The Dancing Israelis and the Spurious Israel–9/11 Connection

a critical look at Ryan Dawson's "The Empire Unmasked"

Shortly after the World Trade Center was struck on September 11, 2001, residents of the Doric Apartment Corporation across the Hudson River witnessed three men taking what appeared to be video and photographs of the smoldering North Tower. What stood out was that all of them were inexplicably excited at the sight of the terrorist attack. The men were eventually detained and found to be Israelis who’d overstayed their visitor visas. Following the launching of an investigation, the company they worked for, Urban Moving Systems, suddenly shut down with its owners fleeing to Israel in a hurry.

While the Israelis were officially cleared of suspicion and deported before long, this episode has formed the primary basis for persistent theories about Israeli foreknowledge of, or even active involvement in, the largest terrorist attack in history — if true, it would obviously be of grave significance. The conspiracy has also forged the careers of a handful of Internet gadflies, most notably Ryan Dawson, who has been its most prolific popularizer through his many documentaries and interviews over the years.

This post will offer an alternative explanation for the so-called “Dancing Israelis” and will reassess the Mossad-9/11 theory as a whole, mainly structured around the claims Ryan makes in The Empire Unmasked. (Although very scattered, the film provides a popular record of the major claims.) It presents a more benign picture based on all the available evidence, from primary reporting of the incident to the 500-odd pages of the FBI’s own declassified files. It also corrects the innumerable lies told by Ryan and others, and puts forth indisputable proof of their dishonesty. Sources used among other resources will be collated at the very bottom of the page.

Ryan’s Mendacity

Let’s begin with the end, which I feel provides a clear example of the kind of tactics the conspiracists generally rely on.

Ryan Dawson closes The Empire Unmasked with a call to action, urging viewers to write to their congresspeople and agitate for change. He calls for an investigation into the 9/11 attacks, saying that he’d like for “heads to roll” because he’s “pretty damn sure what the results would be.”¹ There’s a lot of indignation here, and you would expect to find a compelling basis for it throughout the documentary. But then you realize what Ryan was actually closing on: the notorious, classified “28 pages.”²

Ryan repeatedly asserts that these documents implicate the state of Israel in the attacks on America. The declassification he demanded would then furnish official proof to vindicate the documentary’s narrative and tie it all together. Yet mere months after the film’s 2016 release, these 28 pages actually were declassified — and what top secrets did they reveal? 190 mentions of the word “Saudi”; zero mentions of “Israel.” As many now know, the pages had remained classified for, if anything, the intimate connections they reveal between the hijackers and the House of Saud, not because of any embarrassing links to the Mossad or to Israel as Ryan insisted all along. Clearly, he greatly overstated his case.³

But how could Ryan feel so confident about something so completely incorrect? He simply did what people often do when attempting to build up a losing case. They rely on a broad panoply of weak, circumstantial points, along with plenty of winks and nudges, to give off a strong impression that their argument is correct beyond a doubt. It’s then left to others to show that each one of their points is specious, one by one, and that what they’ve built up is in reality a false impression based on a lot of individually false claims and completely unjustified assumptions. Even if some of the peculiarities they manage to find can’t fully be ruled out, the case overall is far less impressive than they’ve made it out to seem and alternative explanations are much more likely. They might even consciously recognize this fact, and thus feel the need to deliberately mislead. They recognize that the narrative they want others to believe just won’t stick if they stick to the facts and the facts alone.

Let’s return to the 28 pages to see this in action. The individual points Ryan musters include the following, in order:

• Sen. Bob Graham discussing how the hijackers had to have received external funding from “foreign governments,” plural

• a German article about Israeli spies allegedly living next door to Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker

• the Dancing Israelis incident which the rest of this post will address

• Rep. Thomas Massie saying that the report was profoundly shocking to him

• the late Rep. Walter B. Jones, Jr. saying the report makes you question whom we think we can trust internationally⁴

Now, most of this is pretty tenuous.

Ryan makes a great deal out of the fact Sen. Graham used the plural “governments” to describe external involvement with 9/11, presumably Saudi Arabia and Israel. This could well have just been a thoughtless, minor mistake on the part of Graham that isn’t worthy of such intense scrutiny. This is especially likely when you just scroll down and read the rest of his response where he explicitly describes just one singular “foreign government” being involved. One can imagine how painful it would be to express this caution to him or his followers had the 28 pages that Graham references not been declassified, of course revealing mention of only a single foreign government, Saudi Arabia. This kind of “evidence” is the meat and potatoes of Ryan’s case.

The German article is far more revealing, however. Ryan brought it up at an earlier point in the video, though only briefly.⁵ He devotes serious time to advancing the idea that there were Israeli agents secretly monitoring the hijackers, with the implication that they were seeing to it that they had their needs filled and got to where they needed to be. (As seen above, Israel was the second “foreign government” financing the expedition, per Ryan.) And, at first, the Die Zeit article seems to provide intriguing evidence. The investigation, “Next Door to Mohammed Atta,” draws on reports from the DEA and French intelligence and opines that Israeli spies were probably on American soil conducting espionage on some of the hijackers prior to 9/11. However, it’s incredibly eye-opening that in both points in the documentary where Ryan brings up the article, he cuts it off right before it finishes on the following lines:

The Mossad is said to have repeatedly warned its American partners about the terrorists, especially about Khalid al-Midhar. The US government later acknowledged having received such warnings prior to 9/11. However, it was mostly assumed that attacks against US facilities outside the United States would be planned.

According to information from ZEIT, on the other hand, a few weeks before the terrorist attacks, the Israeli secret service gave the US authorities a list with the names of suspects who were in the United States to prepare for attacks. It was only shortly before September 11th that the CIA recognized the danger posed by al-Midhar and asked the investigating authorities to search for him.

It is hard to overstate how much this casts doubt on the entire theory of The Empire Unmasked. All the superficially suspicious evidence of an Israeli espionage campaign in the run-up to the attacks seemingly isn’t even implicating within this context: Why would the Israelis be warning America of an impending attack if they wished to see it carried through? Why would they be sharing specific, critical details of the plot with the government against whom the attacks would be conducted? Even more revealing, why would Ryan cut the article that professes all of this off exactly two lines before it makes the crucial point?

How Ryan Dawson clips the article, including only details of Israeli espionage. There’s plenty of room on screen; why not include the full thing?

The full article from Ryan’s own source, with the excluded lines highlighted.

Things like this call into question Ryan’s motives. He selectively cites only one part of the evidence that otherwise undermines his argument, namely that Israel would be named as an accomplice of sorts by the 28 pages. There’s no way you can willingly deprive your own audience of such information without being fully aware of how self-refuting it is.

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It has long been known that the Mossad warned America of an impending attack prior to September 11th. Justin Raimondo, on whom Ryan relies for far more than he’d like to admit, was actually pretty candid about this in his book, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection. Raimondo’s whole contention was that the warning was simply “non-specific”:

The Israelis warned us, in August 2001, when they sent a delegation to Washington, handed over a list of nineteen individuals in the U.S. whom they believed to be planning terrorist activities, and issued a non-specific warning that a major terrorist attack was afoot.

About the Zeit report, he writes this:

Die Zeit is quite clear that the Israelis were closely observing Atta and his friends. Yet the Israelis didn't tell us what they were up to until August, 2001: Der Spiegel reported that they handed over a list of 19 terrorist suspects [this number is likely his mistake], with at least four of the hijackers on it, "a few weeks before" 9/11, but the Americans say that the warning was for attacks "outside the United States."

But this isn’t exactly true either, of course, because Die Zeit notes very explicitly that the Israelis gave their American counterparts specific information on future hijackers based inside the US for the purpose of preparing obviously domestic attacks. The August 2001 warning by Israel also mentioned attacks within the United States; this “non-specificity” actually refers to shortcomings within American intelligence-gathering, not Israeli.

These facts being what they are, how can they be reconciled with conspiracy? It’s a difficult task, and one that most who subscribe to the theory, like Ryan, simply choose to ignore. But perhaps the Israelis only shared anything at all to divert attention away from themselves. Perhaps they made sure to do so only when the plot was too imminent to be prevented. And what are we to make of the Dancing Israelis, among all the other allegedly incontrovertible proof of Israeli complicity? This alternative isn’t necessarily impossible, but we’d first need to see the evidence that Ryan and his ilk have to offer.

Dancing Israelis

Narratives like this work by isolating a sketchy event from context, and then peppering on layers of nonsense. To fully address the Dancing Israelis, then, we will first have to account for the more specific claims made about them, and then answer the bigger, underlying questions.

One significant allegation has been that the exact timing of their presence at the Doric Apartments demonstrates foreknowledge. Let’s start here.

The Timing

The first plane hits the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 AM. Shortly thereafter, two different residents of the Doric Apartments in New Jersey spot three men kneeling on a white van in the parking lot and taking what they thought was video and pictures of the tower.

Ryan has claimed the following:

Eyewitnesses had seen them already on top of the roof of their van posing and taking pictures only five minutes after the first plane crash. Urban Moving Systems is at least five minutes away. They were already on the roof of a parking garage in place looking at the north side of the North Tower which is exactly where the plane impacted.⁶

Here are the actual accounts of both witnesses:

• Maria Settembrino, the main witness in the investigation, gives testimony here, here, and here; she was also interviewed in the ABC 20/20 report given in the appendix. She received a call at around 9:00 notifying her of the attack, and sometime after noticed the men through her window. This would be at least 14 minutes after the attack.

