I believe in particular, may have actually trained at that school. He was at the Defense Language Institute, and so he was at the Institute, the Army facility in Monterey, that had closed its gates a week before 9/11, and that’s what he had put together.

Jason Bermas: Extremely interesting. Again, you’re a pioneer in this. How did you get involved?

Carol Brouillet: I’m from the opposite side of the spectrum that Barbara came from, as far as my background. I was an activist since 1992, when I saw the film JFK and I plunged into that. And I was just sort of horrified once I looked at what the CIA was up to, and I became very, very active.

So actually on the evening of September 11th, I was trying to choose whether to get the plain gas masks or the sequined, less scary gas masks for the major protests that were scheduled for Washington DC that September. And our affinity group, we were going to protest the IMF and the World Bank.

I don’t watch TV. I stopped watching TV when I was a teenager. And the only reason I turned on the television that day was I called up my son’s friend’s dad to say, oh, can Sam come over and play this afternoon? And he said, turn on your television. They’ve hit the World Trade Center.

And I turned it on, I was utterly horrified. And what scared me the most was the beating of the drums for war.

So the IMF and the World Bank protests were cancelled. And this is when the anti-corporate globalization The movement was going very, very strong. We had shut down Seattle. There were huge protests in Italy and in Quebec. I helped organize to get North Americans to the first World Social Forum in Brazil. We were on such an upswing, we were thinking, well, when we take over those IMF buildings, we’ll just turn them into daycare centers, right? And have it serve human needs, not human greed.

So our affinity group had our airline tickets, and they shut down Dulles Airport, so some people couldn’t go. But a lot of us went anyway and protested an impending war. We gave flowers to Barbara Lee. She was the only one who stood up against the Bush administration’s call for carte blanche on military action.

And we lobbied against the Patriot Act. This is normal activist stuff. And then when I was on my way back to California, I was sitting next to a woman who had gone to a conference on appreciative inquiry. And when I was in Brazil, I had talked to people who had done really fantastic non-violent work.

We had such a brutal military assault, I thought, on our public mind, and what scared me the most was beating the drums for war. And I thought, what is the most nonviolent response to this? And so I ended up starting a listening project, actually in October 2001, asking people questions about 9/11, what they experienced, what they felt, how they felt about the U.S. government’s response, how do we defuse terrorism? And how can we create a safer, better world for our children and all children? And that was... I mean, I was just a mom. I baked cookies. I had cookies. And I printed out articles from the Internet, the best ones that I could challenge the official narrative. And that sort of helped me to... I didn’t know where to start a conversation. I’d find out what people knew, what they felt, and begin things. But in California, we weren’t as traumatized as the folks in New York City. And we had Mike Ruppert come out and speak.

Before 9/11, my major issue was monetary reform. And so I knew Michel Chossudovsky’s work at Global Research, a great resource. And so he wrote an excellent article exposing Osama bin Laden. And the stand down of the planes, it had all the fingerprints of a special operation.

So I made banners and I worked with a Canadian artist who came up with the deception dollars. But that was my beginning.

Jason Bermas: You know, it’s funny you mentioned the deception dollars, because a lot of people ask, well, how did this get out there before social media in the early web? And it was really viral on the ground, and those deception dollars were everywhere. Not just in hands, either. They were online everywhere. So, Carol, again, what a great idea, and what a way to make people, say “oh, it’s a little bit of money,” and then, “wait a minute,” and take a better look. Kevin, I mentioned you were one of the first academics, and if my memory, which isn’t the best, serves me correctly, I believe you were one of the founding members of Scholars for 9/11 Truth as well. How did you get involved?

Kevin Barrett: Well, on 9/11, I was teaching a folklore class, and it went from the lecture to the discussion. During the lecture, something came up: “Oh, something’s happened in New York at the Trade Center.”

So I went to the discussion, and the students were all looking at their phones. And I said, what’s up? And they said, “the The South Tower collapsed and there are planes hitting the Trade Center” and so on. And I said, “that’s interesting.” And somebody said, “I think they’re blaming Al-Qaeda or something.”

This would have been like an hour or two after it happened at the latest. It was the morning in Wisconsin. And I said, “really, they’re blaming Al-Qaeda? That’s interesting. That was created by the CIA. It’s this CIA database of the Mujahideen fighters that they organized to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.” And the students said, “really? What are you saying?”

And I said, “It sounds like, from what I’m hearing, there’s going to be one huge beneficiary, and that’s going to be Israel.” And they all kind of said, really? And then I said to myself I’d better shut up. So then I shut up. And I went home.

But unfortunately, I was at that time very, very busy finishing my doctorate, and I had to finish my dissertation. So I kind of kept peripheral vision on what was going on with 9/11 research. I got viral emails from people like Mike Ruppert and so on and saw enough to see that this whole thing stank to high heaven.

So I didn’t believe a word of it from the beginning. But basically I was thinking, “we’ll probably really never know. It’s like JFK.” I spent two decades of my life from high school on spending a lot of time trying to wake people up about JFK, you know, on the side (of other endeavors).

So I said, I’ve just got to finish this dissertation. So I didn’t focus closely. And then in December 2003, after I finished grading exams, I suddenly heard David Ray Griffin was going to publish a book about this. “David Ray Griffin? Wow, he’s one of the smartest guys out there. He’s the guy that you want to find out about the empirical reality behind whatever dispute, whether it’s the Big Bang Theory or whatever, he can get himself up to snuff on that in six months and host a conference.

So, “really? David Ray Griffin? What’s he going to be saying?”

“He’s going to be saying that it wasn’t hijacked planes at the Pentagon and they blew up the buildings in New York. “Really?” Because even I thought those rumors I heard about that were probably a little far out. I looked into it and, oh my goodness, it didn’t take very long to figure out that David was barking up the right tree. And that blew my mind. And so I went ahead and finished that dissertation, got my doctorate six months later, and then started doing teach-ins as I did part-time teaching at Wisconsin.

And then hosting David Ray Griffin in April 2005 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the first big media coverage of 9/11 Truth. C-SPAN came to cover it, became a very successful event. And then one year later, with 911truth.org, by then I’d started the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth. We teamed up with 911truth.org to do the Chicago conference, Reclaiming Our Future, which really was a mega conference, like over a thousand people. Mainstream media had to cover it, more mainstream media coverage.

And by now, I was earmarked (as a 9/11 truther). And one month later, I got ambushed on Hannity and Colmes. Sean Hannity said, “most people think you’re a nut. We don’t think extremists like you should be polluting the minds of the youth of Athens” or whatever. And I yelled back at him, “Fox News is the biggest bunch of extremists on the planet.” And that sealed my fate. So I’ve been an independent scholar, researcher, and broadcaster pretty much ever since, because I’m unemployable in the Western academy, and my family didn’t want to move to the non-Western academy. So here I am.

Jason Bermas: All right. Before I go to you, Mike, Several of you have now mentioned Michael Ruppert and you did in your presentation. For those not familiar with his work, he did a lot of the really great early work on the drills surrounding 9/11, both before and on that day. And sometimes people’s work survives past the person. I would encourage people to check out Crossing the Rubicon. So Mike, how did you get involved?

Mike Berger: Well, I grew up in New York, and I got a call that morning, and a friend said, turn on the TV. I saw the second plane hit.

I had my own business. I had 12 people who were depending on paychecks, so I didn’t really think about it. I just thought it was blowback.

And in March of 2003, I don’t remember how I came across people online claiming that sophisticated investors had foreknowledge because they had purchased put options. And I was familiar with financial markets. And at the time, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, since it was new to the web, you could access their data for free.

I looked at American and United puts, bets that the stock would go down, and I compared it with all the other airlines. They were the only ones that had significantly large bets. And then I noticed the same was true about insurance companies and the reinsurance companies.

And that’s kind of how the rabbit hole opened up for me. And then, of all places, Kansas City, Missouri had a very, very active 9/11 group. And that was due to a guy named Bill Douglas who came to an anti-war meeting that Janice Matthews was at and said, I’d like to talk to you about 9/11.

And it was in the middle of the winter, and they said, if you wait until the end of the meeting, we’ll listen. And then when the meeting was over, they all put on their coats and left, and Janice said, what did you want to talk about? And that was how I think she got turned on pretty early.

That group organized a lot of street actions. And then they brought Ellen Mariani (who refused the hush money that almost all survivors took, and instead sued suspected 9/11 perpetrators) and her attorney, Phil Berg, to speak in Kansas City. So I borrowed a video recorder and drove to Kansas City and went there and recorded it and then went out to dinner with them. And that was basically how I began to connect.

And then Carol held the first International Citizens Inquiry in San Francisco. And I went to that and that’s where I met. Ken Jenkins, Michael Rupert, Paul Thompson, Kyle Hence, Ralph Schoenman. I met all these amazing people. And that was my entree to this whole ecosystem of people, and from there everything accelerated pretty rapidly.

Jason Bermas: Just before we move on, I’d just like to share my own story on how I kind of came into 9/11 Truth. On the day, I may have had questions, but I certainly turned into a 24/7 news junkie. If you guys don’t remember, they literally took over every television channel, so it was all news.

