Netanyahu predicted WTC attacks in 1995

Tweet

Binyamin Netanyahu has been raising the temperature by pushing for the US to attack Iran over its nuclear programme in recent weeks. Not so well known is that the prime minister of Israel, predicted the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in 1995 - and that Iran would likely have a role in such an attack.

For those who believe Israel had a role in 9/11, a widespread view in the Middle East, it is strange that Netanyahu would boast of his prediction, but who can really know what was behind the claim, other than the widespread knowledge in the intelligence community that the WTC was a target for terrorists from before the first attack in 1993. The first prediction of an attack on the World Trade Centre from Israel dates back to 1979.

Two examples:

• 
On CNN in November 2006: "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."

• To the Jerusalem Conference in January 2009 (at 12:57 into his speech): "Look, I wrote ... in 1995 … that radical Islam will topple the Twin Towers."

In his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), that came out two years after a truck bomb exploded in the World Trade Center basement, Netanyahu wrote two passages which appear to predict some kind of terror attack on the US. First, on p. 52:

What road should the United States and other democracies pursue if they are to overcome not only the domestic terror of Oklahoma City but the potentially much more insidious international terror which produced the [1993] World Trade Center bombing, and which may very well produce other such tragedies before it has been defeated?

On p. 125, Netanyahu speculates on various forms of Islamist terror:

Iran might be tempted to actually use nuclear weapons against Israel or a neighboring Arab state, and then avoid the consequences of Western reaction by threatening to activate its pre-armed militants in the West. … 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.

In an interview with Glen Beck in 2006 he repeated the claim:

BECK: Now, let me play devil’s advocate with you. We’ve heard nut jobs, especially in Iran, for a very long time. What makes you say we should take this nut job at his word? Why is this guy different than what we have seen with religious fanatics that are really only interested in power and not interested in the Apocalypse?

NETANYAHU: Well, I was getting this question in the 1990s, and I said that the West really doesn’t understand militant Islam. 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 is bringing down the World Trade Center.


What did Netanyahu know that we didn't?