Zionist conspiracy theories regarding the September 11, 2001 attacks

After the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack, speculation that the perpetrators were connected with Israel almost immediately began flying. For the first six days, these rumors were limited to vague suggestions of the possibility of Israeli involvement, based almost exclusively on the benefits which, it was claimed, would accrue to Israel as a result of the attack's being attributed to "Islamist" groups; they then branched out to include specific claims about evidence which, if true, would have implicated Israeli intelligence services, notably including the rumor that 4000 Israelis failed to show up to work at the World Trade Center that day. With al-Qaeda's acknowledgement one year later to al-Jazeera correspondent Osama bin Laden did not have the resources to carry out such an attack; the case of the USS Liberty was cited in support.

On September 12, Dr. Anwar Ul Haque (a Pakistani consultant pathologist) made a roughly similar suggestion on the Canada-based "Islamic News and Information Network" site, considerably expanding on the supposed motivations and throwing in John F. Kennedy's assassination. On September 13, this suggestion reached Jordan: two columnists mentioned it in one Jordanian paper, Al-Dustour, (), claiming that Israel stood to benefit, and arguing that only they would have been able to evade American intelligence; one columnist (Jihad Jbara) suggested in another Jordanian paper, Al-Rai, that Israel might have orchestrated the event to give itself a chance to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque without American objections. This was soon followed by Major General Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan's intelligence service (see quotes below) on September 14, who suggested that "Mossad and its American associates are the obvious culprits. Who benefits from the crime?".

On September 15, the English-language Tehran Times suggested that "The Zionists and certain anti-Islamic elements in the West, however, would benefit from any action that would serve to discredit and demonize the Islamic movement" and would thus be the only parties to benefit.

On September 16, the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, according to MEMRI, told the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam that "it was a large intelligence operation, behind which might be the Mossad and American intelligence, with the aim of [bringing about] a new war in the region so as to impoverish and conquer it"; if MEMRI's claim is correct, this quote should be found somewhere .

On September 13, an e-mail allegedly originating from "David Stern" of "Stern-Intel" (thoroughly investigated at ) claimed that "an internal (US-)intelligence memo... points to the Israeli Mossad intelligence service having links to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks". This email's claims represent a mutation of the story: initially slow to spread, its claims were reprinted in the Frontier Post (Peshawar) on September 16["http://web.archive.org/web/20011101045339/http://frontierpost.com.pk/main.asp?id=8&date1=9/16/2001"], and in Jang on September 23.

The Al-Manar rumour (notably including the claim that 4,000 Israelis did not report to work that day)

Probably the widest-spread rumour, however, took off when the Lebanese Hezbollah-owned satellite channel Al-Manar (September 17) came out with a piece arguing that the Israeli secret services and Zionist supporters of them were most likely responsible, and claiming that 4000 Israelis had stayed away from work at the World Trade Center that day. This claim was picked up by the previously mentioned InformationTimes.com, and rapidly picked up by certain credulous anti-Zionist and/or anti-Semitic sources around the world, and became a chain email briefly. By the end of October, this claim had been alluded to by sources including Iran's IRNA, Egypt's Al Ahram, the London-based Al-Hayat, and Russia's Pravda.

This claim was picked up by the previously mentioned InformationTimes.com, and rapidly picked up by many anti-Zionist and/or anti-Semitic sources around the world. It became a chain e-mail, which is still circulating. By the end of October, this claim had been cited by Iran's IRNA, Egypt's Al Ahram, the London-based Al-Hayat, and Russia's Pravda.

Al-Manar's original article claimed the following:

1. that 4,000 Israeli employees did not show up to work on September 11 (the source's term, "Israeli", was frequently changed to "Jewish" as the rumour spread)
2. that unnamed "Arab diplomatic sources" had told a Jordanian newspaper, Al-Watan, that the Israeli Shabak had warned these employees not to show up at work
3. that, according to "Aharon Bernie" of Yediot Aharonot, the Shabak had prevented Ariel Sharon from going to New York for a pro-Israeli festival there
4. that, according to Haaretz, the FBI arrested five Israelis four hours later who were filming the burning building with, in Al-Manar's words, "what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery."

