It’s the 21st century and Jews are still being blamed for poisoning the well.
When the living couldn’t bury all the dead during the depths of the Black Death in 14th century Europe, Jews were quickly set upon as the obvious culprits. More than 750 years later, when terrorist-piloted jumbo jets slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, a disturbingly large portion of the world’s population, once again, immediately blamed the Jews.
As it turns out, those canards had staying power. Five years after the Twin Towers were reduced to rubble, the various “Jews-did-it” scenarios emanating from
the wreckage of New York and Washington, D.C. have proven stubbornly resilient.
“If anything, they’re flourishing,” says Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a liberal think tank based in Somerville, Mass.
“The idea that Jews were somehow involved in 9/11 has now become a permanent feature in the conspiracy pantheon, like the JFK assassination and the Oklahoma City bombing,” says Mark Pitcavage, national director of fact-finding for the Anti-Defamation League.
And if anyone thinks that blaming Jews for 9/11 is only taking place in the public squares of Islamic republics, Oakland does not quite resemble an Islamic Republic. Jonathan Bernstein, the ADL’s San Francisco-based regional director, points out that at least two Muslim leaders right here in California — Amir Abdul Malik Ali, the Imam of Masjid Al-Islam in Oakland and Ghassan AbulGhanam of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Fresno — have been documented as blaming Jews and Israelis for 9/11.
Calls and emails to Malik Ali and Abul Ghanam went unreturned.
The Internet is the chief incubator and disseminator of apocryphal 9/11 storylines, and cyberspace remains awash with chatter purporting to link the Jews with America’s worst terrorist attacks, notes Pitcavage. But the same message, he added, is being spread through books, pamphlets, videos and speakers.
The purveyors are an eclectic aggregation that spans the geopolitical spectrum. It includes neo-Nazis and other white supremacists in the United States and elsewhere; anti-government zealots; young anti-war activists; Holocaust deniers; Lyndon Larouche supporters; New-Age ideologues; and propagandists and journalists within the Arab and Muslim world, to name a few.
“I would see this as a reframing of ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’ for the contemporary period,'” says San Francisco State University Jewish Studies Professor Marc Dollinger, referring to the 19th-century Czarist forgery of a purported Jewish cabal intent on world domination.
Dollinger doesn’t believe such crude anti-Semitism will ever find a truly popular outlet in the United States, but he does note that Egypt’s state-run television station recently ran a long miniseries based on “Protocols.” Anti-Jewish 9/11 theories have found fertile ground in such places, he said.
Stateside efforts to connect the Jews with 9/11, however, are not limited to fringe groups shouting into bullhorns. Contributors to Wikipedia, the popular user-generated online encyclopedia, have tried repeatedly to insert anti-Jewish 9/11 theories into Wikipedia’s pages and represent them as fact or at least plausible versions of reality, according to Berlet.
The insertions — which represent one of countless pieces of potentially suspect information submitted to Wikipedia almost daily — have been promptly excised by the encyclopedia’s volunteer editors, says Berlet, himself a Wikipedia editor, “but it requires constant attention.”
It’s impossible to determine how many viewers have seen the postings before they were removed from the Wikipedia Web site, which has a daily viewership of roughly 30 million, according to a company spokesman.
The 9/11 assaults triggered an almost immediate outpouring of conspiracy conjecture, in part because of the bizarre, almost implausible nature of the attacks, according to Michael Barkun, a professor of political science at Syracuse University who has studied extremist movements and their philosophies.
“These events cried out for some sort of explanation,” Barkun says. “This was a golden opportunity for conspiracy theorists to introduce their ideas to a broader audience. The thing to remember about conspiracy theories is that they are profoundly psychologically comforting. They give sense and meaning to the world. Nothing is arbitrary or accidental or coincidental.”
Not all of the explanatory hypotheses stemming from 9/11 implicate Jews. Many (probably most) still accuse the United States government, for example, of being aware of the attacks and doing nothing to stop them in order to justify military intervention in the Muslim world. In fact, according to a poll undertaken by Ohio University and Scripps Howard News Service, a full 36 percent of Americans believe the U.S. government either aided and abetted in the 9/11 attacks or willfully did nothing to stop them “because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.”