• The second witness (testimony here), unnamed, was notified of the attack “[l]ess than 5 minutes after the 1st plane.” Sometime after, he noticed the three Israelis; according to his recollection, “this occurred between 9:00am and 9:10am.”

Ryan appears to have been referencing the second witness’s account, but neither actually supports his assertion that the men were spotted “only five minutes after” the attack; Ryan simply misrepresented them. And moving beyond the witness testimony, the FBI ran a number of tests on the photos the men had taken regarding this question after seizing their camera:

• analysis of one photo indicated it was taken around 9:00

• a second test was found to place them closer to the second crash at 9:03 than to the first; in other words they were taken after 8:55

• in a third test, the FBI notes that one of the earliest photos was taken sometime between 8:50–9:03, but this test did not provide a precise time and thus is of little import

This is all the relevant information included in the FBI files, and taken together places the men at the Doric Apartments sometime after 8:55 but most likely before the second attack at 9:03. While they could’ve conceivably not taken pictures immediately upon arrival, there’s no evidence at least to suggest they were there suspiciously early, and the FBI eventually concluded that “[n]umerous circumstantial facts strongly support the . . . individuals statements they traveled to the roof of the parking garage after learning of the attacks from radio broadcasts and Internet news sites.”

The view of the Doric Apartments parking lot and former WTC location from Maria’s vantage point; taken from ABC 20/20

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But Ryan also tries his best to locate the men at this site fully prior to the first attack, well before 8:46, because in doing so he can suggest that they were already set up there, camera in hand, anticipating attacks no one else was aware would be taking place.⁷ To support this, he claims that their van was on site since 8:00 that morning, long before the attack.

Another witness did not see the men, but did see their Urban Moving Systems van at Doric Towers at 8 o’clock in the morning. This is long before the first tower was hit.⁸

This is also untrue.

This particular witness did not see an Urban Moving Systems van, but rather “the[/]a white van in the same parking lot” (and, in subsequent phrasings, simply “a white van”). Unlike the other two witnesses quoted in this document, this short account does not note anything to distinguish the vehicle, let alone the words “Urban Moving” on its side. It isn’t mere speculation to suggest there was another generic white van in the parking lot that morning, because in other documents, sure enough, we find just that. This is mentioned at two points in the files, probably from the same witness:

a white van was parked in the rear parking lot of the apartment complex. The van was white and had no windows on the sides. It appeared to be a utility van for an electric company. The name of the company, since forgotten, was in red letters on the van

At approximately 8:15 a.m. . . . [the witness] observed a white van parking in the rear parking lot of the apartment complex. . . . It appeared to be a utility van for an electric company because the words 'electric supplies', among others, were printed on it. The name of the utility or vendor company, since forgotten, was in red letters on the van.

This is certainly not the Dancing Israelis’ van. The testimony was collected in the evidence-gathering process, but does not relate to the incident at hand. In other words, there’s actually no evidence at all to suggest the Israelis were at the Doric Apartments “as early as 8:00,” either.

A bystander’s capture of the Israelis’ white van, featured on ABC 20/20 and Channel 4

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Ryan has further argued that some of the men were at the Doric Apartments the day before.⁹ This point is technically true: some Urban Moving Systems employees, including one of these men, had moved out a client from the building on September 10. In fact, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that this was how the men learned about the good view of the NYC skyline provided by the venue’s parking lot. But there’s no reason at all why being at a place that solely offers a view of the WTC on the day before 9/11 should raise eyebrows. Many people were in similar places the day before; it’s not like the men were seen snooping around the WTC itself for no known reason. This is clearly not a point you’re meant to think about too hard.

Some people, such as Whitney Webb, will go so far as to say that the photographs the men took included images from the day before, and depict the men appearing to anticipate what was to come. (Despite the fact that the FBI already emphasized how none of the photos were taken before 8:46 on 9/11.) When some of the 76 photos were released in a 2019 FOIA request, they seemed to be poor-quality, black-and-white photocopies (likely because the originals were destroyed back in 2005), and many details including the background are impossible to see. On some of the photos, however, you’re just able to make out the printed date 9/10, but the FBI is very clear about why this is the case:

An examination of the Canon EOS Rebel 2000 (serial number [redacted] time/date revealed that on 9/20/2001 at 10:03am the camera's readout read 9/19/2001 and 19:22.58. The discrepancy translates that the time/date readout is fourteen hours and forty one minutes late.

If only Webb would read the material she cites. And while this was most likely a simple configuration error, Ryan of course tries to spin it into evidence of conspiracy, depicting the men frantically screwing with the camera to conceal the evidence.¹⁰ But if the photographs depict the first Tower having just been hit, what could altering the time possibly do? And if it simply required the feds to snap another photo and compare with the current time to figure out the discrepancy, what gives?

Overall, we can conclude that 1. there’s no evidence that the men were at the Doric Apartments suspiciously early on 9/11 (because they likely were not), and 2. while the men were at the complex the previous day, they weren’t taking photos of the still-standing towers. That one misguided detail, by the way, is the entire novel basis for her article “FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks,” which is frequently cited among conspiracists to this day.

“Our Purpose Was to Document the Event”

The narrative that Ryan and others try to advance is not that these men were simply goofing off, but that they were on a mission to “document the event,” in the sense that they had foreknowledge of the attacks and wished to record the full thing. This idea was bolstered by a well-known comment one of these men made on future Israeli PM Yair Lapid’s talk show soon after returning to Israel:

The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event.¹¹

The three “Dancing Israelis” on Yair Lapid

While this is viewed as some sort of bombshell by the conspiracists, in reality the comment only seems suspicious if you already have the conspiracy theory in mind. When people use this exact phrase in other contexts, we know exactly what they mean. Obviously it makes little sense for the Israelis to admit on live television to having foreknowledge of the largest terrorist attack in history and a mission to record it — even if they did — only to be clipped and made viral; they were rather claiming to have “documented” the event like everyone else. In fact, they used this exact wording on another occasion:

But overall we documented the event, like everyone else there. We come from a country of terror attacks; we would not dare laugh at such a thing.¹² [via Google Translate]

A lot of people had eyes and cameras on the tower, and the Israelis were simply explaining that this was the benign reason why they were snapping photos. If we had the full recording of the talk show, this could probably be totally put to rest, but it unfortunately seems to be unavailable online.

Further, there are a couple elephants in the room. It would be truly bizarre for Israeli operatives to be “documenting the event” like this completely out in the open and conspicuously on the roof of a van behind the windows of an entire apartment complex, only to be predictably spotted by residents. In fact, Maria even claimed the men appeared to notice she was watching. This does not seem to be the behavior of seasoned spies fulfilling some sort of intelligence mission.

Even further, the FBI seized all 76 of the photos on the men’s camera and found that “[n]one of the pictures developed from the film . . . depicted the twin towers prior to the attack.” If these men truly were there prematurely, or as early as 8:00 as Ryan would have viewers believe, why would they not think to take photos before the towers were hit, or as the plane was colliding, and only do so minutes later, perfectly lining up with the FBI’s aforementioned conclusion? Why would the camera they were using to document the event rather be filled with extremely common photos that virtually everyone in the vicinity of the North Tower had after it was hit? Why would these pictures depict not the towers alone but the men in the foreground having fun, the last photo even showing something as inane as one of the men cleaning the van at a gas station? Clearly they were not “documenting the event” in any noteworthy sense.

Video Camera?

The above in part makes one unjustified assumption: that there was only a single camera, the 35mm Canon EOS Rebel 2000 with its exclusively still photographs. Ryan is positive the men also had a video camera that they were using to record the attack, so perhaps the Rebel 2000 was secondary and was just conveniently missing any photos with an incriminating timestamp — it’s possible. But a problem emerges for Ryan when we find out that only the Rebel 2000 was with the men when they were later arrested; any video camera they might’ve had was absent, denied by all of the men, and didn’t turn up at their workplace, either. Ryan tries to solve this problem by suggesting in The Empire Unmasked¹³ and stating as a fact in War by Deception¹⁴ that the men “passed off” the video camera in their travels later that day, before being detained in the afternoon. Ryan apparently even believes the FBI is secretly holding on to the camera and its video contents.¹⁵ This is all, of course, speculation in its purest form.

However, the possibility of a now-missing video camera was a problem for the feds as well, as seen in their files, because both witnesses thought the men were taking both video and pictures. At the conclusion of their investigation, however, they’d found no evidence that there ever was such a camera in the Israelis’ possession, and left it at that. Why was this? Was it simply the result of a coverup as Ryan would likely have it? Or was there some reason to believe that the film camera was all they had that day?

Let’s return to Maria, in a brief followup interview. For there to have been a video camera documenting the event, the men would’ve had to have been using it or at least had it out as they were taking still photos with the WTC burning in the distance. But Maria never saw these two cameras, explicitly mentioning seeing only one camera used by the men — which would have to have been the Rebel 2000, the photos from which prove beyond doubt that it was being used at this exact time. A reason she gave for thinking it was a video camera was the fact that its handler was using it in a drifting motion, panning the scene as one might do on video. But we know that this Rebel 2000 was described as being “really nice” with a “big lense [sic],” so the person taking the photos was likely simply using that feature just to view, not record, the destruction far away.

