The Warped Mirror: World of conspiracy

No doubt people in the Middle East have much reason to distrust what their governments and their often not very free media tell them, and want them to believe. In a recent "Memo from Cairo" in the New York Times, Michael Slackman argued that this deep distrust was a major reason for the wide-spread popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories in the Middle East - if official media reports blamed bin Laden and Islamist terrorism, people would immediately suspect that it wasn't true. But let's test this explanation by imagining for a moment that the official media presented the conspiracy theories as the truthful account of what happened seven years ago. Would the talk in the shopping malls, cafes and tea houses of the Middle East then no longer be about how the US and Israel should be blamed for 9/11, but just the opposite - how preposterous it was to blame the US and Israel for these attacks and the destruction they wrought?

Of course not. The popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories in the Middle East clearly reflects deep-seated and wide-spread resentments that have been encouraged for decades by the governments and media in the region. It is therefore entirely misguided to respond like Slackman with an enlightened mea culpa reflex that blames the popularity of these conspiracy theories once more on the West and laments the supposed failure to convince the people in the Middle East that the "war on terror" is not a war against Islam.

The fact of the matter is that the Middle East offers an ideal climate for conspiracy theories - especially those that shift the blame to the outside. Just as anywhere else, people in the Middle East need an explanation for whatever is wrong in their lives, and there is surely a lot wrong in much of the region. But since autocratic rulers and authoritarian governments can not be held accountable and political initiative is rigidly controlled, it is both risky and futile to point the finger to a culprit inside. To be sure, pointing the finger outside doesn't promise a better chance to take control over one’s destiny and start to work for improvements. But at least it makes it possible to express anger about what is wrong publicly, without worrying about who might disagree or disapprove. As long as the finger is pointing outside, nobody will disapprove, because this is just what the government wants.

Believing in 9/11 conspiracy theories in the Middle East also means believing that there is a "clash of civilizations", and that it is America - and of course Israel - that provoked this clash. Political leaders who are perceived as standing up to the "West" are amply rewarded: polls show that Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah is the most popular figure in the Arab world, Syrian president Bashar Assad comes second - and Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes third. And thus, something of a vicious cycle is created: political leaders like these are popular because people see them as heroes in a battle created as part of their conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theories are needed to explain the dismal state of affairs that those political leaders create for the people who admire them.

The obsession of the Arab world with Israel has a lot to do with this: for decades, the people in the Middle East have been told that everything that is wrong in the region is somehow to be blamed on the "Zionist entity", and because they needed an explanation for how this "entity" could survive and thrive, another conspiracy was invented: the US was the evil behind it all - or, another version: the Jews controlled America and made it do what they want. This mix of hostility and anti-Semitism proved a potent poison, but it seems that first and foremost, it poisons the minds of those who nurture it: if somebody like Hassan Nasrallah is widely admired as a political leader, one can only conclude that too many people in the region still delude themselves into thinking that the desire to destroy is more important than the aspiration to create and build.

The attacks of 9/11 and the spectacular destruction that they wrought was an expression of such perverted priorities. Western commentators like Slackman who preach now, seven years after these attacks, that it is incumbent on the West to understand why conspiracy theories about 9/11 are so popular in the Middle East, ignore that quite a few of the very same people who now profess to believe the preposterous notion that America attacked itself, celebrated seven years ago, proudly crediting perpetrators from their own ranks for the attacks.

There is nothing progressive to the patronizing attitude that demanded in 2001 that "the West" had to understand the hatred that motivated the attacks, and that demands seven years later that "the West" has to understand why it is now so popular to reject all responsibility for this hatred in the region where it was nurtured. And make no mistake: this hatred is still being nurtured. One example of many is how Saudi school children are taught to distinguish between "true" and "false" belief in God according to a recent edition of a fourth-grade textbook that asks students to choose the option that describes the "true" believer: 

(a) A man prays but hates those who are virtuous.
(b) A man professes that there is no deity other than God but loves the unbelievers.
(c) A man worships God alone, loves the believers, and hates the unbelievers.

Option (a) is obviously wrong - but so is option (b), because according to the Wahhabi imams who wrote the textbook, "true" belief requires hating the "unbelievers." The "unbelievers" are of course all non-Muslims, and potentially also Muslims who don't adhere to what is considered the proper variety of Islam. But the teaching of hate doesn't end there, because children are also taught "that Jews conspire to 'gain sole control over the world,' that the Christian crusades never ended, and that on Judgment Day 'the rocks or the trees' will call out to Muslims to kill Jews."

As long as children in the Middle East and beyond are taught to believe such hate-filled nonsense, contorted explanations that seek to blame the West for the popularity of conspiracy theories in the Middle East are hardly more than another counterproductive exercise in political correctness.