TikTok users shared a video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying militant Islam would bring down the World Trade Center as proof that he knew about 9/11 before it happened.
But the video occurred years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It’s from a 2006 CNN interview in which Netanyahu says, “So, I wrote a book in 1995, and I said that, ‘If the West doesn’t wake up to the suicidal nature of militant Islam, the next thing you will see is militant Islam bringing down the World Trade Center.’”
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Netanyahu is referring to his 1995 book, “Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists.” In it, he predicts the World Trade Center could be attacked a second time.
He writes of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which occurred in a parking garage, killed six people and injured more than 1,000 other people. According to the FBI, Ramzi Yousef, who helped plan the 1993 bombing, was hoping the attack would cause one of the twin towers to collapse the other.
In his book, Netanyahu wrote, “In the worst of such scenarios, the consequences could be not a car bomb but a nuclear bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center.” But this does not mean he knew that commercial planes would be used to bring down the towers Sept. 11, 2001.
The Anti-Defamation League said that conspiracy theories implicating Jews and Israel in the 9/11 attacks rely on “centuries-old antisemitic tropes about Jews supposedly manipulating world events for their own benefit.”
We rate the claim that Netanyahu knew about 9/11 before it happened False.