So Maria described just one camera when there necessarily should’ve been two, but likely mistook the film camera for a video camera. This is at the very least the most parsimonious explanation that doesn’t introduce any other hypothetical element like the men passing off only one of the cameras at some random location. While I wouldn’t be so arrogant to say for sure, in all likelihood the video camera was not found and was denied vigorously by all the men because it didn’t exist and was the result of a faulty sighting. Things like that happen all the time.

The Arrest

Maria manages to jot down the license plate number of the Israelis’ van as it was driving off, and notifies the police after her husband got home later that day. This leads to the issuing of a “Be On Lookout” (BOLO) for cops¹⁶ and an all-points bulletin for distribution in the media. The UMS van is finally pulled over at 3:56 PM by East Rutherford police officers Scott DeCarlo and Dennis Rivelli, traveling east on State Route 3, NJ. After hesitating to leave the van and with the driver seemingly fumbling with a black bag, five UMS employees including the three seen earlier are forcibly removed from the vehicle at gunpoint. The men are questioned on a service road off R-3 and then taken in on immigration charges. A bomb squad is called out (as was procedure on 9/11) and the items inside the van are logged and inspected.

What we know about the five Israelis is as follows (taken from the incident report unless otherwise specified):

• Sivan Kurzberg, pronounced “Kurtzberg,” (סיון קורצברג): 23, wore blue jeans and gray and black shirt, had an Israeli passport, (likely) a ticket for a flight to Greece on 9/12, and a “black leather fanny pouch type of bag” that contained a few items including $1,022[.30] cash; was the driver of the van and one of the three seen celebrating

• Paul Kurzberg (פאול קורצברג): 27, wore a pink shirt and blue jeans; Sivan’s older brother who was possibly inside the van as the others took pictures on the roof

• Yaron Shmuel (ירון שמואל): 25, wore jean overalls, had Israeli and German passports and an application to visit Australia¹⁷; was one of the three seen celebrating based on the clothing in the van photos

• Oded Ellner (עודד אלנר): 25, had $4,700 cash in a “white sock like sack”; was likely the third man seen celebrating

• Omer Gavriel Marmari (עומר מרמרי): 21; testimony given in FBI files

The Israelis as seen on Yair Lapid's talk show

The Israelis’ mugshots

Truthers allege a great deal about the concerning possessions found with these men, so let’s take a look.

Plane Tickets?

Ryan alleges that all five men had plane tickets providing immediate escape on September 12.¹⁸

What a coincidence that their working holiday ended for all five men, all set to go to different places in the world on the same day on a random Tuesday [he means Wednesday] in September.¹⁹

There are two big problems with this. First of all, it’s not even true. According to the FBI files, only one of the Israelis had a plane ticket for the following day, and it wasn’t to Australia or to Germany. It was probably Sivan Kurzberg who had a flight on September 12 to Athens, Greece, and he also planned on traveling to India. (In fact the Canon camera was apparently purchased by Sivan’s brother, Paul, for him to use in India.) Omer Marmari was brought on as a replacement for Sivan, and was the only one to not have overstayed his visa by the time of their arrest. Yaron Shmuel simply had an unsubmitted application to visit Australia, yet no actual flight planned, as well as a German passport²⁰; Ryan claims these things are proof that two separate men were flying out to Australia²¹ and to Germany²² shortly after 9/11. But we know, in fact, that this was only true for one man, and that he was actually being replaced by another.

The second big problem with this is ironically the very fact that one had a plane ticket for 9/12, given that 9/11 was carried out through the use of hijacked commercial planes. Very quickly, as one would expect, the entire American airspace was shut down to prevent any future attacks, and it was only days later that air traffic was allowed to gradually pick back up; JFKIA, from which the flight would depart, could only officially reopen on 9/14. Even Israel had shut down its airspace. But if this was as predictable as it was, why, then, would Sivan with his foreknowledge book a flight so close to the attack? Not only could this arouse suspicion toward the other four he’d be leaving behind, but it couldn’t realistically have even taken place. Further still, the travel itinerary included both the dates of arrival (June 15, 2001) and departure. This means that for the departure on September 12 to be of any significance with respect to 9/11, Sivan must have known the attack’s date on or before June 15. The problem is that the attack’s final date hadn’t even been decided yet by the perpetrators at their meeting in Tarragona, Spain in July.

Ryan was asked directly about these inconsistencies in his debate with Chef Leopard — one of the only times he’s received pushback on the issue — and he had no answer, instead deflecting to some other topic entirely.²³ Once again, this is not behavior consistent with Israeli operatives with foreknowledge of a massive terrorist attack.

Explosives?

Another item of concern is the oft-cited “explosives” found in the Israelis’ van. Now, there were no explosives in the van, as the Bergen Record notes:

The Bergen County Police bomb squad X-rayed packages found inside the van but did not find any explosives.

However it goes on to mention

that bomb-sniffing dogs reacted as if they had detected explosives, although officers were unable to find anything. The FBI seized the van for further testing.

And this claim is corroborated by the FBI files, which add that swabs were taken from the vehicle’s interior and sent off for identification. The (redacted) lab results appear to have been reproduced at a couple points in the documents, as early as 9/17, but do not figure in the actual investigation and as such, like the maps, do not seem to have been all that important. It’s very possible this was a false positive given by the bomb-sniffing dogs, but we’ll never know for sure. That’s simply a fact about the limited nature of these sources.

Maps and Other Shadiness

Ryan is also at great pains to emphasize the maps in their possession that “had highlighted the World Trade Center and [the] Doric Towers” spot from which they observed the attack.²⁴ The maps he puts on screen at this part of the documentary, of course, did not belong to the men and I can only assume are included for a visual recreation.

The early report of the incident from the Record seems to be the only source for these maps:

police in Bergen County detained five men who they said were found carrying maps linking them to the blasts . . . “There are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted,” the source said. “It looked like they're hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.” [emphasis added]

The item inventory does indeed show they carried maps with them — understandable for an early 2000s moving company — but their contents are not specified, and nowhere in the FBI documents do these maps come up as items of importance or relevance as they necessarily would if they bore incriminating markings. They aren’t even mentioned in the summaries of the “suspicious” or “odd” possessions. What is certainly made up by Ryan is the idea that they had highlighted both the WTC and the Doric Apartments, which isn’t even mentioned by the source above.

It’s important to remember that when the men were thrown out of the van, the police, and certainly bystanders, were understandably apprehensive to the point of being very unreasonable. Their arresting officer, DeCarlo, recalls how “there was confusion. Most people were driving by, they were screaming all sorts of excerpts. Profanity . . . nothing that I’d care to repeat.” According to the men’s recollection, “they pulled guns on us, threw us to the ground like terrorists, and civilians who were around shouted ‘shoot them in the head.’”²⁵ This was typical of the post-attack atmosphere, where embellishments in media were very common and everyone was demanding the perpetrators be caught and receive justice; we’ll get to more examples of this further down. While it’s unclear why the particular unnamed source cited by the Bergen Record brought up the maps the Israelis had on their person, he obviously received his information second-hand as indicated by his unfamiliarity with even the location of the event, and was likely confused, himself.

However this accusation of terrorism levied against the five men is also a plausible explanation for the originally discrepant accounts of their whereabouts on 9/11, e.g., why Shmuel falsely claimed to have been ”on the west side highway during the incident.” Ryan, though, can’t even get these alleged discrepancies right. For example, at 3:31:32 he claims that the explanation Shmuel later gave of arriving at work at 8:20, then spending ~10 minutes at Doric sometime between 8:30 and 9:00, is a lie because the attack occurred at 8:46. But, obviously, Shmuel wasn’t claiming they arrived exactly at 8:30, but rather were at the site during a 10-minute period sometime between 8:30–9:00, which perfectly matches what actually happened. At 3:33:36, Ryan claims that Sivan admitted to investigators that since they could only see one tower from the rooftop at Urban Moving Systems, this was the reason they moved to the Doric location “so that they could document the event,” with the implication that he was expecting the second tower to be hit before it happened; but the document says none of this, and is in fact describing the Israelis’ activities coming back from the Doric Apartments. At 3:33:04 and 3:37:32, Ryan claims the men lied about stopping for gas without even providing a reason, and even when the FBI interviewed an Arab gas station worker and confirmed this very detail.

(EDIT 11/02/23: One set of documents I missed apparently corroborates this point further, though Ryan erroneously interprets them to again place the men at Doric prior to 8:46.)

Urban Moving Systems, Inc.

Ryan and friends outside the former UMS warehouse

On 9/13, the FBI conducts a search of the Israelis’ employer, Urban Moving Systems, and questions its owner, Dominik Suter. “[O]n or about 9/14,” Suter abandons the business, puts his home up for sale, and flees to Israel with his family.

Why would he do such a thing? As the ABC 20/20 investigation put it:

Was Israeli intelligence using Urban Moving as a cover? And if not, why did the company suddenly shut down after the five employees [were] arrested? Why did the owner abruptly leave the country, leaving behind a significant investment, a thriving business, and a lot of unhappy customers?

Hurriedly fleeing to another country after your employees are detained is obviously fishy behavior, and this detail is taken for a smoking gun by the conspiracists. But all you really have to do is think about the whole thing a little deeper. I’ve mentioned before that four (and almost all five) of the Israelis were illegal residents overstaying visas, and yet were under the employ of Dominik Suter — so what does that make him?