But anti-Semitic finger pointing has disproportionately dominated the revisionist view of 9/11, according to a report issued in 2003 by the ADL. Those accusations echoed “The Protocols,” updating a familiar theme: that Jews are inherently evil and have a “master plan” to rule the world, says the report, which profiles the 9/11 conspiracy theorists’ cast of suspected plotters and other scapegoats.
They include:
• The Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, which is accused of orchestrating and carrying out the attacks to advance the Jewish state’s geopolitical agenda. “This perverse respect for the Mossad,” the ADL report says, “derives in part from anti-Semitic notions that only Jews are sufficiently cunning, resourceful and wicked to have carried out the attacks and blamed them on their enemies.”
• A “spy ring” consisting of young Israelis claiming to be art students. They purportedly had been tracking the 9/11 hijackers but did nothing to stop them.
• Jewish businessmen, including owners of the World Trade Center, who plotted to destroy the structures to collect insurance money, thus perpetuating the “myth of the greedy Jew,” the ADL report says.
• “Four thousand Israelis” who allegedly worked at the World Trade Center but were warned by Israeli intelligence operatives to stay home on 9/11. This is one of the most widely accepted 9/11 myths; some sources say it was initiated by Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television network.
In his 2002 poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” Amiri Baraka (nee LeRoi Jones), then the poet laureate of New Jersey, repeated this claim:
“Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed/
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers/
To stay home that day/
Why did Sharon stay away?”
All those assertions have been either laughed off as preposterous — or investigated and discredited. The “spy ring” story, for example, may have emanated from a disclosure that a number of young Israelis who violated their visas had been deported from the United States. Subsequent reports intimating that the deportees had been engaged in sinister, clandestine activities were examined by The Washington Post, among others, and found to be “nothing more than an urban myth,” according to the ADL report.
But the fact that conspiracy theories have been disproved is largely irrelevant to the theories’ adherents, according to Barkun. The reason, he says, is that die-hard conspiracy-mongers are united by their embrace of what he calls “rejected knowledge.”
“These people are profoundly distrustful of authority. It seems absurd to the rest of us, but in the mirror world that conspiracy theorists live, anything that is rejected by mainstream institutions must therefore be true,” he says.
For Professor David Biale, the strategy taken by the anti-Jewish 9/11 conspiracy theorists mirrors that adopted by Holocaust deniers.
Rather than exclude any mention of evidence, “it is hyper evidence-based. It’s not just that they have some evidence, they have an unbelievable amount of evidence of a highly technical nature. It’s the kind of thing their opponents can’t refute because they don’t have [knowledge] of all this tech stuff,” said Biale, a professor of Jewish history at U.C. Davis.
Just as a Holocaust denier might tout blueprints of a gas chamber and claim it was intended to delouse prisoners who eventually died of dysentery, a 9/11 conspirator might wave about Twin Tower schematics and claim a jet plane couldn’t have toppled one of the buildings on its own, so some intelligence service — the Mossad? The CIA? — must have planted explosives.
“People who latch onto these conspiracy theories tend to obsessively amass this kind of information. That’s how they prove it to themselves, and it’s hard to disprove because they bring up all this” highly technical information, Biale says.
As a specialist in collective actions within society — which includes groupthink, hoaxes and conspiracy theories — Professor Robb Willer has given serious thought to the reverberations of 9/11. (In fact, one of his major papers juxtaposed President Bush’s popularity rating with Homeland Security’s terror threat levels; Willer believes the popularity boosts were a factor in Bush’s reelection.)
Unfortunately, the U.C. Berkeley sociology professor can easily explain why 9/11 conspiracy theories gained popularity — and kept it.
“There are a couple of factors that are shown to aid in the propagation of urban legendry. Horror stories and disgusting stories tend to propagate really well. One of the reasons urban legends disseminate so far is people who tell them have a rewarding experience. People say, ‘That’s a great story!'” says Willer.
