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Within an hour of the attempted hijacking of a Tel Aviv-bound FlyDubai flight on Wednesday, antisemitic conspiracy theories were already spreading online claiming the incident was a “false flag” operation orchestrated by Israel.
The first X post making such an assertion was recorded by CAM’s Antisemitism Research Center (ARC) at 2:28 ET, just 67 minutes after the plane sent its first emergency distress signal.
Within five hours, the ARC documented 1,000 hostile posts, and over the full 12-hour monitoring period a total of 2,963 posts were identified attributing the incident to Israel, the Mossad, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Zionists, or Jews.
The narrative proliferated rapidly until it conquered the X discourse on the incident. In the final two hours of the analysis, 81% of all tracked X posts using the term “false flag” contained antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Read the full ARC analysis, “‘False Flag’ Claims Within an Hour: Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories Flourish After FlyDubai Terror Attack,” HERE.
“What’s striking here isn’t just the volume, it’s the speed,” said ARC Research Associate Oliver Marks. “67 minutes is all it took for the near downing of a commercial airliner by a terrorist pilot to become fodder for antisemitic conspiracy theorists across the globe. It’s clear this isn’t a narrative that forms in response to an incident. Rather, it’s part of a script that already exists, sitting ready for use whenever opportunities arise.”
The ARC study’s concluding assessment noted, “The pattern mirrors the influence operations that hostile states, Russia foremost among them, use to destabilize Western societies: sowing social division, exploiting breaking news events, and portraying Israel and Jews as the ‘hidden hand’ behind them.”
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