These are detailed more fully below. The first claim (and hence the second) are false - there were less than 100 Israeli employees there to begin with, and 3 were in fact killed - though the fourth is true.

The theories

Claim that 4,000 Israeli/Jewish employees skipped work at the WTC on September 11

This claim, made by Al-Manar, has been repeated by a wide variety of other sources, such as Amiri Baraka. The original Al-Manar claim was:

With the announcement of the attacks at the World Trade Center in New York, the international media, particularly the Israeli one, hurried to take advantage of the incident and started mourning 4,000 Israelis who work at the two towers. Then suddenly, no one ever mentioned anything about those Israelis and later it became clear that they remarkably did not show up in their jobs the day the incident took place. No one talked about any Israeli being killed or wounded in the attacks.

In some versions of the story circulated on the Internet, the title was changed to "4,000 Jewish Employees in WTC Absent the Day of the Attack" from its original "4000 Israeli Employees in WTC Absent the Day of the Attack", spawning a further rumour that not only Israeli but all Jewish employees stayed away.

There were in fact a total of 5 Israeli deaths in the attack (Alona Avraham, Leon Lebor, Shay Levinhar, Daniel Lewin, Haggai Sheffi), of which 3 were in the World Trade center and 2 were on the planes. (4 are listed as American on most lists, presumably having dual citizenship.) The total number of Israeli-born residents of New York was 21,288 in 2000 (), out of a population of 8,008,278, or 0.27% of the population; multiplying this by the total World Trade Center death toll (2,602) would give 7 expected victims. Early estimates of Israeli deaths, as of the total death toll and the death toll for other countries' citizens (eg India), proved substantially exaggerated (George W. Bush cited the figure of 130 in his of September 20).

The number of Jewish victims, as one might expect in New York, was considerably higher, estimated at 400-500.

The figure "4,000" was probably taken by Al-Manar from a Jerusalem Post article of September 12 (p. 3), which said "The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack." This number, obviously, was not (as Al-Manar claimed) restricted to employees; in fact, , minister of administrative affairs for the Israeli consulate and mission in New York, said on September 14 "that there might have been up to 100 Israeli citizens working in the World Trade Center".

One speculative recent analysis of this tale (possibly itself a conspiracy theory) notes that the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah occurred a week after September 11 that year (beginning on the evening of September 17), a day when many Jews would, in fact, not have been present at work in the WTC, or elsewhere. The speculation is that the stories of Jews skipping work on the day of the attack appeared a week later because they had been pre-written with the intention of appearing on that date; because the WTC attack was originally intended to occur on Rosh Hashanah when many Jews would not be present, thereby giving the stories credence and generating grounds for suspicion of Jewish/Israeli involvement in the attacks. For reasons unknown, the attack was carried out a week earlier, but the now obviously false stories came out a week later, according to the original schedule.

Claims that the allegedly absent Israelis/Jews had been warned by Israeli intelligence

Al-Manar wrote that "Arab diplomatic sources revealed to the Jordanian al-Watan newspaper that those Israelis remained absent that day based on hints from the Israeli General Security apparatus, the Shabak".

It is unclear whether al-Watan (a minor Jordanian newspaper with no website) made these claims, and who (if anyone) the alleged "Arab diplomatic sources" were. Nor is there any independent confirmation of this claim, which is generally regarded as highly implausible.

