Not only has the media buried Michael Collins Piper’s book, Final Judgement; even JFK researchers are too scared to touch his explosive book.
By Dr. Kevin Barrett
I began studying the JFK assassination in 1975. As a 16-year-old student at Pewaukee High School in Wisconsin, where then-librarian Charlotte Smith directed my attention toward such interesting and controversial authors as Immanuel Velikovsky, Erich Von Daniken, and Kurt Vonnegut, I was open to ideas outside the usual orbit. So when a friend invited me to Mark Lane’s talk on the JFK assassination years ago, my response was, “Mark who?” and then, “Sure, why not?”
Lane changed my life by presenting a convincing case that the Warren Commission was wrong: The president had been killed in a high-level coup d’état. The preposterous story of the “magic bullet” causing seven entry-exit wounds in two men, and the fact that Life magazine had reversed the frames of the Zapruder film to produce the illusion of a forward head snap supporting the official story that JFK had been shot from behind, amounted to a convincing prima facie case of establishment complicity.
During the days, weeks, and years after Lane’s talk I read extensively on the case. The upshot was that Lane’s “American coup” hypothesis was confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt. But the question of the identity and motives of the coup plotters was not so easily resolved.
In 1979 I published an article in the University of Wisconsin-Madison student newspaper summarizing evidence of CIA involvement in the assassination. Before the article was published (but after I had submitted it to numerous outlets) a self-described “CIA assassination team member” showed up uninvited for dinner at the student housing co-op where I lived. This odd young woman claimed she had a CIA chip implanted in her brain, and that her job was to conduct reconnaissance against potential CIA assassination targets. When I recounted the bizarre coincidence to my favorite journalism professor, John McNelly, his response was blunt: “Kevin, they are messing with you.”
It wasn’t until the mid-2000s, when I got interested in 9/11 and noticed the obvious role of Zionists in that event, that I sat down to read Michael Collins Piper’s Final Judgment. I had been marginally aware of the existence of Piper’s book for years, but for various reasons—including being busy earning a Ph.D. in an unrelated field, and noticing that the JFK research community didn’t seem to think that much of Piper—I had steered clear of it.
I quickly discovered that Piper had marshalled a strong case for Israel playing a key role, perhaps even the lead role, in the JFK assassination. Yet many leading JFK experts were strangely resistant to admitting this.
In 2007 I interviewed University of California professor Peter Dale Scott, a leading figure in both JFK and 9/11 studies and the main popularizer of the term “deep state.” The interview was broadcast live on RBN radio. Piper called in to the show and asked Scott what he thought about Israel’s role in the JFK assassination. Scott hemmed and hawed, saying (in essence) that he wasn’t convinced by the evidence assembled in Final Judgment. Since that evidence struck me as very strong, I wondered whether Scott’s discomfiture with Piper was driven by conscious or unconscious fear of “going there” and risking the kinds of attacks that would surely plague him if he endorsed Piper’s thesis.
Since Piper’s untimely death in 2015, the stature of his work in general, and Final Judgment in particular, has continued to rise. Some of the best minds of our time now recognize that Piper’s JFK work is indispensable.
Dr. Laurent Guyénot, the French historian and author of From Yahweh to Zion, is one of the key figures driving the resurgence of interest in Final Judgment. Guyénot shows that the methods apparently used by Zionist plotters of the JFK and RFK assassinations are a standard modus operandi that the same forces have used in dozens of other operations. From Yahweh to Zion puts the Kennedy assassinations in historical perspective, not only in terms of 20th and 21st century Zionist covert operations, but also in light of a larger history stretching back 2,500 years.
Another intellectual heavyweight promoting Piper’s work is Ron Unz, publisher of the indispensable alternative media digest Unz Review. Unz, who has done graduate work in theoretical physics at Cambridge and Stanford universities, recently published “American Pravda: The JFK Assassination: Part 1: What Happened? and Part 2: Who Did It?” In that two-part series, and in a radio interview with me, Unz argues that the “most extreme” example of media dishonesty surrounding the JFK assassination is the suppression of Piper’s Final Judgment—not just by the mainstream and alternative media, but also by most of the JFK research community.
After spending 43 years (intermittently) researching the JKF assassination, I wholeheartedly agree.
*Michael Collins Piper’s massive 740-page Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy is available in a handy two-book set for only $40 plus $6 S&H in the U.S. exclusively from AFP’s Online Store. Click here to learn more about Final Judgment and order from AFP.
Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions.
Great article!! Michael Collins Piper’s death impacts me even today.