Icke: Reports of my madness have been greatly exaggerated

Almost one third of us see the official story of 9/11 as exactly that – a story – according to University of Maryland-based research group WorldPublicOpinion.org

But if Islamic terrorists were not responsible, that leads to the rather uncomfortable question of who did kill nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001?

LISTEN: David Icke talks to the Lancashire Post about his career and global politics https://www.lep.co.uk/news/david-icke-tells-it-like-it-is-and-all-is-not-what-it-seems-1-9176522

Some will not even contemplate trying to answer that, and those who dare are often met with fierce condemnation and ridicule.

But it’s a debate that won’t go away despite the passage of time, and one person who continues to focus on it is investigative journalist David Icke.

Not only does he ask: “Who did?” in regard to 9/11, he also demands to know: “Who benefits from it?” and that leads to even-more-uncomfortable answers.

Many people, upon mention of Icke, will immediately think of that infamous Terry Wogan interview from 1991. Some articles about him today still hark back to that time, often falsely claiming Icke refers to himself as “the son of god”.

To put this into context, several national newspapers were already alleging this in the days before the live interview, and Icke was put on the spot about it by Wogan.

Icke – who in his own words was going through a form of mental crisis at that time, in April 1991 – did then use Jesus as an analogy, saying that ridicule was to be expected if you are relaying messages that do not fit with the norms of the day.

And so he was defined – and remains defined to many – by an off-the-cuff remark during a live television interview given 27 years ago.

Since that time, Icke has forged a career as an investigative journalist and shines a light on areas where the mainstream media is often reluctant to go.

Could the uncomfortable questions that Icke puts be a reason why he continues to sell out large venues like the 1,600-seat Southport Theatre and Convention Centre?

After attending his Southport show, I wanted to find out more about Icke so liaised with his sons, Gareth and Jaymie – who handle their dad’s media inquiries – to arrange an interview.

Icke squeezes me in for a chat during a break in his UK tour – his first for well over a decade. And our conversation is something of a first as well – he’s given no other in-depth interview with the UK mainstream media during that time.

I ask him if shining a critical light on the official 9/11 story has left him open to ridicule. The former Coventry City goalkeeper says bluntly: “I couldn’t give a damn whether people think I’m sane or not, I’m just interested in the truth.

“My concern is: ‘Is it true or not?’ That is my only concern.”

Quite a good philosophy for a journalist, perhaps, but one that Icke claims is lacking in newsrooms today.

He says: “I track this every day, it’s my life, but I have not, since September 11, 2001, seen a single mainstream documentary that has questioned the official story of 9/11. That is so ridiculous that it has to be systematic, rather than random chance.

LISTEN: David Icke goes into detail about 9/11 in his interview with Henry Widdas https://www.lep.co.uk/news/opinion/david-icke-my-unanswered-9-11-questions-1-9196768

“The mainstream media agree they were lied to about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and yet accept every word about 9/11 when both narratives came from the same people – not just the same agencies and governments – the same people.

“I was writing in books at the time there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but, of course, ‘that’s just that nutter Icke’. The official story of 9/11 is an absurdity which does not stand up to the mildest scrutiny.”

Icke says a fundamental flaw of mainstream coverage of 9/11 is the failure to look at a document produced by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) whose members included those who came to power with the Bush administration in January 2001.

Icke’s questions around 9/11 hinge on that of motive. And the motive, he says, is presented in the PNAC document called Rebuilding America’s Defences that was written in September 2000. It lists a series of countries named as desirable for regime change including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and North Korea.

A line within it reads: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Icke says: “If the mainstream media were peopled by proper journalists they would have made that connection in a flash but my experience is most have never heard of the Project for the New American Century and those that have don’t see – or specifically ignore – its foundation significance to 9/11 and all that has followed.

“But then conspiracies don’t exist do they? They’re only ‘theories’. Of course, if it’s a conspiracy theory that ‘it’s the Russians’, on no evidence whatsoever, we have to take that seriously.”

Icke dislikes the terms “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy theorists” – understandably so, perhaps, as it sometimes appears he and his work are often tagged with these semantically-loaded labels.

Icke says the two terms were ‘weaponized’ by the CIA in 1967 to quell growing public scepticism towards the assassination of President John F Kennedy. The CIA issued a directive, Document 1035-960, to its contacts in the media in which guidance was given on how best to discredit and undermine the arguments of “conspiracy theorists” who questioned the official version of events.

Former TV sports presenter Icke, 66, says these “conspiracy” labels remain powerful psychological tools to shut down any questioning of 9/11’s official story. He sees world events not as random – he leaves that to the “coincidence theorists” – but as a tapestry that shows the direction the world is deliberately being taken.

