This is an extraordinary story that illustrates the conspiracy-mania that afflicts (infects?) so much of the Muslim world...
A Conspiracy Theory Spreads Polio
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
May 24, 2005
A worldwide campaign begun in 1988 to eradicate the polio infection was on the verge of success when, early in 2003, a conspiracy theory took hold of the Muslim population in northern Nigeria. That conspiracy theory has single-handedly returned polio to epidemic proportions.
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[M]ore important is for Muslims themselves to argue against and defeat the conspiracy-theory mentality. This polio episode is but one example of how conspiracy theories originating in the Muslim world damage everyone, and Muslims first of all.
5 comments:
There are so many people in the world who just need a slap.
Five years after the attack on the World Trade Centre, a group of 75 American academics is claiming that the truth about 9/11 has been covered up. The leader of the group - Steven E Jones, a physics professor at a university in Utah - has studied debris from the disaster and concluded that explosives were used to bring down the towers.
... Clearly, none of the journalists concerned was present at the seminars Jones gave last month at his Mormon university - Brigham Young, in Provo, Utah - where he aired some of his other favourite ideas. ... Jones is convinced, for example, that Jesus was wandering through ancient Mexico around AD 600, paying calls on various Mayan villagers. He has published "evidence" that the Mayans were well aware of the "resurrected Lord" centuries before the Spanish priests crossed the Atlantic and gave them the Good News. And, for the past 10 years, Professor Jones has also been trying to sell Third World countries a solar funnel cooker based on the highly disputed scientific theory of cold fusion.
The cooker doesn't appear to have caught on. But Jones is having much better luck with his 9/11 conspiracy theories. A poll conducted by Ohio University in July revealed that more than a third of the American public believes that the federal government assisted in the World Trade Centre attacks or took no action to stop them. ... So why is it that millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic who would scoff at Jones's theory of a Mayan Christ or pass on his offer of a solar cooker are more than happy to embrace his vague, unsupported charges of a vast conspiracy?
The CIA couldn't have organised this...
Telegraph
08/09/2006
I used to be a big Monbiot fan, but it's rare I find myself in such agreement with him these days as I am over this one.
A 9/11 conspiracy virus is sweeping the world, but it has no basis in fact
George Monbiot
The Guardian
Comment
Tuesday February 6, 2007
Loose Change is a sharp, slick film with an authoritative voiceover, but it drowns the truth in an ocean of nonsense
There is a virus sweeping the world. It infects opponents of the Bush government, sucks their brains out through their eyes and turns them into gibbering idiots. First cultivated in a laboratory in the US, the strain reached these shores a few months ago. In the past fortnight, it has become an epidemic. Scarcely a day now passes without someone possessed by this sickness, eyes rolling, lips flecked with foam, trying to infect me.
The disease is called Loose Change. It is a film made by three young men that airs most of the standard conspiracy theories about the attacks of September 11 2001. Unlike the other 9/11 conspiracy films, Loose Change is sharp and swift, with a thumping soundtrack, slick graphics and a calm and authoritative voiceover. Its makers claim that it has now been watched by 100 million people.
The Pentagon, the film maintains, was not hit by a commercial airliner. There was "no discernible trace" of a plane found in the wreckage, and the entrance and exit holes in the building were far too small. It was hit by a cruise missile. The twin towers were brought down by means of "a carefully planned controlled demolition". You can see the small puffs of smoke caused by explosives just below the cascading sections. All other hypotheses are implausible: the fire was not hot enough to melt steel and the towers fell too quickly. Building 7 was destroyed by the same means a few hours later.
Flight 93 did not crash, but was redirected to Cleveland airport, where the passengers were taken into a Nasa building and never seen again. Their voices had been cloned by the Los Alamos laboratories and used to make fake calls to their relatives. The footage of Osama bin Laden, claiming responsibility for the attacks, was faked. The US government carried out this great crime for four reasons: to help Larry Silverstein, who leased the towers, to collect his insurance money; to assist insider traders betting on falling airline stocks; to steal the gold in the basement; and to grant George Bush new executive powers, so that he could carry out his plans for world domination.
Even if you have seen or read no other accounts of 9/11, and your brain has not yet been liquidised, a few problems must occur to you. The first is the complete absence of scientific advice. At one point, the presenter asks: "So what brought down the twin towers? Let's ask the experts." But they don't ask the experts. The film-makers take some old quotes, edit them to remove any contradictions, then denounce all subsequent retractions as further evidence of conspiracy.
The only people they interview are a janitor, a group of firemen, and a flight instructor. They let the janitor speak at length, but cut the firemen off in mid-sentence. The flight instructor speaks in short clips, which give the impression that his pupil, the hijacker Hani Hanjour, was incapable of hitting the Pentagon. Elsewhere he has said the opposite: he had "no doubt" that Hanjour could have done it.
