Pakistanis Buy Into the Conspiracy Theories

In this city’s Saddr Bazaar, a place of uneven sidewalks, cheap hotels and chockablock shops, the restaurants offer skewers of spicy chicken finished off with sweet, milky tea and served with talk about the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks.

But the recounting of the events is altogether different from the facts that Americans know.

To most people here, there’s no reason to implicate Saudi militant Osama bin Laden or other Muslims in the crime. To the best of their knowledge, the circumstantial evidence points elsewhere: toward Israel first of all, or the Americans themselves, or even the Hindus.

Asshad Malik, 21, of the Malik Sports shop, does not hesitate when asked about his understanding of the attacks Sept. 11. “The Jews did it,” he explains, his face all open credulity as he stands in front of rows of cricket bats and board games.

Mohammed Aamir, a 26-year-old student, chimes in: “We have heard it from the international media. Especially the BBC. . . . They say it not directly but indirectly.”

Aamir and Malik are not alone. Many, if not most, people one encounters on the streets here seem to genuinely believe that the assault on the U.S. was some sort of Jewish, American or Indian conspiracy.

In a country of 141 million, it would suggest that millions subscribe to the most widely heard canard that also has spread across the Arab world and beyond: that 4,000 Jews, forewarned, stayed away from the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks and were spared.

In Pakistan, the account has been published in one or another form in most Urdu-language papers, with no serious disclaimers.

Other widely circulated rumors abound. A quick list would have to include:

* No passengers were in the four jetliners that crashed Sept. 11, and the aircraft were operated by remote control; therefore the passenger lists and the allegation of hijackings are a fiction.

* Australian Prime Minister John Howard canceled a trip to New York just before Sept. 11 because he had been informed of the plot.

* Cameras were prepositioned around the World Trade Center to capture the crashes, proving that the attacks were part of a well-coordinated plot.

* Only Americans could have turned off the aircraft’s radar and accomplished the other technical feats to avoid detection. Therefore, the conspiracy was an internal affair, perhaps triggered by Al Gore’s presidential defeat last year.

* The attack is part of a vast Jewish and/or Hindu plot to pit Muslims and Christians against each other so that Jews or Hindus will emerge on top. Hinduism is the dominant religion of Pakistan’s archrival, India.

Rumors that would be dismissed out of hand in a better-informed society have been wholeheartedly embraced by Pakistan’s tabloid press and even by some semi-respectable newspapers. The stories then have been amplified by word of mouth until they have become in some cases accepted “truths.”

“When a news item is published in the paper about the disappearance of 4,000 Jews from their jobs that day, America should not ignore that,” argued shopkeeper Mohammed Iqbal, 53, when told that the stories he had heard were not true. “I trust the newspaper. The newspeople are very intelligent, and if they are giving the story, it must be true.”

“Most of the people believe these stories because our major problem is illiteracy,” said Mohammed Omar, 27, a finance manager for a Dutch consulting business here. “If anyone told them that fact, they believe it.”

Of course, the fact that such ideas have been sown and have taken root so quickly is due to some extent to political and religious prejudice and hatred. But it is also a reflection of the relative susceptibility of many people to information that is handed to them from a trusted source.

Some of the stories seem to be deliberate plants with a political agenda. For instance, one of the first sightings of a news story directly blaming Israel for the World Trade Center bombing was in the Nation, a leading daily published in the major cities of Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi.

On the Sunday after the tragedy, a front-page story was slipped into the Karachi edition: “Mossad Behind Attacks--From Our Correspondent.”

Ayesha Haroon, an editor at the Islamabad edition of the paper, said she was not sure where the item about the Israeli intelligence service came from, but her first impression was that it was a credible news service.

“It’s quite possible” that there was deliberate malice in printing it, she said. “But I also think it has to do with the Internet. Somebody in Canada, the U.S. or U.K. is sitting there and makes up something and sends it to us. And when you see something on the computer, you tend to believe it’s true.”

No matter how it happens, the result is a house-of-mirrors distortion of information that helps explain the hostility on the streets of Pakistan toward the U.S. demand for the capture or death of Bin Laden, whom many people regard as a man who has been wronged by the West.

“It is possible that people in America did it themselves,” said Ahshed Mahmood, 33, a columnist from the Mussafat, a daily Urdu-language newspaper. But on reflection, Mahmood said he had to admit that many stories printed in Pakistan are simply false.

“The media is much involved--they are giving their own opinions without any research. Most of the stories are not based on facts most of the time,” he said, adding that his own paper is an exception.

“In a country where there is a void of information, newspapers resort to rumors partly in order to fill space,” said Syed Talat Hussan, a prominent Pakistani journalist. “In addition, there is an abiding tradition in the Pakistani print media deliberately to prove that whatever goes wrong is the work of Jews and Hindus.”

Yet the stories could easily have been debunked, he said. “Why don’t they counter-check? Because they don’t want to, because it goes against the grain of their beliefs.”

This bias has a bearing on the demands heard frequently here that the United Stated needs to make public its proof if it wants Pakistani public support for an assault to capture or kill Bin Laden, who is believed to be in Afghanistan. Hussan said he doubts that any proof would be sufficient.

“If they embrace rumors like these,” he said, “they are not going to believe facts.”

Haroon, of the Nation, said another aspect of the problem is that Pakistanis believe that Western publications are against them.

“Generally, the people here are very, very upset with the international media, and they have the feeling that the international media will never take their side,” she said. “They think it is either pro-U.S.A., pro-Israel or pro-India.”

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Times staff writer Tyler Marshall in Islamabad contributed to this report.