ABSTRACT
Conspiracy theories are a routine – some would say ubiquitous – feature of Middle Eastern social and political discourse. The U.S. planned the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to conquer the Middle East – or, according to others, Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, did. British intelligence assassinated Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed. Various Middle Eastern leaders are spies for the U.S. Or for Israel. Or others. The U.S. orchestrated the 2011 Arab uprisings – and the rise of the so-called Islamic State in 2014, too. One of a legion of even stranger ones in 2007 saw some southern Iraqis claim that the British military had bred and released killer monsters, bears, or some such creature; it turned out to probably be an aggressive group of local honey badgers (Farrell 2007). Even Israel, while very culturally and politically different to its neighbours, is not immune from such language: From the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Abramovich 2018) to, more recently, claims in 2018 that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was trying to plant a conspiracy theory in the Israeli media to counter a legal indictment against him (Verter 2018).
