Bigotry? Misunderstanding? Total bunk? But I love Republicans roughly as much as I love Democrats. I think every country should have one. Of each.

It’s not just that the invasion of Iraq (like much Iraq policy under the Clinton administration) was wrong before it happened. It’s that you had to be hiding from obvious, publicly available information not to know that you were being lied to. It was just that clear. Anybody who went along with this has blood on their hands.

And, to our shame, every last self-identified LDS federal legislator, Republican or Democrat, voted for the “all necessary means” resolution that gave the invasion the green light.

Sure, Republicans can be found who say occasional nice things and possibly even feel occasional nice things about Islam—they talk and feel nice things about Mormons too. As they probably did during the Utah War, the Raids, and Edmunds-Tucker.

And it may even turn out that the US has only invaded what missionary-minded evangelicals call “the 10-40 Window” not for oil or for Israel or to remind the world that it is still the “bigest bully on the block”, but because so many Bushies feel deep love in their hearts for all Muslims, in just the way so many evangelicals feel deep love in their hearts for all Mormons.

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

He only hits me because he loves me.

Total bunk. I’ve no doubt that some Republicans go overboard in condemning all Muslims (see LGF, e.g.), though I haven’t seen anything like the complete dismissals of their faith like I’ve seen from the secular left. But at least they have the excuse that most Mulsims are far away and they probably don’t know them well. What excuse do you have for your bigorty and misunderstanding of republicans, many of whom belong to your church and whom you interact with?

Jones is a thoughtful, quiet-spoken fellow, and if from what I could see I had to pick someone from the department as it was back then as the epitome of mainstream Mormon decency, it would probably be him. I would certainly prefer his chances before the bar of the Great Jehovah to those of, say, Rush Limbaugh.

Jones offered his arguments in good faith, in considerable detail, and further invited particular tests.

Criticise the nuts and bolts of his arguments by all means. It is entirely possible that he is sincere and rational and still wrong or incomplete in his evaluation of existing evidence.

Yet many of you seem to have been so revolted by the possible political implications as to question his livelihood, his sanity (“nutter” is just another way of saying “Thou fool”), and even his church standing, often without bothering to meet his arguments. I shouldn’t have to tell you what spirit inspires such venom. And I should think Americans in general and American Mormons in particular could do with a little more skepticism about official truthfulness, after buying the threadbare pretexts manufactured to justify the US invasion of Iraq.

On the one hand, the Book of Mormon is explicit about the rise of secret combinations in the last days, and it is true that a skimpy reading of it can indeed fuel the regrettable existing tendency of nativist Americans and their fellow-travellers to look for Grand Conspiracy.

And yes, I think Ezra Taft Benson fell far into that trap, trusting as he did in the unsavory J. Edgar Hoover. Nor was Benson alone. Benson certainly enjoyed vastly more prominence than a mere professorship at BYU could ever offer, but no-one here appears to be arguing for Benson’s retrospective release and excommunication—or did I miss something?

Despite Benson’s political loopiness, he asked us to read the Book of Mormon, as has Gordon Hinckley, who himself now appears much less supportive of the invasion of Iraq than he was earlier. So it’s back to the Book of Mormon—but the Book of Mormon secret combination is not the Grand Conspiracy of American lore.

First, a secret combination’s aims are often widely known, and they are viewed sympathetically or even backed by significant portions of the public, especially by those who consider themselves to be the of the better sort. Second, it rapidly becomes murderous internally as well as externally.

In particular, Lamanite guerilla war follows naturally from murderous power plays by high-born political Nephites.

Apropos this, consider the following, from a story dated 24 August 1998, i.e. well before 9/11 :

In fact, while he returned to his family’s construction business, bin Laden had split from the relatively conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan.
Most of these Afghan vets, or Afghanis, as the Arabs who fought there became known, turned up later behind violent Islamic movements around the world. Among them: the GIA in Algeria, thought responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of civilians; Egypt’s Gamat Ismalia, which has massacred western tourists repeatedly in recent years; Saudi Arabia Shiite militants, responsible for the Khobar Towers and Riyadh bombings of 1996.
Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.
“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.

Hatch should have read his Book of Mormon.

Is it crazy in Mormon terms for Jones to be reluctant to join the new Republican consensus that, in the absence of communism, the love of Allah is the root of all evil? The Muslims I met at BYU generally kept BYU standards better than the Utahns, to say nothing of the Californians.

I would find it extremely difficult to believe that American intelligence careerists were behind 9/11. None of them had the guts to resign and go public, like Australia’s Andrew Wilkie or the UK’s Katherine Gun. How would they have found the moxie for this?

Much of the Islamic world believed, at least at first, that Mossad did it. It is at least curious that only Barbara McCluskey’s faint note in an addendum names Israel specifically in the Senate’s Intelligence Failure report. Nor does that report even mention the earlier Knesset report (a pdf—see section 1.15 on p. 27) on the same matter, and its curiously wooden denial of culpability for helping precipitate the invasion of Iraq.

The two best-known books on Mossad are probably Gideon’s Spies and By Way of Deception, the first by an admirer, the second by a renegade katza. Both books agree that Mossad is extremely skilled at “false flag” operations and strategic deception, systematically framing one country before the intelligence services of another.

Would Mossad quietly back up a terrorist attack that they’d learned about in advance, without alerting either the terrorists themselves or US authorities? I find that difficult to believe even of Mossad, despite its singular and legendary chutzpah, unless, perhaps, its own sources were at risk… And what if the prize for sufficient destruction was likely to be an American invasion of Iraq? And what if the ancillary explosives were originally intended to limit or manage damage by preventing hit buildings toppling into other buildings?

I mention these possibilities not because I think them likely, but because they should not be dismissed out of hand as any crazier than other crazy things currently accepted, like American legal authorities calmly discussing torture, or imprisoning people indefinitely without even pretending to acknowledge their rights.

Other strange things have been reported, such as 2004 electoral results differing systematically from exit polls, only in favor of Bush, and only where there is no paper trail. So why is it so hard to get hold of the exit polls? That should be an open-and-shut case…

Take a look at the picture of the 1967, January 16: McCormick Place Fire that has been refrenced.

Now tell me there is a similarity between the two occurences. The Mcormic Place was nothing near a “High Rise”.

Try again.

I just hope Jones will investigate why the site was down on the day GM reported the bad news.