Last week, reports emerged that an Israeli plumber had thwarted an alleged attempt by the co-pilot of a FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv to hijack/crash the aircraft.
asserted
plumber → emerge → aircraft
Interestingly, as further details were made public, social media platforms were flooded with thousands of posts alleging that the incident was a false flag operation orchestrated by the far-right Israeli government and its allied countries’ intelligence agencies.
asserted
incident → make → government
I will not delve into the numerous anomalies highlighted by sceptics, including those raised by active pilots and aviation experts.
asserted
I → delve → pilots
Instead, this piece focuses on how false flag tactics have begun to backfire.
asserted
tactics → focus → ?
Over the years, significant evidence has emerged demonstrating that staged pretexts have increasingly transitioned from clandestine exceptions to routine instruments of statecraft.
asserted
pretexts → emerge → statecraft
Countries using such tactics rely on certain psychological mechanisms that help set up false flag operations.
asserted
that → use → operations
For example, long before a staged provocation takes place, its success is often guaranteed by the cultural and news narratives that precede it.
asserted
that → stag → it
In many countries, movies, television shows and news broadcasts have conditioned audiences to view specific societies through a narrow, negative lens.
asserted
movies → condition → lens
By repeatedly depicting these populations through recurring tropes of hostility or violence, mainstream media embeds particular perceptions in the public consciousness.
asserted
media → depict → consciousness
Governments have often used media conditioning and false flag operations to make the public more amenable to their agendas.
asserted
public → use → agendas
In an age of information warfare, however, scepticism about official narratives is increasing.
asserted
scepticism → increase → narratives
In their work Manufacturing Consent, media scholars Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky conceptualised this process through their “propaganda model”, demonstrating how mass media functions as an ideological filter, designed to align public perception with official state policy objectives.
asserted
media → manufacture → objectives
Rather than presenting objective facts, modern entertainment and news ecosystems construct artificial frames that prompt ordinary citizens to support aggressive foreign policy agendas.
asserted
that → present → agendas
When cultural caricatures of ‘enemy’ societies are continuously reinforced, they generate the precise environment required for staged pretexts and/or false flag operations.
asserted
they → reinforce → pretexts
If a government or intelligence apparatus seeks to fabricate a pretext for military action, global observers rarely question the official narrative, because the alleged culprit matches the villain archetype they have been conditioned to accept by the media.
asserted
they → seek → media
Back in 1922, the American journalist and author Walter Lippmann observed that people construct their worldviews based on simplified “pictures in their heads” created by media narratives, rendering ‘enemy’ populations vulnerable to instant condemnation whenever a security crisis is reported.
asserted
crisis → observe → condemnation
This dynamic is illustrated across several geopolitical events.
asserted
dynamic → illustrate → events
During the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Western news outlets and Hollywood routinely depicted Middle Eastern figures through tropes of inherent fanaticism and anti-Western hostility, a phenomenon critically analysed by Edward Said in Orientalism, which showed how cultural production systematically portrays non-Western societies as dangerous.
asserted
production → depict → societies
When US and British leaders falsely asserted that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), large segments of the public accepted the premise without demanding any serious empirical evidence.
asserted
segments → assert → evidence
The claim naturally aligned with a pre-existing media script.
uncertain
claim → align → script
The American media historian Nancy Snow wrote that, across the Cold War, American entertainment and news outlets constantly framed the Soviet Union as a dark, deceitful empire, capable of any atrocity.
asserted
outlets → write → atrocity
This persistent framing meant that US covert intelligence operations and exaggerated threats of Soviet terror were accepted almost instantly by a public already conditioned to expect malevolent behaviour from the Soviet regime.
asserted
operations → mean → regime
However, sometimes, when this tactic is overtly used, the user country can get trapped in its own strategy.
asserted
country → use → strategy
For example, the enemy country’s culture may indeed be successfully demonised by propaganda but, eventually, the user country can also start to become widely perceived as a constant engineer of false flag operations.
uncertain
country → demonise → operations
As British media scholar Andrew Hoskins highlights in his research on digital media and conflict, modern hyper-connectivity has fundamentally transformed how the public consumes news during a security crisis.
asserted
public → highlight → crisis
In an era where audiences are routinely exposed to sensationalised reporting, institutional trust has begun to break down.
asserted
trust → expose → reporting
Instead of taking official explanations at face value, global audiences now immediately scrutinise government narratives, moving towards scepticism.
asserted
audiences → take → scepticism
This scepticism serves as a vital psychological defence mechanism in an era dominated by ‘information warfare.’
asserted
scepticism → serve → warfare
American political scientist Lance Bennett argues that a questioning public is critical for holding power accountable when state actors and media institutions leverage a crisis to manufacture political consent.
asserted
actors → argue → consent
Questioning official narratives allows citizens to filter out manufactured outrage and demand empirical proof.
asserted
citizens → question → proof
Indeed, but scepticism can also become a knee-jerk and intellectually lazy exhibition of cynical reflexivity.
asserted
scepticism → become → reflexivity
According to American legal scholar Cass Sunstein, reflexivity that rejects all official accounts can lead to paranoia, where real crises are dismissed as elaborate fabrications.
uncertain
crises → accord → fabrications
When every high-profile event is instantly dismissed as fake, one crosses into cynicism.
asserted
one → dismiss → cynicism
Media scholar Renee Hobbs warns that this form of cynicism creates a new cognitive trap.
asserted
form → warn → trap
Rather than demanding evidence, individuals simply invert the official narrative to fit their own pre-existing biases.
asserted
individuals → demand → biases
In doing so, the public risks becoming just as easily manipulated by online counter-narratives as they are by official state propaganda.
asserted
they → do → propaganda
What is truly needed is scepticism that is grounded in deliberate critical thinking.
asserted
that → need → thinking
And the good news is that, even amid fierce information wars and state propaganda designed to set the stage for false flag events and despite the knee-jerk reactions that inevitably follow, informed scepticism remains alive.
asserted
scepticism → design → reactions
During the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Vietnam War, initial claims by the US government of unprovoked North Vietnamese attacks on American warships were challenged by journalists and naval analysts.
uncertain
claims → challenge → journalists
Declassified documents later confirmed the attacks were largely fabricated, proving that the US had used them as a pretext for escalating the Vietnam War.
asserted
US → confirm → War
…and 8 more, not listed.
The Aporia