Simply put, Suter was a scam artist whose entire labor force was comprised of illegal immigrants as well as those on visitor visas and thus barred from working. There were 20–30 of them total, mainly Israelis and Eastern Europeans but with some Georgians and Hungarians as well. He would solicit these people by advertising in the region’s many foreign-language newspapers, allowing him to enjoy all the perks of illegal labor. This explains why two of the Israelis were found carrying cash on them, a detail often cast as sketchy: there are multiple references to how Suter would pay his employees in cash, off the books, which, as illegals, was likely optimal for them too.²⁶ The FBI files are indeed filled with descriptions of Suter’s many abuses, often illegal. He would offer his employees fraudulent driver’s licenses. He ran an alternative business called “Max Movers” allegedly to direct unwitting customers to, giving off the illusion of competition. But it’s bigger than just this.

The door to the UMS building, taken from Mark Levin’s Protocols of Zion (2005)

Urban Moving Systems, Inc. was formed in 1997 according to government records, and was a growing enterprise. But, if its hiring practices are any indication, it also happened to be a complete fraud. Israeli moving companies had dominated the New York market for years, and were notorious in the industry for playing dirty pool. The scam involves citing low rates to clients, then hiking the prices while said clients’ goods are in the movers’ possession; it’s simple extortion. In a later interview, one of the Israelis added:

that was the Israeli system over there. The moving system. That you start the move with one price estimate, and then start to charge for every box, for everything. Anything you ask for . . . And when it goes to storage, then the clock starts to tick . . . For every night, for every day, every day. And if you don’t pay, you don’t get your stuff. That was the big system.

Two years after the attack, there was a major crackdown of these shams in what was known as Operation Stow Biz. Some scammers would end up prosecuted, but others would flee to Israel before conviction, taking advantage of the country’s loose extradition habits. So when five of his illegal employees were arrested and the feds began snooping around his business, Dominik Suter became just another Israeli moving scam artist who fled to Israel. And sure enough, by December NJ authorities had filed a lawsuit against Urban Moving Systems for violating the state’s Consumer Fraud Act. The Deputy Police Chief remarked that “[e]ven before Sept. 11, we had calls from people who said they were trying to extort more money from the customers to move their furniture.” Suter was in absentia “charged with several counts of extortion and for passing bad checks.” This was why he picked up and left; as the FBI said: “to avoid prosecution.”

Traveling Israelis

An insurance agent who handled UMS was interviewed by the FBI. He noted similarities between the company and another business they were insuring, Moishe’s Moving Company. The agent described the workers at Moishe’s as “all young individuals from Israel just out of the military. [He] stated he knows this because the subcontractors talk openly about their experiences. [He] also stated the subcontractors seemed to be all hard working nice individuals.”

Moishe’s Moving apparently “started the ball rolling for Israelis in the mid-1980s,” “displacing the Irish and Italians” who’d previously dominated New York moving. “Often the Israelis who join the moving companies are young men fresh out of the Army looking to see the world before they settle down. They are attracted to New York because so many Israelis already live there, and by the lure of "easy money," . . . sometimes more than $6,000 a week.” This concept of young Israelis finishing their compulsory military service and traveling while still young is a thoroughly-covered phenomenon. As The Telegraph puts it:

Young Israelis are required to serve in the military and there is a long tradition that after completing their national service they take advantage of their freedom to go out and see the world.

A Forbes blogpost explains further:

[There are] 30,000-40,000 Israelis who backpack overseas every year . . . Seventy percent of these backpackers are between the ages of 20 and 24, which means they represent one third of the 75,000 Israelis who have completed their mandatory military service and are discharged from the Israel Defense Force each year. . . . For many Israelis, a backpacking trip after their mandatory military service is as much a rite of passage as the two or three years they spend in the army. . . . “People had a rough time in the army . . .  They need to blow some steam off, get over the hard things they had to see.” . . . Upon discharge, however, a soldier receives a bonus of between $1,500 to $3,300, depending on the length of service and whether one was in combat service. This usually covers part of the travel costs. It is common for Israelis to work for up to a year to scrape together additional funds for backpacking . . . Israelis work and backpack at the same time. . . . The typical Israeli backpacker is spontaneous, cost-conscious, and likes traveling in groups.

Who does all this remind you of?

Recall Sivan Kurzberg, who’d arrived in the US back in June and was planning on traveling to India. (Kurzberg also complained that the arrest disrupted the travels he’d planned since joining the IDF.) Or Yaron Shmuel, who’d in the past been to Germany and was looking to explore Australia. Another, likely Marmari, also mentioned traveling around the world. Unless they have some pretty extraordinary agendas, this doesn’t seem to fit the itineraries of focused Israeli spies. It does, however, fit another profile entirely, one of young Israelis spending some time in New York to save up funds for their travels abroad. This, at least, perfectly corresponds to the description of one coworker, who “believes that they all do a lot of traveling around the world,” and “stated that they travel until they run out of money, then they go back to work for a while, accumulate money and then travel again.”

The Question of Espionage

Most of this post has been dedicated to the claim that the five Israelis were in on 9/11 in some way, shape, or form. What we can be reasonably sure about thus far is that they were not sent on some sort of documentary mission by the Mossad, and that there’s no indication they possessed specific foreknowledge. Ryan’s narrative falls apart in the face of questions like why the men were so indiscreet about their actions that day, why they apparently arrived and took photos only after the fact, why one of them planned a flight he should’ve known couldn’t have taken place, or why the Mossad would issue repeated warnings to and share intelligence with America, or even why they would put such young, dope-smoking dorks on such an important mission in the first place. The positive evidence he puts forth for the narrative, needless to say, also proves nothing. And the blatant lies speak for themselves.

But serious questions still remain about the connections between Urban Moving Systems, Inc., or at least some of its Israeli workers, and Israeli intelligence. Fairly quickly into their investigation of the five men, FBI-Newark²⁷ (FBI-NK) transferred the case, initially counter-terrorist in purpose, to its counterintelligence squad, C-9. This was done in the wake of the multi-day police search at UMS, during which Dominik Suter abandons his business and flees. It is repeatedly implied by the files that this was a major reason for the transfer, which, according to ABC 20/20, was motivated by the belief that “Urban Moving may have provided a cover for agents of Israeli intelligence.” The feds were not yet aware of his commercial misdeeds.

It’s important to stress that by all available indications UMS was indeed a “legitimate” business endeavor, at least in the sense that it did receive clients, perform moves, and conduct all the expected activities of a moving company. (Recall the move performed at Doric on 9/10, or all the personal effects left behind and redistributed to clients after Suter’s departure.) When The Forward described UMS as having “few discernable assets,” this seems to have been unjustified, because aside from the vehicles, this was a growing business that had even just recently enjoyed a small business loan of nearly $500,000. (Ryan bizarrely claims the Mossad, rather than the SBA, gave them the loan, yet he provides no evidence for this and quickly changes subjects.²⁸) One FBI agent exhibited similarly unjustified suspicions when they noted that “[o]ddly, equipment typically used in a moving company's daily duties was not found [in the van], including work gloves, blankets, straps, ropes, boxes, dollies, rollers, etc.” Now, not only would this equipment not be expected for the company van being used off-duty²⁹, it wouldn’t have even fit into the Chevy 2000, along with client goods and the drivers; actual moving of goods was likely delegated to the numerous large panel trucks owned and rented by UMS. Instead, the client forms, business cards, and the infamous box cutters all found inside the vehicle fit perfectly into a moving company’s daily obligations.

As mentioned above, the business had also been around for several years, predating the terrorist plot, and employed workers of many different backgrounds, not just Israelis or Jews. Additionally, as we have seen, Israeli-owned moving companies were predominant in the region well before 9/11 as well as years after the fact. Many Israelis come to the New York area as a destination along their travels and seek employment; many of the moving companies in turn seek out Israelis and other tourists for cheap, under-the-table work. For most of the five Israelis, this appears to be a fitting explanation.

Israeli Art Scammers

But it is also typical for intelligence agents to utilize extant practices as a cover for their operations. This seems to have been the case with the Israeli “art students,” who would have been piggy-backing off an existing scam that persisted many years after the 9/11 attacks. Israelis are indeed still notorious for pedaling deceptively cheap artwork to unwitting citizens all over Australia³⁰, New Zealand³¹, Canada³², and I’m sure elsewhere. None of these international incidents ever seem to have aroused the suspicions they did in America, and, according to one espionage expert interviewed by The Forward:

it is unlikely . . . that such an operation would have survived the media storm it encountered . . . in the United States. It’s even more unlikely . . . that such an operation would be resurrected immediately afterward in Canada or anywhere else.

Most of the America-based art students were likely “benign,” too. This was the belief of a May 2001 intelligence bulletin, which described “two groups involved,” one with “an apparently legitimate money-making goal,” and the other with an unknown agenda. This would also explain why the authorities were actually first tipped off to the students’ activities by a former Israeli intelligence officer who described the recruitment process for these scams back in Israel.³³

But a now-infamous memo from the DEA released shortly after 9/11 revealed suspicious characteristics. A contemporary Fox News article which quotes from the memo claims it was produced by a multi-agency working group that had been studying the phenomenon since the mid-1990s (or well before the hijackers had arrived).³⁴ It documents all of the cases up to that point of the encounters that regional DEA offices had with the art scammers, finding, in their assessment, an unusually high number of students with backgrounds in military intelligence. While most of the incidents involved a similar MO as other scams³⁵, not a few Israelis were reported persistently bypassing security measures and engaging in behavior atypical of salesmen. One other point of interest is that a central point of such encounters seemed to be the Hollywood, FL area, which would come to be noted as a hotbed of hijacker activity.³⁶ Why DEA offices were of particular concern is unknown, and the memo suggests some scammers may have been involved with Israeli organized crime, which had been a major player in the drug trade.³⁷ Others have speculated that this was an intentional distraction from an underlying intelligence mission, though to me this seems somewhat counterintuitive.

