Film Review: 9/11 in the Academic Community
9/11 in the Academic Community is more watchable than most “9/11 truth” filmsThe exciting new documentary whose upcoming release we announced in a
September 8 article is now here.
9/11 in the Academic Community was released for purchase on October 8, after having won an award for “Documentary Achievement” at the
University of Toronto Film Festival
earlier this year. At a manageable running time of 75 minutes, with a
title designed to appeal to its target audience, and by avoiding
hot-button phrases such as “9/11 Truth,” the film has an excellent
chance of slipping out of the conspiracy theorist jacket and making
inroads into the American and Canadian intellectual communities.
This is certainly a film that needed to be made. With few exceptions,
there has been a deafening silence in the classrooms of North American
campuses regarding many obvious and undeniable facts that undermine the
official account of 9/11. If the faculty and students at institutions of
higher learning cannot question and even contradict what we have been
told by media and government about the “crime of the century” without
being called “conspiracy theorists,” then what has become of the
academic community? Those who wrote the U.S. Constitution and defeated
the British Empire’s dominion over the American colonies well understood
that the spirit of free inquiry and an understanding of history were
key to a properly functioning democratic republic. Even with those
freedoms and values, Benjamin Franklin famously predicted that it would
be difficult for us to “
keep it.” Nothing less is at stake with regard to the issues covered in this film.
9/11 in the Academic Community is
more watchable than most “9/11 truth” films. One of its biggest
strengths is that all of its speakers express criticisms of the way that
the 9/11 account was advanced and how it’s been treated in the 12 years
since then – mostly without sounding angry.
