In the September 9 issue of leading pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Alawsat, opinion page editor Mshari Al-Zaydi reflects on the popularity of September 11 conspiracy theories. He writes:

All these suggestions and scenarios indicate the extent of the control of wishful thinking over us. This is because the common factor among all these ideas is to put the responsibility on the shoulders of a party other than the Arab and Muslim party, i.e. a party that is not us.

… The main purpose of all these contorted ideas is to kill the questions, and to exonerate the cultural self from responsibility. If the ones who carried out these explosions were Serbs, Mossad, Seventh Day Adventists, Colombian gangs, or the CIA, it would be meaningless to question us about extremism, the culture of fanaticism and religious excess, the need to revise the concepts that establish religious violence, and all this continuous headache of questions that keep hammering on the mind of the society.

… the entire issue is reduced to saying that there are conspiracies that no one knows about except those in the know, but we are a perfect nation with a healthy society, culture, and civilization (where are all these now?!). However, we are targeted and warred upon. We are the main preoccupation of the world. The world wants to oppress us, prevent us from rising, and rob our wealth.

… The defeat of 1967 was a foreign conspiracy, so were the 1956 aggression and the 1948 catastrophe. The appointment of Anwar al-Sadat as president of Egypt was a conspiracy. Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was a conspiracy, and the west deliberately enticed Saddam into it. Osama Bin Laden is a conspiracy. All the religious fanaticism, and the dozens, even hundreds of suicide bombers, who flood our land with blood and torn bodies, are nothing but tools of a conspiracy that is managed from abroad (the nature and type of this abroad vary according to the prevailing circumstances and enemies).

This type of thinking reflects a deep-rooted perplexity, and a continuous fear of facing up to the naked truth.

The title of Al-Zaydi’s essay is “They Feed Our Illusions.”

During the past year, a number of conspiracy theorists have suggested that President Obama was not born in the United States. If this were true — which it is not — he would not be eligible to be the U.S. president, who must be a natural-born American.

On July 27, 2009, Hawaii State Health Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino confirmed that Obama was born in the U.S. state of Hawaii, stating:

I … have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008 over eight months ago ….

In 2008, FactCheck.org examined a copy of Obama’s birth certificate held by the Obama campaign, verifying that it was a real, official document.

Nine days after Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961, the Honolulu Advertiser included among its birth notices, “Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, son, Aug. 4,” which it reprinted in its Aug. 17, 2009 issue. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin printed the identical birth notice one day later, on August 14, 1961. Its former managing editor Dave Shapiro says, “Those were listings that came over from the state Department of Health. They would send the same thing to both papers.”

Interestingly, FactCheck.org determined that Obama was originally both a U.S. citizen and a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies from 1961 to 1963 (because his father was from Kenya, which gained its independence from the British Empire in 1963), then both a U.S. and Kenyan citizen from 1963 to 1982, and solely a U.S. citizen after that.

Last week, I did a Web chat on conspiracy theories, in which I was surprised by the number of questions on the Kennedy assassination.

The most comprehensive book on this subject is the 1600-page book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi, published in 2007. Bugliosi clearly establishes that Oswald acted alone.

From an early age, Oswald was a bitter, angry loner, ill-suited to working with, much less taking orders, from others. At age 13, he told his school psychiatrist “I dislike everybody.” He quit or was fired from every job he ever held, except a factory job he had in the Soviet Union.

Oswald had extreme political views. He defected to the USSR in 1959, requesting Soviet citizenship “because I am a Communist,” complaining that he “lived in a decadent capitalist society, where the workers are slaves.” He tried to commit suicide when the Soviets denied his request.

Oswald was quickly disillusioned by Soviet communism and returned to the United States in 1962, but still idealized Cuban communism. He was not the type of person likely to want to work for the CIA, KGB, or the Mafia, or whom any of these organizations would want to entrust with the most sensitive mission imaginable.

The KGB observed Oswald closely while he was in the USSR and concluded that he was a “mediocre, uninteresting, useless man,” in the words of Vladimir Semichastny, who headed the KGB when Oswald lived in the USSR. Semichastny added, “I had always respected the CIA and FBI, and we knew their work and what they were capable of. It was clear that Oswald was not an agent, couldn’t be an agent, for the CIA or FBI,” noting that “Oswald’s actions in Minsk [where he lived in the USSR] were not those of a foreign agent. His primary interest was in attending dances.”

Bugliosi quotes one of Oswald’s friends when he lived in Fort Worth, Texas, George de Mohrenschildt, who wrote:

I never would believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important … an unstable individual, mixed-up individual, uneducated individual, without background. What government would give him any confidential work? No government would.

