Truth, strike two

[ciphergoth]

Thanks for some interesting and surprising responses to the JFK question. At the risk of creating more heat than light, let me try another example, one that I think might be a little less comfortable to be neutral about.

It seems that many people believe that on the morning of September 11, 2001, four thousand or more Israelis who were working at the World Trade Center did not show up for work.

Are those people wrong?

(Update: amended as per ajva's caveat)

Comments

[mskala.livejournal.com]

I'd be surprised if there were four thousand Israelis employed to work in the WTC at all. From Wikipedia, the typical maximum population of those buildings was about 50,000, and I expect well over 90% of employees would have been US citizens. The spam message quoted in your link uses "Israeli" as a synonym for "Jew," but it ain't.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

There are so many problems with this story that it's hard to pick just one; yours is a prominent one, but I think Snopes puts their finger on the most mind-bending one - the idea that every single one of 4,000 people would allow their colleagues to go to their deaths without a word at the time or afterwards. I trust I won't be accused of Godwinning the discussion, but I'm reminded of this discussion from nizkor.org:

Supposedly the only evidence, "the postwar testimony of individual survivors."

First of all, consider the implicit conspiracy theory. Notice how the testimony of every single inmate of every Nazi camp is automatically dismissed as unconvincing. This total dismissal of inmates' testimony, along with the equally-total dismissal of the Nazis' own testimony (!), is the largest unspoken assumption of Holocaust-denial.

This assumption, which is not often spelled out, is that the attempted Jewish genocide never took place, but rather that a secret conspiracy of Jews, starting around 1941, planted and forged myriad documents to prove that it did; then, after the war, they rounded up all the camp survivors and told them what to say.

What's amazing is not just that they would posit such a ludicrously massive conspiracy, but that they would try to do so without even explicitly setting it out.

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think you can dismiss it as racist insanity without checking absences on the day.