Whatever the case may have been with the art scammers³⁸, Israel has long maintained spies on American soil, unauthorized but occasionally tolerated, mostly to monitor local Arab communities for connections to Hamas and Hezbollah. According to The Forward:

Most experts and former officials interviewed for this article said that such so-called unilateral or uncoordinated Israeli monitoring of radical Muslims in America would not be surprising. In fact, they said, Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation last December. “I have no doubt Israel has an interest in spying on those groups,” said Peter Unsinger, an intelligence expert who teaches justice administration at San Jose University. “The Israelis give us good stuff, like on the Hamas charities.”

And, as noted at the beginning of this post, Israeli intelligence did possess leads on a potentially major attack in the works, as well as on some of the Islamists who would be carrying it out. (The Die Zeit reporter suggests four of the 19.) It would appear this kind of intelligence would have to have come from spies based on American soil, whatever their cover or identity.

Because the precise nature of Israeli intelligence operations in America prior to 9/11 isn’t fully known, one line of speculation that’s popped up has been that the warnings Israel did provide were potentially inadequate. This was the argument of Gerald Shea, a retired lawyer who sent a memo to Congress in 2004 requesting public inquiry into the matter. But Shea’s conclusions are intentionally guarded, and while we may not know how long the Israelis possessed this crucial information, we also don’t know how thoroughly they cooperated with American authorities in addition to the little that’s trickled out into the press. And even if the names of several hijackers were handed over less than a month before the attack, it’s unclear why the Mossad would do such a thing at all if not to prevent it, especially since this would then clue the feds in to the presence of their spy network. If the Mossad instead wished to see the attack through, the sensible thing would be to stay quiet. That nothing would eventually come of their warning was also not a guarantee, but the product of long-standing internal incompetence on the part of the CIA. As Newsweek noted in a recent piece:

U.S. intelligence knew that something was coming—something big—but it was anything but methodical. Despite countless signs that some terrorist planning and preparations involved large commercial airliners, the CIA was never able to put the pieces together. But more important, neither the CIA nor the FBI (nor other agencies) effectively used the tools that were at their disposal. There was no nationwide manhunt, no definitive warning to airlines or airport security.

The men were allowed not only to board the planes on September 11, but to book the flights in late August, after Mossad’s warning, using their real, un-flagged names.

Regardless, all the unknowns in the Israeli-American relationship before 9/11 probably tend to support Shea’s unresolved plea for transparency, and should be added to the countless other pending items of interest regarding the attacks. While I see no positive evidence to this end, significant uncertainty remains.

Also note the stark differences between the more sophisticated argument of someone like Gerald Shea and the argument put forth by Ryan Dawson. Unlike Ryan, Shea makes no claims of Israeli involvement in 9/11. He does not argue that the Mossad was actively lending support to the eventual hijackers, or that they were involved in the alleged controlled demolition of the WTC as Ryan implies, or that they were actually attempting to carry out additional attacks themselves, for whatever reason. (See the following section for more on that.) His line of argument, whatever its merit, is basically foreign to the “Israel did 9/11” crowd.

Shea’s “New Jersey Spy Cell”

But what does all this suggest about the five Dancers? If Israeli agents were using other schemes as cover, could Urban Moving Systems have been just another front for the Mossad? One unjustified point from Shea’s memo is his taking for granted that the Dancing Israelis, were part of this alleged intelligence-gathering operation, primarily due to 1. their proximity to some hijackers in NJ, and 2. their notorious jubilation at the attacks.³⁹

Regarding point 1., the 19 hijackers lived in and visited a number of locations around the country during their stay, “[l]iving mostly in central Florida, Southern California, northern Virginia and northern New Jersey.” Their links to North Jersey aren’t very surprising given the area’s large Muslim community; UMS’ stationing in the area likewise isn’t surprising, given its sizable, adjacent Jewish community⁴⁰ and proximity to NYC. But the hijackers first made contact with the area in March 2001 and “were hardly noticed” while UMS had been in the area since 1997. The proximity thus appears incidental rather than indicative of the alleged shadowing efforts of other Israeli nationals.

Point 2. is obviously central to the whole affair. Why would anyone be so callous in view of such tragedy and danger? This behavior would raise red flags for anyone, including the investigators; to the conspiracists, as well as to Shea, it’s patent evidence of foreknowledge, satisfaction that a goal had been successfully carried out. According to the men’s private explanations, however, their giddy reaction was rather a morbid expression of relief. As one put it, “Israel now has hope that the world will now understand us.” Another reportedly told a coworker that “now you see what they are capable of doing and added that the U.S. will have to get involved now.” Yet another “apologized for appearing happy in the photographs. [He] stated that Israel has been dealing with incidents like this for years. He believes that the United States will take steps to stop terrorism in the world.” The attack happened in a context within Israeli society, which not only had a long history with domestic terrorism but was actually toward the middle of the Second Intifada. A terrorist attack outside their borders, then, meant others would now know how it feels and would come to sympathize with Israelis.

Given that they were rejoicing after only the first plane, however, some have taken issue with this justification. How could the Israelis have possibly known it was terrorism when everyone else was still in the dark? But just how “in the dark” everyone necessarily was in the 17 minutes between the first and second attacks seems overblown to me. It would not be so far-fetched to assume that a plane flying so low on a clear day as to hit the beacon of NYC, already a subject of terror not even a decade prior, was an act of terrorism. Most of the real-time news coverage I’ve reviewed mentions all these things, too, albeit adding a mandatory word of caution until the second attack dissipated all hovering doubts.

Take FOX4’s coverage, for example:

[0:21+] The Twin Towers, of course, was the target of a terrorist bombing several years ago down in the basement area. . . .

[1:36+] So there would be the suspicion, then, that anybody who would drive a plane smack into the middle of the the World Trade Center would have done it on purpose. It would seem that either that or they lost control but I can’t see something like that I mean it was right into the building, you know and it was coming low.

Even still, one would expect Israelis, much more familiar with terrorism, to be in a different headspace than the average American. In this scenario, then, rather than celebrating a successful Israeli plot, or anticipating an attack, camera in hand, the three movers were simply making light of something more common to them in a land no one would have expected. This kind of behavior is of course condemnable, but proponents of the conspiracy frequently confuse its ethics with it being evidence of a criminal link. And looking back, this theory seems to be supported by that infamous comment Sivan Kurzberg made when being removed from the van:

We are Israeli, We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.

While Shea omits this last sentence in his memo⁴¹, the entire phrase appears to indicate that the men were unaware that Osama or Al Qaeda were behind the terror, instead linking it to the Intifada back home. I see no other plausible explanation for the remark.

Dancing Mossad Agents?

The agents in the FBI-NK/NYO investigation, at any rate, seem to have been satisfied not only that the men lacked foreknowledge of 9/11, but that they were also not engaging in espionage. By 9/24, its own classified files revealed that

Both the Newark and the New York Divisions conducted a thorough investigation which determined that none of the Israelis had any information or prior knowledge regarding the bombing of the World Trade Centers. Furthermore, Newark and New York determined that none of the Israelis were actively engaged in clandestine intelligence activities in the United States.

The following day, the department pursues deportation and hands the men over to the INS. However, the INS only got around to deporting them on 11/20, nearly two whole months later, and they finally arrived in Israel on 11/21. According to ABC 20/20, the reason for this delay was that “the FBI and CIA put a hold on the case” as part of their investigations into other Israeli illegals throughout the country. According to sources interviewed by The New York Times, these investigations were part of a broad scrutiny applied to those overstaying their visas, and had to do with their companies of employment. But in many cases, including that of the Dancing Israelis, foreign intelligence links were almost certainly pursued as well as the FBI attempted to remove whatever human intelligence Israel had in the country.

Regarding the five men, we also learn from the files that members of the national intelligence community intimately involved with these dealings didn’t take FBI-NK’s conclusions for granted. In mid-2003, the department drafted a summary report of their findings for FBI HQ. It further reveals that:

In April of 2002 an in-depth analytical inquiry was initiated by personnel from FBIHQ and other members of the U.S. Intelligence Community who physically traveled to Newark to review this case file. Newark was advised the purpose of the inquiry was to determine if a nexus, if any existed between the five (5) Israeli Nationals under investigation by Newark to other Israeli Nationals fitting a similar "profile" some of whom were also held in INS detention around the time of 9/11/01. The analytical inquiry further attempted to determine if these five (5) individuals were possibly part of clandestine human intelligence collection network. Newark notes that the findings of FBIHQ's analytical inquiry are not complete at the time of this writing.

In other words, while FBI-NK and the New York Office ruled the men were uninvolved with Israeli espionage, other agents remained interested.

