| Saturday, November 12, 2005 |
| Disturbing headlines: conspiracy theories |
Today's entires: Many in Jordan aren't blaming Iraqis for the suicide attacks on four American hotels, as many ex-pat Iraqis have feared, they're blaming the Israelis...Says the Times:
While it appears that most Jordanians have accepted that Mr. Zarqawi was involved - with many saying they are sickened by his actions - there is little criticism for those who scapegoat Israel. A former prime minister, Tahir Masri, who said it was clear that Israel was not involved in this attack, said he understood why so many people blame Israel.
"You have to understand, Baghdad was the capital for Arabs and Muslims for 1,000 years," Mr. Masri said. "It is occupied by Americans now. Jerusalem and Baghdad are both occupied. It is too much for ordinary people to bear. If you add to it the misery that people are facing because of the lack of democracy and humiliation by their rulers, that kind of scapegoat we have to have." Never mind that al-Qaida has taken credit for the bombings, and that, according to Debka, the group released a statement in which "Jordan was termed “Israel’s buffer zone.” It will not be long, said the statement, “before raids by the mujahedeen come to the Jewish state itself.” Still, these theories have been fueled by the inevitable "Jews warned of bombings beforehand" stories, which echo the Netanyahu escape stories when the London bombings took place in July (not to mention 9/11). In some cases, those stories are fueled by actual reporting, such as this Haaretz article that states that Israelis were evacuated from the Jordan hotels before the attacks. But of course, the root of the misdirected rage lies in the continued conflict over Palestine...
Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin links to this story about a BYU professor who's speculating that the WTC was felled by explosives planted inside the buildings, not by the planes that hit them (see physics prof Steven Jones paper on the subject here. Note to "moonbat watchers," he doesn't say he thinks the Bushies did it, that's you saying that...) Anyway, Jones clearly wouldn't be the first to raise doubts about what happened on 9/11. There are also those persistent "hunt the Boeing!" queries about the Pentagon (pretty thoroughly debunked here and here) ...
So what's behind the conspiratorial thinking? Rage and frustration at not being able to change policy, whether it's Arabs and Israel or anti-Bush civilians and the administration. Now, the queries on the Trade Center probably go beyond that -- there is a certain amount of ireesistability about probing the engineering behind what for many people, myself included, was the most horrific single image we've ever had in our heads: the twin towers collapsing like two damsels fainting into the dust. It was extraordinary and mentally jarring, and the mind wants to say it couldn't possibly have been done by a small band of outsiders whose leader lives in a cave. (What is equally extraordinary is that the perception of an American president could be so low that some people whould sooner believe that he was responsible for the deaths of some 2,000 people on 9/11 than Osama bin Laden. In life, I guess we pick our villains.)
Now if you really want to talk conspiracy, what about the cheeky late Ayatollah Khomeini, who apparently issued a fatwa that has since turned Iran into the sex change capitol of the world? And it may have all been a clever way to stamp out "alternative lifestyles..." Now that's something to write a BYU paper about...
Tags: News, conspiracy theories, Bush, Jordan, Israel |
posted by JReid @ 11:19 PM   |
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