At different times, the European right, the Latin American left and even groups at the margins of American politics have fallen under the sway of conspiracy theories. But today it is the Middle East that provides the world’s most fertile ground for fears of covert plots. Scholarly works on the region seldom acknowledge the prevalence of such theories — area specialists, after all, have a hard time owning up to the seamier side of their chosen corner of the globe — but anyone who has spent much time in an Arab country can attest to their ubiquity.
The grip these claims have on the imagination of so many in the Islamic world is by no means a trivial issue. According to Daniel Pipes, the editor of the Middle East Quarterly, Arab and Iranian fears of conspiracy “help explain much of what would otherwise seem illogical or implausible, including the region’s record of political extremism and volatility, its culture of violence, and its poor record of modernization.” In his meticulously researched book The Hidden Hand, Pipes explains why the Middle East has proved so rife with conspiracy theories, and what the stakes are for the West.
The first two thirds of The Hidden Hand is a no-frills catalogue of the region’s most popular “plots.” One theory has Israel selectively depleting the ozone layer over Arab countries. Another blames traffic jams on the ” handiwork of American agents.” After Iran’s soccer team loses an important match, an Iranian newspaper complains that:
the teams in this series of games were chosen in such a way as to facilitate the victory of the Iraqi team with the defeat of the Guinean national team. . . . This indicates a premeditated plan aimed at ensuring Iraq’s superiority in this series of games and at belittling Iran’s Islamic Revolution.
Similarly, suffering from a particularly acute bout of paranoia, Iraqi officials become convinced that Coca-Cola is an imperialist cancer — an epiphany for which the unfortunate president and general manager of the Iraqi Coke franchise pay with their lives.
Though the bogeyman that haunts Middle Eastern politicians often carries a British or American passport, his true allegiance usually lies with “the Zionists.” Islamic conspiracy theorists invariably identify the source of their troubles as a tool of the Jews or, better yet, as a Jew himself. Thus, while Yasser Arafat, Leonid Brezhnev, Kemal Ataturk, and Lyndon Johnson may not appear to have much in common, in the mind of the conspiracy theorist they all stand accused of having been bar-mitzvahed.
The anti-Semitic content of so many Middle East conspiracy theories highlights an irony: that their conception is neither Muslim nor Middle Eastern, but distinctly Christian and European. Indeed, until this century, the Arab attitude towards Jews was, if not particularly hospitable, at least far more generous than the prevailing sentiment in Europe. With the creation of the state of Israel, however, all this changed. “Just as anti-Semitic and anti-secret society ideas fell out of the European mainstream, they gained strength in Muslim lands,” writes Pipes. “Europe’s phobias of a century back persist there, as if preserved in amber.”
Why have these phobias taken such hold in the Islamic world? The standard explanation attributes their persistent popularity to the Machiavellian imperatives of Middle Eastern political elites, who hope to channel the more volatile energies of their constituents away from the palace gates. Pipes, however, is not fully satisfied with this interpretation. As he observes, many conspiracy theories bubble up rather than down, and several of the region’s despots seem sincerely to believe their own tales of persecution. A more likely source of this paranoid style lies in a sentiment expressed by an official at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem: “Before, we were masters of the world, and now, we’re not even masters of our own mosques!” Faced with failure upon failure — military, economic, and social — inhabitants of the region have embraced conspiratorial claims as a way of accounting for their seemingly inexplicable bad luck.
By attributing all manner of misdeeds to a “massively competent, forever plotting cabal,” the conspiracy theorist not only lets his own government off the hook but also induces a sense of hopelessness in those credulous enough to subscribe to such notions. Such despair leads to passivity and irresponsibility, impeding efforts at modernization and political reform in a region desperately in need of both.
But Middle East conspiracy theories are our problem as well. As Pipes observes, those willing to subscribe to these preposterous claims are ” unbound by mere facts.” Conspiracy theorists often have trouble distinguishing citizens of the United States and Israel from their “Satanic” governments.
Consequently, some of those convinced of the collective guilt of Westerners developed an unhealthy penchant for targeting innocents in terrorist attacks. How the much-discussed spirit of cooperation envisioned for the New Middle East can co-exist with such beliefs is something students of the region would do well to consider.
Is an omnipotent West intent on subordinating the Islamic world? On the contrary: As our country’s preeminent Middle East watcher recently told a stunned audience of Arab intellectuals, most Americans “don’t give a flying f- -k” about the region. In fact, Western governments lack either the discretion or the will to execute even the most credible-sounding of the alleged plots. This truth about American feelings towards the Middle East is more modest, and yet doubtless more hurtful to the area’s self-important elite than anything a conspiracy theorist could dream up. Not that that will matter to those who imagine they occupy our every waking thought.
Lawrence F. Kaplan is a Merrill fellow of strategic studiess at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.
