On most days, the Brooklyn Commons, a cafe and co-working space in Boerum Hill, is a place where the city’s progressives and radical leftists can feel comfortable. It is home, after all, to socialist literary darlings Jacobin magazine, the Marxist Education Project, and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. But on Wednesday night, demonstrators gathered on the sidewalk outside the commons to protest against the night’s speaker: Christopher Bollyn, a self-styled investigative journalist who was there to deliver a lecture on how the Jews did 9/11.
“Why does 9/11 truth matter?” Bollyn asked, early in his presentation. “For all the same reasons the JFK assassination matters.” The JFK assassination matters, Bollyn said, because it constituted a coup d’etat—meaning that the forces that took power following the assassination (the Jews, he argued) constitute an illegitimate government. “If the media continues to lie about 9/11, that means it is controlled by the same people that perpetrated 9/11,” Bollyn said. (He was talking about the Jews.)
Bollyn is not the kind of person one would expect to find speaking at a place like Brooklyn Commons: Described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a raging anti-Semite,” Bollyn, who has appeared on David Duke’s radio show, calls the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, “a monstrous Jewish-Zionist crime,” the architects of which are “protected by a gang of like-minded Jewish Zionists in the highest positions of the U.S. government.” At one point, he touted his credentials as a contributor to the American Free Press, an anti-Semitic conspiracy rag, and, as progressive Jewish blogger Daniel Sieradski points out, the description of Wednesday’s event on the Commons’ website originally read, “9/11 and the War on Terror are dual deceptions imposed on our nation by the Israeli/Zionist and Neo-Conservative cabal that controls our government and media,” before the more explicitly anti-Semitic language was removed.
(Incidentally, the Anti-Defamation League notes that the American Free Press fired Bollyn in 2006 for filing false stories, which is really saying something for a publication that recently ran the headline, “70,000 Whites Murdered in ‘Modern’ South Africa; Obama’s African Legacy.”)
In any case, Bollyn’s appearance at the Commons has caused a significant rupture in the city’s progressive community—exacerbated in no small part by the cafe’s owner, Melissa Ennen, having responded to criticism of his appearance first with airy dismissals and later, after a number of the co-working spaces tenants released a statement condemning Bollyn’s views, with resentful platitudes about freedom of speech. In a letter posted to the Commons’ website on Wednesday, Ennen wrote that she had been “bombarded by emails” objecting to Bollyn’s talk. “People are demanding that I cancel the event. Some are threatening dire consequences for The Commons. What has brought us to this?”
On July 14, I received an email from a man named Irving Lee asking to rent the Commons in September for a talk by Christopher Bollyn. Bollyn was described in the email as a 9/11 researcher who had been on a Pacifica/WBAI program called Guns & Butter hosted by Bonnie Faulkner. Irving Lee, the man who booked and paid for the rental, identified himself as follows: “We are not part of any organization. We’re just a group who want to bring Bollyn, a cutting edge speaker to NYC for the 15th anniversary of 9/11.”
I did not research the speaker before accepting the rental. I do not have the time, resources or inclination to censor the hundreds of groups who rent the space. Since launching in 2010, the list of renters has included local Tea Partiers, conservative promoters of charter schools, explicitly anti-union corporations, elected officials who voted for the Patriot Act and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although progressive organizations dominate the calendar because I subsidize many of them with free or very low-cost use of the space, the Commons is available for rental by other groups.
By Wednesday night, with former friends holding up signs and angrily shouting just on the other side of the Commons’ tall, glass facade, Ennen had not changed her position. In fact, she continued to insist that she had not yet familiarized herself with Bollyn’s views—the implication being that this was beside the point. (The point being, according to Ennen, that Bollyn’s money was good, and that Ennen needs to keep the lights on, and she can’t do that if she’s just constantly subsidizing socialists.)