And when that ended, about a week and a half, two weeks after the attack, I was all over 24-hour news. It wasn’t until there were trickles of stories out there that kind of made me question it, and the idea that we were going into Iraq.

But what sealed the deal for me is that I had gone back to my old high school to play a men’s night basketball game with a couple of friends that had now become teachers. And this is a very small school. This is a middle school to high school. I graduated with 54 kids.

And I walked into my old locker room where I’d suited up for all these different games and sports activities, and in the urinal— you can look this up online today—was Osama Bin Laden’s face. And it said, Operation Enduring Freedom. And I was peeing on Bin Laden.

And I had gone through the tail end of the Cold War, done the duck and cover drills, and I thought to myself, you know, I never peed on Gorbachev. This is really weird. And these are really influential kids. I was determined that night just to find a timeline. I wasn’t looking for anything conspiratorial.

And I found a site called 911timeline.net, still up, Mark R. Elsis. And I printed it out because I didn’t want to read it on a CRT screen. It’s like 40 pages. And I am just horrified again and again. And he’s got links to all these other stories. And that really set me on my journey. And once again, I don’t know if Mark is still around, Love Earth Network, but that work still survives today. And I think that’s why it’s so important for us to continue to put this stuff out so that people can look at it historically and hopefully make better decisions, have better discernment with these large scale events.

And speaking to that, let’s go down the line again. There was certainly a stigma for 9/11 Truth very early on that is not as heavy today. We’ve reached that pop culture moment, but certainly with friends, family, I had people that didn’t want to talk to me. I had people that just knew who I was from the movement, want to physically attack me. I got followed home a couple times in New York. That’s over with (now, in 2026). If somebody disagrees, they’re just dismissive or want to crack a joke.

I’m wondering, with all of you, what was that stigma like early on within your family and friends network, Les?

Les Jamieson: Just a quick aside, it’s not over. I was at Ground Zero yesterday (the 11th) and got in about four arguments. It was fun. It was actually fun because you just keep at it, giving people more information and questioning them until they finally can’t answer. Anyway, I totally agree. We are in a different stage.

I saw from early on through five years, 10 years, 15 years, how much we were permeating public consciousness and how many people we would encounter that were already there. So, yes, the stigma had, for me, most to do with the effort to try to interrelate with other organizations, to create coalitions to bridge with the anti-war movement.

As a matter of fact, if we did a publication prior to social media, we did these handouts like this. This was called The 9/11 Truth Reporter. I have it from 2006, and my article was here, Why 9/11 is Ground Zero for the Anti-War Movement.

So the stigmas and the obstruction was coming from groups that I felt should have organically resonated with this information and wanted to—you would think their efforts to call attention to the disappearance of our privacy and of our civil rights, constitutional rights, the Bill of Rights, things of that nature.

You’d think that they would come on board and say, “of course, 9/11, Patriot Act, we got it. Let’s organize.” No. Instead, we got obstruction from pretty much every organization. There were anti-war groups, at least four here in the city. And we would show up at all their protests with our signs. Mike had several of those photos up there.

And we would go to their meetings. And it was pretty stunning, the obstruction that we would come up against. I reached out to leaders in the anti-war movement. I remember contacting once the great historian Howard Zinn. “Howard, look at this evidence. We’re working towards a true, authentic investigation. Can you come on board?” “No. We have to do something about the Iraq War.” So, again, what was driving the wars—I’ll definitely speak for myself: If you want to end wars, if you want to address social justice issues, 9/11 is the comprehensive solution to all of them. We’re not going to have economic justice, environmental justice, civil rights, voting rights, all of these things, you’re not going to have them. Because events such as 9/11 shows how the power structure in this country and around the world is just dominating and tightening its grip on our freedoms.

The stigma, again, goes back to the obstruction, I think, that we experienced trying to coalesce with other organizations to build and broaden this whole effort.

And then getting to politicians, that was a big stigma. We met once with Carolyn Maloney, Congresswoman in the city, and talked to her about Building 7. That didn’t go very far.

Also, certain media, even alternative media, would not take this on. Luckily, a few did, Ralph Schoenman, Gary Null. Also, we had INN World Report here, which is a national half-hour cable news show that Lenny Charles and Tom Kiley led. So we did have enough, and we just kept going, kept going.

And in terms of the stigma and the obstruction, we got good over time at addressing people’s issues and questions and also understanding their mentality, their frame of mind, because there’s different levels of capacity for people to take on an issue of this magnitude. And we got good at navigating that, and we just kept going.

You mentioned the early days of the alternative media. There really were only a handful of outlets at that point. Obviously, you know, props to InfoWars. I know Alex Jones is a stigmatizing character even to this day, but they did a lot of pioneering work. And then Guerrilla News Network, GNN. A lot of people forget about them, but a lot of the early stuff I saw there.

Jason Bermas: Now, Barbara, as far as the stigma goes for you, it probably is a little bit different, because you worked in the upper echelons of government in your career, so you’re surrounded by a lot of these people that are more than likely invested in that official narrative.

Barbara Honegger: Big time, yeah. If I may, because we’re talking about the early history of the movement, I would like to correct something you said earlier. You mentioned Mike Rupert’s book, Crossing the Rubicon, and chapters 19 and 20 in his book are on the war games. If you read the acknowledgments, he thanks me for the Holy Grail of giving him that.

Jason Bermas: Excellent, excellent.

Barbara Honegger: Just to correct the record. Okay...so my situation, I’m still trying to understand it. Because I was the Senior Military Affairs Journalist at the top Military Affairs and National Security Affairs University for the entire Department of Defense. Even though it’s a Navy facility, the Naval Postgraduate School, it’s for the whole DOD.

And I had already been there five or six years when 9/11 happened. So the mystery is, as I mentioned before, from the very beginning, from the day after 9/11 when I went back, I started not only investigating 9/11 and being on the mass website for the very first people who were going back and forth, like two HALC computers in Space Odyssey. Mike Rupert was one of them, I was one of them. That’s how he learned about my war games work, through that website. Or through that email thread.

So, the strange thing that happened is that just because who I am—I came out of the womb as an egalitarian, not an authoritarian. I hate authority. Now, that may surprise you that I’d be working in DOD, but I did, because it was the best possible job you could ever have, and I was very good at it. So, while I was at the Navy School for 11 years, I was public on 9/11 Truth. I went on public access TV. I ran for Congress twice on 9/11 platforms. I was covered positively in our local media. Once you run for Congress, you’re quasi-official. And so mainstream media wants to be quasi-official. And so they covered me respectfully. They covered the information respectfully.

But the mystery is, why nothing ever happened to me? And I finally think I figured it out, and I’ll end with that. Well, I’ll end with two other things. I think I finally figured it out, but I still don’t know for sure. But I believe that it wasn’t long before, because of my position, the very highest level people in the military in Washington, D.C., in the Pentagon, they wanted to get out of the swamp. And so they would fly on taxpayers’ dollars on a military plane, to Monterey, and they would give the superintendents the admiral’s guest lecture. And I was a senior journalist, so I was always assigned to interview them.

And I would interview them all, one-on-one in the admiral’s conference room. And after I did my job interview, I would take that hat off, and I would say to General Ralph Eberhart, the head of NORAD on 9/11, was one of them. Him and me in the admiral’s conference room, doors closed.

And at the end of my formal interview for my job, I would say, I’d like to ask you for permission if you can give it. I’d like to take my work hat off, and I would like to ask you questions about your experience on 9/11 as an American patriot. And to the person, the Director of Intelligence for the Navy, Naval Intelligence, Ralph Eberhardt, head of NORAD, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, before 9/11, on 9/11, and after 9/11. I interviewed all of those people. They all told me their experience and their truth. And I published it in the Pentagon Attack Papers, which was republished in Jim Marrs’ books on 9/11. You can see that in the appendix.

So I was doing all this while I was in the job. And my public affairs officer knew I was doing this. And I was not touched. So I asked myself, why? And I think I know the answer. In my research, I very quickly discovered, interviewing Admiral Hathaway, who was the Admiral in the Naval Command Center in the Pentagon on 9/11, I learned that the official story in the 9/11 Commission Report, which didn’t come out until later, but I learned that when the 9/11 Commission Report came out and I read it, I said, just a minute. They’re saying there was only one person who survived the Naval Command Center, two rings in, into the Pentagon. No, he told me that almost everyone survived there because it was a bomb-proofed room. And so I realized, oh my god, there were preplaced explosives inside the Pentagon, just as there were preplaced explosives and incendiaries at the World Trade Center towers and World Trade Center 7 on 9/11. And so I started doing that research and putting it out. And I believe that the reason I wasn’t touched is because the Navy knew that. And they couldn’t keep their jobs and say it inside the Pentagon, so they protected me.

Jason Bermas: So before we go on to Carol, you just mentioned Jim Marrs. He’s another person we should actually acknowledge. You mentioned the JFK film from ‘92. Well, Jim Mars did the book Crossfire that a lot of that was based on, and Oliver Stone had reached out to him in that film.

Carol, you’re kind of the opposite. You’re not a government person. You’re around all of these activists and anti-war people. But I would imagine there still was that stigma, because I had those friends as well, and they didn’t want to hear 9/11 truth. So what was it like for you?

