Syrian defense minister blames WTC, Pentagon attacks on Israel
By Arieh O'Sullivan
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/10/19/News/News.36550.html

TEL AVIV (October 19) - Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass has blamed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center on Israel.

At a meeting in Damascus last week with a delegation from the British Royal College of Defense Studies, Tlass said the Mossad planned the ramming of two hijacked airliners into the WTC's towers as part of a Jewish conspiracy.

He also told the British visitors that the Mossad had given thousands of Jewish employees of the WTC advance warning not to go to work that day.

The Jewish-conspiracy theory started circulating in the Middle East shortly after the terrorist outrages in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. The "rationale" was that Israel wanted to provoke US retaliation against the Arab world.

In Israel and in Jewish circles abroad, the theory has been dismissed as a "gross lie." It had been dismissed by Arabists as "wishful thinking" by frustrated Arabs who badly wanted to believe that Muslims were not responsible for the atrocities.

But Tlass's comments last week indicate that it has been commuted to fact among senior Arab officialdom. Experts believe the false rumor has taken root in the Middle East, thanks to the deep anti-Semitism propagated by Arab governments as well as the myth of the "awesome power" of the Jews.

American Jewish leaders this week urged the Bush administration to debunk the rumor.

"Nobody is challenging this gross lie. Nobody is getting on Arab TV stations and saying it is a lie, it's absurd, and it's a libel," said Abraham Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League.

David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, agreed.

"Perhaps the Bush administration doesn't want to confer legitimacy on these canards by even acknowledging their existence. Sadly, this story has taken on a life of its own. It has even reached non-Muslim countries like Greece and South Africa, where Jewish communities have frantically contacted us, asking for help in refuting these charges," Harris said.

"At this point it would be very helpful for the Bush administration and other countries not only to condemn this canard, but to call it by its real name, which is raw, unadulterated anti-Semitism," he said.

In Iran, the hard-line Resalat newspaper last week quoted "experts" as saying the attacks were so complicated they had to have been carried out by the Israeli government and the Mossad.

In Kuwait, where some speakers on television have ridiculed the report, some people have even added embellishments, saying Jews were advised by New York rabbis to sell their holdings in the stock market the day before the attack and did so.

Public opinion data on Arab views on the September 11 attacks is sparse. One poll conducted a week after the attacks and published in the Lebanese newspaper An Nahar found that 31 percent of respondents thought Israel was behind the hijackings, while only 27% thought Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden was responsible, as the US has charged.

Historian Richard Levy, an expert on anti-Semitism at the University of Illinois in Chicago, said such conspiracy theories have flourished after years during which Arab governments have encouraged crude Jewish conspiracy theories.

"They have encouraged their peoples to explain politics and history by means of myth, lie, and fear. This sort of demagogy will come back to bite them," he said.

"If I were a Pakistani who has internalized what my successive governments have been telling me for years about the awesome power of the Jews and their Israeli pawns, I might well find bin Laden more attractive and inspiring than my so-called leaders," Levy said.

(Reuters contributed to this report.)