Where are the structural engineers, the materials scientists, the specialists in ballistics, explosives or fire? The film-makers now say that the third edition of the film will be fact-checked by an expert, but he turns out to be "a theology professor". They don't name him, but I would bet that it's David Ray Griffin, who also happens to be the high priest of the 9/11 conspiracists.
The next evident flaw is that the plot they propose must have involved tens of thousands of people. It could not have been executed without the help of demolition experts, the security firms guarding the World Trade Centre, Mayor Giuliani (who hastily disposed of the remains), much of the US air force, the Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Aerospace Defence Command, the relatives of the people "killed" in the plane crashes, the rest of the Pentagon's staff, the Los Alamos laboratories, the FBI, the CIA, and the investigators who picked through the rubble.
If there is one universal American characteristic, it is a confessional culture that permits no one with a good story to keep his mouth shut. People appear on the Jerry Springer Show to admit to carnal relations with their tractors. Yet none of the participants in this monumental crime has sought to blow the whistle - before, during or after the attacks. No one has volunteered to tell the greatest story ever told.
Read some conflicting accounts, and Loose Change's case crumbles faster than the twin towers. Hundreds of people saw a plane hit the Pentagon. Because it collided with one of the world's best-defended buildings at full speed, the plane was pulverised - even so, plane parts and body parts were in fact recovered. The wings and tail disintegrated when they hit the wall, which is why the holes weren't bigger.
The failure of the twin towers has been exhaustively documented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Far from being impossible, the collapse turns out to have been inevitable. The planes cut some of the support columns and ignited fires sufficient to weaken (but not melt) the remaining steel structures. As the perimeter columns buckled, the weight of the collapsing top stories generated a momentum the rest of the building could not arrest. Puffs of smoke were blown out of the structure by compression as the building fell.
Counterpunch, the radical leftwing magazine, commissioned its own expert - an aerospace and mechanical engineer - to test the official findings. He shows that the institute must have been right. He also demonstrates how Building 7 collapsed. Burning debris falling from the twin towers ruptured the oil pipes feeding its emergency generators. The reduction in pressure triggered the automatic pumping system, which poured thousands of gallons of diesel on to the fire. The support trusses weakened and buckled, and the building imploded. Popular Mechanics magazine polled 300 experts and came to the same conclusions.
So the critics - even Counterpunch - are labelled co-conspirators, and the plot expands until it comes to involve a substantial part of the world's population. There is no reasoning with this madness. People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil that runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos that really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose. This neat story draws campaigners away from real issues - global warming, the Iraq war, nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality - while permanently wrecking their credibility. Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did follow a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose Change says, by the Project for the New American Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean of nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can never again be taken seriously.
The film's greatest flaw is this: the men who made it are still alive. If the US government is running an all-knowing, all-encompassing conspiracy, why did it not snuff them out long ago? There is only one possible explanation. They are in fact agents of the Bush regime, employed to distract people from its real abuses of power. This, if you are inclined to believe such stories, is surely a more plausible theory than the one proposed in Loose Change.
WTF is wrong with these people?
Giant badgers terrorise Iraqi port city
Yahoo News
Jul 11 2007
The Iraqi port city of Basra, already prey to a nasty turf war between rival militia factions, has now been gripped by a new fear -- a giant badger stalking the streets by night. Local farmers have caught and killed several of the beasts, but this has done nothing to dispel rumours of a bear-like monster that eats humans and was allegedly released into the area by British forces to spread panic.
Iraqi scientists have attempted to calm the public but, amid the confusion and mistrust spawned by the ongoing guerrilla war, the story has spread like wildfire in the streets of the city and the villages round about.
Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, director of Basra's veterinary hospital, has inspected the corpses of several dead badgers and tries to reassure his fellow citizens that they are not a new post-war arrival in the region."These animals appeared before the fall of the regime in 1986. They are known as Al-Ghirayri and locally as Al-Girta," he told AFP. "Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific."
British troops ... have to battle the Iraqi rumour mill, as locals are quick to blame them for almost any calamity that befalls the area -- including an apparent plague of vicious badgers with long claws and powerful jaws
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"I was sleeping at night when this strange animal hit me on my head. I have not seen such an animal before. My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer," said Suad Hassan, a 30-year-old housewife. "It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey. It runs so quickly." The honey badger, or ratel, is known as a brave predator capable of killing a cobra. It weighs up to 14 kilos (30 pounds), not usually known as man-eater.