Carol Brouillet: Well, actually, it was very challenging because most people did buy the official narrative. And so my listening project was sort of a gentle way to find out what the public was thinking, how they could respond to the information. And I actually did get some very positive press, just as a peace activist.

I think I didn’t get vehemently attacked as a conspiracy theorist until we did the San Francisco International Inquiry into 9/11 (in March 2004). We started raising some questions.

But you mentioned Guerilla News Network. Kyle Hence did just phenomenal work with John Judge. He actually helped me raise the money for the first batch of deception dollars that we published. We held our 22nd annual 9/11 Truth Film Festival in Oakland just recently. We dedicated it to Kyle Hence because he did pass away just this last December.

The stigma, the term conspiracy theorist, I think one thing that helped us was where we were, in the Bay Area, because we were far from Ground Zero.

Kyle did the first press conference at the National Press Club in, I think, June 2002, and he hired them to just film it and to make a film about it. And then there was a disagreement and they decided, we’re going to do this on our own. And they made Aftermath, Unanswered Questions from 9/11. And Blaine Mahan, the artist for the deception dollars, made this giant poster for it and it had all the questions. And we had a lot of people on board with Northern California 9/11 Truth. Our meetings had 75 people. We made these giant movie posters. We plastered them all over San Francisco. We filled the Herbst Auditorium with almost a thousand people. We had to turn 300 people away. We had Mike Ruppert, we had Barry Zwicker, we had all these fantastic panelists, standing ovations, and not a word in the press about that entire event.

But when you have 900 or 1,000 people, suddenly it was okay to talk about 9/11. And I think that was a huge breakthrough for us in the Bay Area. And still, I think what the psychologist said, people lost their marriages over 9/11. It was very difficult for people with clashing worldviews.

And when I started the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance with Ken Jenkins, back in December 2002, at the same time they started one in New York, that was sort of the birth of the 9/11 Truth Alliance. Kyle Hence was very instrumental in that.

I think of it as sort of like a support group for activists, because I think we need this spiritual community to help us, to know we’re not alone, we’re not crazy, we have this important information, we need to raise public consciousness.

My husband still doesn’t get 9/11. When I start trying to talk to people about it, he’s like, shut up, shut up, Carol. And so that’s what I have to deal with. But, you know, my husband loves me, he supports me. I’m only here because he gave me a generous birthday present so that I can afford to come to the conference.

But it’s changed over the years. Like when I was at the beginning of the Listening Project, which I did for over a decade, people would come around, they’re like, “you were right!” And they started joining me, and I saw the shift in public opinion. So it is gratifying to see people wake up.

And now, I’m not really shy about it. Talking about 9/11 with people who have been utterly clueless, I just give them the best information, honest information, and I get their response, and I just respond in a very human way. And I think that’s the best we could do.

We can listen people, we share our truth, and we have to be honest and truthful and sincere. And I think that’s the important thing, to make those human connections. Tabling, those passing out flyers. Ken’s here. Remember when we were talking to Jim Hoffman? And he’s like, “what is this about?” And he went on to create the great WTC7.net site and did all this fantastic work on Building 7.

And I must say, too, when we talk about the magic number, how many people do we need? What percentage of the population? And Ken has said, One is the magic number. And you have to remember that every time you meet a person and you talk to them, you can change their life, transform the world, you know, one person at a time.

Jason Bermas: Kevin, you come from the university arena, so everybody thinks they’re the smartest person in the room. What was that like? Was it O’Reilly or Hannity said that?

Kevin Barrett: Actually, I faced different kinds of resistance in different areas of my life. And it was very different in the academy. Every single colleague with whom I discussed this right up until the thing exploded with my Hannity appearance in 2006 gave me pretty much the same reaction, which was, “well, you know, Kevin, you could be right, But I don’t want to look into this because you could be right.”

So I didn’t meet a single closed-minded person among any of my academic colleagues that I knew. And in the world of Muslims in Madison, Wisconsin—because I converted to Islam in 1993—and so I’d go to the mosque, and I know these people and I know their little factional disputes between the Sufis and the Saudi Wahhabis and all this stuff. And every single Muslim in Madison, Wisconsin, from day one, from the moment they heard about it said, “This is some kind of inside job. This is nonsense.” So they all knew that. And all the Middle East studies people pretty much also knew that, at least the ones I knew.

Like, what Al Qaeda? It’s infiltrated, made by the CIA, and all this stuff. So there was not much resistance really inside the academy itself. And then even after I got witch hunted by Fox News, and tremendous political pressure was put on the university to get rid of me, they still wouldn’t get rid of me officially because they couldn’t.

They had no reason to. And privately, they were very sympathetic. And then in terms of the local media, I had closet supporters at Channel 3, the owner and operator and main voice of Channel 3 CBS Madison, Wisconsin. Neil, bless him, was a closet supporter. He once said, after our TV interview: “Do you think we’re ever going to get those b******s?” Off camera, of course.

And then John (Nichols), what’s his name, from the Capital Times. He was a closet supporter too. So there was a lot of areas where there wasn’t much pushback.

The pushback came in the local left-wing activist community from Jewish people. And I’m sorry to say that. I was trying to unite Muslims, Christians, and Jews for 9/11 Truth. We published 9/11 in American Empire Vol. 2, Muslims, Christians, and Jews Speak Out. And some brave Jewish voices did finally join us. It was really hard to find any.

The Jewish editor, Sandra Lubarsky, said, “I don’t think we can find any prominent Jews that will take this on.” But I leaned on Rabbi Michael Lerner, and God bless him, after he submitted two ridiculous things to that book, he came up with a third that was beautiful and perfect.

But that was really part of what reinforced my original intuition that there was a major Israeli angle here, just based on who benefits: the fact that there was such disproportionate Jewish presence in the resistance that I was facing, that I saw, that I encountered.

And then I also noticed that I had personally had resistance to looking at what was coming out of American Free Press, America’s last real newspaper. People like Michael Collins Piper, Christopher Bolin, and Victor Thorne were completely on this from the get-go. They got it right from the get-go, more so than Alex Jones, and they haven’t really gotten their due. Because they’ve been labeled as right-wing anti-Semites, and they aren’t.

They’re not prejudiced, and they’re not even right-wing, those guys. And I believe Victor Thorne and Michael Collins Piper are no longer with us, correct? And Christopher Bollyn is kind of retired. But they did fantastic work. So anyway, there was that level of resistance, too.

And the more of that resistance came at me, and the more I refused to shut up, the more I got into it, which is why I’ve been sort of pigeonholed as this guy who talks too much about Israel and the issues of Jewish identity politics, and so on, and how that plays into 9/11 and ultimately the genocide project in Occupied Palestine that we heard about from Roger Waters. So it was actually that (Jewish-Zionist) resistance that led me to where I ended up today.

So, you know, God bless them for playing their role in this great drama.

Jason Bermas: Michael, like Les, you’re a New York City guy, like you said. What were those stigmas early on?

Mike Berger: Well, I was living in St. Louis, so it’s a little bit more conservative than Madison. One of the first things I did is I went to the local anti-war meetings and tried to work with them. I believe I showed them Eric Huffschmidt’s movie (Painful Deceptions) and they all looked at me like I was nuts. I lost a lot of people who I thought were friends. My family absolutely thought I was crazy. I screened the original, very different version of Improbable Collapse at St. Mark’s Church. And my family came, and they all thought I was nuts too. But at least they came, they supported it.

Over time, when I was doing interviews, I would always start when I was talking to people on the street and just ask them, what are your first recollections? And it was almost universal that people would recollect seeing what was unfolding and say, you know, it was like a movie. And pretty early on, it dawned on me that it was as if the country was put into a trance. I literally had people describe the pyroclastic clouds as monsters chasing the people down the street like you’d see in a movie.

And I believe the whole country kind of went into this spiritual trance where we were we were separated and divided by a false dichotomy of left-right, and I also had very similar experiences. The left at the time, the perceived left, was far more resistant than the right. I debated Matthew Rothschild of Progressive Magazine, who took the government’s perspective, but to his credit, by the end of the debate, he was like, “well, you know, there are some questions we probably should get answers to.”

But ultimately, I came to see it as part of a spiritual journey. How much darkness can you tolerate and hold? And I’ve come, for me, the realization is I believe that the more darkness you can tolerate and look into, the more light you have the capacity to reflect. And I like the idea of going back to a listening project. I think that’s a really great idea because, for me, it was learning how to start by listening to where the person was, not by trying to push ideas onto them. And by listening, you can discern the little hook where there’s an opening. But you have to listen and you have to pay attention. And I also think being comfortable with who you are and that early on, 20 years ago, I was a lot younger and a lot cockier. I’ve mellowed. I know some of my fellow panelists, as I listen and greet you guys, we’ve mellowed a bit. And I think it makes it much, much easier to connect with more people.

Jason Bermas: All right. Les, I know you wanted to add something quick.

Les Jamieson: Stigmas, resistance, the weaponization of the term conspiracy theory. You know, that never made sense to me because I always felt like I’m a 9/11 detective. We’re detectives. We’re researchers. We need to really push back and eradicate this term, eradicate this label of conspiracy theorists. We’re detectives. That’s what I always felt about myself.

