Just hours after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was blown out of the sky by a missile–one almost certainly fired by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine–Rush Limbaugh claimed the media was only covering it to take the heat off the White House. You’d think it wouldn’t be possible to get loonier than that, right? Well, Raw Story discovered that Alex Jones and his team at Infowars somehow managed to top it on Friday night. That night’s edition of “Infowars Nightly News” was devoted almost entirely to the claim that the crash was a “false flag” engineered by the Ukrainian government with the goal of triggering World War III. Watch the whole thing here–but as with anything that comes from Jones, be sure to have a lot of brain bleach handy.
Anchorwoman Lee Ann McAdoo claimed that this was a new tactic by “globalists” hellbent on starting a major international war. She pointed out that within 24 hours of the crash, everyone was pointing the finger at Russia or pro-Russian separatists. McAdoo claimed that Flight 17 may have been a horrific accident–or worse, had been shot down by Ukrainian forces. She claimed there were parallels to the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003.
Infowars reporter David Knight claimed that by joining in the drumbeat against Russia, the press is acting in the same manner it did after the Maine blew up in Havana in 1898, which fanned the flames that led to the Spanish-American War. Continuing the theme that Ukraine may have shot down the plane, Knight referred to the downing of Siberian Airlines Flight 1812 in 2001–conveniently leaving out that the 2001 crash was a freak accident caused by a missile being knocked off course by water interference. He also claimed that the White House was using the crash to distract attention from other events, such as the situation in Gaza.
Knight wondered why any airliner would be flying over a war zone, and noted that it was flying at 32,000 feet–which theoretically made it easier to shoot down. However, Knight added that 32,000 feet is a consistent altitude for European flights.
Later on, the show cut to a clip from Jones’ Thursday show in which PrisonPlanet’s Paul Joseph Watson claimed a Spanish air traffic controller in the tower at Boryspil International Airport in Kiev claimed that just minutes after the tower lost radio contact with the plane, Ukrainian jets surrounded the plane. He maintained that Kiev shot the plane down, and that when he expressed alarm at what was happening, Ukrainian authorities ordered him to “shut up.” The Twitter account has since been deleted–but Infowars didn’t get any screenshots beforehand, so I can only assume this is just another case of Jones blowing smoke.
All things considered, this false-flag talk is downright laughable based on what we know from the ground. For those who missed it, rebel forces in the area where the plane went down refused to allow unfettered access to the site so a proper investigation could begin–thus delaying the families of the victims from giving their loved ones a decent burial. The rebels even went as far as to claim that Kiev wasn’t letting international observers in–a claim that sounds like it could have been put out by Jones and others of his ilk, and is hardly believable considering that they commandeered several bodies at gunpoint and put them on train cars. It took until Monday for them to do what basic decency demanded they do right away–turn over the bodies and black boxes. And they only did that under intense international pressure. You’d think that if Ukraine was trying to false-flag this tragedy, it would have been Kiev that would have been doing the stonewalling. But then again, facts never matter to Jones and others of his ilk.
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Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
