Post-9/11, Americans have learned of the United States’ credibility gap on the storied “Arab street.” That is certainly true in Egypt, where the credibility problem has reached a boiling point in recent days. In the past week alone, protesters have taken to the streets, furious at Israel’s response to Palestinian terrorism and what it views as the United States’ uncritical support of Israel. And on Tuesday, Egypt — which in 1979 became the first Arab country ever to enter a peace agreement with Israel, a plan largely brokered by then-President Jimmy Carter — announced it would suspend diplomatic relations with Israel.

The most populous Arab country and one of the United States’ most cherished allies in the Arab world seems more estranged than ever. As recently as early March, while visiting President Bush, President Hosni Mubarak claimed to “fully agree” with American values such as freedom and integrity — and not without some reason: Egypt receives nearly $3 billion in U.S. aid every year. But while U.S. officials have spurred Egypt to work as the mediator between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Egypt’s role in the Middle East conflict is often to fuel the fire in the region rather than quell it.

That role is nowhere more apparent than in Egypt’s eight daily newspapers. It’s not a free press; it operates largely under government control, and government restrictions hinder other competing newspapers from starting. And it feeds its reading public a steady stream of the sort of bias that has taken root in the Arab world and may be the biggest obstacle to any lasting peace.

The newspapers aren’t always filled with anti-American and anti-Israel conspiracies. Some coverage of the Flight 990 fiasco, for example, while defensive, at least tried to argue with facts.

In its final report, the NTSB never uses the word “suicide,” but the NTSB does use phrases like “as a result of the relief first officer’s flight control inputs” and “manipulation of controls,” clearly implicating the copilot, Al-Batouti. It’s not a surprising claim; media reports have used transcripts of the plane’s flight data recorder, or “black box,” to point the finger at Al-Batouti, who said the phrase “tawalkat ala Allah” (“I rely on God”) at least 10 times in the flight’s final minute and a half, words interpreted by the NTSB — and an American audience — to be those of a man with the darkest intentions.

But Yehia Al-Agati, the owner and chairman of National Aviation, a private charter, cargo and air taxi carrier, was quoted in the March 7, 2002, issue of the independent English weekly Cairo Times, saying, “A missing tail section could cause the plane to nose dive.” Al-Agati went on to attack the conclusions of the NTSB, adding that the Arabic phrase repeated over and over by Al-Batouti, “I rely on God,” was not something a man would say before committing suicide.

And in the Nov. 23, 1999, issue of Al-Ahram, arguably the most popular of Egypt’s Arabic dailies, and one of four officially owned by the government, Salaah Muntaser writes how the translation of the phrase “tawalkatala Allah” was incorrectly translated by some as meaning “I made my decision now. I put my faith in God’s hands.” He states that it is a common phrase used in everyday conversations, rather than words used specifically before one decides to take his own life.

In another article in the same paper, Nabil Fahmi, Egypt’s ambassador to the United States, reiterated this idea, saying that one of the main problems in the NTSB investigation has been “errors in translating [the black box].”

Despite these entirely reasonable arguments, many other Egyptian news sources have offered much more elaborate explanations for the plane’s crash that belie a clear agenda.

According to a front-page Al-Ahram article, in the same issue, “the Egyptian man on the streets” thinks that the true culprit behind the crash was “the Israeli Mossad.”

Another article in the same paper cites Amin Hammad, an Egyptian Parliament member from Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP), as repeating this claim, adding details of his own to the claim. “The Israeli Mossad infiltrated the American control tower and shifted the airplane from its course so that it would be hit [by a missile].”

In the same article, Omar Barakat, another Parliament member, representing the opposition Al-Wafd party, was quoted as saying, “There was an American-Zionist conspiracy. I blame the CIA and the Mossad, because 33 Egyptian officers were on board the airplane.”

The peculiar fact that there were 33 Egyptian army officers on board the flight has been used as the concrete foundation that the crash was part of a conspiracy. But the arguments supporting such a conspiracy, while reported seriously, all lack evidence.

In the November 25, 1999, issue of the English-written Al-Ahram weekly, also owned by the government, Hammad is quoted as saying, “The plane was deliberately obliged by Kennedy airport traffic control to take an air route that is different from the usual course. [This is] because the traffic control is operated by Jews who deliberately pushed the plane to take a different course.”

Numerous other Egyptian dailies reported this same conspiracy, each adding various twists. In an article published on November 12, 1999, in the weekly government-owned magazine Akher Saah, Ibrahim Qaud reported that the Jewish lobby “which controls the American media” was responsible for the negative reaction of the American media toward Egypt in regard to the EgyptAir crash.

Another government-owned weekly magazine, Al-Musawar, cited a senior EgyptAir pilot who criticized the American investigative team, claiming it relied on Jewish translators of the flight recorder.

But while the EgyptAir crash provides an example of how the Egyptian news promulgates conspiracies, it’s hardly the only one. As has been reported elsewhere already, many Egyptians have also claimed that the Mossad was the true culprit behind the Sept. 11 bombings.

In the Nov. 5, 2001, issue of the Egyptian weekly newspaper Al-Usbua, an article titled “True Perpetrators of the Sept. 11 Attacks Arrested — Zionists with maps of the WTC … ” reports that directly following the attacks, seven Israelis were arrested in Florida, with anthrax microbes as well as maps of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House found in their house.

