Too many Americans are focusing on 9/11 conspiracy theories: it was an inside job, the federal government blew up the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and WTC Building Seven. There is  no evidence supporting these claims, yet some in the media are taking the 9/11 conspiracy theories of  the self-titled 9/11 Prophet Alex Jones seriously.  The problem with  conspiracy theories is they take America’s eyes off the real threat facing this nation and the world—Islam.

Recently, host of  Fox Business News’ Freedom Watch Judge Andrew Napolitano was a guest on Alex Jones’ radio show; making claims that WTC 7 was brought down by the United States government, not the violent force of two 1,100 story buildings crashing to the ground next door.  9/11 conspiracy theororists, i.e. truthers, purposely ignore the fact Muslims flew two 767 jumbo jets, carrying 10,000 gallons of fuel each, into the World Trade Center Towers to wage war on America.  20 Tons of jet fuel ignited fires that  melted lightweight steel, causing massive destruction.  That is what brought the towers and WTC 7 down, not alleged demolition explosives set by the U.S. government.

The 9/11 demolition conspiracy,  which has been debunked, takes the focus away from Islam, placing all blame on the United States government, rather than an evil that has been trying to destroy the world for 1,400 years.

Judge Napolitano went so far as to tell Alex Jones:

It’s hard for me to believe that it [WTC 7] came down by itself.  I was gratified to see Geraldo Rivera investigating it. I am gratified to see that people across the board are interested.  I think twenty years from now, people will look at 9/11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today.   It couldn’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.

The climate change conference starting in Cancun Monday is doomed to failure. Many factors contribute to this, such as a healthy skepticism about how much should be spent to remediate climate change, but one alone guarantees failure: Chinese coal production and policy.

When climate change soared up the American agenda with the election of President Obama, those not swept up in blind optimism were  doubtful China could be convinced to go along. The debacle of the Copenhagen summit last year finally brought the administration and its supporters back to reality.

Prior to Copenhagen, it was already clear that  Chinese coal was an insuperable obstacle to an international agreement on greenhouse gases. The past year has made the situation that much starker.

In 2000, the official figure for Chinese coal production was 880 million tons. In less than a decade, it more than tripled to 2.96 billion tons for 2009. In the first quarter of this year, coal production jumped another 28 percent. China, which was a net exporter of coal as recently as 2008, was  the world’s largest importer of coal in the first three quarters of this year and far more in the way of imports are on the way.

China is spending a good deal of money on “green energy” and it is constantly praised for doing so. The praise is somewhat strange: the supposed switch from “black” to “green” has done nothing at all to stop coal: production growth was faster in 2008 than 2007, despite the financial crisis, and steady in 2009 before accelerating early this year. It very well may be that the PRC now accounts for half the world’s coal use.

This is the other facet of Chinese coal policy and is just as disturbing. “It may very well be” that China accounts for half the world’s coal use because there is no longer an easy way to know. China stopped publishing coal production figures in March, possibly because it was about to cross the threshold of half of global consumption and certainly because the coal figures are embarrassing on a number of dimensions.

The PRC has been at odds with the U.S. and other countries about monitoring and enforcement of any international environmental treaty. But how could anyone trust China to monitor itself when it is no longer even willing to provide the most basic and critical piece of information?

The answer is that no sane person could. Cancun will be as useless as Copenhagen was, and for the same principal reason: Chinese coal. This time, however, no one will be surprised.

This popular post was first published on Wednesday, November 24,  here.

Remarking on the intellectual vanity of Christopher Hitchens’ atheist crusade, Ross Douthat once quipped that “If the world were to end tomorrow in the hail of fire, I’m confident that one of the last things to be heard on Earth, before the meteor hits, would be the sound of Hitchens and [evangelical minister] Tim LaHaye both shouting in perfect unison: See, I told you so!”

The point was that perhaps Hitchens’ pride had become a liability, for he seemed to believe that events that actually hurt his case proved him right. Those who have followed his work will be familiar with this. In his atheist manifesto, God is Not Great, Hitchens attempts to prove that religion is child abuse. To buoy his argument, he offers “the repellant original offer of the defenseless boy Isaac on the pyre.”

He is referring, of course, to the Akeidas Yitzchak, the binding of Isaac–the test God gives to Abraham to bring his son as a sacrifice. Leaving aside the fact that the test was never carried to completion, even casual students of the Torah know that Isaac was 37 years old at the time. Far from being the “defenseless boy” that Hitchens claims, Isaac was an adult, and therefore the example actually spoils Hitchens’ argument: the Akeida is an example of an adult exercising his free will.

Hitchens, a man of clear and often bracing brainpower, has let his quest become so single-minded that he brings this mix of arrogance and ignorance to any question of religion–especially the Mideast conflict and Israeli policy. Thus, we are treated to  this Slate column, titled “Israel’s Shabbos Goy” and published Monday, about the indignity of offering Israel incentives to make concessions.

What seems to be bothering Hitchens at the outset is the religious nature of the Jewish state’s governing coalition. He begins by trying to paint the Orthodox Jews in Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition as crazy fanatics. He starts with Shas minister Eli Yishai. Yishai’s values are beyond the pale, Hitchens suggests, because he said that the only Jewish converts that carry “the Jewish gene” are those who convert according to Orthodox standards, and Hitchens links to an article comparing the comment to Nazi propaganda. In addition to the offensive Nazi comparison, Hitchens is denigrating the fact that Orthodox Jews insist on following halakha–Jewish law.

This makes Hitchens–not Yishai–appear the intolerant one. Next, Hitchens moves on to everyone’s favorite Israeli bogeyman, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. In order to paint Lieberman as an extremist, he says Lieberman believes the whole peace process is a “waste of time,” and links to a speech Lieberman gave at the U.N. Hitchens really should have read that speech, because in it Lieberman speaks of the need for a “final status agreement” based on land swaps, and the need “to raise an entire new generation that will have mutual trust.”

In fact, as is widely known, Lieberman has  always been a strong supporter of a two-state solution. Breezing along, Hitchens then shows how simple a final status agreement would be: he says Lieberman has a curious distinction in that he “does not live in the country whose foreign ministry he heads,” instead residing in the “settlement of Nokdim.” You see, Hitchens has just drawn the borders for us!

But if this is supposed to give us the impression that Lieberman is out to take as much land from the future Palestinian state as possible, it fails on that front as well. As the left-wing newspaper Haaretz reminds us, “For years, Lieberman has been repeating that for the sake of an agreement, he would be willing to evacuate his own house in Nokdim.”

I should explain again as I do every week to the viewers as a kind of a viewer’s guide that this is the weekly Sarah Palin segment in which the impression is given that the whole of conservatism in America is encapsulated in this one glorious woman?

[...]

I think in the liberal imagination she is and will always be the only representative of conservatism of any importance.

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