THE BIG LIE
The fast-spreading rumor was unambiguous and to the point.
The horrors of 9/11, so the story went, were perpetrated by a Jewish cabal responsible for the deaths of some 3,000 people in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.
That rumor spread like wildfire on the Arab Street within hours after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center crumbled and the Pentagon suffered heavy damage when terrorists slammed jet airliners into these targeted symbols of Americas financial and military might.
An overwhelming majority of people in the Muslim world do not believe the attacks of September 11th were orchestrated by Osama bin Laden, CBS Evening News anchorman Dan Rather said in a segment on 60 Minutes II, called The Big Lie.
Many believe, instead, said Rather, that the whole thing was a conspiracy by Jews.
This bizarre nonsense was hastened along by the rumor that 4,000 Jews working at the WTC had been warned to remain home on 9/11 because Zionist agents were going to blast the Twin Towers into oblivion on that date.
CBS News consultant Milt Bearden, a retired CIA officer, has noted that Muslims have entertained Jewish conspiracy theories of one sort or another over the years. But the myth of 4,000 Jews having advance warning of the WTC catastrophe, he says, seems now to have just taken off, and gone into the almost unbelievable stratosphere.
For Bearden, this episode underscores the fact that America faces a new kind of threat that it doesnt yet understand. This current war that were in now, he says, is the first war in the information era: information, misinformation, disinformation.
How the myth of the 4,000 became reality in the minds of Muslims around the world, he adds, is a cautionary tale from the dark side of the information age.
You couldnt even get a bad movie put out with a science fiction story line like this, says Bearden. But yet that one caught on very quickly throughout [the Arab] world.
Thats not to say there werent Arabs who knew differently.
For example, car horns blared and guns were fired into the air in East Jerusalem after people there learned that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been hit by flying weapons of mass destruction.
They cheered God is great, says former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg, while they handed out candy, which is a tradition in the Arab world when something good happens.
But few television viewers in the West witnessed similar outpourings of joy in Nablus and Ramallah where Palestinians danced in the streets even as paroxysms of grief and disbelief gripped those who had lost loved ones in the infernos.
The reason for the news blackout was quite simple.
The Palestinian Authority warned representatives of several Western news networks to destroy footage of the celebrations. Or face the consequences.
In one case, an Associated Press cameraman was summoned to a PA security office and bluntly warned not to release the material he had filmed.
If the footage were to be shown on television, a PA official informed APs Jerusalem Bureau, we cannot guarantee the life of the cameraman.
The Jerusalem Post reported that other foreign journalists were trapped inside a Nablus hotel while thousands took to the streets there in celebration of the catastrophe which had just claimed the lives of the innocent 3,000 from some 80 nations.
The Big Lie
Within days, one lie was piled on another until The Big Lie became an accepted fact throughout much of the Muslim world.
If some Arabs harbored doubts about it, a Pakistani mullah offered an alternative theory. He claimed that Al Gore, a die-hard Jew, may have committed the atrocities just to get even for losing the presidential election to George W. Bush.
But even this nonsense pales in comparison to that incessant cacophony of lies aimed at fueling Arab hatred against the Jews. Here are just some of the more bizarre libels Arab leaders have used in their overall campaign to annihilate Israel:
The Jews betrayed and killed Jesus Christ and later tried to murder the Prophet Mohammed.
They have mixed the blood of Christian children in their Passover matzos down through the ages.
In their quest for world dominance, the Jews even invented the fable of the so-called Holocaust to gain sympathy from the rest of the world so that the Zionists could displace the Palestinians from land they owned for centuries. To that end, Israel introduced foot-and-mouth disease in the Middle East. The Jews have even gone so far as to distribute drug-laced candy and chewing gum in Arab countries in order to kill Arab children and to make Arab women sexually promiscuous. Whats more, Jewish homosexuals are behind the AIDS epidemic in the Muslim world. Behind these canards lies the fact that the Koran itself has encouraged Muslims to look down upon the Jews in utter contempt. Whereas the Nazis referred to them as untermenchen, or subhuman, the Koran teaches that the Jews have descended from apes and donkeys.
How this all plays out in daily practice was apparent in a sermon Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi delivered in Gazas Sheikh Ijlin Mosque 10 days after 9/11, and broadcast over the television facilities of Palestinian Authority (PA).
One of the alleged evil deeds committed by the Jews was to invent the story of the Holocaust, the sheikh insisted in this sermon translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. Revisionist historians have proven that this crime, carried out against some Jews, was planned by the Jews leaders, and was part of their policy.
These are the Jews, he added, against whom we fight.
Then, on April 13, 2001, the official PA newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, kept up the drumbeat by insisting that these corrupt and cursed donkeys were caught in a lie since the gas chambers could not have held even one percent of the six million Jews reported to have perished under the Nazis.
But a columnist for Egypts government-sponsored Al-Akhbar apparently didnt quite get the party line on this score.
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