Monday's bombing struck at the start of a procession of Shiites marking Ashoura, the most important day of a monthlong mourning period for the seventh-century death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein. Minority Shiites have suffered frequent attacks by Sunni extremist groups who regard them as heretical.
"I fell down when the bomb went off with a big bang," said Naseem Raza, a 26-year-old who was marching in the procession. "I saw walls stained with blood and splashed with human flesh."
Not relevant to 9/11 denial, you say? Think again. One of the main points I try to push in every debate I have against a denier is that they are not actually fighting just against the laws of physics, a damning body of forensic evidence against the hijackers, and overwhelming evidence against the current leadership of Al Qaeda. They are literally pretending that decades of history never happened. In their world, Ronald Reagan built Osama bin Laden out of old T-1000 parts, he fought the Communists until we were done with him, and then he lay dormant in a warehouse in Area 51 until we needed him again. Their view is false.
They have to pretend that there are no deep ideological rifts in the Muslim world. They have to pretend that there is no cultural backdrop to the terrorism we see in the world today. Their worldview forces them to believe that there are not millions of people around the world, with their own livelihood, personal beliefs, plans and connections willing to do harm in the name of their faith. For them, Muslim cultural evolution literally must stop in the 1880s.
9/11 deniers are often accused of living in a fantasy land, a world of black and white where there is essentially one homogenous group of bad people (mostly composed of the kinds of people we were really, really annoyed by in high school, I think!) and everyone else - everyone else - is just a puppet.
A big part of why the denier movement has completely fallen apart is because they're forced to find a conspiracy theory in basically every violent action that happens in the world. Though there is a damning silence on their part over the obviously organic 12/25 incident aboard Flight 253, their attempts to conjure a fantasy world around every act of obvious terrorism, which their faith requires them to make, are probably a big part of the reason why none of them really appear to believe themselves anymore.
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