Presbyterian and Methodist kooks

Mark Tooley:

DID THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION covertly blow-up the World Trade Center, ignite the Pentagon, and shoot down United Flight 93 to pave the way for a new American empire? The answer is "yes," according to a new book printed by the official publishing house of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and written by a theologian at a United Methodist seminary.

Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11, published by Westminster John Knox Press, is fairly succinct in its conspiracy theory. In fact, only the first half of the book is devoted to dissecting the conspiracy, the facts being so obvious that elaboration is hardly required. The second half is focused on the theological implications of America as empire, and why Christians should stand against it.

David Ray Griffin, professor emeritus of philosophy and theology at Claremont School of Theology in California, is the author of what is now his third book on 9/11. "If we believe that our political and military leaders are acting on the basis of policies that are diametrically opposed to divine purposes, it is incumbent upon us to say so," he explains in the preface. A "process" theologian who believes that God is constantly evolving, Griffin is a member of "Scholars for 9/11 Truth," a non-partisan group that is "dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealing truths behind 9/11."

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Expecting controversy, the Presbyterian publishing house issued a news release, insisting that "Professor Griffin's thorough research and intellectually rigorous arguments have persuaded us that this book should have a place in that conversation, regardless of the conclusions readers come to accept." The Presbyterians are printing more than 7000 copies of Griffin's latest work.

Griffin's thesis is pretty straightforward: The events of 9/11 were a false flag operation undertaken by U.S. intelligence and police agencies at the behest of the Bush administration. Examples of other successful false flag operations cited by the author are the 1931 Mukden Incident, in which the Japanese blew up their own railway in Manchuria and blamed it on Chinese troops to justify further invasion; the 1933 Reichstag Fire that the Nazis ignited and blamed on communists to justify their dictatorship; and Operation Himmler, in which Germans posing as Polish troops "attacked" German border stations in order to justify the subsequent Nazi invasion of Poland.

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On the left, it is common to explain the Bush administration's "imperial" policies as the work of whacky "Left-Behind" evangelicals who supposedly think that the Second Coming will be precipitated by war in the Middle East. But those people on the right, if they actually exist, are almost dull when compared to the nuttiness of Professor Griffin and his colleagues in the curia of old-line Protestantism who agree with his theories.

Apparently Tooley could not find any explanation in the book for why Osama bin Laden confessed his part in the plot or why he would work with all these neo cons to make war on himself. The good news about Presbyterians and Methodist is that they do not engage in human bomb attacks. The bad news is that some of them have had their minds invaded by the liberal pod people or they have just lost them in their attempts to rationalize the evil of al Qaeda and the inconvience of having to respond to its evil. They have opted instead for moral inversion and kookdum.