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The following analysis was authored by Tablet Magazine columnist and CAM editorial advisor Lee Smith:
On the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, the true record of the most devastating attack on America in our history is disappearing and being replaced with lies. According to a recent poll, 66% of Middle East studies professors say their students are incapable of correctly identifying the causes or perpetrators of 9/11. Moreover, just as many of those academic experts believe the epidemic of ignorance is the result of a purposeful campaign to defend and advance the causes of groups and governments hostile to the United States.
In part, the information gap has been filled by social media platforms manipulated by hostile foreign intelligence services and gamed by influencers who’ve made spectacular amounts of money the last several years trafficking the world’s original conspiracy theory — antisemitism. With all these factors, it seems it was only a matter of time before the Jews and Israel would be blamed for 9/11.
Not surprisingly, the Council on American Islamic Affairs (CAIR) has played a major part in disseminating disinformation about 9/11 and the role of Muslims in the attacks. In preparation for the 2026-27 school year, CAIR published a handbook purporting to help Muslim students, parents, and educators navigate tricky subjects likely to come up in classrooms throughout the year, such as 9/11.
The guidebook linked to a “Muslim Studies Curriculum” that rationalized the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people as legitimate responses to U.S. support of Israel, the 1991 Gulf War, and America’s military presence in the Middle East. In other words, the largest Muslim civil rights group in the U.S. was recycling Osama Bin Laden’s talking points. The CAIR-endorsed guide even recommended high- chool students read the late Al Qaeda leader’s “Letter to America,” his bizarre rant defending his mass slaughter of Americans.
After The Jewish Onliner reported on the 9/11 curriculum last month, CAIR ended up removing the link to it from its “Back to School” guide and said the material hadn’t been properly vetted. But CAIR recommended the same curriculum in last year’s guide as well. The difference is this year they got caught.
CAIR’s guidebook portrays Muslims as the real victims of 9/11, and obscures the true nature of the attacks, its causes, and perpetrators because that’s been its mission since the planes hit the World Trade Center towers.
Six days after the Twin Towers collapsed, President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington where CAIR co-founder Nihad Awad was among the Muslim community leaders invited to join him. Days earlier, Bush had been attacked by the press when he described the U.S. government’s planned military response as a “crusade.” Now chastened, he was eager to show he meant no offense to Muslims at home and abroad. So he offended an American public still mourning its dead by exculpating the ideology that had motivated their assassins.
“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” the American president explained after an attack waged in the name of Islam and celebrated by Muslims across the world. “That’s not what Islam is all about,” Bush continued, wading into theological debates that would shape Washington’s approach to Islam throughout the Global War on Terror. “Islam,” he continued, “is peace.”
Bush’s words not only shocked the nation, where first responders were still sorting through the rubble in Lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. By sharing the stage with Awad, Bush credentialed him and his organization, legitimized pro-terror advocacy, and transformed CAIR into a trusted interlocutor for journalists, universities, and even law enforcement agencies.
In the 2007 terror-financing case against the Holy Land Foundation, federal prosecutors showed evidence linking CAIR to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, created to support Hamas. That should have been enough to discredit the organization for good, but America and its media have changed over the last twenty years — or else state school boards wouldn’t be soliciting material on 9/11 from terror apologists.
With massive waves of immigration from the Muslim world since 9/11, including somewhere between 2-2.5 million people who were born and raised in Muslim societies, America has imported a worldview shaped by conspiracy theories, which almost always feature Jews and Israel as leading actors.
According to the Egyptian media, the Mossad has a fleet of spy dolphins that has the Egyptian navy under surveillance. In Turkey, they’re worried about Mossad’s spy falcons. Inevitably, Middle East media was going to point to the Jews as the secret hand behind 9/11 — a narrative that conveniently deflected attention from the real culprits, not Jews but Arabs.
The myth that thousands of Jews had mysteriously stayed away from the World Trade Center complex on 9/11 started circulating throughout the Middle East immediately after the attacks. But at the time it had little purchase in the West. In the U.S, and throughout Europe, 9/11 truthers were intent on proving that the attacks were a “false flag” disguising the American government’s responsibility — most likely, according to the truthers, through a series of controlled demolitions of the Twin Towers.
Ten years after the attacks, researchers noted an uptick in antisemitic conspiracy theories, but the faction blaming Jews and Israel for 9/11 was, though vocal, still small. And then the “Dancing Israelis” meme started to spread like wildfire.
“Dancing Israelis” refers to the conspiracy theory that the attacks were masterminded by several Israeli employees of a local moving company who were seen photographing the burning World Trade Center and appearing to celebrate. The FBI investigated and found no evidence that they knew of or participated in the 9/11 plot.
Nonetheless, by the 2020s, “dancing Israelis” had become a meme circulating throughout social media platforms, and the hysteria reached fever pitch after it was amplified by America’s leading antisemite, Tucker Carlson. In his 2025 paranoia-fueled documentary series, The 9/11 Files, Carlson recounted the story of the Israeli movers and asked, “Did the Israelis know about 9/11 and not tell us?”
Thus it was thanks in part to Carlson’s podcast — which reportedly attracts a large Muslim audience in addition to a domestic constituency for antisemitic conspiracy theories — that the two currents of 9/11 conspiracy theories fully consummated what until then had been a flirtation. Don’t blame Al Qaeda for 9/11 — it was a false flag operation run by the Jews.
Given the amount of effort — domestic and foreign, from the political right as well as the left — devoted to obscuring the facts of 9/11 a quarter-century later, America is at a tipping point. If the historical record is written by anti-American forces, future generations will accept as truth the obscene lie that Jews or the State of Israel were responsible for the attacks and Muslims were its most sorely wounded victims.
