25 years ago, an event occurred that was previously unimaginable. The world watched, live on television, as the World Trade Center crumbled, taking nearly 3,000 innocent people to their graves.
While everyone over the age of 35 or so remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing when it happened, to younger people it’s a historical event, something they must learn about, or, more to the point, something we must educate them about.
Unfortunately, there has always been an interest in distorting the truth, whether through intentional fabrications in the interest of an ideology or more general conspiratorial thinking.
Generally speaking, I abhor conspiracy theories. They are tantalizing and entertaining, easily believed, and damaging to the pursuit of truth.
In most cases, like most people, I’m left to speculate and analyze what’s real and what’s imagined. 9/11 is an exception and one of the conspiracy theories that is most infuriating.
I was in the financial district of Manhattan on 9/11. I saw the towers burning with my own eyes. I saw people falling to their deaths. I don’t have to speculate; the attack happened and was clearly claimed and celebrated by the perpetrators in real-time.
Two planes were flown into the towers; they were hijacked and piloted by Islamic extremists affiliated with the Al Qaeda Islamic terrorist organization. These aren’t guesses; these are irrefutable facts.
Israel didn’t have a role in 9/11, and it was not a U.S. government inside job. Al Qaeda, because of its core religious ideology, murdered thousands of civilians and would have murdered many thousands more if it could have. There is nothing Islamophobic in stating that Al Qaeda committed this act of terror and that it was religiously motivated.
That doesn’t implicate all Muslims; it implicates extremist Muslims who agree with Al Qaeda’s ideology.
Now, 25 years later, the way people consume information has changed. They stream the news as it happens, on various platforms with various filters. While education about historical events has always been crucial, it takes on a more urgent nature in today’s world. Once something is in the public view, it remains and is ultimately picked up by LLMs and other AI platforms and, in some ways, true or false, becomes the historical record.
Ensuring a reliable record is one of the core missions of HonestReporting, and it is one of the reasons the work we do is so important. We are here to monitor the various platforms where people search and receive information and to ensure that Israel is accurately portrayed on them. This is true across a wide range of issues, including the newest conspiracy theories and efforts to distort reality around another awful day in human history, October 7th.
The mindset it takes to believe and spread lies about dancing Israelis on 9/11 is identical to the mindset that claims Israel killed its own people, or to doubt murders, rapes, and other atrocities gleefully filmed by the perpetrators. The difference is the ease with which those claims can be fabricated, made to look professional and believable, and then disseminated to millions of people who have no real innate reason to doubt their authenticity.
The same belief system that led to ecstatic celebrations across the West Bank on 9/11 led to the ecstatic celebrations in Gaza on 10/7. The same ideology that leads a streamer to say the United States, and by extension the civilians murdered, got what they deserved on 9/11 led to social media posts celebrating the mass rape and mutilation of Israelis on 10/7. The difference is the ease with which the streets of Ramallah and Gaza City are beamed directly to the phones of impressionable kids in London, New York and Tokyo.
The role of HonestReporting in all of these cases is the same: expose the lies, surface the truth, and make sure Israel, and Israel’s supporters, are portrayed in the most straightforward and honest light. We simply seek to hold those whom people trust to tell them the truth accountable to basic standards of journalistic integrity and honesty and to expose charlatans posing as genuine journalists as the frauds they are.
Those who seek to bury the truth have always existed. As General Eisenhower was famously paraphrased when he entered the liberated Nazi concentration camps, “get it all on record now, get the films, get the witnesses, because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”
He was right; even with a mountain of undeniable evidence, there are plenty of people who today deny the Holocaust. Some of them even run political movements and countries. The difference today is that nearly everyone has a megaphone in the form of social media, and AI records everything, true or false, for posterity.
We must ensure the record is accurate today, for our benefit and for all those who might be fooled in the future by some bastard who will get up and say it never happened.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
