An article in today’s New York Times and International Herald Tribune explains why I will always have a job.

Michael Slackman reports from Cairo that people throughout the Arab world believe – wrongly – that the United States and Israel were behind the September 11 attacks.

One of the main arguments is the totally false story that no Jews showed up for work that day at the World Trade Center, a myth that has been thoroughly debunked for years but still persists.

Others believe that the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq somehow “proves” that the U.S. government was behind 9/11.

There is absolutely no evidence to support this claim, but that hardly matters. Having spent 15 years countering false stories, it is clear to me that many people decide first what happened – based on gut feelings and their sense of what should be true – and then search for evidence (real or imagined) to support their conclusions, rather than examining the evidence first and drawing conclusions based on the evidence.

The popularity of September 11 conspiracy theories in the Arab world is “the result of widespread mistrust, and the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States has a prejudice against them,” says Wahid Abdel Meguid, deputy director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Egypt, quoted in the Times article.

It seems to me that what matters most are the narratives about the world that people have in their minds. If they mistrust the United States and hate Israel, they will believe that they should be blamed when bad things happen, despite the fact that Osama bin Laden has clearly admitted he launched the September 11 attacks.

So, there will always be work for me to do countering misinformation and conspiracy theories.