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9/11 Rumors Become Conventional Wisdom in Arab World

[New York Times] Michael Slackman - Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom in Cairo that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the U.S. and Israel had to have been involved in their planning, if not their execution. This is what routinely comes up in conversations around the region - in a shopping mall in Dubai, in a park in Algiers, in a cafe in Riyadh, and all over Cairo. It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre, but such ideas represent the inability of the U.S. to convince people in the region that it is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism and not a crusade against Muslims. Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of Arabs - like themselves - could possibly have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the U.S. "Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs, but the brains? No way," said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, of Cairo. There is a reason so many people talk about the U.S. attacking itself to have a reason to go after Arabs. It is a reflection of how they view government leaders throughout the Middle East. They do not believe them. They think that if the government is insisting that bin Laden was behind it, he must not have been.
2008-09-09 01:00:00
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