Even the mayor of this Pakistan town believes this lie. This is beyond iggnorance, this is hate in it’s purest form which like in most cases is drenched with stupidity.
Is this Lie really as widespread as this story claims it to be?
If ever the world became a global village, it was last Sept. 11, when hundreds of millions of people around the world saw and heard the attacks on the World Trade Center.
But the very technology that made that the most communicated and most witnessed event in history also has contributed to what some are calling “the big lie.”
It turns out an overwhelming majority of people in the Muslim world, according to a Gallup poll, do not believe the attacks of Sept. 11 were orchestrated by Osama bin Laden, or by Arabs, or by Muslims.
Many believe, instead, that the whole thing was a conspiracy orchestrated by Jews.
Where did they hear that? From the television and the Internet.
How pervasive is the belief in “the big lie”? We found out when we visited a wedding party in a small town in Pakistan.
The scene: Muslims walking into a large tent where wedding party guests are gathered. Americans are rarely seen in places like this these days. But our guide, Khalid Khawaja, grew up there, and CBS reporter George Crile accepted an invitation to join him at this wedding party.
All the town’s leading citizens were there: the mayor; the pediatrician; a chemical engineer; a businessman; a journalist. And not one of them had anything friendly to say about America.
Said one guest: “People hate America. Yeah, that’s true.”
Such statements have come almost to be expected in the Islamic world. But what came next caught reporter Crile completely by surprise.
The Jews did it. That’s exactly what they are saying: the mayor, the businessman, the journalist, the baby doctor…everyone. And, as one of them said, “Osama is totally innocent!”
Totally innocent? It sounds incredible - the idea that Osama bin Laden had nothing to with the World Trade Center attacks. But as the Gallup poll later confirmed, that’s exactly what most Muslims believe.
“I was surprised that very few, even among the elites, believe that bin Laden did it,” says Dr. Shibley Telhami, the man whom Gallup commissioned to analyze the findings of its survey.
What is most important about the results of the polls?
Says Telhami, “Well, if you look at the polls - and the ones that I have done in the Arab world - pertaining to Sept. 11, it’s clear that there’s almost a unanimous view that bin Laden was not responsible for Sept. 11. And that actually comes as a shock to Americans, given the evidence that is obviously out there. How could this be?”
It’s a perplexing question. In this information age, it may be that the Sept. 11 attack was witnessed by more people than any event in history. And there was every reason to believe and hope that a consensus would have formed around the world about what had happened and who was responsible.
Mass murder had been committed and pictures of the 19 militant Muslim hijackers were printed in the papers. In America, there has never been any doubt about who was ultimately responsible. In the words of President Bush: “The evidence we have gathered points to a person named Osama bin Laden.”
But as pollster Telhami explains it, when the president talks, most Moslems simply don’t listen. He explains, “People say, ‘Yes, you’re giving me evidence. But frankly, I don’t trust the system. I don’t trust the messenger. I don’t trust the message. I just don’t believe.’”
But what is widely believed across the Muslim world, is the story we heard of the Jewish conspiracy, in which 4,000 Jewish employees at the World Trade Center were warned to stay home.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/60II/main520768.shtml