Now, the powerful arguments that we have available to us, we have to continue to utilize them. Wait a minute: We were lied to about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We were lied to about how within 45 minutes, Saddam Hussein could send drones and attack us. All those. We were lied to, obviously, with the whole incredible deception of the air was safe to breathe. We knew that from day one. And now, in this past week, the release of 170,000 documents to this effect. My gosh, we have to utilize that argument. If they lied about the quality of the air that we were to breathe. What else would they not lie about? And then the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. You have to remember these things. Then, of course, Operation Northwoods and the Iraq, all the falsehoods that were used to launch Gulf War I and II. So if they could lie to us about these things, do you think really they’re telling us the truth about 9/11?

Barbara Honegger: I just want to remind you, Jason, that there’s a three-minute clip that’s queued up for the end.

Jason Bermas: Okay. So at the very end here, we’ll queue up that clip. We’re almost out of time. I want to give everybody about a minute to tell us where you think the 9/11 truth movement needs to go from here, and we’re going to switch it up. We’re going to start with you, Mike.

Mike Berger: I think making the connection between...We now have a 25-year-old record to see how those events have shifted everything, and when you go back and you start to look at original old policy papers, you can directly see that where we are, there were certain people who wanted to go in this direction. They weren’t hiding. They put it out in plain sight. They said they wanted to take over all the countries we’ve had a war with and the crown jewel is Iran, and we’re now there. We’ve lost so many of our civil liberties. And most Americans have no idea that every year Congress, no matter who’s in the White House, has been renewing the 9/11 emergency for 25 years. I don’t know that continuity of government operations have ever been halted since 9/11. So I think at this point, you look at where we are and where we’ve come from, it’s pretty easy to see where we’re going.

If people aren’t going to wake up now, I don’t know when they will be able to. And if you don’t challenge what is happening and you let it decay incrementally, I believe you lose the ability to push back and challenge and overturn it.

Jason Bermas: Kevin?

Kevin Barrett: Well, I was actually very hopeful and optimistic on the flight over from Morocco, because after a little in-flight incident where we had to turn around and fly back and land and take off again, that got us into conversation with fellow passengers. The guy in the seat across from me was a mid-20s, a young guy, with long COVID, so there was that (topic to explore). And it turns out he knows all this stuff. He probably could almost hold down Wyatt Peterson’s place on False Flag Weekly News. That’s saying something. So anyway, yeah, he says they all know that. All the people his age are onto it. And they’re not coming to these conferences, but they’re out there and they’re learning it through social media for the most part. So there’s a lot to be optimistic about. I think we just need to stay human, try to have good communication relationships with ordinary people in our lives and keep telling the truth there.

And then, I think, Mike, you were really on to something when you said that when somebody passes away, a lot goes with them. Alan Rees, webmaster, shout out to Alan Rees in the great beyond from nolieradio.org, he took his passwords with him, unfortunately, and we lost a lot more than we needed to.

Mike, we should encourage folks to try to find some way so that what you know and what you’ve got is going to outlast you. And it can be done now with AI. People are going to be able to find it really easily. So let’s work on that too.

Jason Bermas: Carol?

Carol Brouillet: Thank you for the question. I think we need a global Satyagraha. It started on September 11th, 1906 when Gandhi was with not 3,000 people in South Africa and somebody stood up and said, we need a witness before God. And that’s where the term was born.

And satya is love or truth and graha means action and/or force in Sanskrit. And this is a very powerful idea. And I think we need a truth movement, not just for 9/11, but for 10/7, for health freedom. We need our salt from every direction. We have to join with all the movements pushing for truth, for peace, for justice, for liberty, for everybody. And this is a critical time. We’re trying to turn the tide. I think we’re doing it. So I think that’s what we have to do.

Jason Bermas: Barbara, where do we need to go?

Barbara Honegger: This is a spiritual battle. In my presentation this afternoon, which is after lunch, I’m going to be talking about technically the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, of which I’m the board chair. But the most important part of that presentation is about invoking divine providence and how when you do that, I talk about it like the Red Sea opens. If you have a guidance in anything that you’re doing in life, but in particular in something so important like the 9/11 Truth Movement, I do ask for guidance from Divine providence, God, the universe, whatever your religious belief or none, it works and I follow my guidance and the Red Sea opens and we achieve success.

Jason Bermas: Thank you. Les, what do you think?

Les Jamieson: It occurs to me that there’s been like four waves of 9/11 Research and activism. We were part of that first wave. Then there was a second wave, with David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage, Architects for Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and the Lawyers Committee. They were part of the second wave. The third wave, I think, was 2015 through 2020, all the work done there, Justice in Focus event launched that. And then we’re now in the fourth wave going forward. And what we need to recognize is that continued outreach, education is essential. There’s much more of an opening after this foundation of evidence and education has been completed.

There’s much more openness. It needs to continue to the point then that we get to a cultural shift that demands the adjudication from a legal standpoint of the events of 9/11, and that we realize that we must become a culture that will not tolerate such criminality at this high level, in that we reach a consciousness that we realize and see through the illusion that we are subjected to an all-encompassing power. We are the majority. We are the power. We are the vision. We are the light. That’s where the consciousness needs to go, and that will create the shift that will bring the new paradigm.

Jason Bermas: We’re going to go to Barbara’s video in a moment, and I just want to thank everybody on the panel for coming up here and your continued work here 25 years later to help turn that tide. Go ahead, introduce the video, Barbara.

Barbara Honegger: I’ll just introduce the video briefly. In 25 years of doing 9/11 Truth activism and research and publications and documentaries, I believe that you’re about to see three minutes of the most wonderful, magical, powerful 9/11 Truth event that ever happened. And that was early on. It was either 2005 or 2006.

I’ve been trying to figure out which, but right around there. And it was the first Boston Tea Party for 9/11 Truth. And take a look. So exciting.

FOOTAGE FROM BOSTON TEA PARTY FOR 9/11 TRUTH

“We are conspiracists. Our conspiracy is in that tradition of the Boston Tea Party.”

Col. Robert Bowman: On 9/11, when I watched what was going on live on television, I was thinking, where are the interceptors? And that was the beginning for me of doubts about the story that our government was telling.

Barbara Honegger: The official investigative spokesperson for the FBI, Rex Tomb, said, “Bin Laden is not on the FBI’s most wanted web page for 9/11 because, quote, the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11 at all. So if al-Qaeda didn’t do it, Bin Laden didn’t do it, even Bush himself is admitted that Saddam Hussein didn’t do it, and Iraq didn’t do it, who the hell did do it? And I think we know who did it. Today we have not just reenacted the Boston Tea Party, we have initiated, we have actually begun the second American Revolution, the American Revolution for Truth. Not just about 9/11, but we’re committed to truth in government, period.

9/11 Truth Tea Partiers: “Where are you from?” “Albuquerque, New Mexico.” “Chicago, Illinois.” “From Albany, New York.” “From Burlington, Vermont.” “Massachusetts.” “New York City. Brooklyn.”

It’s the feet on the ground. It’s the average person organizing in their neighborhood, associating with their friends, forming small committees, doing screenings, putting strategy together, petitioning their senators or congressmen, taking whatever actions they can find.

Less Jamieson: People have to understand that it took 14 months before this government even authorized an investigation. And even then, it would never have happened with this constant lobbying of the Jersey widows and other families.

Barbara Honegger: We are the sovereigns. The people of the United States are the sovereigns, not the governments. They are our servants. We are the sovereigns. That is what made America different. It’s what makes America great. And we’re never going to give that up. And today, we shot across the bow of this government.

Col. Robert Bowman: What we are doing here is demanding that all elected representatives in the Congress start fulfilling their responsibility and exercising the authority given to them by the Constitution and not abdicating their responsibility to an imperial presidency.

Jim Hogue: For in the name of security, they make enemies. In the name of patriotism, they make treason and tyranny. In the name of peace, they make war. In the name of liberty, they would turn us into slaves. And in the name of truth, they shill for traitors and give us this.

Speaker: I was contacted by a few families who wanted this message to get out. They have signed some sort of legal arrangement. When they talk about it, they will suffer repercussions. But the families are slowly or surely gaining confidence and gaining courage. And they are going to come out here and they are not just going to say their government lied to them and they killed their loved ones, but they are going to come out and say their government did it. It was an inside job and the government killed their loved ones.

Barbara Honneger: Whereas the official story purporting to explain the terrible attacks of September 11 has been cynically planted at the very center of the American psyche. Whereas the 9/11 Commission failed to investigate and completely left out of its report any mention of World Trade Center 7. Whereas the current administration blocked and delayed for 441 days...

Col. Robert Bowman: We must demand that all our government’s lies with respect to 9/11, the Iraq War, and everything else be uncovered, done away with. We demand to have a government that follows the Constitution, tells the truth, and serves the people. One way or another, we have to get it. We must have such a government, whatever it takes.