Claim that Sharon stayed away because of a Shabak warning

Al-Manar claimed that

Suspicions had increased further after Israeli newspaper Yadiot Ahranot revealed that the Shabak prevented Israeli premier Ariel Sharon from traveling to New York and particularly to the city's eastern coast to participate in a festival organized by the Zionist organizations in support of the "Israel". Aharon Bernie, the commentator at the newspaper, brought up the issue and came up with a negative conclusion, saying "no answer". He then asked about the clue behind the Shabak's position in preventing Sharon's participation, and again without giving an answer.

A pro-Israel rally, led by the United Jewish Communities and expected to include 50,000 people, had been planned for September 23, 2001, and Ariel Sharon had been going to speak there. It was canceled on September 12. However, according to The Forward, Sharon was still scheduled to speak there at that point.

There is an Israeli reporter named Aharon Barnea, of Israel's Channel 2 News, whose wife Amalia works for Yediot Aharonot; it has been speculated that "Aharon Bernie" arose as a misspelling of this name.

Claim that five Israelis were filming the event

This claim formed part of the Al-Manar report mentioned above, which claimed that:

For its part, the Israeli Ha'aretz newspaper revealed that the FBI arrested five Israelis four hours after the attack on the Twin Towers while filming the smoking skyline from the roof of their company's building. The FBI had arrested the five for "puzzling behavior". They are said to have been caught videotaping the disaster in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery.

This claim was correct: Yossi Melman did indeed make a report to that effect in Haaretz on September 17, 2001, still available from Haaretz' site, and did use the precise words "puzzling behavior" and "what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery." It has been followed up on by several mainstream Western media groups. On June 21, 2002, ABC published that five Israelis, seen filming the events of September 11 in New York and looking "happy", were subsequently arrested, claiming on The Forward's authority that the "FBI concluded that two of the men were Israeli intelligence operatives" but had no advance knowledge of 9/11.

The claim was recently revived by the Scotland-based Sunday Herald's article: (Nov 2, 2003). Several other sources are listed at .

Some sources, such as The Forward (), interpret these five as a Mossad surveillance operation conducted not against the US but against "radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism."

Claims that Israel had some amount of advance knowledge but failed to share it

A more ambiguous claim that the Mossad had been shadowing the perpetrators and had advance warning of these attacks but failed to share it has also been made.

Supporters of this claim sometimes cite a Washington Post article of September 28, 2001, according to which "Officials at instant-messaging firm Odigo confirmed today that two employees received text messages warning of an attack on the World Trade Center two hours before terrorists crashed planes into the New York landmarks." CNN also reported this, but added that "Alex Diamandis, vice president for sales and marketing with Odigo Inc., said there was nothing specifically about the attacks in the message, but he said it was suspicious in nature, especially because of its timing." The Israeli newspaper Haaretz also published reports regarding these warnings .

The first major Western source to explicitly make this claim was Fox News, in a story in December 2001 - a four-part series by Carl Cameron, condemned by Israeli officials (), that "alleges that Israeli intelligence officials failed to share what they knew about September 11 with their American counterparts prior to the attacks". However, soon afterwards Fox pulled it from its website without explanation. What appears to be a transcript of the original can still be read at .

Examples

"WASHINGTON, DC, USA, 11 September 2001 (FPN): CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA and all other U.S. Government agencies should also deeply investigate to determine that did the anti-American regime of Israeli international terrorist, serial killer and war criminal Ariel Sharon play any role in the Sept. 11 suicide airplane attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center that have killed and injured thousands of innocent Americans and caused huge financial losses amounting to billions of dollars. Top secret role of the terrorist Government of Israel in the genocide of the American people and in the destruction of World Trade Center and the Pentagon building cannot be ruled out..." - (InformationTimes.com)

"It is clear that Israel is the one to benefit greatly from the bloody, loathsome terror operation that occurred yesterday, and that it seeks to benefit still more by accusing the Arabs and Muslims of perpetrating this loathsome attack.... Only Israel does not fear the discovery that the Jews are behind this operation, if indeed it was so; who in the US or outside it would dare to accuse them, as every blow to them means talk of a new 'Holocaust?' They, more than anyone, are capable of hiding a criminal act they perpetrate, and they can be certain that no one will ask them about what they do." (Source: Al-Dustour, Jordanian newspaper, September 13, 2001, by columnist Rakan Al-Majali (MEMRI, September 20, 2001, No. 270))