In April 1963, Oswald attempted to kill retired General Edwin Walker, a fierce anti-Communist. This was an act characteristic of an unstable individual, not that of a government agent. In August 1963, he planned to hijack a plane to Cuba — not a likely activity for a secret U.S. or Soviet government agent or a Mafia hit man. In September 1963, he travelled to Mexico City, visiting both the Cuban and Soviet embassies in an unsuccessful attempt to travel to Cuba, where he apparently hoped to defect — again, not the act of someone secretly working for the United States, USSR, or the Mafia.

Bugliosi also points out that Oswald had no help from any co-conspirators when fleeing after killing President Kennedy. He took a bus and then a cab back to his room in Dallas, and then hid in a movie theater.

Oswald only had a total of $183.87 when he killed President Kennedy. He lived in a tiny (1.5 meters by four meters) room, which he rented for eight dollars per week. Nobody had paid him a lot of money to be an assassin.

Oswald was obsessed with making his mark in history. He told his wife that someday he would be “prime minister” of the United States – a job that has never existed. He was a fool but, tragically, made it into the history books, entirely on his own.

On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon while fellow astronaut Michael Collins orbited in a command module. Conspiracy theories denying the moon landing soon started.

For authoritative Web sites debunking these conspiracy theories, see:

• Robert Braeunig’s site, “DID WE LAND ON THE MOON?”
• Phil Plait’s BadAstronomy.com site
• Redzero’s “Moon Hoax” site.

Robert Braeunig explains why stars are not visible in photographs taken on the moon:

The answer is very simple: they are too faint. The Apollo photos are of brightly lit objects on the surface of the Moon, for which fast [camera] exposure settings were required. The fast exposures simply did not allow enough starlight into the camera to record an image on the film. For the same reason, images of the Earth taken from orbit also lack stars. The stars are there; they just don’t appear in the pictures.

Redzero talks about the almost 400 kg. of moon rocks the astronauts brought back:

We know for certain that they came from the moon. 100% certain. They are like nothing else on Earth and they couldn’t have been constructed artificially because they bear the evidence of billions of years exposure to a vacuum, high energy cosmic rays, tiny asteroids and virtually no water. Nothing on Earth could replicate this, either naturally or man-made.

Phil Plait explains why the lunar landing module did not produce any flames when it took off from the moon:

There is actually a simple reason why you cannot see the flame from the lander when it took off. The fuels they used produced no visible flame! The lander used a mix of hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide (an oxidizer). These two chemicals ignite upon contact and produce a product that is transparent.

NASA recently stated it is “disappointed that conspiracy theorists ignore basic science principles to diminish arguably the greatest feat in the history of human exploration. It insults the dedication and the sacrifices made by hundreds of thousands of people who were a part of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.”

I did a Web chat yesterday on conspiracy theories. Topics included the September 11 attacks, the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, the origin of AIDS, why Osama bin Laden is not wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for the September 11 attacks, the Illuminati, and other subjects. Check it out.

A July 9 entry in Paul Goble’s “Window on Eurasia” blog calls attention to a recent article in the Ukrainian press, “The Jewish card in Russian operations against Ukraine,” which exposes what the article’s author says was a Russian disinformation ploy against Ukraine’s president Viktor Yushchenko.

In 2008, Russia’s Regnum news service announced the publication of a book about Viktor Yushchenko’s father called Andrei Yushchenko: The Person and the “Legend” by Yuri Vilner. The book claims that Yushchenko’s father collaborated with the Nazis as a camp policeman and informer while a prisoner of war during World War II.

Ukrainian poet Moses Fishbein, who wrote the “Jewish card” article, read the book on the Internet and called the person to whom it was dedicated, Aron Shneer of Israel, to ask about the author, Yuri Vilner, identified as an Israeli historian.

Shneer had never heard of Vilner and Fishbein eventually concluded that “no one either in Israel or in Russia—or anywhere else for that matter—neither scholars nor journalists” knew of Vilner.

Fishbein then checked the book’s ISBN (International Standard Book Number), which provides a unique identification for books published internationally. It was 969-228-292-5.

The first group of numbers in a 10-digit ISBN denotes the country in which the book was published. The numbers 969 are for books published in Pakistan, not Israel. The number for Israel is 965.

In addition, ISBNs for books published in 2007 or later have 13 digits, not 10, another indication the Yushchenko book is a fake.

Fishbein says the fraudulent book was exposed in the Ukrainian press in 2008 and on an Israeli Web site, but that “Russian secret services” continue to use disinformation in “special operations” against Ukraine.

(Paul Goble, who spotted the Fishbein article, is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious issues in Russia and the former Soviet Union.)