Is it conceivable that Muslims did the killing on 9/11? Yes, they did. They killed 3,000 people… It must have been an American conspiracy… The concept of conspiracy has spread in a very organized and efficient way, and many Arabs, even intellectuals, believe they are victims of conspiracy…
–Ahmad Al-Rubi, a former Kuwaiti minister of education, Al-Rai TV, March 27, 2006
Today marks the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001. Since the attacks, The Middle East Media Research Institute has documented what the Arab and Iranian press have said about that day.
A documentary about this compilation, narrated by actor Ron Silver and produced by Interface Media Group, will be screened at events throughout Washington, D.C., and a webcast will premier on www.memrifilms.org today.
Immediate Reaction in the Print Media
The response to the attacks in the print media was immediate, with prominent journalists, members of academia, and leading religious figures spreading conspiracy theories.
‐ “[Those moments of] exquisite, incandescent hell were the most beautiful and precious moments of my life.” Muhammad Mustagas, Al-Usbu’ [Egypt], September 17, 2001.
‐ “When the towers collapsed … my lungs filled with air. I breathed in relief, as I’d never breathed before,” the chairman of the Syrian Arab Writers Association wrote in Al-Usbu’ Al-Adabi on September 15, 2001.
‐ “Oh Osama, you are a hero in the full sense of the world.” Ahmad Al-Magdoub, Journal of the Muslim Brotherhood, September 26, 2001.
‐ ”Oh yeah, guys, Her Royal Highness America has taken this defeat; she has turned out to be a paper tiger, and the Americans [have turned out to be] no more than a gang of delinquent children.” Salim Azzous, Al-Ahrar [Egypt], September 14, 2001.
‐ “Were the hijackers American Robin Hoods who developed because of America’s racist ‘class’ and ‘geographical’ rifts… or American ‘workers’ of Satan who trained in the violent cowboy culture of Hollywood?” Kayhan [Iran], September 13, 2001.
‐ “I have a sneaking suspicion that George W. Bush was involved in the operations of September 11, as was Colin Powell.” Samir Atallah, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat [London], September 13, 2001.
Arab government officials were responsible in part for creating and spreading conspiracies about what “really” happened. This occurred even at the highest levels of government in America’s two closest Arab allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Saudi Arabia
In November 2002, the Saudi royal-family website, Ain Al-Yaqeen, quoted the powerful Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef, as saying: “It is impossible that 19 youths carried out the operation of September 11, or that bin Laden or Al Qaeda did that alone… I think [the Zionists] are behind these events.”
Prince Nayef’s statement was considered shocking and was immediately condemned. As NBC reported, his interview “completely undercut a $10 million Saudi public relations campaign.”
While 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, and Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen, one of the countries most popular preachers, Sad bin Abdallah Al-Breik, appeared on Saudi TV channel 1, the country’s main TV channel on August 16, 2004, and said there is no evidence that al Qaeda was involved in the attacks and the Zionist-controlled media is making false accusations against Saudis by claiming they were:
It is a mistake to ignore the possibility that the Zionist hands used some people who were planted into one of the stages of this plan, from this issue. I have read some books that were translated from English into Arabic in which the Americans themselves call 9/11 ‘The Great Deception’ or the ‘The Great Game,’ so why do we use all sort of names to avoid this subject… These false accusations and the rush to accuse Saudi Arabia, the judging of others according to the guidance of the Zionists via the media which is owned by the Zionist… If there was any evidence, we did not see it…
This was just one of the countless examples of conspiracies from Saudi Arabia which proliferate to this day.
Egypt
In the five years since the terrorist attacks on the U.S., members of the Egyptian government and military, along with top scholars from that country, continue to question “the true identity” of those behind 9/11.
“I find it hard to believe that people who were learning to fly in Florida could, within a year and a half, fly large commercial airlines and hit with accuracy the towers of the World Trade Center, which would appear, to the pilot from the air, the size of a pencil,” President Mubarak of Egypt told Al-Ahram Weekly on October 25, 2001. “Only a professional pilot could carry out this mission, not someone who learned to fly for 18 months in Florida.”