"You must look inside. F-16s don't scramble in time, though they had 18 minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Radar gets jammed. Transponders are turned off. A flight to Los Angeles turns to Washington and is in the air for 45 minutes, and the world's most sophisticated air defense doesn't go into action. I tell you, it was a coup [attempt], and I can't say for sure who was behind it, but it's the Israelis who are creating so much misery in the world. The Israelis don't want to see any power in Washington unless it's subservient to their interests, and President Bush has not been subservient." (Source: Major General Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan's intelligence service, in an interview with Rob Nordland of Newsweek, September 14, 2001)

"With the announcement of the attacks at the World Trade Center in New York, the international media, particularly the Israeli one, hurried to take advantage of the incident and started mourning 4000 Israelis who work at the two towers. Then suddenly, no one ever mentioned anything about those Israelis and later it became clear that they remarkably did not show up in their jobs the day the incident took place. No one talked about any Israeli being killed or wounded in the attacks. Arab diplomatic sources revealed to the al-Watan newspaper published in Oman that those Israelis remained absent that day based on hints from the Israeli General Security Apparatus, the Shabak, the fact which evoked unannounced suspicions on American officials who wanted to know how the Israeli government learned about the incident before it occurred, and the reasons why it refrained from informing the U.S authorities of the information it had." (English version of the Web site of Lebanon's Jordanian newspaper, September 13, 2001, by columnist Ahmad Al-Muslih (MEMRI, September 20, 2001, No. 270))

"On 21/9/2001, George Karatzaferis asked Foreign Minister George Papandreou to inform him as to whether he was aware of the articles published in two Israeli newspapers (Ha'aretz and Yedioth Ahronot), and if he had brought them to the attention of his European counterparts. According to George Karatzaferis, these publications “reveal” that the “4000 Jews working in the Twin Towers did not go to work on the day of the attack”; that “Ariel Sharon canceled his trip to New York that day where he was to speak at a celebration of Zionism”; and that “5 Jews were arrested while videotaping the destruction 4 hours after the event [and] are being held by the FBI for suspicious behavior interpreted as ridiculing the tragic event.”"

According to the Washington Post (Oct. 13, 2001), surveys in the Muslim nation of Pakistan showed that 71% of Pakistanis thought that it was a "possible fact" that 4000 Jews stayed away from the WTC that day because they were part of a Jewish conspiracy which had advance warning of the terrorist attacks.

This year's most characteristic example was the widespread espousal as truth of the preposterous rumor that 4000 Jews had been warned and did not go to their offices on September 11th, the day of the terror attack in New York. This was substantiated by a television poll conducted for state TV NET on 17-18/10/2001, which showed that 42% of Greeks subscribe to this rumor, as opposed to 30% who do not. In another poll, published in Eleftherotypia, the Greeks who believed that the September 11 attacks were the work of Bin Landen (30%) or of some Arab terrorists (9%) were fewer than those who believed that they were perpetrated by the secret services of America (28%) or Israel (8%), or by Americans of the extreme right (4%) or the extreme left (2%)."

