New York (JTA) — The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have produced a seemingly indestructible offshoot: anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Those canards were not fleeting expressions of paranoid fantasy that dissipated once debunked. Nearly five years later, various “Jews-did-it” scenarios have proven stubbornly resilient.
“If anything, they’re flourishing,” said 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,” said Mark Pitcavage, director of fact-finding for the Anti-Defamation League.
The Internet is the chief incubator and disseminator of apocryphal 9/11 story lines, and cyberspace remains awash with chatter purporting to link the Jews with America’s worst terrorist attacks, according to Pitcavage.
But the same message, he added, is being spread through books, pamphlets, videos and speakers.
The purveyors span the geopolitical spectrum. They include neo-Nazis and other white supremacists; anti-government zealots; anti-war activists; Holocaust deniers; New-Age ideologues; propagandists and journalists within the Arab and Muslim world; and devotees of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the Czarist Russian forgery that purports to document a Jewish plan to dominate the world.
Efforts to connect the Jews with 9/11, however, are not limited to fringe groups talking with one another.
‘ Profoundly comforting’
The 9/11 assaults triggered an almost immediate outpouring of conspiracy conjectures, 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.
“These events cried out for some sort of explanation,” Barkun said. “This was a golden opportunity for conspiracy theorists to introduce their theories 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 9/11 hypotheses implicate Jews. But anti-Semitic libels soon came to dominate the revisionist view of 9/11, according to a report issued in 2003 by the ADL.
These accusations brought “‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ into the 21st century, updating a familiar theme: that Jews are inherently evil and have a ‘master plan’ to rule the world,” said the report, which profiles the 9/11 conspiracists’ 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 Israel’s 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” of young Israelis claiming to be art students, who purportedly had tracked 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. One of the most widely accepted 9/11 myths, some sources say it was initiated by Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television network.
These assertions have been either laughed off as preposterous, or have been investigated and discredited.
The “spy ring” story, for example, may have emanated from a disclosure that some young Israelis violated their visas and had been deported.
The Washington Post, among others, examined subsequent reports intimating that the deportees had been engaged in sinister, clandestine activities, and found these allegations to be “an urban myth,” according to the ADL report.
But evidence disproving conspiracy theories is irrelevant to the theories’ adherents, according to Barkun. Die-hard conspiracy-mongers embrace what he calls “rejected knowledge.”
“These people are profoundly distrustful of authority,” and, therefore, to them “anything that is rejected by mainstream institutions must therefore be true,” Barkun said.
A conspiracy-tinged view of world events seems to be gaining traction in America and elsewhere, according to Lou Manza, chair of the psychology department at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa. 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 this 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 said. “If it’s on the Internet and the graphics are good, it must be true.”
But why does it 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 conspiracists, who contend that military retaliation against Arabs was its own reward for the Jews and Israel.
Asked why the Jews were implicated, Barkun said, “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, these 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 on conspiracy theories.
Virtually every major conspiracy theory hatched over the past 900 years has featured one of two key elements, Pipes said. One is so-called “secret societies,” 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.
However, “Any form of conspiracy theory is toxic to the democratic process,” Berlet said. “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 said. “It’s one more brick in the edifice of fear and loathing of Israel and the Jews.”
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