The deputy chairman of the Egyptian Parliamentary Committee for Defense and National Security, Muhammad Abd Al-Fattah, told Ein TV on May 2, “I said that 9/11 was carried out by American agents.”
A retired Egyptian general, Muhammed Khalef, told Al-Mihwar TV on September 11, 2005, that the planning for the attack began in 1999 at the National Defense University. He claimed that Vice-President Cheney told President Bush, “It was an inside the White House job.”
Egypt’s most popular singer has even devoted a popular songs about the real perpetrators of 9/11: “Two sides of the same coin. America and Israel. They have turned the world into a jungle, and lit the fuse. There was a tower, oh people, and for sure his friends were the ones who toppled it. What kind of terrorism is this?…” A review in the Cairo Times about the song stated: “Abad Al-Raheem boldly sings that the U.S.A. is the perpetrator of the September 11th attacks.”
American-Muslim Organizations
In the U.S., American-Muslim leaders have also pushed conspiracies. Two weeks after the attacks, Sheik Muhammad al-Gameia — an Egyptian imam at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York and the American representative to Al-Azhar University, the highest religious authority in Sunni Islam — gave an interview to one of the school’s websites. He said, among other things, “If the Americans knew that the Jews carried out the September 11 attacks, they would do to them what Hitler did.”
Jamal Badawi, guest lecturer at Michigan’s “The American Learning Institute for Muslims,” faculty member at St. Mary’s University in Maryland, and former Stanford University lecturer, condemned the 9/11 attacks in an interview with the Saudi Gazette of June 24, 2005, but added, “It is not confirmed yet who is actually behind these attacks.”
More recently, an American Muslim scholar, Salah Sultan, gave an interview to Saudi Al-Resala TV on May 17: “September 11 could not have been carried out entirely from outside [America] — by Muslims or others.… The entire thing was of a large scale and was planned within America in order to enable America to control and terrorize the entire world.”
It should be noted that Al-Resala is owned by the world’s fifth-richest man, billionaire Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Abd Al-Aziz. When former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani rejected Talal’s $10 million donation to New York City in 2001 following the latter’s comments on what he referred to as the root causes of the September 11 attacks, newspaper columnists throughout the Arab world attacked Giuliani and the U.S.
Mahmoud bin Abd Al-Ghani Sabbagh, columnist for the Saudi paper Al-Riyadh, wrote in a column (headlined “Al-Walid’s check, the homosexual governor [sic], and the propaganda war”) on October 15, 2001: “The words of [Prince Al-Walid] did not, of course, please the Jewish lobby in the home of the largest Jewish community in the world. Because the governor [sic] of the Big Apple is a Jew, he refused [to accept the donation] and caused a storm…By Allah, I am amazed at your act, you Jew; everything Prince Al-Walid said was true…What happened proves beyond any doubt the public insolence, the open hatred, and the collapse of American democratic theory. If democracy means a governor who is a homosexual in a city in which dance clubs, prostitution, homosexuality, and stripping proliferate — the U.S. can keep its democracy.”
The Palestinian Authority mouthpiece Al-Hayat Al-Jadida’s editor wrote on October 17, 2001: “New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani was obsessed by his hatred of Arabs even before the terrorist attacks on New York. He hides his first name, chosen for him by his Italian father, so as not to remind the Jewish voters of the infamous Rudolph Hitler [sic]. This is why he prefers to shorten it to Rudy.”
Prince Talal’s biography quotes directly from Rudy Giuliani’s book Leadership, which recalled the episode: “When the Prince arrived, he was wearing an opulent gold robe and headdress… He gave me a cashier’s check for $10 million, for the Twin Towers Fund. Looking at the site from the small podium, the Prince was saying the right things… But something wasn’t quite right. There was a smirk on his face, which seemed to carry over to his entourage. He was the only visitor who was unmoved by what he saw.”
