How Do Trump’s Conspiracy Theories Go Over in the Middle East? Dangerously.
In November 2015, a cartoon in Al-Ahram, an Egyptian state-owned newspaper, depicted an Islamic State ogre with “Made in America” emblazoned on his back. It wasn’t unusual. A look at Middle Eastern news media shows that this idea is startlingly common.
.. Mr. Trump is drawing on a tradition in American politics that tars political opponents as treasonous and un-American. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote when describing an earlier flare-up in 1964, “it is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”
.. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, told an interviewer, “it appears that there has been a deep penetration in the halls of our United States government by the Muslim Brotherhood.” Without offering any credible evidence, Mrs. Bachmann and other House colleagues called for the Justice Department to investigate
.. Egyptian news outlets showed clips of Representative Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, on the House floor alleging United States support for the Muslim Brotherhood to malign the United States as the sinister hidden hand behind Egypt’s turmoil.
To this day, such accusations damage United States-Egypt relations, providing fuel for the prosecution of Egyptians who have worked with the United States and complicating cooperation on counterterrorism and counter-radicalization.
.. The Arab world has been primed to receive these conspiracy theories by lying authoritarian governments and, in some cases, American military interventions under flimsy premises.
.. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly endorsed Mr. Trump’s remarks: “This is an American presidential candidate. This was spoken on behalf of the Republican Party. He has data and documents.”