Islamic State Conspiracy Theories Include a Purported American Plot

The sudden rise of the militant group known as the Islamic State has prompted a serious effort to make sense of the group's appeal in the Arab world, Syrian columnist Hassan Hassan wrote last week.

"Since ISIS took over large swaths of Iraq, in particular, Arabic media outlets of all types have produced reports about the nature of the group and the source of its ideology," Hassan wrote in The Guardian, using an acronym for one of the militant group's names. "There is a collective soul-searching in the region, coming from everyone from ordinary people to clerics and intellectuals."

For instance, Lebanese scholar Ziad Majed wrote on his blog that at least six factors from the recent history of the Middle East helped give birth to the militant movement, including "despotism in the most heinous form that has plagued the region," as well as "the American invasion of Iraq in 2003," and "a profound crisis, deeply rooted in the thinking of some Islamist groups seeking to escape from their terrible failure to confront the challenges of the present toward a delusional model ostensibly taken from the seventh century."

That sort of introspection is not for everyone, so a popular conspiracy theory has spread online that offers an easier answer to the riddle of where Islamic State came from: Washington.

According to the theory, which appears to have started in Egypt and spread rapidly across the region, Islamic State was created by the United States as part of a plot orchestrated by former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton to replace the region's autocratic rulers with more pliant Islamist allies. The evidence cited to back up this claim sounds unimpeachable: passages from Clinton's new memoir in which she describes how a plan to bolster the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was foiled at the last moment when the Egyptian military seized power on July 5, 2013, and deployed submarines and fighter jets to block a U.S. invasion.

If that plot sounds like the stuff of fiction, that's because it is. The passages described by supporters of the Egyptian military on Facebook as quotes from Clinton's memoir were entirely fabricated and do not appear anywhere in the text of her book, "Hard Choices."
The fictional plot was reported as fact by Egyptian, Tunisian, Palestinian, Jordanian and Lebanese news organizations.

As the Egyptian blogger who writes as Zeinobia explained, Egypt's new culture minister, Gaber Asfour, cited a version of the theory in televised remarks in which he said that he had learned from Clinton's book "that the Americans decided to support and create ISIS" to undermine the military-backed government that deposed the elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, last summer.

Although some writers, like Jordanian journalist Lina Ejeilat and Egyptian scholar Manar el-Shorbagy, tried to debunk the conspiracy theory after actually reading Clinton's memoir, the rumor that it contained an admission of U.S. support for Islamic State spread so far that Lebanon's foreign minister, Gebran Bassil, boasted on Twitter that he had demanded an explanation from David Hale, the U.S. ambassador in Beirut.

Hours after the foreign minister's tweet, the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon posted a statement on Facebook denying that there was any substance to the rumors.

Though Clinton declined to comment on the fake quotes attributed to her, one section of her memoir does describe her efforts during a visit to Egypt in 2012 to debunk a similar conspiracy theory: Shortly after the election of Morsi, opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood demonstrated loudly outside Clinton's hotel, holding signs that accused her of a secret pact with the Brotherhood.

The former secretary of state explains that she tried to reassure members of Egypt's Coptic Christian community, during discussions at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. "In our meeting, one of the more agitated participants brought up an especially outrageous canard," Clinton writes. "He accused my trusted aide Huma Abedin, who is Muslim, of being a secret agent of the Muslim Brotherhood."

As Clinton explains, this conspiracy theory "had been circulated by some unusually irresponsible and demagogic right-wing political and media personalities in the United States, including members of Congress," and had spread to Egypt via the Internet ahead of her visit.
"I wasn't going to let that stand and told him in no uncertain terms how wrong he was," Clinton recalls in her book. "After a few minutes of conversation the embarrassed accuser apologized and asked why a member of the U.S. Congress would make such an assertion if it wasn't true. I laughed and said that unfortunately plenty of falsehoods are circulated in Congress."