Conspiracies This Past Year
Notable conspiracy theories from the Arab world and Iran between 2001 and 2004 put the blame for the attacks on Jews, Zionists, Christian Zionists, born again Christians, the Vatican, Mossad, the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Council, white supremacist groups, Britain, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many others. These conspiracies have continued over the past year.
“The 9/11 story is, in fact, a Zionist conspiracy,” an Egyptian cleric, Abd Al-Sabur Shaheen, said on Al-Nas TV on July 10.
Writing in the Oman daily Al-Watan on June 26, Abdallah Hammouda discussed the possibility that neoconservative Christians and Zionists planned and implemented the attacks.
The “real facts are not available” to explain what really happened on September 11, but besides al Qaeda, it is possible Jews or even the “Americans themselves were behind it,” the chairman of the Somali Islamic Courts Union, Sheik Sherif Sheik Ahmed, told the Somaliland Times on June 9.
Throughout September 2005, Al-Jazeera aired a special titled The Truth Behind 9/11. Part IV, which aired September 30, was devoted to the Mossad’s involvement, including “agents … dancing and cheering in front of the World Trade Center.”
Iran
Since 9/11 the government-run Iranian TV stations, along with the government’s satellite channels that help spread the Iranian Islamic revolution’s message, have had countless programs devoted to conspiracy theories on 9/11.
Iranian TV frequently airs absurdities about the attacks ranging from attempts at connecting it to the O. J. Simpson trial to a series called The New Fascism, which aired in 2005, and which links the planning of 9/11 and of Pearl Harbor to the U.S. It’s important to note that Iran’s satellite channels reach out to the Arab world, Europe, and even the Iranian community in Los Angeles.
On September 13, 2005, Iran’s Jaame Jam 1 TV aired a program on September 11 conspiracies, including the “true” passengers on the planes that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and why 4,000 Jews did not show up to work that day.
An Iranian TV documentary on Sahar 1 TV on September 11, 2005, suggested that the American government attacked its own people.
Birth of Reform Movement
September 11, 2001, also marks the beginning of the reform movement in the Arab and Muslim world. Following the attacks, an ever-growing number of intellectuals, writers, journalists, associations, reform websites, and organizations launched an unyielding call for reform, demanding that the culture and education that led to the attacks in America be fundamentally changed.
Mammon Fendi wrote in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat on September 17, 2001: “Either we clearly condemn the terror, or we do not; either we are sorry, or we are not. Each of us must state his position clearly, with no ‘buts.’ The deaths of thousands… under the ruins is an unforgivable crime…”
Saudi columnist, Suleiman Al-Keedan sharply censured proponents of the conspiracy theories written in the Arabic media about 9/11 in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat on October 25, 2001:
“Unfortunately, if we examine modern Arab thought… we will find that it is collapsing under the weight of these delusions. The Arab thought completely lacks the rationality or critical spirit required for Arab and Islamic societies today and in the future… Most of the Arab and Islamic commentators have not eliminated the possibility of conspiracy in one way or another … Some of us make assumptions, and settle for determining that there is nothing to do but to conclude that the Jews assisted in the planning of the attacks, and hinting that U.S. intelligence apparatuses could have carried out such an action… there has not been a single instance of proof of the veracity of the assumptions underpinning this conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, Arab thought has become enamored of it…”
Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, former dean of the faculty of Islamic law, University of Qatar, wrote in Al-Hayat on November 29, 2001: “Do the satellite channels have the right to broadcast terrorist opinions and incitement on the pretext of the ‘principle of freedom for all,’ disseminating hatred in the hearts of the viewers, who then carry out harmful acts of stupidity? We must examine our curriculum, and evaluate our educational methods. We must reexamine our education and our media.”
Al-Ansari ended with a call to the Arab world: “This will be the right beginning for the fight against the culture of terrorism.”
Let’s hope his call will be heard.
– Steven Stalinsky is the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.