A crisis doesn’t have to be manufactured to become propaganda. The political opportunity lies in deciding what it means, who deserves the blame and which questions the public should stop asking. The competing accounts surrounding FlyDubai Flight FZ1073 raise a much larger question: what happens when a politician’s explanation becomes the accepted story before the evidence has been properly examined?
In this episode, we examine Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the FlyDubai incident and the relationship between narratives of terrorism, national security and political survival. Stories of mortal danger and heroic rescue sweep up all the attention while pushing uncomfortable questions about Gaza and government accountability into the background. Establishing what happened aboard the aircraft and examining how its story has been used are separate, and equally necessary tasks.
History should gives journalists – and the public – good reason to scrutinise official statements. Operation Northwoods, the unimplemented 1962 US military proposal to manufacture terrorist attacks as a pretext for an invasion of Cuba, demonstrates that such schemes have been seriously contemplated. The Gulf of Tonkin controversy and the failed claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction reveal other ways disputed or false evidence can become a justification for war.
These examples don’t establish that FlyDubai was a false flag. But they do establish why evidence is far more than important the statements of a compromised political leader. Journalism’s responsibility is to investigate the gaps in information, challenge unsupported claims and resist the pressure to turn a complicated event into a convenient political story.
