Tel-Chai Nation

Or, put another way, 9-11 trutherism is rife under Islam. In this report:

ISTANBUL (AP) - About a week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared to the United Nations that most people in the world believe the United States was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

To many people in the West, the statement was ludicrous, almost laughable if it weren't so incendiary. And surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that the U.S. orchestrated the attacks.

However, the belief persists strongly among a minority, even with U.S. allies like Turkey or in the U.S. itself. And it cannot be dismissed because it reflects a gulf in politics and perception, especially between the West and many Muslims.

"That theory might be true," said Ugur Tezer, a 48-year-old businessman who sells floor tiles in the Turkish capital, Ankara. "When I first heard about the attack I thought, 'Osama,' but then I thought the U.S. might have done it to suppress the rise of Muslims."

Compassion for the United States swept the globe right after the attacks, but conspiracy theories were circulating even then. It wasn't al-Qaida, they said, but the United States or Israel that downed the towers. Weeks after the strikes, at the United Nations, President George W. Bush urged the world not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories" that deflected blame from the culprits.

However, the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provided fodder for the damning claim that the U.S. killed its own citizens, supposedly to justify military action in the Middle East and to protect Israel. A 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that significant majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey—all among the most moderate nations in the Islamic world—said they did not believe Arabs carried out the attacks.

Two years later, a poll of 17 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.org, an international research project, found majorities in nine of them believed al-Qaida was behind the attacks. However, the U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians.

Is the AP inserting any anti-war sentiment here? I'm not sure, though what this does tell is how Muslims are unwilling to recognize blame for themselves or take responsibility for what their Religion of Peace teaches.

They repeat the laughable claim that some of these mideastern countries are "moderate" when they're hardly at all so. But they do tell why such places should be avoided like the plague.

Labels: anti-americanism, Egypt, iran, islam, Israel, jihad, jordan, New York, terrorism, turkey, UN corruption, United States