A few such agents came to make (mostly anonymous) statements to the mainstream press in 2002, expressing a hunch that UMS employees may have been spying on the local Arab community. One point of suspicion is that, according to terrorism consultant Vince Cannistraro⁴², “the names of two of the five Israelis showed up on a CIA-FBI database of foreign intelligence operatives.” This, accordingly, played a major role in the transfer of the case to FBI-NK’s C-9 squad. If you noticed earlier, while FBI-NK’s investigation ruled out the possibility of the men actively engaging in espionage, it did not deny potential links to the Mossad — which would not necessarily be surprising. Since military service is compulsory for all Israelis, that some would have played a role in intelligence is not as eyebrow-raising as it would be for, say, a group of Americans.

The FBI’s 2003 report mentioned above apparently refers to this database hit, mentioning that the C-9 investigation “was initiated after the criminal investigation indicated a possible/undefined intelligence affiliation with an Israeli Intelligence Service.” The only time it appears to mention this connection in the subsequent report, however, is in relation to an Israeli UMS worker spotted in Pennsylvania, unrelated to the five in question:

A search of FBI records for any references to [blank] (Urban Moving employee detained and questioned in Pennsylvania) revealed two (2) references to a [blank] born [blank] which further identified [blank] as an [blank]

Whether these references are what Cannistraro (who was briefed on the investigation but personally uninvolved in it) was referring to is unclear.

Paul Kurzberg, on the other hand, apparently had also worked for Israeli intelligence in the past. He was the one who notoriously resisted taking polygraph tests, and then failed one, “but did better on a second try.” According to his own admission in a later interview, he served in a “special unit” in the IDF, but refused on principle to divulge information: “It’s not a big secret or something like that, but there are things that I have to keep to myself, as loyal to my country.” According to ABC, his lawyer claimed “he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.”⁴³

That FBI-NK/NYO was wrong and that some UMS employees conducted intelligence-gathering on the nearby North Jersey Muslim community are certainly possible, albeit unclear. As previously argued, the company itself was almost certainly independent of such operations, and for most of our five, traveling seems a more fitting explanation. It should be emphasized, however, that while there was debate over the workers’ exact activities, the same sources otherwise willing to volunteer such unauthorized conclusions also distinguished this from the question of foreknowledge. As ABC 20/20 concluded:

Sources tell 20/20 there is still debate within the FBI over whether or not the young men were spies. But many in the US intelligence community believe that some of the men were engaged in espionage for Israel. However, sources also tell us, even if they were spies, there was no evidence to conclude they had advanced knowledge of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Were There Other Vans?

Ryan introduces the Israel part of his video not actually with the Dancing Israelis incident, but rather with a montage of news clips reporting of a van allegedly ready to blow up the George Washington Bridge (GWB) linking New Jersey and Manhattan.⁴⁴ In fact, Ryan’s theory is that the Mossad had at least four different vans tooling around New York that day.⁴⁵

From War by Deception, 14:31

The Dancing Israelis, then, were just one piece of the puzzle, and actually pulled attention away from this other “far more damning” van packed with explosives.⁴⁶ Here’s the TL;DR for this one: it was a myth. Such a van never existed.

But how can I say this with such confidence? After all, Ryan even provides an image of its two Israeli drivers in custody (and apparently even being arraigned?):

But, characteristic of Ryan, there’s no source attached and the viewer is expected to take him at his word that the photo depicts what he says it does. And it doesn’t.

I was able to track the photo down to some random story from 2004 about two Israeli residents arrested for speeding. Since then, people have apparently been misusing this image left and right. Images of the same men were featured in an article by Christopher Bollyn, who claimed the men depicted had attempted to drive a truck of explosives into a naval base, which also never happened and should stand as a testament to how dishonest these people are. In fact, Bollyn amazingly claims in the article that one of these men (whose names return nothing in a Google search) somehow later learned of his obscure article and emailed him, confirming everything he wrote and basically patting him on the back. Whatever the case, the photos are certainly not who Ryan says they are.

Bollyn’s images

And if Ryan at least agrees that Arab hijackers were the ones who actually committed the other attacks, even as Israelis stood by and cheered them on, why would these other alleged foiled plots be carried out by the Israelis themselves? Pretty odd.

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But what about the news reports Ryan and others cite? There are so many clips one can pull up of news anchors and reporters mentioning the GWB incident that it couldn’t possibly be untrue — or can it? Let’s first review the context.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, people were understandably frantic. Put yourself in that environment: you wouldn’t know that there were only four planes and another attack may well have been on its way. This kind of fervor could only lead to desperate confusion as well as heaps of misinformed reporting. And it did. There were “any number of reports all day long about bombs in schools, planes setting down because there was a rumor of a bomb on board.” There were rumors of a plane hitting the UN, of a fire at the Capitol Mall, of an explosion on Capitol Hill. There was reporting of a car bomb detonating outside the State Department headquarters, which never happened and was later retracted. There was reporting of miraculously surviving first responders emerging from the rubble, which also, sadly, was never to take place.

In this latter example, we can see how these things often started: the story had developed from a few firefighters getting trapped under some rubble for only a couple minutes. Confused onlookers then gave false testimony to reporters, along with a lying witness who’d claimed her husband was one of those who’d just been saved.

The New York Times put it like this:

Tips are sometimes reported as they are received and correspondents and anchors convey information as they are developing it. Sometimes it pans out, and sometimes it doesn't.

Obviously this practice, although reasonable in light of a need for speedy information, can greatly sacrifice accuracy.

Now, these reports aren’t usually fabricated; the basis they typically do have just gets ripped out of context, and the story may develop on its own from there in a game of journalistic telephone. And for the reporting of a truck attempting to blow up the George Washington Bridge, this was very clearly the case.

I’ve gone ahead and collected all the news reports I could find and organized them into a (loose) chronological order. The contrasting details will be emboldened for comparison. If we carefully analyze all of the reporting, we can see how it mutated and, most importantly, can surmise the actual event it was referencing the whole time.

• CBS-2’s Marcia Kramer gives an exclusive report which likely kicked everything off. The report mentions two people arrested in the NJ Meadowlands after driving a truckload of explosives across the GWB.

• CBS’s Dan Rather, relying on Kramer’s report, goes on to twist the story into two people arrested underneath the GWB.

• CNN’s Deborah Feyerick reports “from two sources” of either two or three men in a van near the bridge, but admits uncertainty of the location in which they were actually arrested, which was possibly on top of the bridge.

• FOX-5 reports of a white van on R-3 in the Meadowlands.

• FOX-5’s Mary Garofalo reports of three men in a white truck, this time coming from the Meadowlands, heading over the GWB when intercepted. This report mentions a certain all-points bulletin.

• ABC’s John Miller briefly reports on a truck with explosives in NJ, although with plenty of precaution.

• CBC’s Peter Mansbridge reports of a truck with two people and explosives on the GWB.

• Channel 8 News broadcasts a man’s account of an officer instructing him to leave the nearby Tri-Borough bridge because of two trucks with explosives headed to the Meadowlands; however, Channel 8 immediately contradicts this report with information of a single van targeting the GWB.

(Note how none of these reports actually specify the GWB van was driven by Israelis; this is just another thing Ryan takes for granted.)

From these highly inconsistent initial reports, taken together, we can get a basic idea of what’s going on. The original event they’re ultimately referencing is the Dancing Israelis’ van being pulled over; there are no two vans, only this one. The Meadowlands region that kept getting referenced — and even more so “R-3 in the Meadowlands,” — is the exact location where the five Israelis were pulled over.

A lot can be gleaned from Marcia Kramer’s reporting since it’s the initial sketch of this version of events. She claims two people were arrested in the Meadowlands with a truckload of explosives after driving across the GWB. So, contrary to the later accounts, she places the “truck” in the same location as the Israelis’ van, introducing a couple novel elements both minor and major:

• two people arrested

• driving it across the GWB

• being packed full of explosives.

As to the GWB, it’s certainly possible the Israelis had driven their van over the GWB prior to being arrested, when they were stuck in traffic searching for a way back to their apartments in Brooklyn. This is actually how the NYT originally reported it and is similar to how their lawyer would recall it years later.

Regarding the explosives, we only need to recall the incident with the bomb squad. It’s understandable that this would trigger a panic just hours after the WTC attacks and with bystanders already suspecting the men of terrorism. In fact, The Record reported that “[a]s a precaution, police shut down Route 3 traffic in both directions after the stop and evacuated a small roadside motel near the Sheraton” and that “police evacuated the [Homestead Studio Suites H]otel without offering guests an explanation.” It’s easy to see how this episode would be interpreted as the discovery of a “truckload of explosives,” the exact interpretation Yaron Shmuel would later describe in a Channel 4 interview: “they said there’s a bomb in a white van . . . they’re on their way to Manhattan to make a suicide.”

We can then see the story evolve when Dan Rather mistakenly links the two details together: instead of having simply driven over the GWB, now the drivers were said to have targeted the GWB with their purported explosives, a simple but highly consequential error. Further confused reporting goes on to claim the van was stopped on, or near, or heading toward the bridge. Other reporting claims there were not two men in a truck but three men in a white van, apparently adding fresh details from the UMS incident. (Recall that while there were five Israelis arrested, only the three witnessed taking pictures were mentioned in the original APB.) Even Ryan seems uncertain whether there were two or three people in this GWB van.⁴⁷

Despite the fact Marcia Kramer’s initial report was said to have been confirmed by the NYPD and Mayor’s Office officials (who, if anything, were likely referencing the five Israelis), every time an authority figure was asked directly about explosives on the GWB they either pleaded ignorance or denied it outright, including NBC’s interview with a Port Authority inspector and their interview with NY Governor George Pataki. Dan Rather eventually qualifies his initial reporting, saying that CBS reached out to FBI HQ and NYC law enforcement officials who claimed they knew nothing about the story. 

