67 minutes. That's how long it took for "false flag" theories to start flooding social media after flydubai Flight FZ1073 sent its first emergency signal. I've written about conspiracy thinking for decades, and it does not surprise me that they start spreading in the digital age before anyone actually knows what happened. Facts are not necessary for conspiracy theories to go viral. Over 12 hours, @CombatASemitism researchers tracking X counted nearly 3,000 posts blaming Israel, the Mossad, Netanyahu, "Zionists," or Jews. A thousand of them came within five hours. Among posts using the phrase "false flag," roughly 72% were pushing that, and by the final hours it was above 80%. After any major catastrophe, expect it. Psychologists call it proportionality bias: a huge event feels like it needs an equally huge cause. A simple explanation is not enough for many people, so they reach for a far more complicated and nefarious hidden hand. That instinct is human. But that does not explain what happened here in the hours as the story was unfolding. These conspiracies are created and distributed by opportunists, hostile governments, and professional Jew-haters. They want to fill the online vacuum before the facts arrive. Look at the first day. The false-flag frame was available from state-linked media in Tehran almost immediately. Iran's semiofficial Fars news agency cited unnamed Iranian security agencies claiming Israel was planning an aviation attack to pin on Tehran, and ran that claim alongside the diversion of this flight. Of course, it offered no evidence linking the two. At the same time, unverified accounts were inventing details about who was involved, leaning on India-Pakistan hostility to assign nationalities to the people on board before authorities had said anything. I can't tell you the posts on X were coordinated, and I won't pretend to. That takes evidence, the same standard I'd demand of the conspiracy theorists. What the record does show is a script that was ready before the event, and an event that provided the ideal occasion for it. Look at what that script does. Israelis on a plane someone tried to crash become the suspects. The victims are erased and the blame is flipped in about an hour. None of this is a game. A huge share of people now get their news from TikTok clips and memes, not from reading. For them a viral lie that arrives first becomes the truth. Distrust any explanation that shows up before the evidence does.

The new political oath test is genocide. An Israeli in the Netherlands tried to enroll in a Dutch-language course. The teacher opened the admissions by saying, “I only want to work with people at my school who share the same view on the Palestinian genocide. This is important to me because there are Palestinians in our community.” He told the Israeli that before he would teach him Dutch, he needed to know the student “strongly oppose[d] what your government is doing” The student said the subject was personal since he lost his uncle in the Hamas massacre of October 7 and that he would NOT call the war a genocide. He said war crimes, if committed, should be investigated and punished. That was too much for the teacher:“Everyone agrees on one thing: that there was deliberate genocide. I only want students who oppose genocide, and genocide is a fact. You deny it, and I don’t like that. I wish you all the best at another school.” This is the new fascism of the pro-Palestinian far left. Conform or be purged. And yes, the mass influx of Muslim immigrants into Europe has changed how Israel is judged. When a language teacher treats “genocide” as settled dogma, in part because of the sensitivity to Palestinians living in the community, demography is already writing the rules. @CIDI_nieuws, a Dutch Jewish human rights organization that monitors antisemitism, has taken the case to the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights. In 2025 Dutch authorities logged 867 antisemitic hate crimes. Jews are under 0.3% of the population and 26% of discrimination cases. This is what this attitude looks like up close.

Anyone remember EgyptAir 990 in 1999?? That is what I immediately thought of when I read the reports this morning about Flydubai FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv. The 737 transmitted a general emergency, then the hijack code, then dropped thousands of feet in a couple of minutes over northwestern Saudi Arabia. Israeli officials say the two pilots fought in the cockpit. Multiple passenger accounts describe a knife, blood, one pilot down, others rushing the flight deck. The plane diverted safely to Tabuk. EgyptAir 990, on October 31, 1999, was a Boeing 767 from New York to Cairo that crashed and killed 217. After the captain had left the cockpit to use the lavatory, the relief first officer—Gameel al-Batouti—was alone at the controls. Moments after the captain left him in the cockpit, the plane dove, then climbed, then dove again into the Atlantic. The official U.S. investigation concluded that al-Batouti intentionally crashed Flight 990 into the Atlantic but it stopped short of saying it was suicide/terrorism. The NTSB said the reason why he crashed the plane was "not determined." The cockpit voice recorder captured al-Batouti saying "I rely on God." Egypt pushed back and claimed it was mechanical failure. Details are still coming in on the Flydubai flight. Motives are not yet public. But the architecture of the threat is old: the person in the cockpit never has to come through the checkpoint as a stranger. We hardened cockpit doors after 9/11. We did not solve the problem of who is allowed to sit behind them. EgyptAir 990 was nearly 27 years ago. The question it raised is still the one that matters when a flight bound for Israel suddenly starts dropping rapidly toward the desert.

Green Party members have been told to replace terms such as “mothers and fathers” with gender-neutral terminology under new guidance on inclusive language ⤵️ telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…

The NY Times initially called today’s Flydubai incident an “altercation between the pilot and co-pilot.” Community Notes had to add that the co-pilot stabbed the captain and tried to take over a plane full of Israelis. Then @NYTimesPR lectured that unlike “activists and partisans,” they don’t traffic in “speculation or unverified information.” That’s pretty rich coming from the paper whose Israel coverage has been stained with bias.

You cannot fight a poison you refuse to name. @NYCMayor Mamdani just released New York’s first municipal “plan to combat antisemitism” — and pointedly refused to define it. The city, the document says, can fight this hate “without needing to adopt a definition.” That is not caution. It is the tell. The devil is in the details he left out. The hatred driving so much of today’s street violence, campus intimidation, and synagogue attacks is not some vague “bias.” It is the charge that Jews are committing genocide. It is “globalize the intifada.” It is the claim that Israel’s existence itself is a crime. If your definition will not touch that, you are not fighting antisemitism. You are managing the politics around it. You cannot defeat a hate virus by declining to identify it.