When Egypt’s premier social commentator, Saad Eddine Ibrahim, was on one television call-in show on the fatal crash of EgyptAir 990, every caller had his or her idea about what or who caused the crash.
More Top Picks Best Mechanical Pencils
Most of the callers asked: “Why did the Americans do it?” Several suggested other culprits, and two said, confidently, referring to Israeli intelligence, “No, it was the Mossad.”
“The majority believe that the United States shot the plane down with a rocket,” remarked the sociologist and director of the Cairo-based Ibn Khaldoun Center after the show. “They say that there were 30 Egyptian military men onboard, but I said: “The Americans have no reason to do this. There are always Egyptian military men on these EgyptAir flights–and there were many more Americans aboard. There is a great need for a conspiracy (among certain parts of the population) to vent their frustrations.”
So goes the Cairo version of the “conspiracy story” of EgyptAir Flight 990 these days. As information comes out in the United States about the possible involvement in the crash of veteran co-pilot Gameel El-Batouty many Egyptians are understandably agitated.
But the public discussion here had little to do with the reality of the late pilots’ actual actions. As is the case with emotional situations such as this one involving Arab pride, it is the United States, or in other cases Israel, which rapidly becomes the target of massive ire.
Last spring, conspiracy theories appeared several times in Egypt. First was a battle over school curricula, which seemed to “the street,” which is largely Muslim, to be favoring always-suspect Christian Copts. After that, another “conspiracy” broke into the Egyptian news over the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, with rival conferences–holding roppposite views on it–meeting at hotels across the Nile. Accusations were so strong they called it the “Battle of the Hotels.”
The inner need for some kind of conspiratorial answer to life’s problems, of course, is hardly limited to the Middle East. The United States has had its Kennedy and King assassinations, its Waco and Ruby Ridge, its letter bombers and Ku Klux Klan members.
Conspiracy erupts wherever there are minds agile enough to use traditional versions of honor and honesty in a society to mislead otherwise rational minds toward responses in favor of others’ interests.
But particularly at this time, it does seem that this response to the EgyptAir tragedy–coming so immediately, without waiting for any real conclusions to emerge–should be said to highlight some real truths in the world around us.
First, the constant need for conspiracy on the part of so many people in the world totally belies the benign assurance of America’s new-era elites that the world of the Internet and the “information revolution” is going to make us all one big, well-informed, rational family.
Second, it is that very world of the Internet and the supposed information revolution–and the globalization of the world’s economies that goes with them–that is driving more and more individuals and peoples back into alienation. And thus being able to blame everything wrong on some deliberate dark conspiracy.
As the relatively developed and often secular and tolerant nation-states are then threatened, people fall back on their old ways, as well as their old fears.
That is why the response to the EgyptAir crash is so tremendously interesting–and also revealing of far more than one nation’s tragedy.