How Convenient!

Williams himself makes the connection between Holocaust-denial fruitcakery and the wacktivism of 9/11 refuseniks in his intro to The Puzzle of the Holocaust by referring to his previous tome The Puzzle of 9/11, asking, "If we are being lied to about the events of September 11, and its pursuing 'War on Terror,' then what else have we been lied to [sic]?"

Williams, er, denied he's an anti-Semite or a member of any white-power or neo-Nazi org. Still, his book and his role in the powwow call into question the legitimacy of a conference that, even without him, would be a few clowns short of a circus.

For instance, local 9/11 denier Kent Knudson's helping to put together the three-day event. You may recall Knudson from this woodpecker's column "Loose Screws" (September 7, 2006), wherein Knudson asserted that al-Qaeda doesn't exist. Knudson's weirdo Web site, www.cowcrap.org, kvetches about his felony conviction for shooting someone else's cattle on his Snowflake property. Read the site and you'll observe that Knudson suffers from a definite marble deficiency.

Also on the list of speakers are a former follower of Lyndon LaRouche; a publisher of an Idaho-based survivalist newsletter; Dylan Avery, the filmmaker behind the pseudo-documentary Loose Change; perennial PHX Libertarian candidate Ernie Hancock; radio talk show host Charles Goyette of 1100 KFNX AM; and Alessandra Soler Meetze, executive director of AZ's ACLU, whose presence at this Mad Hatter's convention sticks out like a zit on a Playboy Playmate's airbrushed caboose.

"This is the first I've heard of it," Meetze confessed to this clucker when told of Williams' Holocaust-denying. But she disagreed with the argument that her presence at the conference might give oddballs like Williams legitimacy.

"If those are his views, they're certainly atrocious," she said. "Because I personally condemn these views doesn't mean the ACLU should shy away from getting its message across."

Getting its message across to a conference organized by a Holocaust denier, and made up of people who think 9/11 was government-staged? Hey, it's one thing to defend the right of kooks like these to speak, Alessandra. It's another to appear at their meetings.