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.”

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.

London Times columnist David Aaronovitch has written a new book on conspiracy theories: Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, published in the UK. It covers the Kennedy assassination, The September 11 attacks, Princess Diana’s death, Marilyn Monroe’s death, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the moon landing, the attack on Pearl Harbor and other popular conspiracy theories.

I haven’t read the book yet, but Aaronovitch published excerpts in The Times on April 29 and gave a talk on this subject at the London School of Economics on May 7.

Aaronovitch makes the point that conspiracy theories assume unworkably complex arrangements. He writes, in The Times, about those who wrongly believe the U.S. government planned the September 11 attacks:

This group of conspirators would have had to suborn, dupe or train 19 hijackers, create elaborate background stories for them, send them to flying schools to be seen around Florida and other parts of the US, before disposing of them either in the crashes or, in the case of Flight 77, in a manner unknown.

… The conspirators would have had to have sent experts in to rig the two main [World Trade Center] towers and WTC7 with sufficient explosives to be sure of bringing the first two buildings down some time after the planes had hit them, and WTC7 whenever it was felt expedient to do so. But the explosives had to be sufficiently inert not to be triggered either by the impacts of the planes or by the thousands of gallons of burning aviation fuel, an especially tricky proposition since no precedent existed for the crashing of a large civil airliner into a 1,000-foot skyscraper. …

Hundreds, if not thousands, would have to have been directly involved in different aspects of the conspiracy. And all of them would have to have been either fanatically committed to the project or else almost unimaginably immoral.

Yet, as Aaronovitch points out, a government that allegedly engaged in such a super-secret conspiracy, with absolutely no leaks, couldn’t accomplish the infinitely easier task of “plant[ing] weapons of mass destruction in the vastnesses of the Iraqi desert.”

Sounds like a good read to me.

A recent World Public Opinion.org poll reports growing numbers of people in some of the largest Muslim countries claim they don’t know who was behind the September 11 attacks:

• In February 2007, 29% of Egyptians said they didn’t know; in August 2008, that figure had grown to 46%.
• In January 2007, 43% of Indonesians said they didn’t know; in August 2008, 54%
• In February 2007, 63% of Pakistanis said they didn’t know; in August 2008, 72%.

(See page 24-25 of the February 25 report “Public Opinion in the Islamic World on Terrorism, al Qaeda, and US Policies” for data on these and other countries.)

If views about the September 11 attacks were based on facts, the trend would go the other way as more information becomes available, but this isn’t happening in Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan.

The World Public Opinion.org report comments, “this suggests that, rather than the passage of time allowing greater distance and deliberation, an avoidance and denial mechanism may have grown more habitual.”

It adds:

[C]onflicted feelings about al Qaeda—support for its goals coupled with rejection of its attacks on civilians—may help explain … the widespread rejection of the idea that al Qaeda was behind the September 11 attacks. … What this suggests is that many Muslims may feel tension or cognitive dissonance between their support for al Qaeda’s goals and disapproval of attacks on civilians. To alleviate this tension they may then avoid or discount information that points to al Qaeda (even the videos in which al Qaeda leaders claim responsibility) and seek out information that casts doubts on al Qaeda’s culpability and offers alternative theories.

The recent World Public Opinion poll “Who was behind 9/11?” noted that 46 percent correctly responded Al Qaida; 15 percent the United States, and 7 percent Israel. But 7 percent blamed other groups for the crime. I wondered: who might these supposed culprits be?

I called World Public Opinion, but they did not collect this data. Their pollsters were told to place answers in an overall category, not to record individual responses.

I found one creative “answer” in a recent book by ABC foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto, Against Us: The New Face of America’s Enemies in the Muslim World. He wrote:

“An American diplomat serving … in Saudi Arabia told the story of being invited to dinner at the home of a senior Saudi business executive in Riyadh in 2004. After the meal … his host leaned over as if to pass on a secret. He knew who was behind 9/11, he said. The diplomat had heard it all before: the CIA, the Israelis. No, no, the man replied, it was the Japanese. The Japanese had a history of kamikaze attacks, he explained, and they had to take revenge for losing World War II and they were angry at America for overtaking the Japanese economy after the 1980s.”

At a conference last month, I learned some West Africans believe former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who lost the 2000 election by the narrowest of margins, was behind 9/11. Some people there misinterpreted it as an attempt by Gore to seize state power.

Our creative minds are very good at concocting “reasons” that “explain” why groups that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks were supposedly “behind” it.

On September 11, The Washington Post published a special section on the dedication of the memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

A large part of the section focused on the lives lost and the impact on surviving family members, a human dimension that is often overlooked.

I was struck by the story of 8-year-old Anthony Tolbert, as told to his mother Shari. Anthony was only 18 months old when his father, Lt. Commander Otis Vincent Tolbert, died. Here are excerpts from Anthony’s story, which I could not find on the Web:

My mom told my sisters, who are older than me, that our dad wasn’t coming home anymore.

I think everybody thought that I understood what happened. But I didn’t. I really just thought my dad was at work from before I got up in the morning until after I went to bed at night. It’s the only thing that made sense to me. …

Now that I know my dad is dead and not just at work, I am trying to get used to the idea of not having a dad around. … I wonder sometimes what that feels like, to be with your dad. …

I kind of wish I had been older when 9/11 happened so that I could have understood what was happening. Sometimes I imagine that I would have been at home and would have seen what was happening on the news or even out a window. I would have called my dad’s cell phone number and told him to get out of the building.

My grandfather has taught me a lot about airplanes, and I think I could have calculated where the plane would have landed. If I had been there, maybe I could have saved my dad.

I don’t really remember anything about my dad. I dream about him sometimes, but the dreams are like slide shows of pictures I’ve seen of him. Sometimes I stop in the hall and stare at the pictures. I try so hard to remember.

Deep down inside, I feel sad once in a while. Some days, I try to erase it from my mind and to pretend that day never happened.