MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, has been tracking the sermons of radical Imams in America whose messages related to Israel, Jews and America are largely unknown to the wider public but can have far reaching impact, instilling false, negative beliefs in congregants.
On September 11, 2026, MEMRI documented a sermon by Imam John Ederer at the Pillars Mosque in Charlotte, North Carolina, during which he asserted that the Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence agency, “rigged up” the Twin Towers to explode. According to Ederer, the Israelis’ motivation was to “extinguish Islam.” He described this position as “rooted in the reality that no other claimed reality can claim.” According to MEMRI, the mosque posted the sermon to its own Youtube page.
Amid the 25th anniversary remembrances of the traumatic September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks – in which the Islamist terrorist organization al-Qaeda murdered thousands by hijacking commercial airliners, flying them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and crashing one in a Pennsylvania field when heroic passengers confronted the terrorists – the North Carolina imam’s delusional speech is a troubling occurrence.
Conspiracy theories that falsely implicate Israel or Jews in the 9/11 attacks have persisted for decades, and no group of people is immune to falling for them – the Muslim community included. The London-based, Muslim affairs-focused outlet 5 Pillars recently underscored this unfortunate trend – perhaps inadvertently – sharing that according to a poll it commissioned of its audience, “62% pointed to Israel” as responsible for 9/11. A 2002 Gallup poll found that “Overwhelming majorities in Kuwait, Pakistan, and Indonesia, and most Iranians and Lebanese” rejected the factual reality that “groups of Arabs carried out the attacks against the USA on September 11.” Furthermore, “In three countries – Lebanon, Kuwait, and Morocco – the single most frequently named source for the attacks [was] Israel.”
Similar data in the United States is harder to come by, but Ederer’s sermon is not the only example of a U.S.-based imam falsely blaming Israel for 9/11. In addition to the video of Ederer’s talk, MEMRI published on September 11 a video compilation of U.S.-based imams propagating 9/11-related conspiracy theories within the past several years, many of whom claimed that Israel carried out the attacks.
Religious communities and their houses of worship form a bedrock of the American social fabric. It is incumbent on their leaders to act responsibly and refrain from exploiting the pulpit to promote falsehoods – not least ones that risk exacerbating hostility toward Jews in a time of widespread antisemitism. Doing otherwise surely betrays the moral authority with which their congregations have entrusted them.
