There is nothing in the delivery of this poem to suggest that Baraka is in any way genuinely asking questions or setting up straw men -- creating "what if" scenarios to make a larger point. His questions are simply rhetorical. He is not using his paranoia ironically in some way as an indictment of paranoia. This is a very straightforward poem.
It is a straightforward indictment of white racism and oppression spanning decades and continents. Ergo, there is no reason to wonder if Baraka is being any less straightforward when he begins laying blame, in the form of questions -- for 9/11.
Nope, he is clearly contending that our government, and the Israeli government, knew about the attacks in advance as part of some diabolical global conspiracy of some sort. And that thus forewarned, the Israelis got their own people out of there.
The allegation on its own is so hysterical -- not funny hysterical, hysteria hysterical -- so grotesquely over the top, that it establishes anti-semitism on its face. But it also falls apart factually.
Baraka has explained that those 4,000 Israelis he referenced represented the employees of Zim, an Israeli shipping company that moved out of the WTC a week or two before 9/11.
Okay, Zim had 200 employees, not 4,000, but let's not quibble. They DID move to Virginia the first week of September! Whoa.
The fact is, however, that the company's move was announced two years in advance, coinciding on the day in September 2001 day that their WTC lease ran out. In other words, they were scheduled to move even before the 9/11 plot had been hatched.
Okay, but, but ... maybe knowledge of that date TRIGGERED the date for the nefarious plot!
Alas, Zim wasn't done with the move by 9/11. They had a lot of employees still in the building. These people barely escaped, and all their computers -- the whole computer infrastructure of Zim -- was destroyed in the attacks. Pretty stupid planning for Jews. Wouldn't you think Jews would be shrewder than that, if they were planning, you know, mass murder and global dominance?
