A senior UAE official on Friday described the attempted crashing of a flydubai flight in Tel Aviv earlier in the week as an “act of terrorism”.
The suspect, who was the co-pilot of the FZ1073 flight, is Omani national Hamam al-Hammami, who attacked the pilot with an axe in an attempt to crash the plane. Previously, he was banned from flying in Oman over his radical Islamist views – possibly formed while living in Syria – and was also reportedly found to be in possession of extremist materials while a co-pilot trainee.
If not for the heroic actions of the pilot, Indian national Smit Machchhar, and several Israeli passengers, all 170 people on board the plane, including 162 Israelis, would have been killed. Reports suggest that al-Hammami’s aim was to fly the plane into a Tel Aviv high-rise, similar to the 9/11 attack on the twin towers in Manhattan.
While the initial fact pattern was intuitively interpreted by many as the attempted mass murder of Israelis, influential MSM outlets evidently didn’t find the fact that the blood-soaked pilot issued a hijacking distress signal as the plane dove at least 14,000 feet in the span of two minutes, as enough information to frame it as such.
As CAMERA reported, many outlets insisted on calling the stabbing of a copilot and the dangerous nosedive thereafter a “clash”, “altercation”, “cockpit incident”, “brawl”, or “fight” between the pilots in their headlines. In addition, many outlets omitted the stabbing altogether, leaving the reason for the diverted flight a mystery.
Then, of course there were the inevitable conspiracy theories. As ADL documented, notable influencers and activists spread “false flag” conspiracy theory narratives. Such figures included Ana Kasparian, host at the progressive outlet The Young Turks, former British MP George Galloway, Egyptian comedian Bassem Youseff, Iran’s PressTV and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
The antisemitic, pro-terror, popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker called the timing of the incident “unbelievably beneficial, unbelievably fortuitous for Benjamin Netanyahu”, while adding that “the idea that [the plane descended] 14,000 feet in altitude in a matter of like 30 seconds…and then the dude just grabbed the yoke and cranked it…able to successfully bring the plane back up…sorry there’s a lot of red flags”.
This brings us to the Independent, which published this original headline – accompanying an Oct. 1 analysis by their world affairs editor Sam Kiley – evincing the “false flag” conspiracy.
After a flurry of criticism on social media, the headline was changed to “How the FlyDubai hijacking could help Netanyahu stay in power“.
Kiley – who revealed his clear biases two months ago by penning a piece at the Indy calling for sanctions against Israel – vehemently denied that he was conjuring an Israeli conspiracy theory.
However, the analysis he wrote – representing his only take on the attempted terror attack – seemed motivated by a desperate desire to obfuscate the malevolence and likely Islamist extremist inspiration for the hijacking, while saving all of his outrage for Israel, and providing succor for conspiracists.
Also, as we’ll show, a variation of the “only Netanyahu gains” line appears in the text of the article – which Kiley did write.
Here are the opening paragraphs:
The motives for an alleged hijacker to try and plunge a plane bound for Israel are vivid – and they are opaque.
But whether the attempt on Flight FZ1073 was in revenge for the thousands killed by Israel’s forces in Gaza or the consequences of a psychotic breakdown, only one person benefits. Benjamin Netanyahu.
It’s extremely telling that, to the degree that Kiley floats the idea that al-Hammami may have been engaged in a terror attack, he couches it in language softening his likely jihadist motives by framing it as an act of “revenge” for IDF killings in Gaza – devoid of context concerning Hamas’ mass murder, rape, torture and mutilation on Oct. 7 which started the war.
The overwhelming majority of the rest of his nearly 900-word analysis focuses on “the only one person” to benefit, Israel’s premier. In fact, 22 of the 24 paragraphs of the Indy world affairs editor’s piece is devoted to Netanyahu, while only the first two paragraphs even touch upon the attacker and his motives.
Within those twenty-two paragraphs, Kiley paints Israel, after three years of war, as “isolated” and having been “accused of genocide”, with a desperate government whose attempts “to make criticism of Israel an act of antisemitism, sometimes in law” have “failed”. The Indy journalist omits the tsunami of real antisemitism in the UK following the Oct. 7 attacks – most of which was motivated by antizionist agitation.
He ends by reinforcing the “only” Netanyahu “benefits” from the hijacking narrative by noting that the PM’s “reelection hangs by a thread”, and thus, he concludes, “the FlyDubai hijacking reinforces [his] narrative that under him his country is more sinned against than sinning – an island of democracy surrounded by violence and madness that only he can protect”.
The most revealing tick in that final flourish, demonstrating again that the British commentariat has insisted on learning nothing from the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust, and the national trauma of being victimised by such savagery, is Kiley’s framing – as nothing but a chimera – Israel’s “narrative” that the country is “surrounded by violence and madness”.
Tellingly, even several years before Oct. 2023, while reporting for CNN, Kiley revealed a disturbing tendency to erase the threats faced by Israel to its very existence when he characterised the 1948 and 1967 wars – both of which were Arab wars of aggression to wipe the Jewish state off the map – as “Israeli wars to expand territory“. Though CAMERA prompted CNN to correct Kiley’s wildly propagandistic and anti-historical framing, there is no evidence that he apologised for his journalistic failure.
Similarly, Kiley’s erasure of the evil on board flight FZ1073, and the fanatical jihadist ideology that it was almost certainly inspired by, ensures that Indy readers will learn nothing about the malignant antisemitic madness that poses an existential threat to Israel, diaspora Jews and the West.