Kevin Barrett – Introduction Oct 10, 2026
During the first few months after the heroic 10/7/2023 breakout from the Gaza concentration camp, I resisted claims that Israel had stood down its defenses. No Israeli leader, I thought, would be stupid enough want this to happen.
Al-Aqsa Storm had put Palestine back on the international map—and put Israel in an impossible position: If the Israelis went scorched-earth on Gaza they would delegitimize themselves; whereas if they didn’t, October 7 would go down in history as a smashing Palestinian victory. A third option—a military war on Hamas that followed international law by doing its best to spare Gaza civilians and infrastructure—wasn’t going to happen, because the Israelis are cowards, and Hamas’s fighters are lions and their defensive infrastructure is formidable.
By November 2023, Israel was genocidally massacring thousands of civilians. I revised my assessment, based on the possibility that Israeli leaders thought they could succeed in emptying Gaza by terrorizing survivors into fleeing into Egypt. If they really believed that, they might have stood down defenses on October 7, then raised the death count with Hannibal Directive massacres of their own people, in service to their final solution to the Gaza problem. That wasn’t going to happen, I strongly suspected, but perhaps Israeli leaders had some reason to think it might. So my view of the 10/7 truth movement shifted from strong skepticism to agnosticism.
Since then, a long series of revelations, many of them published in Haaretz, have strengthened the case that Netanyahu not only knew 10/7 was coming, but actually helped orchestrate it. I finally became a convinced 10/7 truther last month after Haaretz published its September 7 article on MBZ’s warning. That article not only made clear that Netanyahu had been urgently warned of Hamas’s planned attack—and held Hamas’s actual battle plan that laid out exactly what would happen on October 7 in great detail—but also that the Israeli Prime Minister had rejected Hamas’s offer, on the evening of October 7 itself, to unconditionally release all civilian hostages if a brief ceasefire were put in place to make such a release possible.
My assumption had always been that Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders viewed Israeli hostages as a serious strategic liability. There would be no way to get them back militarily, and pressure from the Israeli public would force concessions.
But I misjudged the genocidal insanity of Netanyahu, other Israeli leaders, and the criminally insane society they represent. Netanyahu didn’t want the hostages back. He explicitly refused Hamas’s offer to return them unconditionally on the very day those hostages were taken.
Obviously Netanyahu and his brain trust wanted to turn October 7 into the pretext for a huge regional war that would allow Israel to use its blackmailed pedophile assets Biden and Trump to not only accelerate their genocide of Palestine, but also attack Lebanon and Iran. That, presumably, was the plan from the very beginning.
My frequent podcast guest the late Alan Hart, former lead Mideast correspondent for the BBC and a close personal friend of Golda Meir and Yasser Arafat, repeatedly warned that Israel would manufacture a pretext to start a huge regional war, with the aim of finishing their genocide of Palestine, and perhaps neighboring lands as well, under cover of “the fog of war.” Though I suspected that Hart was right, I long resisted seeing October 7 as that pretext, mainly because Israel’s position was so weak, and its chances of getting what it wanted seemed so slim.
But the weight of accumulated evidence has shown that the 10/7 truthers, like the 9/11 truthers, were right all along. For an introduction to that evidence, check out Ben Swann’s seven-part series, appended at the end of this post. -KB
October 7, not September 11, Was the Real “New Pearl Harbor”
By Kevin Barrett, for American Free Press
David Ray Griffin’s seminal 2004 book on 9/11 was entitled The New Pearl Harbor. The title was taken from the September 2000 memo “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” published by the Israel-loyalist Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In that memo, PNAC openly yearned for a Pearl Harbor style surprise attack killing thousands of Americans. Only such a “galvanizing event,” the Zionists mused, could convince Americans to launch regime-change wars against Israel’s Middle Eastern enemies.
