Perhaps you heard the news. Terrorists hijacked four airliners and crashed three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the fourth was brought down in a field in Pennsylvania. The work of Osama bin Laden? No, actually it was just another job pulled off by the Israeli spy agency Mossad. Israeli agents recruited the Arab hijackers, or else used a high-tech radio transmitter to guide the planes to their targets. The proof? Well, the Israeli embassy secretly warned 4,000 Jews to stay home from their jobs at the World Trade Center that day. Heard the truth about Saddam Hussein? He’s a CIA agent, whose invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was intended to provide a pretext for crushing Iraq, the Arab country most threatening to Israel. And Monica Lewinsky? A Jewess guided by Israel to create a sex scandal for President Clinton, who was pressuring Israel to accept a Palestinian state.
Such accounts should be immediately dismissed as ludicrous, anti-Semitic fabrications. Not in much of the Arab world, however. From Rabat to Baghdad, these and similar tales are widely accepted as fact among the poorly educated populace as well as by many officials, diplomats, academics, journalists and others who should know better.
While the rest of the world is busy trying to understand how best to deal with extremism of all kinds ? whether from Muslims or xenophobic Westerners ? many Arabs seem locked in a never-never land where conspiracy theories, usually featuring a sinister Jewish hand and scarcely a scrap of evidence, neatly explain everything there is to know about a complex world. The West has its share of people who believe in kooky ideas, of course, but in the Middle East they are not on the loony fringe.
An apparent growth in anti-Semitism is part of the problem. But some critics believe that the Arab reflex to blame Jews is rooted in military humiliations, economic stagnation and repressive rule. “Arab society is broken in back and spirit,” says Fawaz Turki, a columnist for the Saudi daily Arab News, one of the rare Arab journalists who dares challenge Arab conventional wisdom. “That is why conspiracy theories are welcome. It is comforting to say, ‘It is not our fault.'”
According to scholars studying public attitudes, the readiness of Arabs to embrace conspiracy theories is a blend of ancient superstition and modern suspicion. In discussing the region’s colonial history, school texts have taught generations of Arabs about secret deals concocted by outside powers to carve up the Middle East and foster a state for Jews. Authoritarian Arab regimes have further sown confusion by tightly controlling information or the media. Many Arabs believe that the U.S. is a new colonial master, working secretly with Arab dictators to control oil production and assure Israel’s dominance.
While not all Arab conspiracy theories involve Jews, a disturbing upsurge in anti-Semitism is nonetheless apparent. It shows itself not only in tabloid media, but in the naked hatred against Jews displayed in mainstream government-controlled newspapers. Last week, Al Akhbar, Egypt’s second-largest daily, reported that Israelis were removing the organs of Palestinians killed in recent fighting and providing them to Jews in need of transplants. In April, the paper carried a commentary headlined “Cursed Forever” in which author Fatma Abdullah Mahmoud dismissed the Holocaust as a fabrication while addressing Hitler with the lament, “If only you had done it, brother.”
Scholars argue that anti-Semitism came late to the Muslim Middle East, largely the result of a long, bitter Arab conflict with the Jewish state, and that much of Middle Eastern anti-Semitism borrows its falsehoods from the older European variety. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous Russian forgery now wholly discredited in Europe that describes a Jewish plot to take over the world, is widely available in Arab countries. If Arabs seem insensitive to anti-Semitism, it is partly because of the anti-Arab racism they perceive in everything from Israeli repression of Palestinians to Hollywood stereotypes of swarthy Arab terrorists. Arabs complain they are the victims of racial profiling, pointing to rising physical attacks on Muslims in Europe as well as last week’s U.S. Justice Department proposal to fingerprint and register Muslims entering the U.S.
Western diplomats who made a six-month study of Egypt’s press concluded that while anti-Semitism existed, it was by no means prevalent. The Egyptian media’s daily barrage of criticism of Israel, says a diplomat involved in the review, is not an expression of anti-Semitism but of strong political disagreement.
Tell that to Israelis, whose sense of being under siege is only heightened by Arab commentary that not only cheers on suicide attacks but vents vulgar opinions about Jews as a people. Israeli viewers were shocked by an Abu Dhabi satirical program rebroadcast in Israel in April that depicted a ghoulish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cackling about using Arab blood in the recipe for a new Israeli soft drink. Israeli analysts say that Saudi Arabia’s tolerance of anti-Semitism is one reason for Israel’s relatively cool reception of the recent Saudi peace plan. Even as Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud was touting his proposal in the West, the Saudi daily Al Riyadh was publishing a diatribe (later repudiated by its editor) repeating the notorious “blood libel,” claiming that Jews use the blood of non-Jews in preparing their Passover and Purim feasts. The impact of such crude anti-Semitism extends far beyond the Middle East. Pro-Israel groups like the Middle East Media Research Institute in Washington translate the articles and disseminate them to influential politicians and journalists, tarnishing the image of Arabs further.
While free, intelligent and healthy debate may have to await the end of authoritarian rule, a growing number of Arab intellectuals are determined to start now. Lebanese writer Hazem Saghiyeh, outspoken in condemning racism against Arabs and Muslims, recently penned a harsh attack on Arab anti-Semitism for being “dangerous, uncivilized and totally idiotic.” He advocates a change in the way Arabs think. “There is almost an impossibility to put aside wishful thinking and conspiracy theories and grasp the world the way it is,” Saghiyeh complains. Unfortunately, it is a world where terrorists and warmongers threaten the peace. And where sometimes a sex scandal is just a sex scandal.
More Must-Reads from TIME
- L.A. Fires Show Reality of 1.5°C of Warming
- Home Losses From L.A. Fires Hasten ‘An Uninsurable Future’
- The Women Refusing to Participate in Trump’s Economy
- Bad Bunny On Heartbreak and New Album
- How to Dress Warmly for Cold Weather
- We’re Lucky to Have Been Alive in the Age of David Lynch
- The Motivational Trick That Makes You Exercise Harder
- Column: No One Won The War in Gaza
Contact us at letters@time.com