The 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks was marked at some of New York’s most prominent cultural institutions.
At the Perelman Performing Arts Center, at ground zero, Gustavo Dudamel conducted the New York Philharmonic Orchestra as it appeared with the Soldiers’ Chorus of the U.S. Army Field Band.
At Lincoln Center, dancers performed “Table of Silence Project 9/11” outside in an annual ritual described as “an artistic call to action for peace.”
Inside El Museo del Barrio, there was a conference called “Turning the Tide: 9/11 25 Years Later,” whose organizers rented space for the event from the museum for four days. But here, the talk was of conspiracies and cover-ups. The museum said it regretted hosting the event.
Speakers labeled the congressional commission report on Sept. 11 “a total whitewash” and suggested planes could have been remotely steered into the twin towers to provide a pretext for war. There was a reference to planted explosives and the view that controlled demolitions, not the planes and resulting fires, were more directly involved in the building collapses.
“Everyone has a right to question the official explanation of that day, especially the victims’ family members who participated in the conference,” said Ted Walter, executive director of the International Center for 9/11 Justice, which helped organize conference that began on Sept. 10.
A study by a federal science agency found in 2005 that the towers collapsed after the impact of the hijacked planes dislodged fireproofing insulation and allowed structural steel to buckle in the intense heat from the jet fuel and other fires.
On its website, the International Center for 9/11 Justice describes one of its goals as forging “a society that is no longer shaped by the false official account of 9/11 and that is committed to eradicating the elite criminality and institutional corruption that produced the 9/11 atrocities and facilitated their cover-up.”
Mr. Walter said in an interview that the conference speakers had included rescue workers and relatives of victims of Sept. 11, among others, who he said had researched the events to raise legitimate questions.
But the timing and topic of the gathering on Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile struck some as discordant at a moment when the nation was focused on the lasting horrors of the attack.
Terry Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families United, said that her group rejects the idea promoted by speakers at the conference that 9/11 was something other than a terror attack carried out by hijackers.
“We strongly disagree with their premise and find it disrespectful to those lost on 9/11 and all those left behind,” she said in a statement.
El Museo, the country’s oldest museum dedicated to Latin art, said last week it had no role in organizing the conference, had not been aware of the full program, content or the speaker list when it agreed to the rental and that it had no contractual ability to cancel it.
“El Museo del Barrio recognizes its responsibility as a steward of the public trust and deeply regrets this event,” the museum said in a statement. “We sincerely regret this lapse in our vetting process and accept responsibility for the pain this has caused to all of us who continue to endure the tragedy of 9/11,” it added. “We are currently undertaking a thorough review of our rental policies.”
The museum, which stated in its last tax return that annual expenses had outpaced revenues by $1.5 million, declined to disclose how much the organizers had paid to rent the space.
Though it operates independently, El Museo is housed in a building owned by New York City and is scheduled to receive $1.3 million this year in operating support from the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. The agency said in a statement that it had not been aware of the conference and described the organizers’ decision to hold it on the anniversary as “reprehensible.”
“As our city mourned, reflected, and remembered the tragic anniversary of 9/11, this conference gave oxygen to the most hurtful conspiracy theories that make that day even more painful for so many New Yorkers,” the statement said.
Museums often push boundaries in the name of freedom of expression. But Janet Marstine, the former founding director of the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University, said museums have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the agendas of events held on their premises do not lessen trust in the institution.
“In the case of the September 11 conspiracy theorists’ conference, held at El Museo del Barrio during the 25th anniversary of the Al Qaeda attacks, the compromise of public trust is particularly egregious,” Ms. Marstine wrote in an email.
El Museo is far from the first museum to be scrutinized over what sort of outside events it has allowed.
In 2023, London’s Natural History Museum apologized for renting space for a dinner that was part of the three-day National Conservatism Conference, a project of a U.S.-based group. The apology came after critics objected to views aired by speakers, including one who said the Black Lives Matter movement only cares about “the symbolic destruction of white culture.”
This year’s was the second “Turning the Tides” conference about Sept. 11. Last year, the conference was held at Friends Meeting of Washington, a Quaker space in Washington.
The organizers for the New York conference this year invited participants to show up at the former site of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11 to hand out fliers and educate the public.
The Anti-Defamation League took issue with the conference, expressing concern on its website that some conspiracy theorists have taken on an antisemitic cast by speculating that Jews or Israel had secretly precipitated the attacks.
“The so-called 9/11 ‘truther’ movement, once a niche subculture presented with a pseudoscientific veneer, has shifted over time into simplified and sweeping claims about supposed Jewish and Zionist power,” the ADL said.
During this year’s conference, one speaker said the two towers had been felled in a scheming “false flag” attack and then played a video showing the flags of the United States and Israel. The flags were bordered by the words “We Know” and a reference to Sept. 11 as “False Flag Day.”
Mr. Walter wrote in an email that what he called “the ADL’s attempt to characterize the Turning the Tide conference or its speakers as antisemitic” was “baseless and misguided.”
Among the speakers on the evening the conference opened was Matt Campbell, whose late brother Geoff, a Reuters employee from Britain, was killed inside the north tower. Mr. Cambell, who is pushing for a new inquest in Britain into his brother’s death, told the audience that “questions remain” about whether American intelligence agencies could have facilitated the attacks on the towers.
“In Geoff’s case,” Mr. Campbell said, “answering how he died meant looking not only at the fact that the north tower collapsed, but at why it collapsed.”
Mr. Walter objected in an email to criticism of the conference by the Department of Cultural Affairs, saying he found it “reprehensible” that a city agency “would demean the perspective of so many grieving and hurt New Yorkers who believe that the full truth of 9/11 has yet to be told.”
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