Conspiracy Encyclopedia

Daniel Pipes has written a book and many essays on the prevalence of conspiracy theories throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Conspiracy theories in the Arab and Muslim worlds largely blame Israelis or Jews for many problems facing the world. Some of these include the following:

• The Islamist organization Hamas states in their charter that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion accurately describe the Zionist plan to take over Palestine, and that the Freemasons, Lions Club, and the Rotarians are organizations promoting “the interest of Zionism.” It accuses those organizations, and the “Zionist invasion” in general, of being “behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its kinds.”
• On several occasions, Palestinians have claimed that the Israeli government has used nerve gas against them, and then suppressed the evidence of such.
• Some Arabs, mostly Egyptians, believe that Israelis engineered the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999. Others insist that the US is covering up for Boeing, the airplane’s manufacturer.
• Many in the Arab world believe that some Jewish doctors have deliberately given Palestinians AIDS.
• The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis was popularly attributed to Jewish speculators by Malaysian and Indonesian commentators and some government figures.
• Like some others worldwide, but perhaps more so than in other communities, many Arabs and Muslims believe that the September 11, 2001 attacks were allowed or caused to happen by parts of the U.S. government (e.g., CIA) and/or Jews.

Richard Landes and some other pro-Israel media-watchdog advocates maintain that Muhammad al-Durrah, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy reported to have been killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces in September 2000, was not in fact killed and the entire incident was staged by Palestinian cameramen (see Pallywood).