Later on, NYC Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik clarifies on one occasion that he’d received a report of “a van that might have had explosives in it,” but denied there were any explosives on or near the GWB. And at a later press conference with Giuliani, he directly refers to the UMS van, mentioning receiving confirmation of a NJ van with three men in it, but that it didn’t have any explosives and wasn’t on the GWB. After these official clarifications, news media retractions begin to filter in — albeit still confused and mainly emphasizing the most important detail of the story to worried Americans, the lack of explosives. Peter Mansbridge claims simply there were no explosives in the van, not mentioning that it wasn’t on the GWB. Brokaw does the same, adding that all sorts of false reports have been coming in all day. CNN’s Bill Hemmer mentions the lack of explosives in a van “outside New York City.”⁴⁸ 

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So that’s what happened. The Dancing Israelis’ van was pulled over in the Meadowlands after driving across the GWB, and bomb-sniffing dogs indicated the presence of explosives. In the frenetic atmosphere of post-attack September 11, with all sorts of misinformed leads being passed around, the incident gets reported as a vehicle carrying explosives on the George Washington bridge — some pretty simple mistakes that make worlds of difference. Then the reporters ask officials for more details about such a sensational happening, only to be told very plainly that there was no such incident, and that they were really referring to the UMS van pulled over along Route 3. The reporters then retract yet another false story of the day, and everyone moves on with their lives.

Everyone, that is, except for Ryan Dawson and his fellow conspiracists. They will often dismiss Bernard Kerik’s statement out of hand by attacking his character; thus, reason to doubt the incident (although not the only one of course) becomes independent proof of a systematic coverup. While the man was surely involved in some corrupt dealings years later, it’s unclear how this so obviously invalidates his statement on a completely different matter.

Giuliani was very clever. He never answered any of his questions directly. Any time that [the GWB van incident] came up, he turned around behind him and had Kerik come to the microphone. Kerik would admit arrests but deny the explosives found. Of course it’s hard to trust somebody who’s getting a half a million dollars worth of loans from Israeli businessmen that we know of. (2:45:17)

Except the loan in question was taken in 2003, well after the press conference, and of course Giuliani would pass the mic to the person with the relevant answer.⁴⁹ None of these criticisms make sense and all of them rely on the same desperate tactics and cheap insinuations intended to lend a patina of credence to this preselected narrative. And one is dying to ask the obvious: if they could just cover something like that up so easily, why would they not only refuse to cover up but openly admit to the other van of Israelis caught observing the attacks that Ryan regards as “damning” as well? None of this makes sense, because none of it is true.

The Big Picture

To put everything together: in all likelihood, what actually happened?

Two months after the 9/11 attacks, over one thousand illegal residents were detained on immigration charges in the massive criminal inquiry known as PENTTBOM. As one Justice Department spokesman put it, “We are conducting the largest investigation in U.S. history, and we are leaving no stone unturned.” Swept up in this great process were the five “Dancing Israelis.”

By all indications, these men went to work as usual on 9/11 and arrived at the Doric Apartments site after receiving news of the 8:46 strike. Like many other bystanders that day, Sivan took photos of the scene with two or three coworkers using his newly-gifted camera. The earliest photos depict an already-smoking North Tower and the men expressing a mixed reaction of excitement and relief. Fleeing a country in the midst of an unprecedented wave of terror, the men would describe their relief that others now knew what it was like and could sympathize. Linking the attack to Israel’s Intifada, Sivan would tell his arresting officer: “Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” And with the Israelis clearly not worried about being spotted, residents of the Doric Apartments witness their insensitivity and report them to the police, who promptly issue alerts for their arrest.

The East Rutherford PD officers diverting traffic off R-3 had received this alert. They were rightfully suspicious when they encountered the white Urban Moving Systems van, given the chaotic nature of the day and the men’s positive reaction relayed in the BOLO. The men’s refusal to leave the van — possibly due to an apprehensiveness toward the police as illegal aliens — fueled that suspicion. A panic ensued as armed officers conducted the arrest, with oblivious drivers assuming that accomplices had been caught. This criminal accusation of which the men knew they stood accused, along with their involvement in an illegal scam, were likely the cause of their initially discrepant testimonies.

Most of these men appear to have been tourists overstaying their visitor visas. They were looking to collect funds for their travels around the world, and were doing so by manning a lucrative NY-area moving firm — a very typical position for Israelis to find themselves in. (One of them was even apparently ready to fly back out on a day when the entire American airspace was closed.) This being the case, their detention and the subsequent investigation meant their employer was then put under special scrutiny. In another expected detail typical for those in his position, the owner then packs up shop and flees the country, anticipating severe legal ramifications for his abuse of workers and clients alike. Consequently, the state serves him a lawsuit not long after.

In light of this sudden exit, however, the suspicion of the police is carried over into the Israelis’ PENTTBOM investigation, compounded by the shady circumstances of other Israelis around the country and by the (possibly unsurprising) connections of some UMS workers to Israeli intelligence. The investigation eventually rules out the possibility of foreknowledge or espionage work on the part of the five men, although some in the national intelligence community retain questions about the latter.

The hectic environment on the day of also led to a separate false story about an intercepted van (or truck), filled with explosives, attempting to demolish the George Washington Bridge. The story evolved from initially erroneous reporting about the Israelis’ van and the reaction of the bomb squad’s dogs. One of the men later recalled bystanders’ belief that they were on a suicide mission: “they said there’s a bomb in a white van . . . they’re on their way to Manhattan to make a suicide.” But the situation was then corrected by the relevant officials and retracted by the media. The other two vans that Ryan briefly brings up, by the way, were simply too unimportant to spend serious time on. Ryan is just talking out of his ass when he claims the “mural van” was in any way linked to Israelis or was some sort of intentional “distraction” for the police.⁵⁰ For the other “van,” see footnote 15.

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The entire ordeal of the Dancing Israelis clearly has a lot of moving parts and some unknowns. This makes it ripe for conspiracy-seekers to pick apart, but to seriously overstate their case in doing so. As stated before, these kinds of narratives rely on isolating events from needed context, overhyping any and all ambiguity, and sprinkling in falsehoods that they know most viewers will simply be too careless to question.

We saw this in the beginning of the post, when Ryan felt fine wrapping up his whole magnum opus with an undeniable error based on incredibly poor standards of evidence and intentional deception. But despite this anticlimax, to this day he remains “pretty damn sure what the results would be” of the impartial investigation into Israeli involvement in 9/11 that he called for back in 2016. And there can be no doubt that this position continues to be maintained in bad faith. Despite being confronted by Chef Leopard, Ryan has still maintained that the men were at the Doric Apartments since 8:00, that they passed off a video camera before their arrest, that they all had immediate plans to flee the country, that they had maps highlighting the WTC, that they received a loan from the Mossad, that other Israeli vans were attempting to commit further acts of terror, etc., just as confidently as he did about the 28 pages. He’s apparently redoing The Empire Unmasked at this very moment, so maybe this will give him the opportunity to at least cut the most untenable pieces from his argument to better fit the narrative. It’s imperative we understand that not all proponents of Israeli foreknowledge are of an equal level of sophistication, but Ryan’s argument of active Israeli involvement in the attacks that day is near the lowest variety. It’s interesting, then, that he goes to such lengths to call out the “kooks” in the conspiracy community (those who argue the planes were holograms or whatnot) when he himself is merely a kook with somewhat different myths to peddle.

And yet, in something that has surely opened my own eyes a bit wider, this type of nonsense is simply taken for granted as proven fact by virtually everyone else in the so-called Dissident Right.

Keith Woods repeating Whitney Webb’s lie

But it’s well understood that these figures will simply toss around different ideas they know nothing about as long as they support their case against the Jews. Yet many seem to genuinely be this foolish, and some will go even further than Ryan. Some will continue to believe the myth that some 4,000 Jews had stayed home after being tipped off in advance.⁵¹ Others prefer the myths about the WTC’s Jewish owner, Larry Silverstein. Ron Unz apparently has the idea that 9/11 didn’t even have to do with bin Laden or Al Qaeda at all. He prominently cites a sarcastic joke by former Italian President Francesco Cossiga to prove that the attacks were entirely staged by the CIA and the Mossad! Alas, one can hope for a right-wing politics for once freed from the paranoid style, but I’m not holding my breath.

