Dave Winer wrote something on his web log yesterday which I had been thinking, but hadn’t gotten around to reading — in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Jorn Barger’s RobotWisdom web log has really descended into a rather bizarre mix of anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories involving Israel.
Last December I mentioned that I was a fan of Robot Wisdom and visited it regularly, but Barger’s posts have become so bizarre that I rarely visit the site anymore.
The Israeli embassy made a minor error in releasing estimates of how many of its citizens were missing or dead in the attack, for example, and Barger has spun that into a huge conspiracy theory in which Israel allegedly knew about or even planned the attack and evacuated its citizens from the building beforehand. The average “X Files” episode had more credibility than that.
Barger had always flirted with the line between anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, and in my opinion completely crossed over that line a few days ago with his, “Leading White-House hawk Wolfowitz is also highest-placed Jew” link.
It’s bizarre to see someone who is otherwise so intelligent go off into this sort of nonsense.