While speaking at a conference at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, former Prime Minister of Israel and chairman of the conservative Likud Party, told an audience that the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were good for Israel.
On April 16, the Israeli newspaper service Ma’ariv quoted Netanyahu as saying, “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.” He added that those events “swung American public opinion in our favor.”
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad provided a different perspective. At an April 16 rally in the city of Qom, Ahmadinejad asserted that the United States has used the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to invade Afghanistan and Iraq—wars that have killed millions of people in the name of colonial domination.
