Truther madness hits Germany

Truther madness has invaded Germany at the highest levels: one of the government-run TV stations ran an “investigative” show that examined whether it was OBL or the US government that took down the Twin Towers and tried to destroy the Pentagon and other buildings in D.C.:

Have you heard this one before?

Jupp says to his friend Willy: “Hey, how’s your wife in bed?” Willy says to Jupp: “Some say she’s good, some say she’s not.”

Everything, as it happens, is relative. Three hairs in a bowl of soup are three hairs too many, while three hairs on someone’s head are relatively few. Even the oldest jokes about this theory of relativity, the ones that wouldn’t even get a laugh out of drunken fools, suddenly become precious pearls of humor to those who saw Tuesday’s ZDF documentary titled “Sept. 11, 2001 — What Really Happened.”

Some might say the documentary was relatively harmless compared with the wildest conspiracy theories that have been circulating since the attacks, such as the one claiming that 4,000 Jewish New Yorkers who worked at the World Trade Center didn’t show up for work on Sept. 11. But if we hold a documentary up to a different standard, the ZDF broadcast was relatively malicious, misleading and, most of all, deceptive from beginning to end. On its Web site, the network claimed: “ZDF research bears out accusations against authorities.” The facts behind the documentary were supposedly provided by “well-known skeptics, experts and eyewitnesses to the attacks.” ZDF also claimed that it would contain “never before published documents and footage.”

The network trumpeted the documentary at full volume. But in reality, the “never before seen footage” consisted of a few close-ups from the engineering rooms of the Twin Towers, which could have just as easily been shot in ZDF’s furnace room. The “well-known skeptics” were the usual suspects who have long been performing their acrobatics in the 9/11 circus. One was a former chairman of a local chapter of the German Social Democratic Party. He served as Minister of Research and Technology under former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and has spent the last 25 years publicizing his revelations about the practices of intelligence agencies. Another one of ZDF’s competent experts was a 23-year-old American who produced a “documentary” on his laptop that became a hit on the Internet and will soon be released as a film.

In the interest of balance, several eyewitnesses to the Sept. 11 attacks were also interviewed. But almost everything they said was attacked and qualified by the skeptics and experts.

Read here the rest of Henryk M. Broder’s expose of Germany’s ugly anti-American side.