From 9/11 to October 7: The Same Lie, The Same Playbook

Terrorists deny their own crimes, accuse their victims of genocide, and hide behind the language of human rights. The tragedy is how often the world believes them.

One of the most striking features of modern terrorism is not only the violence itself but the way propaganda quickly follows. Time and again, Islamist groups have committed atrocities and then sought to erase their responsibility by planting doubt, redirecting anger, and shifting blame. The attack itself may last hours, but the narrative battle begins almost immediately and often outlives the tragedy itself.

The September 11 attacks provide the clearest example of this pattern. Al-Qaeda hijackers killed nearly three thousand people in New York and Washington, yet within days conspiracy theories were racing around the globe. Everyone watched on their televisions as the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. The truth was right there in front of them, yet almost immediately the conspiracies began claiming it was an “inside job” orchestrated by the Bush administration. Others insisted Osama bin Laden was a CIA agent. These theories spread far and wide, despite bin Laden himself eventually admitting responsibility in recorded messages. A film called Zeitgeist: The Movie took these theories further, weaving them together with antisemitic tropes. It portrayed the Rothschild family as puppet-masters pulling the strings of world events, and even suggested that the United States destroyed its own buildings for an insurance scam. It was a lie dressed up as a documentary, and millions believed it.

What made Zeitgeist so effective was the way it blended half-truths with long-standing prejudices. It did not need to prove anything. It only needed to cast doubt, to create an alternative narrative that sounded clever enough to convince those who wanted to believe it. The result was that the guilt of al-Qaeda was blurred, while centuries-old myths about Jewish control of finance and politics gained fresh oxygen. The victims were killed once in the attacks, and then again in the distortion of memory.

This conspiracy culture did not end with 9/11. The Madrid train bombings of 2004 were carried out by Islamist terrorists inspired by al-Qaeda. They murdered 191 innocent people, yet almost instantly, claims began circulating that the Basque separatist group ETA was behind it. The confusion dragged on for days until evidence made it impossible to deny the truth. In London in 2005, four suicide bombers killed 52 people on the Underground and a bus, but before the smoke had even cleared, theories appeared that MI5 or MI6 had staged the attack themselves. When Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out the Mumbai attacks in 2008, murdering 166 civilians, some voices in Pakistan claimed India had staged the massacre to justify hostility toward them. Even when ISIS terrorists stormed Paris in 2015, murdering journalists, concert-goers, and diners, conspiracy videos flooded social media suggesting the French government had orchestrated it as a false flag operation.

The playbook was always the same. Commit the atrocity. Deny responsibility. Sow confusion. Redirect blame onto the victims or onto governments. If the narrative holds long enough, sympathy shifts and pressure eases on the perpetrators. What matters is not whether the story is true, but whether enough people repeat it until the lie takes on the weight of plausibility.

The same strategy is playing out today in the conflict between Hamas and Israel. On October 7 Hamas committed atrocities that were shocking even by the standards of terrorism. Civilians were massacred in their homes and at a music festival. Women were raped. Families were burned alive. Over two hundred people were taken hostage. Hamas fighters filmed themselves as they did it, proudly sharing their crimes with the world. Yet within days a parallel story began circulating that Israel had somehow staged the attacks, or had deliberately let them happen in order to justify war in Gaza.

As the conflict deepened, this denial evolved into familiar accusations. Israel, people said, was guilty of genocide. Israel was guilty of apartheid. Israel was the Nazi state of our time. All of this ignored the glaring fact that it is Hamas, not Israel, that has declared genocidal intent. Their charter openly calls for the elimination of Jews. Their schools glorify martyrdom. Their leaders boast that their goal is not coexistence but destruction. The intent is theirs, yet the accusation is projected onto their victim.

This inversion is not new either. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union discovered the effectiveness of such propaganda and invested heavily in it. The KGB spread narratives that Israel was a colonialist, racist, and even Nazi-like state. These ideas trickled through universities, political movements, and international institutions. By the time the Cold War ended, the groundwork had been laid for what we now see echoed in chants of “Zionist apartheid” and “Zionist Nazis.” The smear was not born of fact but of strategy, a way to isolate Israel, delegitimise Jewish statehood, and turn the memory of the Holocaust into a weapon against its survivors.

Today on social media we see how deep that poison has sunk. Posts openly appear saying “the Germans were right,” as if Hitler’s genocide was something to be admired. In parts of the Islamic world, antisemitism has remained entrenched and often reinforced by state propaganda and preachers. Nazi ideology has found a second life there, where praising Hitler is not a fringe view but an accepted trope. The cruel twist is that the same people who admire Hitler and call Jews subhuman then accuse Jews of being Nazis themselves. The slur “Zio-Nazi” is the ultimate gaslighting. It projects onto Jews the very ideology that their enemies embrace.

This is why the campaign against Israel cannot be understood simply as a disagreement over policy. It is rooted in the same propaganda techniques used after every major terror attack. Commit the crime. Deny it. Redirect it. Project it onto the victim. And then sit back as the lie races across the world while the truth is still struggling to be heard.

The persistence of these lies tells us something uncomfortable about human nature. People prefer simple narratives, especially ones that confirm what they already suspect. Believing that 9/11 was an inside job allowed some to maintain their view that America is the true villain. Believing that Israel is committing genocide allows others to keep seeing Jews as the problem, rather than confronting the uncomfortable reality of Islamist ideology. In both cases, truth is not rejected because it is weak but because lies are more convenient.

What makes this especially tragic is that these lies often travel in the language of justice and human rights. They borrow the moral vocabulary of freedom and equality but strip it of honesty. They use the Holocaust not to remember its victims but to weaponise its imagery against the Jewish state. They use the language of anti-colonialism not to liberate but to mask a call for extermination. In doing so, they turn the very ideals of human dignity into shields for those who trample on them.

We must see the pattern clearly. After New York, after Madrid, after London, after Mumbai, after Paris, and now after October 7, the playbook does not change. The actors change, the slogans shift, the hashtags evolve, but the structure remains the same. Lies are deployed as weapons, repeated until they become accepted, and then used to turn global opinion against the victims of terror.

The question is not whether Hamas intends genocide. They have declared it openly for decades. The question is why so many are willing to believe the opposite and accuse Israel of what Hamas themselves are guilty of. Perhaps it is because lies are easier than truth. Perhaps it is because antisemitism never disappeared but only reinvented itself. Perhaps it is because propaganda, once embedded, is harder to uproot than any military force.

What is certain is that until people learn to recognise this playbook, they will continue to fall for it. Terrorists will keep murdering and then blaming others. Their supporters will keep gaslighting history and twisting morality. And ordinary people, unless they pause to think, will keep sharing the lies as if they were truths.

Lies travel fast. The truth is slower, heavier, burdened with the task of evidence. But history shows that the truth does outlast the lies. It took years for the full story of 9/11 to drown out the conspiracies. It took time for Madrid, London, Mumbai, and Paris to be remembered for what they were. And in time, the world will remember October 7 for what it was: a day when Hamas unleashed violence not to liberate but to annihilate, and then tried to mask its guilt behind the same tired accusations.