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.

On March 30, shortly after French composer Maurice Jarre died, Irish student Shane Fitzgerald inserted a fake quotation attributed to Jarre onto his Wikipedia site, to see how many journalists would be fooled.

Fitzgerald described the incident in the May 7 Irish Times:

“One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack,” I wrote into the Wikipedia entry. “Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear.”

This was a totally fake quote and neither Maurice Jarre, nor anyone else, has ever been on record as uttering these words. …

While I expected online blogs and maybe some smaller papers to use the quote, I did not think it would have a major impact. I was wrong. Quality newspapers in England, India, America and as far away as Australia had my words in their reports of Jarre’s death.

Vigilant Wikipedia editors deleted the fake quotation twice on March 30 – once only six minutes after Fitzgerald had posted it the second time. But after Fitzgerald posted it a third time, it remained on the sire for 25 hours.

Fitzgerald revealed his hoax a month later, in e-mails to newspapers that had been fooled. The UK Guardian printed a correction on May 4, noting:

The absence of a footnote containing a reference for the quote ought to have made obituary writers suspicious. … The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source.

Fitzgerald’s conclusion:

If I could so easily falsify the news across the globe, even to this small extent, then it is unnerving to think about what other false information may be reported in the press.

Especially when the hoax fits the story line.

Color me grumpy. I went to the U.S. Holocaust Museum last week to see their exhibit “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda.” It was visually impressive, but I was disappointed.

What interests me most about Nazi propaganda is how was Hitler able to strike a responsive chord in the German people, enabling him to rise from obscurity to winning 37% of the German vote in 1932. He was undoubtedly a brilliant demagogue, but how was he able to sway so many?

I would have liked to learn more about how Hitler played upon the powerful emotions of the time: German feelings about defeat in World War I (with Russia decisively defeated by German arms and no Western armies on German soil); the role Germany saw itself rightfully playing in Europe and the world, the threat of Bolshevism (which was intense in the 1920s); the ruinous post-World War I hyperinflation; the harsh impositions of the Versailles Treaty; the failure of the Weimar Republic; and economic depression. The exhibit has a little about the stab-in-the-back theory, but I would have liked to know more about how Hitler artfully played on German resentments and aspirations.

There’s a great deal in the exhibit on anti-Semitism, as would be expected, but little on how widespread anti-Semitism was in Europe. I remember once looking through a 19th century edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and seeing the unfamiliar story “The Jew in the Brambles,” in which a stereotypical dishonest, thieving Jew is hanged. A bit more on the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1930s might help explain the power of Nazi propaganda.

There was also a reference to allied atrocity propaganda in World War I as a precursor to Nazi propaganda, but no such references to Soviet propaganda, which seems a better fit to me. The exhibit notes that one popular Nazi slogan was “Work, Freedom, and Bread,” which is strikingly similar to the 1917 Bolshevik slogan “Peace, Land, and Bread.”

On November 19, Washington Post reporter Charles Krause wrote an account of what happened when he was shot and wounded while accompanying U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan to Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. Ryan’s visit prompted Jonestown leader Jim Jones to murder Ryan and others in his party as well as 909 Jonestown residents, who died in a revolutionary “mass suicide.”

Krause recalls his encounter at that time with Mark Lane, a lawyer for Jonestown and author of one of the most influential conspiracy theory books on the Kennedy assassination, Rush to Judgment. Lane had accompanied Ryan, Krause and others in their visit to Jonestown, but escaped the carnage.

Krause writes:

A few days after the killings, Lane asked me if I had eaten the cheese sandwiches served to us that day before we left for the airstrip where I was wounded and Ryan was murdered. When I said yes, I had eaten the sandwiches, Lane said he had not – because he’d been told they were poisoned. Why hadn’t he told Ryan and the rest of us, I asked. There was no response.

Lane’s ethical lapses are also evident in Rush to Judgment. Vincent Bugliosi writes, in Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, “if the reader checks Lane’s assertions against the evidence produced by the [Warren] Commission … he or she will find that Lane’s contentions are either distortions or outright fabrications.”

Bugliosi notes that Lane says that none of the doctors who treated Kennedy in Dallas observed a bullet entry wound in the back of his head. This would seem to indicate that Oswald, who was behind Kennedy, could not have been the assassin. But Bugliosi says the reason the doctors saw no entry wound is that they did not turn over Kennedy’s body to look at the back of his head. Their concern was treating his visible injuries to try to save his life.

It sounds like it’s not wise to trust either a cheese sandwich served by Lane’s employers or a book produced by him.

In a related historical footnote, when Vasili Mitrokhin, senior archivist for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 with thousands of transcribed summaries of KGB documents, he revealed the KGB had sent Lane, through an intermediary, $2000 to support his work on Rush to Judgment. Lane says he did not know these funds had come from the KGB, although the KGB suspected he might have guessed.

Thirty years ago, on November 18, 1978, Jim Jones ordered the mass “revolutionary suicide” of 909 of his followers in Jonestown, Guyana, as well as the murder of a U.S. congressman, Leo Ryan, and others who accompanied him on his visit to investigate Jonestown.

Jones was a communist who admired Stalin and North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, and who wanted to move his commune to the USSR. He was not religious. He stated, “We do not accept religion,” characterizing it, in Marxist terms, as the “opiate” of the people.

Jones was plagued by conspiratorial delusions. Deborah Layton Blakey, a member of Jones’ Peoples Temple for seven years, wrote in a June 15, 1978 affidavit:

Jones saw himself as the center of a conspiracy. The identity of the conspirators changed from day to day along with his erratic world vision. … He convinced black Temple members that if they did not follow him to Guyana, they would be put into concentration camps and killed. White members were instilled with the belief that their names appeared on a secret list of enemies of the state that was kept by the C.I.A. and that they would be tracked down, tortured, imprisoned, and subsequently killed if they did not flee to Guyana.

Blakey wrote: “in Jonestown, the concept of mass suicide for socialism arose. Because our lives were so wretched anyway and because we were so afraid to contradict Rev. Jones, the concept was not challenged.”

Mass suicides were rehearsed and, following Ryan’s visit, one was ordered by Jones. In a final act, he tried to give seven million dollars he had hoarded to the Soviet Communist Party. The letter to the Soviet consul in Guyana explained, “we, as Communists, want our money to be of benefit for help to oppressed peoples all over the world.”

The 918 people who died 30 years ago at Jonestown were victims of Jones’ megalomania, conspiracy thinking, and communist delusions.

Jihad Unspun publisher Khadija Abdul Qaharr has reportedly been kidnapped in Pakistan.

Jihad Unspun is a pro-al Qaida, pro-Taliban website run by Qahaar, who was known as Beverly Giesbrecht before converting to Islam after the September 11 attacks.

I wrote about Jihad Unspun as a prime venue for disinformation several years ago.

Qahaar traveled to Pakistan in August, entering Mohmand province in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, in order to make a film on the Pakistani Taliban. She describes the difficulties of her trip and a near escape from kidnapping in an August 26 dispatch, “Qahaar: Live from Mohmand Agency.” She said that four different translators she had hired for the trip to the tribal areas quit, mostly out of fear.

On October 22, she published an “Urgent Request” for funds to leave the country.

Last week, Pakistani newspapers reported she had been kidnapped on November 11, along with a translator and personal assistant.

On Friday, Canadian foreign affairs spokesperson Lisa Monette confirmed that an unnamed Canadian citizen had been kidnapped in Pakistan, stating “Canadian officials are working with Pakistan for her early release.” She refused to comment further, saying disclosing more details could undermine efforts to free the woman and put her at greater risk.