We all know US Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene is a fruit loop conspiracy theorist, but one of her latest offerings tells you how wild she is and how far down the rabbit hole Donald Trump’s MAGA Republicans have gone.
MTG, as the far right Georgia representative is known, recently gave credence to a 9/11 conspiracy theory that the attack by al-Qaeda hijackers on The Pentagon was not real. The theory has it that the US Defence building was hit and 125 people were killed — not by an American Airlines plane but by an American missile or unmanned drone. This aligns with the belief the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job”, carried out to justify the US government’s geostrategic motives.
It’s scary enough that any American would hold this belief, let alone an elected member of the US Congress. How the wheel has turned.
9/11 conspiracy theories were all the rage in the Arab world back in 2001. The prevailing view in the Middle East was that the attacks were engineered not by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda but by the CIA, possibly acting in concert with Israel. The reason was that this would justify American military action in the Middle East. Oh, and if you doubt that, didn’t you know that no Jews arrived for work at the World Trade Center that day?
Power. Might. Lies.
One argument supporting that theory was that the attacks were too sophisticated, and could have been done only by the superpower of America.
As The New Republic reported, the prevalence of the 9/11 conspiracy theory continued to be hugely problematic for US diplomacy. According to the Pew Research Center, a decade later a large majority (up to 75%) doubted that al-Qaeda had carried out the attacks. So Arabs viewed policies aimed at preventing “another 9/11” as thoroughly illegitimate since, as they saw it, 9/11 was just a big American lie.
I heard the 9/11 theory many times while living in Alexandria, Egypt. The same kind of explanation extended to another terrorist attack in the London underground in July 2005 in which more than 50 people were killed.
The story of the London bombings was reported on the front page of Egypt’s national newspaper which is, naturally enough, a government mouthpiece. The attack was very clearly terrorism. And yet, no. As I read the story with my Arabic teacher, he was coming to a very different view. He was 100% certain it was orchestrated by MI5 to justify a UK government crackdown on Muslims in the UK.
It was sobering to be confronted with this: a very in-your-face moment about the two different worlds my friend and I inhabited. But it was not a surprise given the default position in Egypt that western security agencies are/were the secret hand behind world-shaping events.
Death blows
There is a whole pathology to unpack about why Egyptians and other Middle East people have been so prone to adopt conspiracy theories as truth. How could anyone possibly believe that a government would kill its own citizens en masse to justify waging a war in another country?
In a way it is not totally unreasonable given that regimes such as Egypt have conducted psy-ops against their own people for decades through the disinformation of state-controlled media. To doubt the truth of what you see or are told is pretty much a survival mechanism.
Just two decades ago, the US could bring change to the Middle East by educating locals on the role of the media and the importance of acts in projects aimed at building democracy. Those were the days. The US has well and truly caught the conspiracy disease. We know the culprits: social media; algorithms; rabbit holes. We know the accompanying catchcries: do your own research; experts don’t know shit; your lived experience is valid. We also know the real life consequences. Above all, who ever predicted that a former (and hopeful) US president would come to the fore actively seeking to destroy the very idea of truth for his own ends — just like a Middle East dictator — with Fox News taking the role of state-run media?
The mis-and dis- of information
The UK’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has taken on the Herculean task of tracking how online disinformation fuels extremism and hate in events around the world. Earlier this month it published a study of conspiracy theories related to the October 7 attacks in Israel, based on its analysis of Twitter/X. As if the reality wasn’t complicated and horrific enough, the study explores how disinformation has sought to shape perceptions of the moral culpability of the combatants.
Its findings include that:
- Mis-contextualised conflict footage and misrepresented findings from media investigations were used to infer that the Israeli military killed its own civilians on October 7 in numbers surpassing the deaths caused by Hamas;
- Violence against civilians was justified through the “myth of the Israeli civilian”, which characterises Israeli civilians as legitimate military targets;
- The “no Israeli civilians” discourse was notably paralleled in the Israeli and western context by a “no innocents” discourse, which rejects the description of Palestinians in Gaza as civilian and asserts collective complicity for October 7;
- Misogynist influencer Andrew Tate implied in a livestream that the Israeli state may have instigated the war as a pretext for a tightening of government control over its population.
(The ISD promises coming research on a parallel discourse which, it said, dehumanises Palestinians and advocates for collective punishment and other violations of international law. We plan to bring you the results of that investigation.)
Implying a real world impact, the study found that a sharp increase in anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic hate online was accompanied by a significant increase in reported hate crimes in Europe, the US and Canada,
Code red
Who’s behind it all? The ISD study found two major online influencers in the Israel/Hamas conflict also had a record of spreading disinformation about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. One, The Grayzone, allegedly had ties to Russian and Iranian state media. The Economist (reported here) makes the case that Russia propagandists have pumped out disinformation around the world as part of an all-encompassing Russian effort to create chaos.
It quoted Avril Haines, America’s director of National Intelligence, as describing Russia as “the most active foreign threat to our elections”:
“Moscow most likely views such operations as a means to tear down the United States as its perceived primary adversary, enabling Russia to promote itself as a great power.”
It can’t hurt Russia’s effort that the leading promoter of disinformation in the US is running to be the next president.
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