Steven Jones Interviews Hang 'em High Barrett

Now I am used to the papers published in the Journal of 911 Studies being of low scientific quality (just read anything ever written by Frank Legge for example) but this "interview" of Kevin Barrett by Steven Jones sets new ground for academic fraud. It's only saving grace is that he at least didn't call it "peer reviewed". A wit at the JREF forum once proposed that we should use TTFL (Time To First Lie) as a quantitative method for evaluating truther claims, well in this case it only takes until the second sentence for the misleading statements to start, and that is only because the first sentence is Jones' question.

How many Afghanis have fled their country due to the 9/11 wars?

One source estimates that there are about 2 million Afghan refugees in Iran
(http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070611/text/70611w0026.ht
m). Another report estimates that there are 1.3 million Afghan refugees from the US invasion and occupation currently living in Pakistan.

Yes, although the number is open to dispute, there are a large number of Afghan refugees (not Afghanis as Jones terms them, Afghanis refers to their money) in Iran and Afghanistan. I could not get his link to work, but what Barrett is intentionally leaving out here, is those 3+ million refugees did not flee their country because of "the 9/11 wars", they largely left before 9/11. In fact due to the increased security situation after the US invasion huge numbers of Afghans are returning.

In fact, according to the UNHCR, over 3.7 million Afghans have been voluntarily repatriated since the US invasion. Of course Barrett can't say this, despite the fact that Jones specifically asked the question, because it would violate his world view that all evil flows from the United States. Jones has no excuse though, for not noticing his evasiveness, and researching this easily available fact.

Barrett continues later:

The relative strength of loyalty to religion and family, and the relative weakness of loyalty to the state, has good and bad effects in Muslim cultures. A good effect is that Muslim countries aren’t very good at building war machines...which has a bad side in that it leaves many Muslim countries open to invasion and exploitation by resource-hungry predator nations. Europeans colonized and looted almost the whole Muslim world starting in the 19th century, mainly because the Europeans were much more efficient, technologically-advanced mass murderers.

Hello, you are supposed to be a professor of Islam, have you ever heard of the Caliphate? Islam was largely spread through military conquest, at one time the Caliphate stretched from Spain to Central Asia. Sounds like a bit of a war machine to me. Islamic countries were conquered later because they were not able to adapt to the new technologies, not because of their peaceful nature.

Then of course, Kevin "The Holocaust was a myth" Barrett gets asked about Iran:

Is Iran a "bad" country, seeking nuclear weapons so they can annihilate Israel or the US?

Hardly. Iran, unlike Israel, is a signatory in good standing to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Its religious authorities have ruled that nuclear weapons are prohibited by Islam.

More disassembling here. Yes, Iran is a signatory to the NPT. In good standing though? Hardly, they have admitted to repeated violations of the treaty by secretly processing uranium, and were sanctioned by the UN as a result.

Even though the question was about Iran, Barrett, then goes on a 3 paragraph rant about Israel, including the completely bizarre claims that both the Achille Lauro (in which one US citizen was killed) and the Entebbe hijackings (in which one Israeli soldier, 6 Palestinian hijackers, and 3 hostages were killed) were Israeli "false flag" operations. His "anti-Zionist" vitriol reaches such a fever pitch that I am surprised he does not accuse the Jews of drinking the blood of gentile babies. It is quite disturbing.

I have always considered Jones, despite his association with such despicable characters as Christopher Bollyn to be one of the more reasonable members of the "truth" movement. After posting this dreck though, he loses even that meager honor.