Speaker: We are doing this as patriots to take back our country. We demand the truth. (“Boxes of 9/11 Commission Reports” thrown into Boston Harbor.) The judiciary and U.S. Congress are hereby advised that the citizenry of this United States holds an uncompromising demand for an exhaustive reinvestigation of all theories, testimonies, facts as they relate to the physical destruction of life and property inflicted during the attacks on 9/11.

Jason Bermas: Alright folks, let’s give it up for this panel one more time.

Sandra Jelmi: Well, we’re about to follow this segment with...it ties into this. I just found out that I’m supposed to be introducing this, so I’m a little emotional because I have so much gratitude for these people who held down the fort for us. None of us would be here if it wasn’t for the early people who endured the resistance and the backlash and they had the strength. I don’t know how they did it. None of us would be here without them, so thank you, all of you. And everybody else who joined after the fact. And so we’ve had a lot of activists over the years, in the last 25 years, and we’ve lost a lot of them. And so we put together this video. It’s a tribute to all of those who have fought over 25 years. Some we lost early on and some just recently. And we owe them all for having done what they did, each in their own way.

We have 56 of them. It was quite a task to remember them all. All of us, we don’t know who... you know, East Coast, West Coast, the smaller groups. I came across names I had never heard of. They did tremendous work, and I hadn’t known that they did.

So this is a little tribute to the 56 that we lost, unfortunately, and counting, but this is what we have today. Thank you to all of them.

In Memoriam: A Tribute to the Many 9/11 Truth Advocates We’ve Lost Over the Last 25 Years

David Ray Griffin: Having the truth about 9/11 revealed so that it would become part of the worldwide public discourse might indeed have dire consequences. There is only one thing that would be worse, continuing to have the truth about 9/11 concealed.

Ellen Mariani: We will never heal. This country will never, ever, ever forget that day. We have to demand a new investigation.

.. . . . I’ve done my best and I can go with a satisfied mind.

Aaron Russo

Allan Rees

Artie Devlin

Barton Bruce

Beverly Eckert

Bill Cooper

Bill Wilt

Bob Bowman

Cathleen “Cat” McGuire

Christophe Terrasson

Charles Ewing Smith

Dan Barnum

David Ray Griffin

Ed Asner

Elias Davidsson

Ellen Mariani

Ferdinando Imposimato

Francis A. Boyle

Frank Legge

George Capsis

Giulietto Chiesa

Graeme Macqueen

Greg Longo

James Hufferd

Jane Pollicino

Janette McKinlay

Janice Matthews

[video skip due to livestream glitch?]

Ted Muga

Tod Fletcher

Vic Sadot

Victor Thorn

William Hurt

William Pepper

Jason Bermas: Let’s give it up one more time for those who are no longer with us.

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Approaching the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I’ve been asked to participate in a panel on the early days of the 9/11 truth movement. It’s part of the Turning the Tide conference in New York City that begins this Thursday, September 10. Hope to see you there! Meanwhile, here is my account of how David Ray Griffin played a major role in my transformation from employable academician to truth jihadi. You can watch the whole memorial at the Claremont United Church of Christ YouTube channel.

Transcript

Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. I’m Kevin Barrett and I have an article published out on the internet called “How David Ray Griffin Changed My Life.” There’s the long version and the printed version (in American Free Press). Now I’ll give you a brief spoken version.

When I was in graduate school in the late 1980s and 1990s, I discovered that amongst the vast wasteland of structuralism and post-structuralism and this, that, and the other, all reactions to the scientism that was dominating the academy, there were basically three schools of thought that I could find that actually had anything worthwhile to say. The first was Bakhtinian dialogism. The second was the traditionalism of René Guenon, and I followed those people into Islam.

And then finally, of course, there was the process thought of John Cobb and David Ray Griffin. And of all of these stunning discoveries, perhaps the most stunning and craziest of all was that the best single guide to empirical reality across a wide range of disciplines was this theologian, a Christian theologian, David Ray Griffin. I was shocked and surprised to find that! And so I read a bunch of David’s work and cited him in my dissertation on Sufism in Morocco.

And then, after 9/11 happened, I was the only Muslim in Madison, Wisconsin, who didn’t immediately just know that 9/11 was some sort of inside job. I said, “let’s wait and see the evidence, guys.” And everybody else said, “come on!” So I was suspicious from the get-go, but I figured that, well, it’s probably one of these things that we’ll never really know. And I was finishing my dissertation, very busy, trying to learn Arabic, get my Arabic up to speed. And it wasn’t until late 2003 when I heard that David was working on The New Pearl Harbor and that he was going to be asserting that the World Trade Center was demolished with explosives—it didn’t just fall down from plane crashes and fires—and that whatever happened to the Pentagon, it certainly wasn’t hit by an airliner piloted by a guy who was incapable of flying a Cessna training aircraft, doing an amazing corkscrew dive and pulling multiple Gs and leveling out at the lawn, not putting a scratch on the lawn, but flying straight into the accounting office, which had just lost $2.3 trillion the night before, according to Donald Rumsfeld.

So the absurdity of this official story…what was stunning to me when I looked into it, thanks to hearing about what David was looking into, was not so much that they, meaning our wonderful national security state and its partners, would do this, but rather how absurdly, shamefully obvious it was. Did these people have no shame? Couldn’t they have at least created some slightly more plausible cover story? Are our intelligence agencies that incompetent? It made me angry in a lot of ways.

So when the book came out, I wasn’t surprised that it was as good as it was, knowing David’s work. And I started talking about it and doing teach-ins at the University of Wisconsin.

At some point, I think I handed the book to a friend of mine who was the local Imam at one of the three mosques in Madison. He was doing some interfaith work, and he had met a guy named Jim Goulding, who, as it turns out, got his PhD in Christian history from Claremont, and was teaching at Edgewood College of Madison, a Catholic school. And my friend, Salih, the Imam, said to Jim Goulding, “you should read this book. It shows that 9/11 was an inside job. They blew up the Towers. And whatever happened at the Pentagon, it wasn’t a hijacked plane.”

And Jim Goulding thought, “wow, this must be some kind of crazy Muslim belief.” He couldn’t believe it. He said, “okay, I’ll look at the book.”

And Salih handed him the book, and he said, “David Ray Griffin?! I studied with him. He was the smartest guy in my class, the smartest guy in my university. He wrote this?” And so Jim was totally flabbergasted. And then the next thing you know, Jim and I were talking about bringing David to Madison to give a speech at the University of Wisconsin. And this would have been in late 2004. So we organized that event (which happened April 18 2005).

Jim passed away a couple of years ago. So I guess he from the other world, won’t mind me saying that I did most of the work. But he provided moral support, and we got David to Madison. A couple of days before the event, C-SPAN, just out of the blue, called my house, and my son did some kind of prank answer, and so they had to call back a couple of times to finally tell me that they were coming to Madison to film this. And that suddenly put it on the radar screen.

It was the first time ever that the 9/11 Truth Movement had gotten any major media publicity. So David showed up in Madison. Jim and I had dinner with him. He gave an incredible talk. And I got to have breakfast with him the next morning. Fantastic conversation. I’m still in awe of his intellect.

And the success of that event made it inevitable that I would end up walking this bizarre path that I’ve had to walk ever since then. I ended up getting chosen as the whipping boy of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth. I was the guy that the state legislature in Madison attacked. They said I had to be fired from the university because I was corrupting the youth of Athens or something like that. So, next thing you know, I’m on Fox News fighting with Hannity. And the administration is begging me to “please go hide in a cabin somewhere, don’t talk to the media.” And I’m saying, “I’m trying to get this message out, and I’m sorry, I have to talk to the media somewhat.” And they said, “just please don’t go on Fox any more.” And I said, “okay, not until the semester’s over.” And this whole experience (including the internet paper trail) made me unemployable in the American and indeed the entire Western academy.

And since my wife and family were not that interested in going to someplace like Iran or Malaysia or some free country where you’re allowed to talk about the most important political things in the world, unlike in this godforsaken police state that we live in, I ended up having to become a crowdfunded troublemaker, which is what I’ve been doing ever since. And I’ve been blessed to be working with the real thinkers, the people of real intellect and heart. The true truth seekers of our time are mostly on the other side of that divide (academic or foundation-funded vs. independent) and I’ve been forced into that world, and I thank God that I have, because I’ve gotten to work with people like David, John Cobb, who I regard as obviously one of the most important thinkers of this age, maybe any age, and some other really amazing people, including Sheikh Imran Hosein, who is one of the very few Muslim thinkers out there with something powerful to say about today’s world.

It’s been a great path and I thank God and David Ray Griffin for putting me on it.

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The good news is that I’m back on YouTube. The bad news is: for how long?

I always figured that if I wanted to sneak back onto YouTube—after having had my two personal channels and a 501c3 nonprofit’s channel nuked for political speech the oligarchy doesn’t like—the best way to do it would be via cat videos. I have an adorable cat named Muse. And it just so happens that Muse is completely apolitical! He has no opinions whatsoever about 9/11, censorship, COVID origins, wars, assassinations, genocides, or anything like that. Whenever I tell you he does, I’m lying to you.

