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Time To Put This Conspiracy Theory To Bed

Portfolio Armor's Photo
by Portfolio Armor
Tuesday, Oct 24, 2023 - 21:15
Soldiers in ultralights flying over a desert.

Let's Put At Least One Conspiracy Theory To Bed

One of the top comments on our post yesterday (How Israel Is Losing The Propaganda War To Hamas) criticized us for including the Statista chart below, because Statista listed Al Qaeda as the perpetrators of 9/11, insisting the perpetrators were the Mossad and "CIA traitors". If you liked that comment, you will probably like Ron Unz. 

Statistic: Deadliest terrorist attacks worldwide from 1970 to 2023, by number of fatalities and perpetrator | Statista

Ron Unz is a software entrepreneur, researcher, and proprietor of the online magazine Unz.com hosting dissident writers, who wrote this about 9/11: 

Over the years, diligent researchers and courageous journalists have largely demolished the original narrative of those events, and have made a strong, perhaps even overwhelming case that the Israeli Mossad together with its American collaborators played the central role. My own reconstruction, substantially relying upon this accumulated evidence, came to such conclusions...

We don't share Unz's views on 9/11, but we mention them here so you understand that Ron Unz isn't someone who takes official explanations at face value, particularly when Israel is involved (for example, he believes Israel bombed the hospital in Gaza, despite mainstream media organizations apologizing for their initial coverage of the incident).

So when he shoots down a conspiracy theory none of the usual ad hominem explanations apply. He's simply done the analysis and found the theory lacking.

Ron Unz On Netanyahu And The Hamas Attack

Here's what Ron Unz wrote yesterday ("American Pravda: Israel, Gaza, and Broader Issues") about the conspiracy theory that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deliberately allowed the Hamas attack to reverse his declining political fortunes (emphasis ours): 

For many months, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been facing enormous public demonstrations by his bitter political opponents, representing a historic division in his own society that was even verging on civil war. So according to this theory, Netanyahu had deliberately allowed that attack to take place, hoping to use it as his “Pearl Harbor” or “9/11” to solidify his own political position, perhaps even providing him an excuse to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, thereby achieving the political goal of the more extreme members of his coalition by expanding Israel’s frontiers while permanently solving the festering “Palestinian problem.”

Despite its apparent popularity, the likelihood of this scenario disintegrates upon any careful consideration. Israel probably suffered the worst one-day defeat in its national history, a strategic disaster. Even aside from the huge loss of life in such a small population, the tremendous Hamas success punctured the powerful myth of Israeli military strength, which for three generations has been the cornerstone of the country’s national security strategy. Such heavy losses suggested that the IDF had become a paper-tiger, greatly amplifying the lesson of its 2006 military setbacks at the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon. If poorly-armed Hamas militants could achieve such a serious blow, all of Israel’s regional adversaries were surely emboldened, and this would have been obvious to any Israeli national security officials who might have considered such a gambit.

We should also remember that Israel had been on the very verge of achieving normalized relations with Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest and most influential Arab state, a prospect that has now completely vanished. Israeli leaders had been pursuing that particular objective for decades and it seems very unlikely that Israel’s government would have sacrificed that opportunity by deliberately enabling a large Hamas attack.

But suppose that Netanyahu had actually been so politically desperate and so irrational that he had decided to allow a successful Hamas assault by standing down his own security defenses. How could he have possibly done so?

Aside from its regular army, Israel has three separate intelligence services, Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200, all of which tend to be rivals. So as former CIA Analyst Larry Johnson noted, Netanyahu would have needed to enlist the leadership of all three of those organizations in his treacherous plan to facilitate a successful Hamas attack, while making sure that none of the relevant rank-and-file officers disagreed and leaked the ultra-explosive story to the fiercely anti-Netanyahu media. This seems an impossibility.

Moreover, as already mentioned, Israeli society has recently been extremely divided, with the bulk of the nation’s elites lined up against Netanyahu and trying to drive him from office. According to media reports, the leadership of Mossad was squarely in the anti-Netanyahu camp with claims that Mossad agents were even helping to orchestrate the huge public demonstrations demanding his resignation. Surely if they had gotten the slightest hint the Netanyahu was deliberately opening the country to a huge Hamas attack, they would have used that fact to destroy him.

Also, Netanyahu is running a coalition government, with many of his top ministers hating him and eager to undermine his reputation. Even his own lieutenants might welcome his fall so that they could replace him and rise to power and it’s difficult to believe that so deadly a secret could have been kept in such a political snake-pit. And now that so many hundreds of Israeli civilians have been killed, a single outraged leaker could have Netanyahu and his fellow conspirators put on trial or even lynched. According to Seymour Hersh’s Israeli sources, Netanyahu’s long political career cannot possibly survive the aftermath of the military disaster his country has now suffered.

Reports that an Egyptian warning of a planned Hamas attack were ignored may or may not be a sign of negligence; perhaps numerous previous warnings along similar lines had always turned out to be false alarms. More serious are reports that Netanyahu had recently redeployed two of the three Israeli battalions based on the Gaza border to the West Bank in order to support Jewish settlers in their aggressive actions against the local Palestinians. But that seems more a sign of complacency and incompetence than treasonous plotting.

Under normal circumstances, the notion that the Hamas attack was an “inside job” facilitated by Israel’s own government seems so totally absurd I would hardly have given it a single sentence. But with so many on the Internet promoting the idea, it was worth explaining some of the obvious flaws, not that this may do much good. Kevin Barrett is a Muslim convert who has spent decades as an active participant in the 9/11 Truth movement and embraced a very wide range of other conspiracy theories, but when he doubted that this one was correct, most of the commenters angrily disagreed with him, and I got the same reaction when I took a similar position.

Based upon my experience, I’d say that 90-95% of all the so-called “conspiracy theories” floating around on the Internet are false or at least unsubstantiated. But the remaining 5-10% still provide a shocking catalog of important exceptions, and when many individuals first discover the reality of these, they often begin to gullibly accept all too many of the others as well.

If you disagree with what Unz wrote above, you will almost certainly agree with most of the rest of his column there. Read it there and let us know below. 

Maybe We Can Still Make Some Money Together

In case you missed it, in a post earlier today (An Oversold Industrial Insiders Are Buying), we wrote about a compelling opportunity, a beaten-down small cap that: 

  1. Has an RSI below 20, indicating it is oversold. 
  2. Has a Piotroski F-Score of 8 (on a scall of 0-9), indicating that it is financially solid. 
  3. Has had insiders, including members of its board of directors buying the stock as recently as two weeks ago.
  4. And is releasing earnings this week. 

The stock dropped about 25% after a disappointing earnings report last quarter, and five insiders bought more after that, including the chairman of the board. It's now down another ~24% from where they bought the stock. If the stock just climbs back to where those insiders bought it, our options trade should return more than 100%. 

Of course, it's possible the directors are wrong about how their company is doing (or about how the market will react to news about that), in which case, we'll take a loss on this one. But we like the odds here. If you do too, consider joining us on this one. You can find the details on our trading Substack linked to below. 

 

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You can scan for optimal hedges for individual securities, find our current top ten names, and create hedged portfolios on our website. You can also follow Portfolio Armor on Twitter here, or become a free subscriber to our trading Substack using the link below (we're using that for our occasional emails now).

 

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