A recent report by Human Rights Watch accuses Burkina Faso’s armed forces of multiple abuses, particularly against the Fulani, an ethnic group regularly accused of supporting jihadists across West Africa. But President Ibrahim Traoré has a ready-made conspiracy-peddling explanation: a false-flag attack. “That’s what you call perfidy,” he says. “Terrorists come, they carry out massacres […]
Conspiracy thinking in Belgium is often dismissed as a marginal phenomenon, the preserve of a few eccentrics on social media. But a new survey by the Institut Jonathas invites a reassessment of that narrative. In the Brussels-Capital Region, 50 per cent of respondents believe that the pharmaceutical industry and governments are lying about the harmful […]
When Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned today in protest of the Iran war, he blamed everyone except the person who launched it. In his resignation letter, addressed to President Trump, Kent portrays the president as a passive figure manipulated by others—“high-ranking Israeli officials” and “influential members of the American media”—rather […]
It has the distinctive air of 1989. Or as Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad put it: “This is a Berlin Wall moment. Let’s tear this wall down. Then America will be safe without the Islamic Republic.” 1989 was not only a watershed because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was also the year Ayatollah […]
Thousands of demonstrators shot behind closed doors − with multiple reports that more than 16,500 people have been killed — hundreds of thousands injured, hundreds of executions scheduled. The repression unleashed against the Iranian people by the regime of the Mullahs has reached terrifying proportions. Faced with this methodical state violence, Ayatollah Khamenei and his […]
After years of abuse, ten people have been found guilty of cyber bullying Brigitte Macron. Their claims included outright lies about her gender as well as allegations around the nature of her relationship with her husband, President Emmanuel Macron. But the legal action won't stop there, with the couple also suing the American right-wing influencer […]
Within hours, a sprawling ecosystem of conspiracy theories metastasized across social platforms, pushed by far-left activists, Islamist and jihadi propagandists, and far-right influencers alike. Their political differences collapsed into a single, familiar pattern: blaming Jews - reframed as “Israel,” “Zionists,” or the Mossad - for their own murder. A mass-casualty attack against a Jewish community […]
On November 13, 2015, France was struck by the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. In the heart of Paris, Islamist suicide attackers affiliated with the Islamic State massacred 90 people at the Bataclan concert hall and killed 130 in total during a rampage across the capital’s cafés and streets. The facts of the attacks […]
This week in Paris, ten people went on trial for cyber-bullying Brigitte Macron, the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, by spreading a conspiracy theory as grotesque as it was absurd. For the most serious offenses, prosecutors sought suspended sentences ranging from three to twelve months. Yet Brigitte Macron herself has, in a sense, been […]
The invention of imaginary plots on the one hand and the denial of reality on the other are two sides of the same coin. That is why historical negationism, insofar as it stems from a fundamentally conspiracist approach, has always been at the heart of our editorial concerns. Over more than fifteen years of research […]