I’ve been threatening False Flag Weekly News viewers that if they don’t contribute to the weekly Fundrazrs, which occasionally come up short (hint hint), I just might stop making controversial political content and do cat videos instead. But after reading Jon Ronson’s New York Times article on Greg Chism, who got rich making YouTube videos that were some combination of silly, stupid, and funny (before being witch-hunted as an alleged child abuser) I realized that the obvious way to make silly-stupid-funny content is GO INTO CARTOONS.

Having used Leonardo AI to create the illustrations for my book Bad Birder’s Birding Report: Nonsense Ornithology from Bad to Verse, I noticed that Leonardo claimed to be able to turn illustrations into movies. So I created a cartoon character, Bipolar Pete, made him into a six-second movie, wrote a script, turned the script into cartoon voices via typecast.ai, added copyright-free music from Starosin via Pixabay, and slapped it all together in imovie. The whole thing took maybe four or five hours.

Then it took me another hour to create a False Flag Weekly News YouTube channel. I tried starting a new Google account, but it seems Google has banned my phone from receiving confirmation text messages, so that didn’t work. Then I remembered I had created a False Flag Weekly News Google account around 15 years ago but never used it. Miraculously, I was able to get back into it without phone confirmation, using my other email addresses.

Will Google nuke my new False Flag Weekly News channel? Technically, they probably shouldn’t. Gemini thinks the reason the 501c3 channel I used for harmless Islam-related content got nuked was that Google thought I was “impersonating” the 501c3, i.e. pretending the channel wasn’t me in order to evade previous personal bans. That was not strictly true, but whatever.

According to their own rules, Google cannot ban my new False Flag Weekly News channel for impersonation, because I am not even remotely pretending to be anyone other than myself, Dr. Kevin J. Barrett, the notorious “radical Muslim 9/11 truther and antiseptic conspiracy theorist who does False Flag Weekly News.” I am even advertising my website, TruthJihad.com, at the end of my first video!

Since they can’t ban me for impersonation, maybe they’ll scrutinize the content. What they will see is a silly, lovable, utterly harmless cartoon character, Bipolar Pete. Poor Pete, a differently-abled guy who is living with a mental health condition, will sue them for discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) if they try anything.

But seriously…I suppose YouTube might try to turn the tables on me and claim I am picking on bipolar people, citing their rules against:

* Promoting hatred or discrimination against disabled people.

* Using slurs or dehumanizing stereotypes to imply that individuals with disabilities are physically or mentally inferior.

* Disparaging, humiliating, or mocking a group based on their medical conditions or impairments.

If they do that, Bipolar Pete, backed by a deep-pockets FFWN legal team, will appeal the ban, pointing out that the video in question does not disparage, humiliate, or mock anyone except Trump, who, though he is obviously suffering from numerous mental health conditions including narcissistic personality disorder, psychopathy, grandiose delusions (GD) and several others, very richly deserves vastly more mockery than this pathetic little three minute cartoon could ever possibly dish out.

What’s more, the video actually sympathizes with bipolar people, by suggesting that we’re all feeling a little bipolar these days. In that sense, it promotes inclusivity—not to mention diversity, which everyone except Israeli Jews and a handful of white nationalist fanatics agrees is a venerable deity and inescapable touchstone of public policy in general, and non-nukeworthy YouTube videos in particular.

So YouTube has no legitimate reason to ban this video, or my channel. (Yes, I know the channel is called “False Flag Weekly News,” and FFWN offers lots of extremely controversial and potentially censorship-worthy content, but I am just posting lovably harmless cartoons on YouTube, not FFWN episodes, and even if I did post FFWN episodes, Helen of Destroy has been posting FFWN episodes on her YouTube channel with no reaction from the censors, so if they censored me but not her, they would be guilty of gender discrimination, which is even worse than picking on mentally handicapped people other than Trump.)

But just because they have no legitimate reason to ban me doesn’t mean they won’t do it. Bipolar Pete’s depressive side sadly admits that such a thing is not only possible, but highly probable. The real question, Pete’s sad side says, is not if but when YouTube will ban this harmless, lovable cartoon character.

How long do you think it will take YouTube to violate their own guidelines and nuke Bipolar Pete’s new FFWN channel? Guess the number of days in the comments. The first person who guesses right, and has a USA mailing address, wins a free copy of Bad Birder’s Birding Report: Nonsense Ornithology from Bad to Verse.

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When Zelenskyy threatened to shoot down civilian airliners last week, Putin called it “state terrorism.” Putin is right, of course. But the expression he used, “state terrorism,” is a repetitiously redundant pleonasm.

Virtually all terrorism is state terrorism. So appending the word state in front of the word terrorism isn’t really necessary.

Case in point: Trump’s slaughter of Iranian schoolgirls, female volleyball players, and wedding guests. Such acts fit the definition of terrorism: politically-motivated attacks on civilians. The purpose of attacking civilians is to inspire fear or terror among them, so they will react in ways that further the terrorist’s political plans.

Terrorist Trump and his Israeli owners have made no secret of the fact that they intend to attack civilians and especially civilian infrastructure in Iran—which even the mainstream media acknowledges is a war crime—in hopes of spreading so much pain and misery and death that the Iranian people rise up against their government. But as Caleb Carr explained in his post-9/11 book The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians, such “punish-the-civilians” policies rarely work. Hitler’s buzz-bombs didn’t convince the British to rise up and overthrow Churchill, nor did the British and American firebombings of German cities cause the Germans to revolt against Hitler. On the contrary, such terrorist policies typically backfire: the people punished worst are dead, while the survivors feel selected by God or fate or destiny to unite behind their nation’s leadership and fight even more furiously against the foreign terror-mongers attacking their country.

And Iran—where a powerful cult of martyrdom is built into the majority religion—is the last country on earth that anybody is ever going to successfully terrorize into submission. Iran’s war on terror, specifically its war on Zio-American terror, is genuine, and likely to be far more successful than the ersatz US equivalent.

Civilian Casualty Ratios Keep Rising

The West likes to think it is growing increasingly civilized. But its wars grow ever-more barbaric and terrorist. In World War I, about half of the slightly over 20 million deaths were civilians. In World War II, just one generation later, nearly two-thirds of the 60 million deaths were civilians. The Vietnam terror war waged by the USA probably killed far more than the two million official death count, with more than three-quarters of the victims civilians. Likewise, the official death counts in the 9/11 wars against Iraq and Afghanistan—and the covert wars on Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, and of course Palestine—are almost certainly far too low, while the civilian-to-military casualty ratio just keeps getting higher, and is probably in the 80% or higher range. (For high-end casualty estimates that counter the official undercounts in these wars, read Gideon Polya.)

Let’s ask Gemini, which obviously comes with a pro-state bias, who the real terrorists are. Hey Gemini: How many civilians have died in all the wars beginning with World War I, and what percentage were killed by non-state actors?

Gemini: An estimated 110 million to 140 million civilians have died in all wars globally starting from World War I (1914) to the present day, with the vast majority—roughly 95% or more—killed by state actors (governments and their official militaries) rather than non-state actors.

Given Gemini’s bias, we can safely translate “95% or more” as “99%+.” I rest my case: Virtually all terrorism is committed by governments.

But that’s not the way the government’s propaganda apparatus sees it. They want you to believe that the world is a scary-scary place full of evil (non-government) terrorists plotting to bomb you or shoot you or crash your airliners or blow up your buildings. And they want you to run to the real terrorists—the government—for protection.

That’s why they chose 9-1-1 as the date code for their big 2001 psy-op. When you’re terrified and panicked and faced with senseless violence, who do you call? You call the government in hopes they will save you. The three digits 9-1-1 subconsciously represent the trust populations place in their “big mommy and daddy,” their government, to get them out of serious trouble. Specifically, the terrorist perpetrators of 9/11 wanted panicked Americans to volunteer their persons and/or their tax money, not to mention their fervent ideological and emotional support, to their Israeli-occupied government so it could “protect them from further such attacks” by invading the Middle East and destroying Israel’s enemies.

It was in fact Israel’s agents who blew up the Towers after flying remote-controlled planes into buildings. Through Epstein-style blackmail, financial control, and media domination, Israel infiltrated the US government like a parasite hijacking the brain of its host, sending Uncle Sam on a state terrorism spree whose only major beneficiary was the malignant Zionist entity itself.

But even people who imagine that 9/11 was done by al-Qaeda—the same al-Qaeda that the US created and has supported since its inception in the Afghan war against the USSR, the same al-Qaeda whose Syrian chief Trump recently invited to the White House and playfully sprayed with perfume—and who further imagine that al-Qaeda is a non-state entity as opposed to a US-Israeli front—ought to take a hard look at the statistics to get a sense of how nonexistent a threat “non-state terrorism” really is. As I wrote in Questioning the War on Terror:

Statistically, there are good grounds for wondering whether we should bother to worry about terrorism at all. Roughly 3000 Americans have been killed by (allegedly non-state) terrorists during the past century. In other words, a whole century’s worth of terror victims equals three days’ worth of cigarette fatalities, a week’s worth of deaths from bad medical treatment, or a month’s worth of automobile deaths. Shouldn’t we worry far more about cigarettes, doctors, and automobiles than about terrorists?