The Zionists calling for a “new Pearl Harbor” knew that US President Franklin Roosevelt had orchestrated the December 7, 1941 attack that killed 2,403 Americans. Roosevelt had implemented an eight-point plan designed to force Japan to strike. The US had broken Japanese codes, so FDR knew when and where the attack would occur. He deliberately allowed Japan to destroy America’s outmoded, mothballed battleships, but had the strategic sense to send aircraft carriers out to sea. Thousands of American casualties, hyped in hysterical newsreels, reversed 80%+ antiwar sentiment and allowed Roosevelt to bring the US into the war.
But 9/11 differed significantly from Pearl Harbor in one key respect: The purported 9/11 attacker did not even exist! In 1941, Japan really did attack the United States. But in September 2001, “al-Qaeda” was not a real, powerful foreign entity like Japan, but an essentially fictitious narrative. The term al-Qaeda means “the database” in Arabic, and refers to the CIA’s database of Arab mercenaries that it used to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That unorganized rabble of mercenaries, infiltrated and steered by Israel, the US, and several Arab governments, had nothing to do with 9/11, which was an Israeli false flag attack on the United States, pure and simple. (The fact that “al-Qaeda” is not, and never was, an enemy of the US and Israel, is obvious today, thanks to the US-Israeli installation of “al-Qaeda” loyalist Ahmed al-Sharaa as puppet president of Syria.)
10/7, not 9/11, was the “new Pearl Harbor.” As with Pearl Harbor, Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, was an actual attack by a hostile foreign entity. And just as Roosevelt orchestrated Pearl Harbor, so too Netanyahu orchestrated October 7.
Roosevelt ignored decoded intercepts detailing Japan’s plans to attack Pearl Harbor. Likewise, Netanyahu ignored a long list of urgent warnings from regional leaders—and even statements from Hamas itself—about the coming mini-invasion of Israel.
A blockbuster September 7 Haaretz article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz dropped the biggest bombshell: Ten days before October 7, Emirati ruler Mohamed Bin Zayed (MBZ) called Netanyahu to warn that Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar was about to invade.
The call lasted 45 minutes. MBZ was astonished by Netanyahu’s apparent lack of interest in the dire warning. MBZ and his circle were even more astonished by what they learned later: “None of them imagined that the prime minister would hear the message but wouldn’t brief the heads of the defense establishment. The head of the Shin Bet, the head of the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff – none of them knew about bin Zayed’s warning.” Egypt and Qatar, too, issued multiple urgent warnings to Netanyahu, which were buried.
The Haaretz article strings together facts in such a way as to inform the alert reader that Netanyahu not only knew October 7 was coming, but deliberately orchestrated it by dangling deals in front of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, then frustrating him by outrageously stalling, in a manner calculated to incite Sinwar to use the military capability that Netanyahu had helped him create.
Haaretz shows Netanyahu playing a double game with Sinwar—and his own security establishment. By dangling a breakthrough agreement to end the genocidal blockade of Gaza and allow Gazans a share of their natural gas wealth, Netanyahu convinced his security establishment that Hamas was tamed. Meanwhile, by facilitating Qatar’s funding and arming of Hamas—and then by alternately tantalizing and then frustrating it—Netanyahu incited the raid on Israel that Hamas had been loudly promising, while drilling for it right in front of the apartheid wall, in full view of the IDF units who repeatedly reported them and had their reports quashed. And since Hamas’s raid, unaided, would not have killed nearly enough Israelis to trigger a regional war for Greater Israel, Netanyahu not only stood down Israeli forces to facilitate a huge incursion, but also issued the Hannibal Directive order for Israeli forces to slaughter hundreds of their own civilians—whose deaths could be blamed on Hamas, creating the public outrage to enable Netanyahu’s war of genocidal expansion.
Israelis vote on October 27. Will they wake up and smell the treason? Or will they lap up ridiculous tales of plumbers saving hijacked airplanes, and blindly endorse Netanyahu’s genocidal, treasonous lies?*
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