this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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I remember hearing that conspiracy theory, snopes has a detailed page about its origins: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/israelis-absent-911/
TLDR: originally it was not nazi, but Syrian propaganda. Obviously nazis pick up whatever fits their world view.
You just solved a 20 year old mystery that I didn't even realize I was curious about. It was super weird, because these were relatively progressive, educated adults, and the audacity of the bigotry just sort of left me confused. This helps me understand a little bit better.
Before the modern internet it was really hard to fact check something. In 2001 in the eastern bloc it was still rare to have internet at home (in Poland only 10% of the population used the internet in 2001 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?locations=PL), and English language knowledge was very low, the compulsory second language taught in schools was Russian before 1990 (this was the case in Hungary, I guess it was common in other Warsaw-pact countries).
I just looked up the snopes article now, I didn't know the origin story an hour ago, but I suspected it was not true. If someone just heard this gossip around that time they didn't really have an easy way to check it, and in their long term memory it was saved as fact.
Before the Internet, we had to rely mostly on Critical Thinking Skills, which used to be overtly taught in decent American school systems (not Republican states).
If someone in a bar said something as dumb as "No Jews died on 9/11," most people would recognize that as almost certainly wrong, just on the face of it. Two enormous NYC office buildings, filled with primarily financial companies, in a city with one of the highest Jewish populations in the world, and not ONE of them was Jewish?
Even if you could buy the ludicrous story that somehow EVERY single Jew was warned to stay out of the Twin Towers (and presumably all the airplanes, too), are we supposed to believe that wouldn't somehow leak out in the non-Jewish world? Some Jew wouldn't call a co-worker who is also a close trusted friend, and warn them to not go to work tomorrow? That someone wouldn't contact the media? That would require us to believe that the entire Jewish community is such a strong monolithic block that they would hide this massive secret from the rest of the world, and simply let their non-Jewish fellow citizens perish that day, instead of warning the authorities and stopping it.
Does that make any logical sense at all? It might if you are so virulently racist that you think the Jewish community would actually do that. But a thinking person would just look at them like they are either an idiot, crazy, or both.
Of course, the real problem in the pre-Internet era, is that you couldn't pull out your phone and slam the moron with sources and facts, so stupid arguments like this one would often end with a highly unsatisfying Agree to Disagree.
If someone in a bar said something dumb before the internet, most people actually believed it outright. I don't know what school taught you critical thinking, you lucky bastard, but you're in an enormous minority.
Most people carried so many misconceptions around, from small to big, it's not even funny. There was less connectivity in stupid people, so their bullshit wasn't that refined, but it was absolutely more ubiquitous.
And yet - *gestures to everything*
Tbf the Syrian regime had ties to Nazis
And these Syrian nazis wrote articles in the state newspaper Al-Thawra in 2001? Or what do you mean?