"The Syrian Rebellion Is the Work of the US"*: A Simpsons Episode Proves It

An Egyptian channel propagates a snippet from a 2001 episode, where a flag appears that the anti-Assad rebels would use only 10 years later: a small anthology of the great publicly-known cases of alleged American conspiracy.

“What is happening in Syria today was premeditated” by Western powers, said Rania Badawy, an Egyptian TV personality who in an episode of her talk show on the private TV station, Al Tahrir, recently affirmed that behind the revolt on Assad, as well as over all the other Arab revolts, are the long tentacles of the U.S. To prove her theory, there are no secret documents from American agencies, but a Simpsons episode from 2001, which Badawy showed during her program. The 80 second clip transmitted by the Egyptian anchorwoman shows four characters, including Bart and Milhouse, bombing a group of Middle Easterners at the helm of military aircraft.

The detail that is supposed to give credence to this thesis is a jeep decorated with a version of the Syrian flag used by the protesters and anti-Assad rebels. “In 2011, there was no such thing as the flag of the Syrian opposition … How it reached this animated video nobody knows,” said Badawy, concluding that if the Americans were aware of it 10 years in advance, then that confirms that they were the architects of the Syrian revolt.

Robert Mackey took to the case to clear it up by fact checking its accuracy. On The Lede [blog] of The New York Times, Mackey affirmed that the flag is indeed not something new. The Syrian rebels simply adopted the first Syrian tri-color from 1932, which was replaced after the coup d’etat of 1963. Otherwise, the scene seems to be set in Iraq, and not Syria. Among those in the Middle Eastern group in the episode, there is a UN blue beret — a specific reference to the US bombing of Iraq in 1998 in Operation Desert Fox, which was decided upon by Washington following a dispute arising from a UN inspection of Iraqi weapons.

In full Anglo-Saxon style, Mackey makes fun of an episode that would cause hilarity among Western audiences, but not Egyptian ones — nor among those living in other Middle Eastern countries, where conspiracy theory as a kind of syndrome had already given rise to equally surreal precedents. Among the incidents of the last few years, the most exhilarating have to do with a pigeon and a stork. In January 2013, the former got “arrested” in Cairo for having a microfilm holder tied to its leg and the message “Egypt and Islam.” In November 2013, it was a stork coming from France that ended up in “prison,” stopped in Qena (a small city 450 km from Cairo) because she was hiding an electronic gizmo in her feathers, which the Egyptian authorities mistook for an espionage device.

“In the Middle East, conspiracy theories are very widespread because they were used by various regimes to keep populations at bay,”* explains Enrico De Angelis, an international political communications researcher at CEDEJ, Cairo. Whether or not journalists believe these types of ruminations is not clear, but what’s striking is the popular belief in the continued and essential interference of Western powers in the internal affairs of their countries. “We are facing the exhaustion of the European and American roles,”* continues De Angelis. “We cannot deny their interests and direct involvement in the history of the Middle East, but placing the burden of the fate of the entire region on the West means isolating the states and their citizens from their own responsibilities.”*

The revolutions seem to have weakened the conspiracy theories, giving the self-awareness to Middle Eastern populations to be able to decide the fate of their own nations. But the tormented periods of transition that brought together the fates of all those countries touched by the so-called Arab Spring have caused conspiracy theories to return even more acutely in the mass media. Egypt has to learn its lesson once again. The electoral media campaign for Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, former general of the Egyptian armed forces (and the favored candidate to win the presidency during the upcoming elections at the end of the month), has used conspiracy theories to weaken and repress forms of dissent through violence: in particular, against the Muslim Brotherhood, which the government has declared a terrorist organization without any concrete proof, and also thanks to a denigrating electoral campaign [propagated] through newspapers and TV stations that are close to the army.

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.