Crippled by conspiracies

By Leonard Stern, The Ottawa Citizen:

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.

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