Jewish Conspiracy Theory Dismissed But Not Debunked
[Original headline: Jewish conspiracy theory dismissed]
WASHINGTON - A couple of days after last month's attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, a rumour began to spread in the Arab and Islamic world that a vast international Jewish conspiracy lay behind them.
According to this conspiracy theory, which surfaced a few days after the attack, some 4,000 Jewish employees of the World Trade Centre received advanced warning not to go to work on September 11. According to the theory, commandos working for Israel's Mossad secret service hijacked the planes aiming to provoke a U.S. revenge attack against the Arab world.
Although the story may sound far-fetched to most, and the long stream of Jewish funerals and obituaries following September 11 prove it false, it has been accepted as fact by sectors of ordinary people in some Muslim countries, spread by hardline newspapers, clerics and the internet.
Some American Jewish leaders feel the Bush administration needs to debunk the myth.
"Nobody is challenging this gross lie. Nobody is getting on Arab TV stations and saying it is a lie, it's absurd and it's a libel," said Abraham Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League.
David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, agreed.
"Perhaps the Bush administration doesn't want to confer legitimacy on these canards by even acknowledging their existence. Sadly, this story has taken on a life of its own. It has even reached non-Muslim countries like Greece and South Africa where Jewish communities have frantically contacted us, asking for help in refuting these charges," Harris said.
"At this point it would be very helpful for the Bush administration and other countries not only to condemn this canard but to call it by its real name, which is raw, unadulterated anti-Semitism," he said.
But James Zogby, chairman of the Arab American Institute, said: "This is a cruel as well as a bizarre story but once things like this get started and spread on the Internet, it is so difficult to snuff them out."
WISH FULFILMENT
"This and other similar stories function as a form of wish-fulfilment by people who wanted so badly not to accept that Arabs were responsible," he said.
In Iran, the hard-line Resalat newspaper last week quoted "experts" as saying the attacks were so complicated they had to have been carried out by the Israeli government and the Mossad.
In Kuwait, where some speakers on television have ridiculed the report, some people have even added embellishments, saying Jews were advised by New York rabbis to sell their holdings in the stock market the day before the attack and did so.
Public opinion data on Arab views toward the September 11 attack is sparse. One poll conducted a week after the hijacking and published in the Lebanese newspaper An Nahar found that 31 percent of respondents thought Israel was behind the hijackings while only 27 percent thought Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden was responsible, as the United States has charged.
Historian Richard Levy, an expert on anti-Semitism at the University of Illinois, Chicago, said such conspiracy theories have flourished after years during which Arab governments have encouraged crude Jewish conspiracy theories.
"They have encouraged their peoples to explain politics and history by means of myth, lie, and fear. This sort of demagogy will come back to bite them," he said.
"If I were a Pakistani who has internalised what my successive governments have been telling me for years about the awesome power of the Jews and their Israeli pawns, I might well find bin Laden more attractive and inspiring than my so-called leaders," Levy said.
Yossef Bodansky, a congressional consultant on terrorism and author of a book about bin Laden, said some Arab leaders have stoked anti-Jewish feeling as a way of diverting internal dissent and side-stepping calls for democratisation.
"Since there has never been any consideration of democratisation in any Arab country, it became imperative for Arab governments to come up with Satanic enemies of the state in order to legitimise the current state of affairs," he said.
But Clovis Maksoud, former ambassador of the League of Arab States to the United Nations and the United States, told Reuters: "This (rumour) was disposed with a long time ago. It has been marginalised. I don't think anybody takes that seriously. It is a remnant of the paranoiac approach.
"The funny thing is that some of the people who were saying that were indicating that no Arab can do that."
Asked about recent Western TV interviews with ordinary Muslims from as far apart as Indonesia, Pakistan and the Gulf who repeated the rumours, Maksoud, now director of Centre for the Global South, said: "Well that is because the e-mail has spread all sorts of things in repeating it, but no mainstream Arab person takes that seriously at all.
"The governments definitely don't do that. Of course there are people who are so frustrated. It might be repeated as you would find many crackpots all over on all sorts of issues, not only on this one here."
Shibley Telhami, who holds the Anwar Sadat chair for peace and development at the University of Maryland, wrote in an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury October 14:
"This is not about the objective reality of where the blame lies, it is about entrenched perceptions: The public in the region blames the powers that be, and sees Israel as the most powerful state in the region, an occupier of Arab lands, and the United States as the anchor of that order.
"Conspiracy theories abound in the Middle East, the favourite explanation for every ill: Even the September 11 attack is sometimes blamed on an Israeli conspiracy to discredit the Muslim world."
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- Oct 16.01
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