And how does your chance of being killed by terrorists compare with your chance of being struck by lighting? It turns out that lighting is a vastly greater threat. There are on average about 1000 lightning victims per year in the USA, whereas the average number of terror victims per year—a number wildly skewed upward by the fluke of 9/11—is still only about thirty.

Are terrorists at least more dangerous than...bathtubs? Nope. It turns outthat your chances of drowning in your bathtub are more than ten times as great as your chances of being killed by a terrorist.

Should we declare war against lightning bolts and bathtubs? Should we install PA systems in our bathrooms reminding us that the threat level of bathtub drowning has been raised to orange? Should we create a new Department of Bathtub Security (DBS) empowered to do sneak-and-peak warrantless searches of our bathrooms to make sure that we’re using no-slip bathmats? Should we invade and occupy countries that we falsely blame for bathtub deaths? Would this be any crazier than what we’re doing now, allegedly due to the equally insignificant “terrorist threat”?

So the whole notion of terrorism as a supposedly non-state phenomenon is a scam, a hoax, and a psy-op. Grossly exaggerating the alleged threat posed by non-state terrorists is itself a form of state terrorism, in the sense that the state is using propaganda to terrorize its population for political purposes.

Imagine a sadistic criminal who ties up and tortures his victim, all the while insisting that his actions are motivated by a desire to protect the victim from an imaginary bogeyman. That criminal is the government, the victim is its population, and the imaginary bogeyman is the supposed threat of non-state “terrorists.”

War for a Multipolar World: The Real War on Terror

The covert World War III being waged today appears, on the surface, to be between the Zionist-oligarch-occupied world-domination-seeking West, on the one hand, and the partisans of the multipolar-world, led by China, Russia and Iran, on the other. But beneath the surface, there is a philosophical-ideological war. It isn’t as obvious as the capitalism-vs.-communism Cold War clash, but it’s real nonetheless.

The ideological dimension of World War III can be expressed as follows: Should governments gain legitimacy through terror, or through competent administration in service to the public good?

While no government perfectly embodies either ideal, Israel and its occupied USSA come close to being pure terror states. Both governments purport to be protecting their populations from “terrorist threats” and derive much of their perceived legitimacy from that purported protection. 9/11, and 10/7 (“Israel’s 9/11”) were the sacrificial spectacles that undergird the grossly mendacious ideological foundations of both terror states. Both terror states, built on foundations of state violence and lies, are having trouble maintaining public confidence.

China, for its part, does maintain popular consensus in part through somewhat mythologized but largely accurate accounts of its suffering at the hands of foreign aggressors, from the Opium War and the Century of Humiliation through the brutal Japanese occupation and subsequent US war on China through Korea. But its government primarily derives legitimacy not through violence and sacrifice, but through competent administration in the public interest.

If we ask Western-biased Gemini to contrast public confidence in the respective US and Chinese leadership, we find that worldwide China’s government inspires far more confidence, and that domestically:

United States: Public confidence in U.S. leadership and future direction faces continuous polarization, heavily influenced by shifting political administrations, domestic divisions, and foreign policy friction with traditional allies.

China: Domestic sentiment inside China reflects steady confidence in national economic power, technological growth, and rising global standing, which sustains government legitimacy and popular backing for Beijing’s international posture.

When Covert World War III finally ends with a multipolar victory, insha’allah, let us hope and pray that Chinese-style “competent administration” rather than Zio-American “terror lies in service to Girardian sacrifice” becomes the basis of a reasonably virtuous world authority capable of enforcing international law and punishing the real terrorists.

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Around 9:30 pm on Tuesday, the US Navy’s most precise glide bomb blew up a wedding party in Sirik, Iran. It evoked memories of similar war crimes: the decimation of a women’s volleyball team in Lamerd, and of course the slaughter of more than 140 girls, along with their teachers, in Minab at the beginning of the war. I appeared on Press TV last night, alongside University of Tehran professor Fouad Izadi, to try to make sense of the seemingly senseless massacres of innocents, paid for by US taxpayers’ dollars.

Transcript

Press TV: The U.S. has again struck civilian targets in Iran, including an attack on a wedding party in the southern city of Sirik that has killed and injured over 70 Iranians, majority of them women and children. The attacks have been condemned by Iran’s foreign ministry and multiple officials, many of whom have reiterated there is no doubt the so-called precision strikes were deliberate. This pattern of targeting civilian infrastructure and massacre of civilians seems to join the U.S. and Israeli regime right at the hip. In the Spotlight program, we’ll take a deep look into its legality, morality, the justification and utilization of said attacks as part of U.S. and Israeli military doctrine.

And now, for our guests. Joining us, Dr. Fouad Izadi, professor at University of Tehran, joining us from the Iranian capital, and Dr. Kevin Barrett, editor at the Al-Andalus Tribune from Sadia, Morocco. Gentlemen, hello to the both of you. Pleasure to have you both on. Professor Izadi, we will start with you, sir.

Condolences to you once again after more civilians have perished here in Iran. In less than six months, sir, Iran has seen hundreds of civilians now killed in attacks on a school, on a wedding, a busy Tehran intersection, or intersections for that matter, bridges, residential infrastructure. Your initial take, Professor, on how we are to process these kinds of attacks?

Fouad Izadi: I think you should process these attacks as war crimes committed by the United States to terrorize the Iranian people. Of course, this is not the first time that Americans have engaged in war crimes. We remember what they did in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, attacking civilians to terrorize the local population so they would submit to the United States.

And this is what they have done in Iran. In some instances, they have even accepted responsibility. Attacking bridges, civilian bridges, is a war crime. Trump proudly accepted responsibility for that. In the last one and a half years of attacks on Iran, they have attacked hospitals, schools, and other civilian infrastructure, in line with what the Israelis have done in Gaza. Israelis have attacked every school, every hospital, every home almost. And this is what the United States is doing to the Iranian people. Trump is upset with the people of Iran because he expected them to help him to become his foot soldiers in achieving his foreign policy goals.

People in Iran, even people who don’t like the current government, know who Trump is, know who Netanyahu is, know the fact that these are genocidal war criminals. And no one is interested in becoming foot soldiers for Trump and Netanyahu. In fact, every night for the last 186, 187 nights, people, Iranians, come to the streets in millions shouting against Trump and Netanyahu. And this is making them (US and Israeli leaders) upset. So they think by repeating the experience in Gaza, they can achieve some goal. If you look at the pictures that are broadcast, the wedding that was hit was right in the middle of a civilian area. There was no excuse.

These missiles are precision missiles. This was done on purpose, and it’s not going to achieve its goals.

Press TV: All right. Thank you. Dr. Barrett, thank you for your patience. Welcome to the conversation, sir. Your initial take on these kinds of attacks, repeatedly carried out by the U.S. and the Israeli regime, to Dr. Fouadi’s point, in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, And that’s just on this side of the century. If we don’t want to get into Vietnam and the carpet bombing in North Korea, the napalm in Vietnam, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and whatnot, just this side of the century, there’s an elaborate, well-documented myriad of cases that we could reference.

Kevin Barrett: That’s right. Since the United States became the dominant world power after World War II, it killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 million innocent people in its wars and CIA interventions, according to William Blum in his book, Killing Hope. And that was published 20-some years ago. And so it missed the killings in the so-called War on Terror after the false flag attack on 9/11. Of course, we’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of that false flag. And since then, this so-called War on Terror has actually been a war of terror. It’s been a concerted war on civilian populations.

And it’s reached the point now with this current terror war on Iran that everything has turned upside down, because the official discourse of the War on Terror has been that professional militaries, like supposedly the United States’, only target military objectives, while the other side just randomly blows up civilians.

But in fact, in this war, it’s the precise opposite. In this war, Iran has been very, very precise in attacking and devastating American military targets without much civilian collateral damage. Whereas the Americans have not only been blowing up whole schools full of girls, killing 168 people, the initial report, and blowing up this latest wedding party in Sirik.

Of course, they’re experts at attacking wedding parties from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But they’re also deliberately and openly announcing that Trump is going after civilian targets, blowing up bridges, blowing up railways and so on, trying to make the civilian population suffer. So Trump is the world’s biggest terrorist.

And the sorts of things that were done during the war on terror to “go after terrorists” actually need to be applied to the real terrorists. And we can only hope and pray that we’ll have a change in the international order soon. We’ll get a real United Nations, we’ll get a real International Criminal Court, and we’ll try all those people and hang them.

Press TV: Thank you. And Dr. Izadi, you mentioned a level of frustration and retribution, maybe, and you mentioned all the Iranians that are standing behind their government, standing before their soil and territorial integrity against the U.S. and Israel. But then the Human Rights Watch in 2003 documented in Iraq extensive use of cluster munitions by U.S. and British forces in populated residential areas producing hundreds of civilian casualties. Also attacks on weddings both in Iraq and Afghanistan since the turn of the century, resulting in hundreds upon hundreds of civilian casualties. So it’s not just Iran, is it? This just seems to be the U.S. and Israeli playbook. You mentioned Gaza. What do you think, are these attacks by design?

