As Americans and allies around the world continue to mourn the loss of nearly 3,000 innocent people murdered in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a fringe movement is busy spreading more hatred.
Radicals within our borders are exploiting our national pain to further their antisemitic aims, blaming Jews and the State of Israel for the 9/11 attacks.
Many antisemites are responsible for these repulsive and dangerous claims, and we’ll alert you of a few. However, we must be ready to combat these antisemitic conspiracy theories wherever they rear their ugly head.
Christopher Bollyn is one of the first promoters of the antisemitic 9/11 conspiracy theories. He began writing about the attacks soon after they occurred as a reporter for American Free Press, an antisemitic conspiracy-oriented newspaper. On his website, Bollyn asserts, "The terror attacks of 9/11 were an Israeli false-flag operation that was designed to be blamed on Arab Muslims for the sake of kick-starting the long-planned Zionist strategy known as the 'War on Terror,' which is really an Israeli war agenda to be fought by the U.S."
Ken O'Keefe, whose real name is Kenneth Roy Nichols, is an ex-Marine and antisemitic conspiracy theorist who often peddles in horrific lies about the Jewish people. For example, he claims:
Jewish bankers being "corrupt, immoral" who "bought everything and everyone that can be bought"
Jews control the media and Hollywood
Israel operates within “Talmudic dictates” that allows Jews to rape non-Jewish three-year-old girls
O'Keefe has traveled the country to promote vile antisemitism, including his favorite topic of blaming Israel and the Mossad for the 9/11 attacks.
In 2001, he set fire to his United States passport and later was a passenger on the Mavi Marmara flotilla to Gaza, where he claims he attacked two of the Israeli soldiers who boarded the ship, initiating a confrontation in which ten terror affiliated activists were killed.
Kevin Barrett is a former Professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison that promotes Holocaust-denial and radical antisemitic conspiracy theories online and in the media. He’s presented on Press TV, Iran’s English language news network and propaganda machine, and is a writer for Veterans Today, an antisemitic news website.
In a Veterans Today article, Barrett wrote - "The same forces that orchestrated 9/11 – namely, Operation Gladio B [refers to a supposed secret operation to carry out false flag acts and blame them on Muslim extremists] which is essentially a joint NATO-Israeli project – continue to inflict trauma on the American people with their ongoing false flag operations."
These conspiracy theories can also be readily found throughout the world of radical Islam.
Despite the fact that all the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks were radical Muslims and the operation was organized by Osama Bin Laden, these outlandish antisemitic claims have also reached many areas of the Muslim world.
Chairman of the Somali Islamic Courts Union, Sheik Sherif Sheik Ahmed, told the Somaliland Times - the "real facts are not available to explain what really happened on September 11th but besides Al Qaeda, it is possible Jews were behind it."
In March 2019, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who was born in Somalia, stated at a benefit dinner of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas Terror group, that "some people did something" when speaking about the 9/11 attacks. Many believe the Jew-hating Congresswoman was invoking the same antisemitic trope shared by her native country's Islamic Sheik over a decade earlier.
We are horrified that these hurtful and atrocious antisemitic conspiracy theories still exist, 19 years after the tragic 9/11 attacks took place. Social media has enabled them to spread faster and wider, and we cannot afford this amplification of hatred to continue.
It is more crucial than ever that social media users urge giants like Facebook, YouTube (owned by Google), and Twitter to take measures to eliminate these dangerous lies from their websites!