A number of societal factors have combined to help keep 9/11 theories alive. Willer notes that conspiracy theories gain steam in times of trouble or uncertainty; also, conspiracy theories are especially useful for people who have trouble understanding complicated, multifaceted world events (and “The Jews did it” takes care of that). That’s somewhat unavoidable, but Willer adds that the Bush administration’s behavior in the post-9/11 world hasn’t helped stem wild theories of government involvement.
“Research shows a large number of Americans, at times a majority, thought Iraq was responsible for 9/11. Objective facts show al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11 and had little to do with Iraq. It’s possible that this climate of confusion made it possible for someone to step in and say ‘Jews did it.’ We shouldn’t be surprised that people can be convinced of a large Jewish conspiracy if at one time [most] Americans believed Saddam was responsible, which is equally untrue,” he says.
Willer adds that the Bush administration’s standoffish and uncooperative behavior regarding the 9/11 commission has given conspiracy theorists a reason to believe the government is hiding something. Combined with a plethora of Web sites just bursting with “proof,” that may be all conspiracy-minded people need.
“In psychology there is something called ‘motivated reasoning’ and ‘motivated information processing.’ People who have a preconception tend to seek out evidence that confirms that preconception … and disregarding information that contradicts that preconception,” says Willer.
“Because of that, you can end up in a situation where the weight of facts may be on one side of the issue, but people continue to hold onto their beliefs as long as there’s a little to cling to.”
In fact, conspiracy-tinged view of world events seems to be gaining traction in America and elsewhere, according to Lou Manza, chairman of the psychology department at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa. As evidence of this trend, he cites polls indicating that suspect theories of all kinds have gained popularity over the past 10 to 15 years.
Among the possible explanations for that emerging worldview: In today’s information-bloated environment, the conviction that all-powerful forces control global events makes life easier for believers by obviating the need to think critically about complex issues.
“Our environment today is not conducive to a critical-thinking approach, especially with the instant access we have to so much information,” Manza elaborates. “If it’s on the Internet and the graphics are good, it must be true.”
But why does it necessarily follow that the Jews in particular were the unseen hand behind America’s most infamous terrorist attack? Because they had something to gain from 9/11, according to conspiracy advocates, who contend that military retaliation against Arabs was its own reward for the Jews and Israel.
Asked why the Jews were implicated in the attacks, Barkun says, “You might as well ask, ‘Why does anti- Semitism exist?’ Unfortunately, the concept is deeply rooted in Western culture. And like a lot of conspiracy theories, it’s a closed system of ideas that is structured so that it’s impossible to disprove.”
In a sense, the extremist explanations for 9/11 are merely an update of conspiracy theories that have been evolving ever since the Crusades, according to conservative columnist and analyst Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, who has written two books examining conspiracy theories.
Virtually every major conspiracy theory hatched over the past 900 years has featured one of two key elements, Pipes maintains. One is so-called “secret societies,” such as the Trilateral Commission — an influential coalition of influential private citizens — as well as suspected government cabals; the other is the Jews.
Anti-Semitic 9/11 scenarios have staying power, but it’s unclear how widely they’re embraced. In the West, according to Pipes and others, 9/11-related Judeophobia seems to have a limited constituency among both ordinary people and those in positions of power and influence.
No American office-holder, for example, has tried to score political points by blaming the Jews for 9/11 — though recently defeated Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) made a name for herself by repeatedly taking anti-Israel stands and alleging that the federal government was complicit in the 9/11 attacks.
All told, the Western strain of 9/11 revisionism seems dominated by conspiracy buffs rather than bona fide anti-Semites who pose a real danger to Jews, according to Pipes.
Berlet takes a less benign view.
“Any form of conspiracy theory is toxic to the democratic process,” he says. “How can you reach compromise with those ‘evil people’ who bombed the World Trade Center? That sort of thinking could flare up in hard times and affect policy.”
Overtly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories stemming from 9/11 appear to be more widely accepted and tenacious in the Arab and Muslim world than in the West.
“The implications in the Middle East are quite profound,” Pipes says. “It’s one more brick in the edifice of fear and loathing of Israel and the Jews.”
RELATED STORIES: