Conspiracy Theorists Spread New Fake Story About Chabad Tunnel 'Collapse'

A construction worker was killed in a building collapse in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn on Friday afternoon, according to local media mentionted. But the tragic accident led disinformation accounts and conspiracy theorists on X (formerly Twitter) to falsely claim that the incident had taken place in Crown Heights, concocting a completely false story about the tunnel under the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters in Crown Heights suddenly entering .

As the disturbance in Borough Park attracted hordes of emergency responders, social media vultures went to work, falsifying the footage of ambulances, firefighters and Hasidic Jewish bystanders to promote propaganda about Chabad and Jews in general.

“TRACK: NEW YORK 60-FOOT TUNNELS COLLAPSES UNDER CHABAD SYNAGOGUE” He wrote Sulaiman Ahmed, an X/Twitter commenter who raised his profile significantly by posting misleading material about the Israel-Hamas war (while previously focusing on defending misogynistic manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who is currently on trial on human trafficking charges in Romania). “Emergency crews are rushing to stabilize the situation,” Ahmed added. The video shown in the tweet is from Borough Park crash sitenot Crown Heights, which is about four miles away.

The synagogue's passage, dug illegally and secretly by a splinter sect of Chabad, the Hasidic community that owns the synagogue (the offshoot group tried to maintain access to the property), was discovered in early January thanks to a chaotic fight and several arrests. engineers tried to fill the tunnel. The story immediately unleashed a firestorm of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories alleging a sophisticated underground network used for human trafficking or even ritual sacrifice – a centuries-old conspiracy trope known as the blood libel.

Such claims were fueled by the widespread and false attribution of images from the Borough Park scene as activity at Chabad headquarters. “Jewish New York sex-trafficking tunnels under synagogue collapsed,” reads one untrue tweetwhich included the false claim that “many civilians have been crushed”.

“Semitic Tunnels Collapse at New York Chabad Headquarters in Brooklyn”. He wrote a verified user with more than 130,000 followers. “Do you think other synagogues have tunnels under them?” Another account supporting Tate asked, “What are they trying to hide?” A self-proclaimed “citizen journalist” he tweeted with Israeli flag and smiley emojis: “Panic in Jewish community as 60-foot tunnels collapse under New York Chabad synagogue.” The post added: “It would be interesting if the tunnel investigation was made public.”

And white nationalist Richard Spencer, one of those blamed for the violence at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, shared a cartoon image of a city building sliding into an open pit, appearing to imply that the “chabad tunnels” can cause a building to collapse. “Many blocks have now been breached BC. from the Chabad tunnels,” read one answer. “Someone should sue the hoodlums outside the temple.”

The erroneous videos of Friday's fatal crash circulated for hours without any apparent correction from X's Community Notes feature. (Ahmed's post, viewed more than 800,000 times, was eventually called inaccurate.) But even some who didn't identify it mistakenly as a result of the collapse of the Chabad synagogue they seized the opportunity to engage in anti-Semitic terrorism. “The Jews and their tunnels” he tweeted Another verified user sharing the clip from Borough Park, referring to it only as a “Jewish area”. They continued to wonder, “Could another illegal Jewish underground network of tunnels, built without proper safety measures, cause the building above them to collapse?”

Accounts of what happened at the Chabad synagogue had already been heavily distorted. It now appears that any incident in Brooklyn where Jews happen to be present can be linked to these false narratives in order to deepen and expand the anti-Semitic views spread in X far beyond measure. Don't be surprised if by next week Influencers claim that a Jewish cabal controls the entire subway system.