Sources

• Declassified FBI documents; six volumes (500+ total pages) of internal files included, including the police report; much information including all names remain redacted in the documents

  • Index of the Israelis’ possessions; some items also described starting here

  • 09/15/01 investigation rundown

  • 09/23/01 rundown

  • 09/24/01 rundown; following pages include referral to INS for deportation

  • 07/10/03 rundown; closes the FBI-NK investigation

  • 07/10/03 rundown; produced to advise national counterintelligence of FBI-NK’s findings

• Declassified FBI photos

• 09/12/01: “Five men detained as suspected conspirators” (The Record)

• 09/13/01: “AFTER THE ATTACKS: THE INVESTIGATION; BIN LADEN TIE CITED” (New York Times)

• 09/14/01: “Authorities Have Learned the Identities of 18 Hijackers, Attorney General Says” (New York Times)

• 09/17/01: “5 Israelis Detained for Puzzling Behavior' After WTC Tragedy” (Ha’aretz)

• 10/08/01: “5 Young Israelis, Caught in Net of Suspicion” (New York Times)

• 10/29/01: “Senior U.S. Officials Join Effort to Free 5 Israelis Held in Brooklyn” (Ha’aretz)

• 11/21/01: “3 More of the Israelis Arrested in New York Landed in Israel” (Ha’aretz)

• 11/21/01: “A NATION CHALLENGED: THE DETAINEES; Dozens of Israeli Jews Are Being Kept in Federal Detention” (New York Times)

• 11/22/01: “The 5 Israelis arrested in the US: we will sue the authorities” (Ha’aretz)

• 11/23/01: “We screamed 'hope' to each other to make sure we were all alive” (Makorrishon)

• 12/12/01: Fox’s Carl Cameron Investigates, related article

• 12/13/01: “FOX NEWS’S CARL CAMERON RECYCLES MORE RUBBISH” (CAMERA)

• 03/07/02: “U.S. officials dismiss report of Israeli spies” (Seattle Times)

• 03/15/02: “Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage” (The Forward)

• 06/21/02: Preview of the ABC 20/20 report, related article. The full report (“The White Van – Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?”) is unavailable, although a (partial?) transcript has apparently surfaced.

• 09/09/04: Relevant clip of “The 9/11 Conspiracies” (Channel 4)

1. 4:57:21–4:59:45

2. 4:48:58+

3. Funnily enough, Ryan quickly went back and inserted affirmation of the 28 pages’ declassification after the fact at 3:11:09 in the documentary. The voice audio is noticeably different and, oddly, he refers to The Empire Unmasked in the past tense, all while choosing to leave in the ending with its obsolete call for declassification.

4. 4:49:18–4:54:09

5. 3:45:49

6. 15:44 in War by Deception

7. “We know these men had been filming the entire event, which shows prior knowledge.” (18:25 in WbD) Although he cites the police BOLO and “reports from the New York Times and Fox,” he gives no evidence to this end and none of these sources, discussed later, support anything close to that contention.

8. 3:29:02

9. 3:34:15

10. 3:52:54

11. The YouTube clip comes from Marc Levin’s Protocols of Zion (2005), but likely originates from the now-unavailable ABC 20/20 report mentioned in the appendix, and can be read from its transcript.

12. While the men certainly were making light of 9/11 and confessed this to investigators, they publicly denied doing so after being released.

13. 3:43:10

14. 17:10

15. 4:59:20

16. The contents of this message apparently noted that the men had been seen at Liberty State Park at the time of the attack, rather than Doric Towers, a mistake that would ever since cause confusion. Even Ryan made this mistake in his earlier documentary, War by Deception. (14:48) We also know the alert incorrectly transmitted the men’s license number given by Maria. Now, there were one or two witnesses who reported seeing an Urban Moving Systems vehicle at Liberty State Park, but this was a separate vehicle apparently only reported at the request of the all-points bulletin which had asked for information from the public, and neither account reports any suspicious activity by its occupants. Ryan brings up some other man’s purported encounter with two Israelis at Liberty State Park on 9/11 posted in the “Black Agenda Report,” but I honestly retain serious doubts about it.

17. Although the names in the FBI files are redacted, we know of Shmuel’s Miami address from the police report which links him to the German passport and Australian embassy application here.

18. 3:30:57

19. 3:33:26

20. See footnote 16. Ryan erroneously claims Oded Ellner was the one with this German passport (3:33:23), which probably indicates just how accurate his name-deciphering method described in the video is.

21. 3:33:00

22. 3:33:23

23. 44:48 here

24. 3:33:59; 16:52 in WbD

25. The Israelis elaborate on this in their interview with Channel 4 (2:14+)

26. The men’s apartments were also allegedly recently robbed.

27. Their Full Field Investigation, launched 9/14, was conducted with the assistance of the New York Office, FBI-NY. (Very minor detail: at least one document claims the FFI was initiated 9/13, but this appears to have been a mistake.) The initial investigation was conducted under PENTTBOM, the FBI’s 9/11 investigation, with an eye to their potential foreknowledge of or “criminal link” to 9/11.

28. 3:54:22

29. The men had spent the day trying to reach their Brooklyn apartments in the midst of the city-wide post-9/11 shutdown.

30. Example, example, example, example, example.

31. Example, example, example, example, example, example. First report, from 2004, notes that “the scam had been going on for years.” Multiple articles note that NZ police “say the fake artwork is part of a global fraud scam allegedly involving Israeli nationals, which has been operating in Europe, America and Australia for more than eight years.”

32. Example, example, example, example. First source notes that the Israeli art scam took root in Canada in 2002.

33. DEA report, p. 138, #125. The ex-officer mentioned this apparently casually enough as part of immigration proceedings for medical treatment in the US.

34. The Fox article is the first known reporting of the memo, which then fell into the hands of the French Intelligence Online, and was released in full not long after. There have been questions around its authenticity since the start. While DEA and Justice Department spokespeople reportedly confirmed it as authentic, unnamed officials interviewed by the press expressed unfamiliarity and claimed it was likely the work of a single employee unsatisfied with official conclusions ruling out Israeli espionage. The same article, however, quotes another DEA spokesperson as saying a certain draft memo had indeed existed since early 2001. Whatever the case, it’s highly unlikely the report is a simple fabrication, and blanket denials of foreign espionage, especially by allies, are generally procedural.

35. Genuine transactions of cheap art produced in China. Deception regarding their identities and credentials were also common and, although puzzling to investigators, make sense for scammers merely posing as art students.

36. However, as noted by 911myths, it’s important to point out that most of these scammers indicated they kept many addresses, and the one who lived “next door to Mohamed Atta” had actually stayed at that residence before Atta, and likely wasn’t there concurrently with him.

37. A drug connection is made in the report’s introduction, which notes that telephone numbers from one student had been linked to an ongoing MDMA investigation. Insight reports that “[s]ome [Israelis] also were found to have illegal drugs or admitted to illegal-drug usage and were deported for this.”

38. The ins and outs of this mystery are dizzying and needlessly complex as far as this post is concerned. Investigative and overview pieces are to be found from Ha’aretz, The Forward, Insight, and Salon.

39. A minor point is that the men weren’t actually witnessed “dancing” per se. Maria’s description was that “All of the males appeared to be jovial. The smiled, they hugged each other and they appeared to ‘high five’ one another.” According to the Bergen County Police Chief’s recollection of the faulty police BOLO, “Three individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the impact. They said three people were jumping up and down.” According to David Sheen, the specific rumor of “dancing” can be traced back to Mohamed Atta’s father, who famously chose to live in utter fantasy rather than accept his son’s fate.

40. See page 51 of this report.

41. Page 4 of the memorandum quotes the line as such: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems.”

42. The Forward article keeps him anonymous, but Cannistraro is identified by ABC 20/20, fits the same profile and says basically the same thing.

43. Ryan prides himself in linking Paul to the Jewish Agency, but he apparently isn’t aware that this organization is not involved in espionage in any sense. Also see footnote 48.

44. 3:24:49

45. Keep in mind that Urban Moving Systems only owned one van, the other vehicles being large moving trucks.

46. 3:54:33

47. Compare the number he gives at 3:27:44 with the number given on screen at 3:27:35+.

48. The last attempt some make in defense of this story is by linking to a WSJ article the following year, which recalls that a delivery truck “bound for Manhattan” had been stopped on 9/12 at the George Washington Bridge because a “van suspected of carrying explosives had been stopped — and the entire inbound bridge lanes were closed.” But the author is mistaken, because the bidirectional closing of all entry points into Manhattan the day after 9/11 was a general safety precaution that also governed the George Washington bridge. As CNN’s Garrick Utley explained on 9/12, “Manhattan of course is an island, and in a way this island has now pulled up its drawbridges. . . Only the George Washington Bridge has one lane open for outgoing traffic, nothing coming inbound.” The GWB van incident also had occurred on 9/11, not 9/12.

49. Ryan also tries to connect the Israeli businessman who gave Kerik the loan, Eitan (or “Ertheim” in his pronunciation) Wertheimer, to Paul Kurzberg via his connection to the Jewish Agency (3:39:25), but Wertheimer only became affiliated with the Agency in 2004, a year after the loan was given and many years after Paul worked for them. (Ryan cuts off this information in his screenshot.) This is just a conspiracy theorist stringing together random points on a corkboard, not even bothering to make them cohere, at this point.

50. The “mural van” originates with a clip from purported NYPD communication (allegedly taken from here) describing the discovery of a large panel truck on King St. with its side depicting a plane diving into NYC and exploding. Apparent (unavailable) hearsay alleged the van was driven by “Iranians” who then exchanged gunshots with police. There are only two mainstream accounts of this incident I know of. One claims it had “a painting of a plane flying into the World Trade Center” but “was found to be an innocent delivery truck.” Another doesn’t provide any important details. The episode is bizarre but, again, in no way connected to Israel. Also, the alleged photos of the mural van aren’t genuine as is often said.

51. This is quickly dispelled by finding a list of 9/11 victims and keyword searching for “berg,” “stein,” “gold,” etc. An estimated 10–15% of victims were Jewish.