"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Diehard conspiracists claim the 2015 Islamist strikes on Paris were a ‘false flag’ set up, blaming Israel and the West
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 were indisputable. Yet immediately, conspiracy theories began to circulate—claims that the terrorist strikes had been ‘staged’ or were a planned ‘inside job’ orchestrated by the police, Israel’s intelligence agency the Mossad, US and western intelligence more broadly, and the French state itself.
Ten years on, as France commemorates those who were murdered that night, and the hundreds of injured survivors and their families who still live every day with the impact of this horror, diehards of the conspiracy sphere continue to claim it was a ‘false flag’ - a clandestine staged operation carried out under a false banner to make others bear responsibility — thus providing a pretext to justify reprisals against them. A recurring argument in their sinister world of hateful fantasy is that “the police always manage to kill suspects in terrorist attacks to keep them silent.”
Among the spreaders of these narratives were notorious hate influencers and ideologues. Swiss Islamist preacher Hani Ramadan—grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder and brother of the convicted rapist Islamist influencer Tariq Ramadan—claimed that the terrorists had been “manipulated” and that “all of this served the American-Zionist axis.”
The Irish “independent journalist” Gearoid O’Colmain appeared on Russia Today (RT) within hours of the attacks to claim that the “terrorist attacks [were] carried out by groups that are financed, armed, and trained by Western intelligence services. There has never been any ISIS! ISIS is a creation of the United States.” According to him, these terrorist groups are used “against nation-states that resist American and Israeli hegemony,” while “the attacks that are continually destroying Syria” are “orchestrated by NATO.”
The conspiracy essayist Youssef Hindi, who later teamed up with O’Colmain on a joint podcast, pushed a similar narrative. He claimed that the November 13 attacks were part of a U.S. plan to subdue a “too rebellious” France, asserting that “France’s support for terrorist groups is blatant” and that such attacks aimed to “fuel a clash of civilizations.” A long-time believer in Israeli involvement in 9/11, Hindi declared in a 2016 interview that “it has long been known that the CIA and Mossad work together to create terrorist groups.”
Reality, however, tells another story. Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the November 13 commando, was captured after months on the run. He was tried and convicted after ten months of hearings and several years of investigation, sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole—the harshest sentence in French law.
Do conspiracy theorists know the names of the other jihadists who were tried and convicted, both in France and abroad?
Do they know Mehdi Nemmouche, convicted in Belgium for the four terrorist murders at the Jewish Museum of Brussels (2014) and in France for acts of torture and barbarity connected to a terrorist enterprise?
Do they know Ali Riza Polat, convicted of complicity in the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks (2015)?
Do they know Sid Ahmed Ghlam, convicted for murder and attempted terrorist attacks linked to ISIS (2015)?
Do they know Ayoub El Khazzani, convicted for the thwarted Amsterdam–Paris Thalys train attack (2015)?
Do they know Mohamed Abrini, convicted in both France and Belgium for his involvement in the November 13 attacks (2015) and the Brussels bombings (2016)?
Do they know Abdallah El-Hamahmy, convicted for the attack on soldiers at the Louvre Carrousel (2017)?
Do they know Farid Ikken, convicted for the attack in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral (2017)?
Do they know Brahim Aouissaoui, convicted for the terrorist attack at the Notre-Dame Basilica in Nice (2020)?
The list of Islamist terrorists who were captured, tried, and sentenced is long. It demonstrates, contrary to a persistent myth, that no one is “eliminating” terrorists to keep them from speaking. On the contrary, they are guaranteed all the rights due to a defendant in a democracy—beginning with the right to a fair and public trial.
Time is working against the conspiracy theorists. A decade after the events, can anyone seriously claim that we still lack the perspective necessary to assess the absurd “false flag” hypothesis?
Let us return to the facts. Salah Abdeslam was found guilty as a co-perpetrator of the November 13 attacks. At the very start of his 2022 trial, he described himself as a “fighter for the Islamic State.” Within conspiracy circles, this statement was ignored. Those who, on the very night of the attacks, denounced a “state plot” have remained silent ever since.
Between the million pages of the investigative file, Abdeslam’s own confessions (despite his brother initially claiming that Salah had been “manipulated”), the testimonies of hundreds of witnesses, the meticulous reconstruction of events, and the multitude of details uncovered by the press, it has become impossible to sustain the “inside job” theory. What we learned from the Abdeslam trial only confirmed what was already clear on the night of November 13, 2015.
And yet, a handful of intransigent conspiracists continue, even today, to insist that November 13 was a “false flag” and that Abdeslam’s conviction was a “sham.” Unsurprisingly, these are largely the same people who—attempting to disguise their ideological certainties as skepticism—terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 (2,977 killed), the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France on January 7, 2015 (12 killed), the antisemitic murders at the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Paris on January 9, 2015 (4 killed), the Nice promenade truck attack by an Islamist radical on July 14, 2016 (86 killed), and even the Hamas terrorist massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023 (more than 1,200 killed) were all “staged.”
In most cases, they see the hand of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, behind each of these events—a “revelation” that says far more about their obsessions than about the facts themselves.
This is no longer the expression of doubt but the rejection of reality itself: a dogmatic, quasi-religious denial that has become the hallmark of fanatics. A point of convergence where the discourse of conspiracy theorists and terrorists ultimately becomes indistinguishable.
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