Sattar Jabbar, a 50-year-old local farmer from Abu Sakhar north of Basra, believes the badger can tackle even large prey. "I saw it three days ago at night attacking animals. It even ate a cow. It tore the cow up piece by piece. I tried to shoot it with my gun but it ran away into the orchards. I missed it," he said.
In Iraq there can be only one explanation for an animal so vicious. "I believe this animal appeared following a raid to the region by the British forces," said Ali Mohsen, a farmer in his 40s from Karmat Ali, near the air base used by the multinational force. "As we are close to the airport, they probably released this animal into the area," he reasoned.
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Azzam speculated that the badgers were being driven towards the city because Iraq is trying to re-flood marshland north of Basra that was drained by Saddam in order to persecute local Marsh Arab tribes. ... "We have not released giant badgers in Basra," he said, "and nor have we been collecting eggs and releasing serpents into the Shatt al-Arab river."
Parody this if you can.
Mossad Behind Egyptian Shark Attacks?
Sky News Middle East Blog
December 07, 2010
Israelis get blamed for a lot in this part of the world, but Egyptian officials have plumbed new depths of pottiness with their latest Zionist conspiracy theory.
General Abdel-Fadeel Shosha, the governor of South Sinai says he cannot rule out Mossad was behind a series of shark attack on tourists in Sharm el Sheikh, one of them fatal.
Israeli intelligence agents may have caused the Jaws like terror in Sharm in order to wreck the Egyptian tourist industry he says.
Whether this was an Israeli agent in a shark costume, a specially indoctrinated Zionist shark, or a remote controlled cybershark, the general does not elaborate, but he says the theory needs investigating.
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"Why would these sharks travel 4000 km and not have any accidents until they entered Sinai waters?"
Bewitched Animals and the Muslim Media
Hudson NY
January 26, 2011
Because conspiracy theories emanating from the Muslim world are nothing new—a decade ago, Israel was accused of perpetrating the strikes of 9/11, today it is accused of perpetrating the bombings of a Coptic church—they tend to be dismissed in the West.
A close examination of these theories, however, reveals pathological trends that need to be acknowledged—especially by Western leaders who stubbornly interact with the Muslim world under the assumption that all Muslims "think just like us."
Consider, for starters, those conspiracy theories dealing with subversive animals:
*"Iranians arrest fourteen squirrels for spying": According to Iranian state-sponsored news agency IRNA, "Intelligence operatives have arrested 14 squirrels within Iran's borders." ...
*Israel unleashes rats and pigs against Jerusalem Arabs ...
*"Israel responsible for fatal shark attack and lethal jellyfish in Red Sea" ...
*Saudi Arabia "arrests" a vulture as part of a "Zionist plot" ...
...[H]ere is the latest example, from just last month. According to released Gitmo inmate Walid Muhammad Hajj, the Jews at the base cast "spells" on the Muslim inmates—including through the use of bewitched birds and a phantom feline that tried to sodomize Walid:
The most common method to wear down the brothers [Muslim inmates] was witchcraft…. There were, of course, Jews among the [staff of] the Guantanamo Base, and they would set traps for the guys…. I remembered an incident with a guy who sat next to me in the morning. ... I said to him: "Why are you urinating in the milk?" That's when we knew that he was under a spell. After he had recovered a little, after we read Koranic verses to him, he said to me: "The birds on the barbed wire would talk to me, and tell me to urinate in the milk"…. Once, when I was sleeping—on the floor, not on a bed—I suddenly felt that a cat was trying to penetrate me. It tried to penetrate me again and again. I recited the kursi verse again and again [Koran 2:255] until the cat left.
Considering that Islam's prophet Muhammad decreed that black dogs must die, "for they are devils"; that a fatwa to kill Mickey Mouse (a cartoon character) was recently issued, since rodents are "corrupters, steered by Satan"; that the Koran depicts talking ants and birds, vouches for the power of sorcery, and has an entire chapter dedicated to the Jinn (Sura 72); that Hamas arrested 150 "witches" in Gaza — considering all this, it should come as no surprise that animals are being portrayed as infidel operatives.
...[A]ll of the aforementioned animal accusations were either made or disseminated by "authoritative" sources in the Muslim world: Spying squirrels, Iranian state-sponsored news; rampaging rats and pigs, Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority media; tourism-destroying shark, an Egyptian official; spying vulture awaiting Sharia justice, Saudi media.
... The point here is simple: if the media—especially news and current affairs programs—reflect the concerns of their society, imagine if a prime-time CNN program hosted someone who earnestly accused people of witchcraft, talking birds, and rapist cats—all to a sincerely concerned host.
What would that suggest about the American mindset? What does it suggest about the Muslim mindset?
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