by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
The 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks came earlier this month, and I published an article reviewing those historic events and analyzing the important evidence always ignored by our mainstream media.
This time I sought to place that story within the context of the rapidly-approaching first anniversary of the 10/7 Hamas raid, which had launched a new round of very bloody conflict involving Israel, the Palestinians, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and other major players in the region.
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- American Pravda: October 7th and September 11th
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 9, 2024 • 11,200 Words
The September 11th attacks once loomed very large in American public life, prompting as they did a long series of our Middle Eastern wars that killed or displaced many millions of Muslims. But now after more than two decades they seem to have become little more than a fading memory and my article attracted less readership than I had hoped. Meanwhile, a large fraction of the lightly-moderated discussion was dominated by fanatic conspiracy-cranks, who claimed that no jetliners had ever struck the WTC towers or that the buildings had been destroyed by nuclear explosions or even that almost no New Yorkers had actually died that day, with thousands of imaginary victims having merely been invented by our dishonest media. These seem like exactly the sort of crackpots who tend to monopolize an issue once more sensible people have gradually lost interest and gone elsewhere.
Those 2001 events were certainly the largest and most dramatic terrorist attacks in the entire history of the world, perhaps even comparable in their magnitude to all previous terrorist attacks combined. But it is only natural that their memory and relevance would gradually fade away over the course of nearly a quarter-century, much as had previously happened with the great battles of the First World War or our country’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam.
However, just a few days later on September 17th, the world’s headlines were filled with a dramatic new story of a somewhat related type. Thousands of simple pagers all across Lebanon beeped their notice of an incoming message and then suddenly exploded a few seconds later, with many walkie-talkies and solar panels similarly detonating the following day. Although the death-toll was nothing like that on 9/11—only about three dozen were killed including a couple of children—some 2,800 individuals were injured, with many hundreds of them being blinded and Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon losing an eye in the attack.
Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group that is one of Lebanon’s largest political parties, had purchased those pagers earlier this year as a replacement for less secure cellphones and distributed them to its membership, so that nearly all the victims seemed to have some connection with that organization. Given the ongoing military conflict with Israel, that latter country was universally assumed to be responsible for the attack. Although no official credit was claimed, a dozen of Israel’s knowledgeable defense and intelligence officials boasted of this very successful Mossad operation and provided all its details to the New York Times, which published several major stories based upon that information. Pro-Israel pundits and activists loudly crowed at their major victory against Hezbollah, whose membership had suffered such grievous losses.
I discussed all of these developments in an article last week, which attracted considerable readership and debate.
- Mossad’s Exploding Pager Attacks and 9/11
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 23, 2024 • 5,600 Words
In that piece, I noted that this sudden wave of thousands of simultaneous explosions across Lebanon, often striking civilians, was seen as Lebanon’s own 9/11, and it terrorized the entire population, which suddenly grew very fearful of all their electronic devices. Indeed, according to longstanding international law, this attack constituted an absolutely flagrant example of illegal terrorism, as was discussed by the experts interviewed by NPR and the Australia Broadcasting Corporation. Despite the lawyerly protestations of pro-Israel apologists, the international statutes seemed completely unequivocal.