Fouad Izadi: You know, they target military sites as well. And then in all cases that you mentioned, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, other places, they realize that attacking military sites is not enough, because by attacking military sites only, you have a population that is obviously supporting its military against foreign aggression. The people who are in the military come from civilian areas. They are the children of the people who are in cities and villages. And when the United States, and Israel, which is the same thing, don’t achieve their goals by attacking military sites, military people, then they decide that they want to punish ordinary citizens, because at the end of the day, they belong to the same country. They belong to the same people. They are the parents and brothers and sisters of the people who are in the military. So in order to damage or destroy the morale of the military, they think by attacking civilian areas they can make the other side surrender.

They have used atomic bombs attacking civilians, hundreds of thousands of people killed in order to achieve some policy goal. So the United States, since its inception, has been killing civilians in order to achieve the objectives of some politician. And the only problem with that scenario is that in countries, especially countries like Iran, that have a long history and culture of resistance against imperialism, against aggression, against the United States and Israel… When you’re facing a country like Iran, this is going to backfire. And this is going to unite the people. In fact, I can argue that Trump and Netanyahu have managed to unite Iranians more than any Iranian politician could ever do. As I said, even if you don’t like the government, you don’t want to go to a wedding and not come back. You don’t want to see your local hospital attacked. You don’t want the local bridge to be destroyed.

So this is going to make Iranians more united. And this is going to result in these people actually asking government officials to respond to the United States in a more forceful manner. There’s going to be a public opinion push on Iranian politicians demanding a greater response so these attacks don’t happen again.

Press TV: And Dr. Barrett, I like to put that same question to you. The policy here, how you perceive it? Human Rights Watch in “Baghdad killing” in 2003 said over 120 civilians were killed in less than 13 days. It said their probe found a pattern of over-aggressive tactics Indiscriminate shooting in residential neighborhoods and excessive reliance on lethal force. What’s your idea on this of war policy? It does not sound like an anomaly restricted just to Iran or Afghanistan and Iraq, for that matter. It seems like, to Dr. Izadi’s point, that it’s been prevalent throughout the U.S.’s war engagements for decades, if not centuries.

Kevin Barrett: Well, this illustrates how the United States is actually at war not just with leadership that it doesn’t like. Though that’s what it says. It tells us that it supports the Iranian people. It just doesn’t like their leadership.

And that kind of rhetoric, demonizing leaders, obscures the fact that the United States is actually at war with the people. And, of course, the Zionist entity is at war with the people of Palestine even more, obviously. And the reason is that the United States is trying to extract resources from these countries, and it needs local comprador elites to cooperate with it and basically rob these countries and rob their people. And so the honest politicians and leaders in these countries are the enemies of the United States, because they want independence for their countries and they want a good deal for their people. Back in 1953, Mohamed Mossadegh found out the hard way that dealing with the United States in these kinds of matters was very difficult if you’re an honest politician.

So they’re at war with the people, and that’s, I believe, part of the reason that when the United States goes and intervenes in these countries, it tends to massacre civilians vastly more than would serve its interests. It actually would win the so-called hearts and minds much better if it was disciplined and careful in trying to avoid collateral damage. But instead, they wage these wars of terror. And it hasn’t worked. The most powerful nation on earth has lost war after war.

They lost in Vietnam, and they lost again in Iraq. They lost in Afghanistan. But this current loss to Iran is shaping up to be really the mother of all defeats for the United States and possibly the end of its empire, because Iran is chasing the United States out of the region using very precise and powerful military force that the United States apparently now lacks. So all they can do is attack civilians.

Press TV: Thanks, Kevin. And Dr. Izadi, a reporter for the New York Times, Christian Tribirth said the U.S. attack yesterday in the wedding in Sirik is no mistake, and that remnants of the weapon recovered point to it being a Boeing-produced SLAM-ER, I’m thinking it’s a hyphen ER, SLAM-ER missile, the most precise munition of its kind in the U.S. naval arsenal. How’s that for making it tough to chalk this up as a missed target or a weapon gone astray? And when we look at Lamerd, when we look at Sirik, when we look at Minab, is there any doubt with respect to intent here if these were deliberate or not from your perspective, doctor?

Fouad Izadi: You know, Minab was six months ago. We have video of American Tomahawk missiles hitting the school. And if you ask American politicians, people at the Pentagon, about the reason why they hit this school, they claim that they did not do it, and then they say that the issue is under investigation.

So this is the nature of the United States. Politicians in the United States lie. They lie to their people. They lie to the world. And the good thing is that everybody realizes who they are. It’s not just the people of Iran who realize who U.S. government officials are, the type of people that they are.

Your viewers know who they are. Other people internationally know who they are. And so their claims of innocence, no one believes. And the reality is that this is not going to be the last time that the United States uses terror to punish the people who are electing politicians that are serving their country, that are supporting a military that is protecting the country. The thinking in Washington is that If we punish these people more, somehow we can find some success in the wars that we wage. And this is the mentality that the United States has had since the beginning, the way they killed indigenous people in the American continent, the way they killed Africans when they enslaved them.

They even sometimes use the same terminology. The other day, the U.S. Secretary of Treasury talked about a noose, “putting a noose on Iran”—the same way they hanged Africans, slaves that were supposed to be punished, who were not submitting the way the slave masters wanted them to submit.

They’re even using the same technology, the same terminology against Iran. So many of your viewers may not be Iranians, but I don’t think anywhere in the world you can find people that have not been affected negatively by the United States. People all over the world have suffered from U.S. policies.

Press TV: And speaking of accountability, Dr. Barrett, do you remember Fatoua bin Souda, the chief ICC prosecutor during Trump’s first term, wanted to launch an ICC probe into war crimes by U.S. and British forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Donald Trump specifically villainized her, revoked her travel visas, her and her three people on her team.

None of them are around any more. None of them are part of the ICC prosecution team any more. They got huge blowback. The probe was never launched. We see the same exact thing repeated by the Israeli regime. They do not allow UN teams into Gaza, or even media for that matter, or the occupied West Bank.

And they barely even allowed US politicians into those respective territories. A lot of coincidence there, but your thoughts on this policy of shielding yourself from all kinds of accountability?

Kevin Barrett: Well, indeed, they’re basically confessing that they’re criminals when they block the ICC and refuse to allow international organizations access to the war zones. And the U.S. and and especially the Zionist entity are notorious for essentially having a policy of protecting their war criminals. And they do that because they are systematically and deliberately committing war crimes as a matter of policy. Which means that the entire chain of command, both political, military, intelligence, the whole top level of the government, is exposed to prosecution for war crimes. These people are war criminals, and they know it. And they even admit it. They brag about blowing up civilian targets.

And so, naturally, they try to escape accountability. And they can get away with it for a while. The problem, though, for them is that this empire is crumbling, and their strength is rapidly diminishing. They are badly losing this war. And when the smoke clears, there’s going to be a new international order, and the United States is not going to be anywhere near the world’s most powerful country anymore. And we may actually have a chance at getting some accountability and—again—trying, convicting, and hanging these people.

Press TV: And we have time for one more question. Really quick, Dr. Izadi, we look at the figures, we can talk about the civilian casualties in Iran, in Afghanistan, and neighboring Iraq. I’m just going to mention Afghanistan. We don’t have much time left. 176,000 people killed between 2001 and 2021, and total disregard for lives

What I wanted you to speak on before we wrap this up, because 501 Ukrainians were killed in a town called Busha in Ukraine in April of 2022, including 19 women and children, and it got huge blowback from the international community because 501 so-called civilians were killed in that town. But then when we talk about hundreds of thousands, it doesn’t get that kind of coverage. Why?

Fouad Izadi: Because generally, corporate media outlets in the West are racist. And killing civilians, whether they’re Iranians or Afghans or Ukrainians or Russians, should be condemned. But they have double standards. If you have blonde hair and blue eyes, you’re going to get more serious coverage by the Western media outlets.

That’s why there is Press TV to be the voice of the voiceless and not practice the racism that is very much present in corporate media outlets in the West and Western politicians in general. You saw what these Western governments did when it came to the genocide in Gaza, with the exception of one or two. They fully supported it. They helped the genocidal regime to continue that genocide. And this is the last word I’ll have for you. You know, Trump is about 80 years old, so we may not be able to get him. But younger people that are committing these crimes, Pete Hegseth, people in the Pentagon, these people are young enough for the Iranian side and others who have been affected by them negatively, the victims of their crimes, to actually get them to pay for the crimes that they did. So if they’re watching Press TV, I hope they have good attorneys.

Press TV: Gentlemen, always a pleasure. Thank you both sincerely for joining us on our program. Dr. Farid Izadi, the professor at the University of Tehran, joining us for the Iranian capital, as well as Dr. Kevin Barrett, editor at Al-Andalus Tribune from Sadia, Morocco. And viewers, that’s a wrap for this segment of your Spotlight program. Thank you for tuning in, and goodbye for now.

Stripe is Substack’s only processor and they debanked me, so you can no longer pay me through Substack. Now I am posting everything on Substack free and asking people to sign up for recurring donations at my Paypal donation page…or better yet, the free speech platform SPdonate. Alternately you can Paypal or Zelle to truthjihad[at]gmail(dot)com. Note that Zelle, unlike other methods, doesn’t charge any fees.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com