The “4,000 stayed home” hoax

Four thousand Jews were falsely accused of not reporting to work at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, supposedly because they had been warned not to do so by those who had advance knowledge of the attack.

A further elaboration of this falsehood claims that Jews who worked at the World Trade Center had been warned by the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad, not to go to work that day.

The fact is, there was no mass absence of any group of people at the World Trade Center on September 11.

as attested to by the numerous funerals of World Trade Center victims at synagogues and temples.

The 4,000 figure apparently came from an article entitled “Hundreds of Israelis missing in World Trade Center attack,” which appeared in the September 12 Internet edition of the Jerusalem Post.

It stated, “The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attacks”

Anti-Semitism is at the root of numerous contemporary conspiracy theories, including the following examples of false claims.

The Syrian ambassador to Iran, Turki Muhammad Saqr, at a conference held at the Iranian Foreign Ministry on October 24, 2001

and the Pentagon at the time of the attacks”—in other words, in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Sources emphasized that the release of all the Israelis under investigation indicates that they were cleared of any suspicion that they had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks, as some anti-Israel media outlets have suggested.

a group of five Israelis arrested in New Jersey shortly after the September 11 attacks and held for more than two months