Crippled by conspiracies

 By Leonard Stern, The Ottawa Citizen June 26, 2010

The Toronto 18 trials wrapped up this week, as the final two accused were found guilty of plotting to commit violence in the name of militant Islam. 

Originally, many people assumed the allegations were exaggerated. These were just a bunch of angry young men fantasizing out loud, more stupid than dangerous. In the end, however, it turned out to be the real deal, a textbook example of self-radicalization and homegrown terrorism. 

Now that 11 of the original 18 suspects have been convicted, you'd think there would be a sense of relief. Not really. As the Toronto Star reported, focus groups organized by McGill University indicate some 90 per cent of Muslim youth believe the Toronto terrorism case was a government conspiracy, concocted to make Muslims look bad. 

It's hard to overstate how depressing this is, even though we've seen it before. The most disheartening event surrounding the 9/11 attack, other than the attack itself, was the mass denial among Muslim communities right here in the West. 

  

The tradition of conspiracy-thinking in the Muslim world is entrenched and quite fascinating. My first exposure to it was back in journalism school at Carleton University. It was 1993, and I was part of a student television crew sent to cover, as a class assignment, an anti-Israel protest outside the Ottawa Congress Centre, where then-Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres was speaking. 

As we walked into the crowd lugging our TV equipment, an Arab demonstrator pointed to our camera and screamed "Mossad!" Other demonstrators, wearing Yasser Arafat-style kafiyas, became very agitated and started jostling us, yelling "Mossad! Mossad!" We showed our university student IDs. The mob grew angrier, convinced the cards were fake. 

Now it's true that all cultures have conspiracy industries. Here in the industrialized West, there are people who believe in alien abduction, that pharmaceutical companies orchestrated the H1N1 vaccination campaign, and that Bobby Kennedy killed Marilyn Monroe. 

In the West, however, this stuff is relegated to the fringe. Conversely, the culture of conspiracy in the Arab and Muslim world is mainstream, promoted in mass-circulation media and by influential intellectual, religious and political leaders. 

Earlier this year, the daily Iranian newspaper Jomhouri-ye Eslami reported that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are secret arms of the U.S. government. Whenever the Americans want to justify imperial aggression, they simply order up another "terror" attack from their ally Osama bin Laden. Another daily Iranian newspaper, Kayhan, reported that the U.S. and Israel used secret technology to trigger the Haiti earthquake, to provide an excuse for western governments to station troops in Haiti and destabilize nearby Cuba and Venezuela. 

Last month, a prominent Pakistani columnist wrote in the Peshawar daily Frontier Post that the attempted bombing in Times Square was actually a CIA-Mossad plot. The purpose? To provide an excuse for the U.S. to attack and invade Pakistan. 

Just this month, the head of the Palestinian Writers' Union in Gaza, Abu Al-Subh, published a series of articles explaining how Jews are planning to take over the planet by brainwashing future leaders and corrupting the education systems of countries around the world. Al-Subh is an important figure not just because he heads up the writers' union, but also because he has also served as culture minister in the Hamas government. 

The above examples come courtesy of the Middle East Media Research Institute, an invaluable organization that provides English translations of what is being said in the mainstream Arab and Muslim press -- again, not the fringe, but mainstream. (If you check it out at memri.org, you'll see that it translates liberal and moderate Muslim voices, too, where it can find them.) 

So why has a culture of conspiracy and paranoia come to be institutionalized in the Muslim Middle East? There is a growing academic literature on the subject, but two principal explanations stand out. 

One is that conspiracy theories are a tool by which illiberal Muslim leaders preserve power. Conspiracy theories allow corrupt autocrats to deflect criticism and blame outsiders -- Zionists, the CIA and so on --for all the poverty, illiteracy and suffering in their own mismanaged societies. 

The second explanation is that Muslims willingly embrace conspiracist thinking as a collective defence mechanism, a way of rationalizing the gap in human development between the West and Islam. 

In many Muslim societies, honour is paramount. The collision between Islam and modernity has led to chronic underachievement in the Muslim world, and that, some scholars say, is a profound humiliation. Conspiracy theories help ease the shame, by explaining how Islam, once a glorious empire, came to this sorry state. 

Conspiracist thinking is a symptom of total dysfunction. An obsession for external enemies, especially invented ones, means there will never be an imperative to look for the real enemies within, and to embrace the long, painful reforms that ultimately must begin at home.