Q33NY

Fun fact: type the flight number Q33NY in Microsoft Word and change the font to Wingdings. You may be surprised to find that the symbols which correspond to these letters depict a plane flying into two word documents, which could kind of sort of look like buildings if you wanted them to, followed by a skull and the Star of David. Shocking, albeit slightly obscure, evidence that Israel was behind September 11th . And knowing them, the United States government was probably in on it too. The Bush administration has after all made huge leaps in their foreign policy goals and Israel has found yet more evidence to prove Muslims are terrorists. Was 9/11 a massive plot by the US and Israel to make Arabs look bad? Gone, it seems, are the good ol’ days when governments used staged assassination attempts to tarnish our image. Whatever stance you take on the issue it’s clear what this apocalyptic message of Zionistic proportions tells us; people will believe anything.

You probably read the Q33NY conspiracy on the internet when it made its rounds on countless web pages a few years ago or in one of those annoying chain mails that have become ever so popular among the more feeble minded of us but you may not know, however, that the sequence Q33NY is not in any way associated with any of the planes that flew into the World Trade Centers or Pentagon on September 11th . In fact all civilian aircraft in the United States have flight numbers that are 6 characters, not 5, and none start with the letter “Q.“ Q33NY, as it turns out, is simply an arbitrary sequence of numbers and letters, most likely stumbled upon and posted.

Sadder yet is the fact that I, like so many of us actually believed the Q33NY warning, and so many other conspiracies like it, when I first heard it. Instead of actually using fact, or more importantly common sense, to question whether what we read is fact or fiction, so many of us have become prone to taking the side of wild and often fantastical fiction we read over the fact, which may sometimes to be harder to swallow. Many Muslims, it seems, find it easier to stomach the idea of a vast, far reaching conspiracy in which our enemies have organized all their time and resources against us than it is to accept that there are some Muslims in the world that murder. Take into account some of these other conspiracies that have been spreading through the Muslim consciousness like wild fire.

Many claim, for example, in a rather popular conspiracy theory that a Boeing 757 could not have made the relatively minor amount of damage to the Pentagon that was depicted in the countless photographs, aerial or otherwise, taken of the post attack building. To many, the size of the crater left in the side of the Pentagon could not correspond the size and speed of the afore– mentioned jetliner.

That, in addition to the fact that no debris from the plane was found on the Pentagon premises or anywhere else near its immediate proximity has led many to believe that a US missile, not a commercial jet liner, slammed into the side of the Pentagon on 9/11; a hypothesis which gained much notoriety after the book, “9/11: The Big Lie“ by French author Thierry Meyssan, hit numerous international best seller lists. This conspiracy, however, like so many others is conveniently “cleansed“ of any evidence contradictory to the predetermined hypothesis. Eye witness accounts, for example, of a plane, not a missile, flying into the Pentagon disprove this conspiracy in its entirety all too easily. That’s the short answer. There’s a long technical explanation with testimonials from professional physicists on how the Pentagon crash is scientifically feasible but really, who has the time?

An even more prominent conspiracy, yet one not lacking in its own fair share of absurdity, was the theory that 4000 Jews were warned by Israeli secret service not to show up to the World Trade Center on September 11th . How 4,000 Jews new about the mass murder that was about to take place without a single one of them spilling the beans is beyond me. I guess they were asked by Israel to keep it on the down– low. The conspiracy started after the Israeli Embassy expressed concern over the 4,000 Israeli nationals who resided in New York City at the time. Few of these 4,000 actually worked at the World Trade Centers. The 4,000 figure was then picked up by numerous Arab publications and other Muslim public figures who then heavily extrapolated it into the claim that 4,000 Jewish WTC employees were forewarned of the attacks. Many even went on to say that not a single Jew was killed at the World Trade Centers on September 11th. The facts, however, disagree with this assessment as biographical data compiled by The New York Times and the Medical Examiners report of the WTC victims was interpreted by The Wall Street Journal to indicate that 10% of all 9/11 victims were Jewish. Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank with four floors on one of the towers that collapsed, alone lost 49 Jewish employees; about 12% of the total number of employees it lost on 9/11. These figures correspond closely with the estimated number of Jewish residents living in New York: about 10%–15% of the total population. Had 4,000 been warned not to show up these figures would be much lower if not completely non existent.

The conspiracies are, of course, simply an elaborate form of denial. Blame the Jews, George Bush, the media, etc. Blame anyone and everyone we can in order to deny the fact that there are some of our own, rationally challenged as he or she may be, who are capable of the causing the great harm to innocent people that we witnessed on 9/11. Each new incident of Muslims behaving badly that arises, instead of being an opportunity for us to distance ourselves from the injustice caused by a few on the fringe of our society, has become a new excuse for us to point fingers at someone else and this does nothing but hurt us.

Take for example a conspiracy which spread in Nigeria in 2003 after the president of Nigeria’s Supreme Council for Shari’a Law, Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, accused Americans of lacing the country’s anti Polio vaccines with HIV and other chemicals which would render its users infertile. This claim, which was taken very seriously by the Nigerian people who were quick to boycott the vaccines, caused what the World Health Organization called a “major epidemic“ of Polio in Nigeria and surrounding countries. Countries where Polio had previously been eradicated reported outbreaks in the subsequent months following the conspiracy theory. All in all, the conspiracy caused an outbreak of Polio in no less than 16 African and Middle Eastern countries, with reports of vaccine boycotts in Indian and other South Asian slums. All because of one man’s ignorance.

The conspiracy theory has become somewhat of an addiction in the Muslim world. An easy fix, “get out of jail free card,“ answer to the hard questions we face from frightened onlookers of extremism. I, for one, believe it’s time for us to take responsibility for the fringe groups of our own societies and denounce their actions instead jumping on the ever growing fad of pointing fingers abroad.

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