Wednesday October 17, 6:07 AM Rumour in Arab world blames Jews for September 11 http://sg.news.yahoo.com/011016/3/1kj4p.html By Alan Elsner, National Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A couple of days after last month's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a rumour began to spread in the Arab and Islamic world that a vast international Jewish conspiracy lay behind them. According to this conspiracy theory, which surfaced a few days after the attack, some 4,000 Jewish employees of the World Trade Center received advanced warning not to go to work on September 11. According to the theory, commandos working for Israel's Mossad secret service hijacked the planes aiming to provoke a U.S. revenge attack against the Arab world. Although the story sounds incredible, and the long stream of Jewish funerals and obituaries following September 11 prove it false, it has been accepted as fact by sectors of opinion in some Muslim countries, spread by hardline newspapers, clerics and the Internet. In Pakistan, dozens of letters to newspapers have perpetuated the tale without anyone denying it or offering a rebuttal. Some American Jewish leaders feel the Bush administration needs to debunk the rumour. "Nobody is challenging this gross lie. Nobody is getting on Arab TV stations and saying it is a lie, it's absurd and it's a libel," said Abraham Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League. David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, agreed. "Perhaps the Bush administration doesn't want to confer legitimacy on these canards by even acknowledging their existence. Sadly, this story has taken on a life of its own. It has even reached non-Muslim countries like Greece and South Africa where Jewish communities have frantically contacted us, asking for help in refuting these charges," Harris said. "At this point it would be very helpful for the Bush administration and other countries not only to condemn this canard but to call it by its real name, which is raw, unadulterated anti-Semitism," he said. But James Zogby, chairman of the Arab American Institute, said: "This is a cruel as well as a bizarre story but once things like this get started and spread on the Internet, it is so difficult to snuff them out." WISH FULFILLMENT "This and other similar stories function as a form of wish-fulfillment by people who wanted so badly not to accept that Arabs were responsible," he said. Shibley Telhami, who holds the Anwar Sadat chair for peace and development at the University of Maryland, said conspiracy theories spread in Islamic countries partly because people felt powerless and tended to blame their troubles on what they saw as powerful outside forces. "There is also a lot of anti-Jewish rhetoric in much of the Middle East which is unfortunate and should stop and has not stopped," he said. He called the spread of such rumours "disastrous and self-defeating", saying it encouraged people to accept their lack of rights instead of asserting them. In Iran, the hard-line Resalat newspaper last week quoted "experts" as saying the attacks were so complicated they had to have been carried out by the Israeli government and the Mossad. In Kuwait, where some speakers on television have ridiculed the report, some people have even added embellishments, saying Jews were advised by New York rabbis to sell their holdings in the stock market the day before the attack and did so. Public opinion data on Arab views toward the Sept. 11 attack is sparse. One poll conducted a week after the hijacking and published in the Lebanese newspaper An Nahar found that 31 percent of respondents thought Israel was behind the hijackings while only 27 percent thought Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden was responsible, as the United States has charged. Historian Richard Levy, an expert on anti-Semitism at the University of Illinois, Chicago, said such conspiracy theories have flourished after years during which Arab governments have encouraged crude Jewish conspiracy theories. "They have encouraged their peoples to explain politics and history by means of myth, lie, and fear. This sort of demagogy will come back to bite them," he said. "If I were a Pakistani who has internalised what my successive governments have been telling me for years about the awesome power of the Jews and their Israeli pawns, I might well find bin Laden more attractive and inspiring than my so-called leaders," Levy said. But Clovis Maksoud, former ambassador of the League of Arab States to the United Nations and the United States, told Reuters: "This (rumour) was disposed with a long time ago. It has been marginalized. I don't think anybody takes that seriously. It is a remnant of the paranoiac approach. "The funny thing is that some of the people who were saying that were indicating that no Arab can do that." Asked about recent Western TV interviews with ordinary Muslims from as far apart as Indonesia, Pakistan and the Gulf who repeated the rumours, Maksoud, now director of Center for the Global South, said: "Well that is because the e-mail has spread all sorts of things in repeating it, but no mainstream Arab person takes that seriously at all. "The governments definitely don't do that. Of course there are people who are so frustrated. It might be repeated as you would find many crackpots all over on all sorts of issues, not only on this one here." -- NSP Lista isprobava demokratiju u praksi ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?bUrBE8.bVKZIq Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: archive@jab.org T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