Icke has battled with countless naysayers over the years, but one prominent challenger today is online global encyclopaedia Wikipedia – the go-to-source of information for many with 18 billion visits per month. Icke says the website is notoriously anti-“conspiracy theories” .

This leads us to the first of three myths about Icke. The mainstream media has started insinuating – and sometimes overtly claims – Icke is a racist or, to be more specific, that he is antisemitic.

On Wikipedia, there is a line reading "critics have accused Icke of being a Holocaust denier" in the intro section of his page, despite repeated protestations from his son, Gareth, who claims to have been threatened with a ban from moderating on the website if he manually removed the line anymore himself.

Several attempts to remove the line have resulted in it being returned, sometimes within a day, Icke says.

The “Holocaust denier” slur was repeated in the first paragraph of one newspaper article last month. Icke claims that, when his younger son, Jaymie, asked them to provide evidence of that, the line was immediately withdrawn from the online story.

Having interviewed Icke for two hours, and having seen his four-hour show, I do not believe he is racist. Far from it in fact.

He abhors racism and sees identifying oneself with any race as a misunderstanding of who we actually are – more on that later.

And he does not deny the Holocaust. Icke says: “The way the Jewish people in Nazi Germany were treated by the Nazis is grotesque, horrific and almost beyond comprehension.”

Myth number two is that he is mad, a line the UK national press has been pedalling for decades. And yet, in our chat, the main impressions I get from him are ones of lucidity and clear thinking backed up by facts drawn from decades of research.

Icke isn’t all about global politics, though, he’s also interested in the fundamental nature of reality. To put it in layman’s terms – he believes we are all “god”, if you want to use that word.

Icke himself would say we are all a part of the same infinite Awareness with a capital A.

Icke says: “To self-identify with race, let alone be racist, is the ultimate misunderstanding of the nature of reality.”

Despite Icke’s growing popularity across the world, he continues to be condemned. He says the main difference from the 1990s is the condemnation has evolved into censorship-by-stealth in some quarters. He says: “The mainstream media has completely shut me out. It’s an interesting change as they used to delight in ridiculing me.”

Icke says the censorship also manifests itself in the form of venues where he is due to speak cancelling at the 11th hour.

Icke claims police have put pressure on venue owners to pull out of hosting his events. He alleges this happens after groups contact senior officers to misrepresent who will attend and what he is going to say, and to claim that venue staff and the audience could be at risk – when there has been no trouble of note at any of his events in nearly 30 years of touring.

This has led to Icke having to keep venue details secret from those buying tickets until 24 hours before the shows.

Having had one of his booked venues pull out at the last minute earlier this year, Icke sent a Freedom of Information request to Norfolk Constabulary to ask about its involvement.

He received email correspondence between the police and an unnamed group that was raising concerns about Icke. The emails revealed officers were being tasked to find out where the venue was that Icke was due to speak.

Norfolk Police told the Lancashire Post that the decision to cancel was down to the venue.

A further question was put to the police press office by the Post, asking if Icke himself was approached about allegations being made against him in the FoI emails but no response was given.

Icke says: "The police emails confirm what I have known was happening for a long time. Third parties that wish to silence opposition and exposure - some assets of a foreign power - work with the police to block their targets from speaking in public and preventing audiences from making a free choice about what they wish to see and hear.

"This is a blatant official attack on freedom of speech and assembly from a police force that should, in a free society, be defending both against tyrannies that wish to destroy them. But while there are many decent and genuine police officers their profession collectively is there primarily to serve the system to which they answer and not the public whose interests they claim to represent.

"What these emails expose is deeply sinister and confirmation that Orwell's world is becoming the new normal."

One thing notably absent from the police emails is that Icke is a pacifist – he quotes Mahatma Ghandi extensively in his shows – and feels no malice towards anyone, including the national press. In fact, he fears for the existence of mainstream news as we know it, on account of upcoming legislation that he says will further erode freedoms to challenge those in authority.

Myth number three is that Icke owns a Bentley and rakes in millions of pounds a year. He actually drives a Mazda3, lives in a block of flats on the Isle of Wight, and ploughs money from his shows and books back into research projects and future tours.

He says he has no interest in material wealth and is driven by a desire to warn others of a global network – a hidden hand that controls presidents and prime ministers on both sides of the political spectrum – that is pushing humanity towards World War Three with the endgame being the assimilation of the human race by artificial intelligence.

Sounds far-fetched doesn’t it but perhaps not as much so when you consider the late Prof Stephen Hawking and even former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger have issued stark warnings – the latter just last month– about AI’s future impact on humanity.

Followers of Icke will hope his upcoming events can be held without interference. Whether that happens or not remains to be seen.