David Icke, The Trigger: The lie that changed the world – who really did it and why (Book Review by Elias Davidsson)
Pretentious and without scholarly value
Before examining the present book, I wish to report what I consider as minimal quality rules for scholarly works. The reason I do so is that the author purports by the size of the book and his wide scope to have produced a comprehensive and thorough study of its subject matter. He manifestly wanted his book to be considered as a work of a scholar. For that reason, I will gage his book by undisputed scholarly standards. These eight standards may though not be exhaustive.
1. Substantiate every factual claim except those who constitute common knowledge (no one has to substantiate that the Earth is Round)
2. Use, wherever possible, primary sources and if these are not accessible, then the most reliable secondary sources.
3. Provide readers with the sources for your factual claims
4. Don’t mingle factual claims with your opinion
5. Follow rigorous rules of citations.
6. Tell the readers at the outset about the purpose and scope of your work
7. Refrain from cherry-picking facts to support your view
8. Refrain from qualifying individuals with a demeaning term (presenting Hitler as “the murderer Hitler” is not acceptable in scholarly literature. It is a completely different thing to analyze his conduct and conclude that he “ordered” the commission of murders)
A cursory examination of this book reveals that the author violated every one of the above quality rules. The author makes hundreds, if not thousands, of factual claims but provides no sources for his claims. The reader cannot know whether these claims are true, partly true, or fantasies. A substantial part of the book is merely a reformulation of what other authors have discovered and written. This would have been acceptable, if the author had either corroborated, by his own research, what others have found, or added significant findings. I could not discover any of that in the book.
The author’s real intent is not to elucidate 9/11, as implied by its cover, but is revealed in the second part of the book. On p. 5 he already prepares the ground by telling his readers about the existence of an “inner-core elite of Zionism” which he calls “Ultra-Zionism.” Although he fails to define what he means by this term, he tries with many words and pages to link this undefined creature with the Rothschild family, Satanism, a Death Cult, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Vatican. Make your pick! We later learn that this fictional entity was responsible for 9/11.
Typical of his rantings are sentences such as the following:” Dark Occult Rothschilds have been the drivers of ultra-Zionism and much of the Hidden Hand structure and it is hardly a shock that satanic occultist Jacob Frank and his Sabbatian-Frankism formed an alliance in 1773 with Mayer Amstel [sic] Rothschild and the Jesuit-educated Jew, Adam Weishaupt, who later became (in public) a Protestant….Weishaupt was a Sabbatian-Frankist infiltrator posing as a Jesuit within the Roman Church after apparently being persuaded by Mayer Amschel Rothschild to join the Frankist ‘crusade’. Illuminati ambitions for world domination and revolution came to light in 1785 when a horseman courier called Lanz was reported to be struck by lightning and in his saddlebags were found extensive Illuminati documents laying out the plan for world domination and revolution.” (p. 587). I counted in these few lines no less than 16 factual allegations, none of which was supported by a source to a document from the 18th century, let alone verified.
In his attempts to create the appearance of the cabal that calls by various names, he ventures into historical writing. His historical forays go back to ancient times. Historians spend months or years in archives studying documents from the various periods of history in order to support one or two points. The author thinks he can bypass this tedious research and make hundreds of historical claims without doing the primary research. It is no excuse that the author is no historian. He also displays his bigotry and zeal to make a point by labeling his opponents with demeaning prefixes such as “elite stooge” or “ultra-Zionist”. Such labels disqualify the author completely as a serious writer.
Having established that the book does not qualify to be regarded as a scholarly study of the subject matter, I see no need to delve into the details of this pretentious book.