by Dr. Paul Rea   Apr 17, 2012

Jon Gold, 9/11 Truther: The Fight for Peace, Justice and Accountability. Foreword by Cindy Sheehan. ePublishPartners.com, 2012.

9/11 Truther is an important book because it both renders leading personalities in the movement and also displays wide, well researched knowledge of many key issues.

As one of the first 9/11 memoirs, 9/11 Truther takes readers into the life of an activist, now 40, who’s been an important player on the East Coast and in the blogosphere. Jon Gold went to Hebrew school and took his Bar Mitzvah. Later, as he moved into “calling out” people he believed were hurting the movement with their wild speculations, Gold encountered vicious anti-Semitism. Consequences included high blood pressure, chronic depression, and, later, panic attacks (pp. 112-115). The book does not, however, explore broader questions of anti-Semitism in the 9/11 movement.

The first few dozen pages recount how Gold got into drugs, attempted suicide, and joined narcotics anonymous. Though the first 55 pages or so could strike readers as largely, perhaps overly autobiographical, they do capture key moments in the movement.

Unlike some “truthers,” Gold doesn’t claim to have “woken up” right away, almost before the smoke had cleared. After 9/11, he worked as a web developer and did the “patriotic” things, placing a small American flag on the company website.

Gold’s Entry into the 9/11 Truth Movement

By 2004, however, questions were piling up, eroding Gold’s belief in the Official Story. When he watched Kyle Hence of Citizens Watch question the 9/11 Commission findings, on C-SPAN, he felt immediate resonance: “They were asking many of the same questions I had been asking.” In an intense moment of self-confrontation, he felt “abused by the media and by the government. I [had] openly advocated killing people because of the lies I was told.”

The next year, led by 9/11 widows Lorie Van Auken, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg and Monica Gabrielle, a group of family members issued a statement questioning the “entire veracity of the 9/11 Report.” Along with bereaved father Bob McIlvaine, they mounted a cogent challenge to the corporate media which had uncritically accepted the Report. But the news media continued to afford scant coverage to their challenge. Two years later, Gold attended a preview of “Press for Truth,” which he believes is the “most important documentary of our age,” but which received almost no media coverage at the time. Nor has it received much since.

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