"The September 11 terrorist attacks on World Trade Centre (WTC) in New York and Pentagon in Washington were masterminded by an international Zionist organization, 'The Elders of Zion,' as a reaction to the strong condemnation of the religio-ethnic cleansing policy being carried out by the Israelis in the Palestinian territories at the 3rd UN Conference against Racism recently held in the South African town of Durban. According to an article published in a Lahore-based Urdu weekly, 'The Jihad Times,' the 300-member apex Zionist body consisting of peers of the Judaism in the world, decided to avenge the anti-Israel bashing at the Durban moot. It tasked the Zionist-controlled FBI and the Israeli secret agency Shabak, just second to Mossad, to carry out the devastating attacks, writes the weekly on the basis of strong evidence.... Another extremely important information leaked out was that around 4,000 Israelis working in the World Trade Center had been issued a secret directive before the incident not to report for duty on September 11 which they complied with. This is evident from the fact that not a single Israeli or American Jew working in the WTC was reported killed or missing. The EoZ [Elders of Zion] is learnt to have instructed the Zionist controlled media to unleash a vilification campaign against the Muslims portraying them as the perpetrators of the attacks on the U.S. cities." (Zionists Could Be Behind Attack on WTC and Pentagon, posted October 14, 2001 on the IslamWeb site, registered to the State of Qatar Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs. The claim made in this article that no Jews were killed in 911, like the claim of the existence of the Elders of Zion, are fabrications.)

"Following the incident, Muslims and Arabs stopped feeling that is was safe to leave [their homes in America].... Muslims do not feel safe even going to the hospitals, because some Jewish doctors in one of the hospitals poisoned sick Muslim children, who then died.... Although the Americans suspect that the Zionists are behind the act [the terrorist attacks], none had the courage to talk about it in public."

Source: Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Al-Gamei'a, the Al-Azhar University representative in the U.S. and former Imam of the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque of New York City, in an interview for the Lilatalqadr Web site an unofficial Al-Azhar University site, October 4, 2001 (The Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI), October 17, 2001, No. 288)

"The Syrian official [Syrian Ambassador to Tehran Turki Mohammad Saqar] said that the racist Zionist regime will be the beneficiary of the recent incidents and added that one day after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Israel killed 12 Palestinians and was proud of it. He also said that there are reliable evidence to prove that the Israelis have been involved in these incidents and added that no Jewish employee was present in the World Trade Organization buildings on the day of the attack, and Sharon's visit to the U.S. was postponed before the incident." (Tehran Times.com, Iranian newspaper, October 25, 2001; Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), October, 24, 2001)

"Bin Laden's Al-Qa'ida is a possible suspect, but I would also suggest the involvement of the Israeli Mossad. The scare may be an attempt to shift attention from greater Israeli atrocities in the Palestinian territories." (Al-Ahram Weekly Online, Egyptian newspaper, October 25-31, 2001, Who's doing it? by Mamdouh Attiya)

"Six Israelis suspected of involvement in the attacks on New York and Washington were arrested in the US, to be later released. This confirms our strong suspicions about the involvement of Israel's Mossad in the ugly crime. If we look carefully into this matter, we find no more influential sides in the US that the Israeli Mossad agents, who have the ability to penetrate and the capability to execute with high efficiency." (Editorial in Okaz, Saudi newspaper, November 6, 2001 on The Times of India online)

"Von Bülow told AFP that he believes that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, is behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks. These attacks, he said, were carried out to turn public opinion against the Arabs and boost military and security spending." - , a Washington-based paper. Date not given, but its reference to the Fox News report indicates December 2001.

"It is the latter, the IDF, which, as part of its war aims, has carried out an aggressive espionage and covert operations penetration of the U.S.A., including the recruitment of American-born assets. It is so far unknown, but strongly suspected, that some of these Israeli assets may have contributed an included feature of the rogue networks whose complicity abetted the successful attacks of Sept. 11." - "EIR Blows Israeli Spies' Cover In September 11 Case", Jeffrey Steinberg and Edward Spannaus in Executive Intelligence Review, the magazine of Lyndon LaRouche's movement, a tiny fringe group, 4/7/2002 ()

"It is clear that Israel wanted the 911 attack against America, and Israel knew in advance the details of the attack, and treacherously did not reveal these details to American officials, because they needed the attack to accomplish their objectives against the Palestinians." - David Duke, head of the American racist organization the Ku Klux Klan, 9/11/2002 (on his site: .)