Other theories, however outrageous, were at least somewhat more polished. In an editorial published in the Oct. 7, 2001, issue of Al-Ahram, Dr. Zahran of Suez Canal University wrote, “The scope and nature of the attacks attest to planning and execution by an intelligence apparatus close to the CIA. No intelligence apparatus is as close to the CIA as the Israeli Mossad.” Dr. Zahran’s piece seems to lose its luster thereafter, as he states that “there were many rumors, and open publicly, that the Jews, who were huge stockholders in the airlines and insurance companies, sold their stocks at the highest possible prices in Europe some 10 days before the attacks on America.” Suddenly Mossad and these alleged stockholding Jews are one and the same.

In an article published in Al-Ahram on October 29, 2001, titled “The Jews are behind the Explosions in America,” author Abu Zayid cites 14 pieces of alleged evidence to make his claim. His “facts” include that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was warned by his security services not to travel to New York City during the month of September, no Arabs were actually on board the four airplanes seized by the hijackers, and many Jews sold their stock in the Manhattan stock exchange two days before the attack, in addition to the now-infamous myth that 4,000 Israelis employed in the World Trade Center did not go to work the morning of Sept. 11. As ludicrous as that story seems, the press repeats it frequently and easily here, with no reader ever confronted with, for example, the New York Times “Portraits of Grief” section that memorializes the victims in the tragedy, listing their numerous Jewish surnames as well as Israeli nationalities.

Interestingly enough, though guilty for spreading numerous Egyptian conspiracies in its own right, the Sept. 27, 2001, issue of Al-Ahram Weekly cited an unknown Canadian organization, Intel-Stern, as the source of the infamous e-mail that cited how 4,000 Israelis were warned not to go to work in the World Trade Center the day of the attack. This article goes on to censure those who created the e-mail as well as those who sent it on to others. As reporter Omayma Abdel-Latif writes, these conspiracies play on “people’s fears, hopes and appetite for extravagant hidden horrors, invisible enemies and future threats.”

No better example may exist than one that appeared in the November 2001 issue of Al-Ilm, a scientific journal published by the government-run Al-Gumhuriya, which is edited by Samir Ragab, a ubiquitous presence who also edits the government-run English daily Egyptian Gazette. It includes an article on the history of biological and chemical warfare that blames Jews for purposely spreading the AIDS virus in an evil plot. According to the study’s author, Dr. Husniya Hassan Moussa, a lecturer at the National Research Center of Egypt, “Jewish tourists infected with AIDS are traveling around Asian and African countries with the aim of spreading the disease.”

What makes these wild conspiracy theories particularly insidious is the lack of a strong, reliable Egyptian media voice that will set the record straight. The most recent of such tales to take hold in downtown Cairo has no connection to the Mossad or Jews at all, but involves the claim that there is a taxi-driver serial killer on the loose, referred to as As-Safah (the killer), in two of Cairo’s neighborhoods, Nasser City and Heliopolis, targeting young female Cairenes. Like the WTC conspiracy theory before it, according to the March 7 issue of the Cairo Times, this rumor was also started by various e-mails, one of which was titled “Warning: Serial Killer on the Loose!” and cites a nonexistent Reuters story as its source.

Perhaps because this e-mail was the cause of a sweeping wave of fear among many Cairenes, the Egyptian government decided to conduct its own investigation into the writers of the e-mail, soon finding the young men who spread this dangerous notion. But not before media sources such as Sawt Al-Ummah, a weekly newspaper, had already done their own part in spreading the tale. An article published on February 25, 2002, titled “The Slaughter of Women: A Ghost Threatens the Young Women of Heliopolis,” details murders of numerous young women in Cairo, with vivid descriptions of their gory deaths.

In this case, at least, the Egyptian government shot down the conspiracy. But it was a rare effort to chain a beast it largely controls. Due to government restrictions on the licensing of newspapers, only eight daily papers are published in Egypt. Four of these are officially owned by the government itself, and the other four, though technically owned by other organizations, including some opposition parties, are dependent upon direct government subsidies to continue their operations. Furthermore, according to a Cairo Times article, each of these other four dailies prints its copy at government-owned printing presses.

Egypt’s censorship laws, which in various forms began under the late President Gamal Abd Al-Nasser, produces a system of “shabby journalism,” in the words of Cairo Times Publisher Hisham Qassem. Qassem adds that “[Egyptian] reporters are not properly trained, and subsequently their articles are often based upon mere speculation.” Additionally, because the government essentially supports the press, there is no competition among the papers and thus no motivation to improve. “The Egyptian government has created a system of disinformation,” which in turn has encouraged “a lack of political and economic development for the last 50 years.”

Why the Egyptian government uses its right hand to publish these conspiracy theories in its newspapers as it uses its left hand to accept a U.S. aid package is a legitimate question. As is why the U.S. government continues to give aid without publicly condemning the government-run media’s pernicious anti-American, anti-Jewish, and anti-Israel conspiracy tales, all of which only help incite the Egyptian public against the U.S. and Israel.

Then again, pre-9/11, no one seemed to take the rumor mill too seriously. Last year, the region was gripped by stories about the Japanese children’s game Pokimon, during the first year Nintendo decided to market the children’s game to those in the Arab world. Those smiling neon characters, newspaper readers soon learned, were hiding a dark agenda.

Saudi Arabian Sheikh Abd Al-Monim publicly declared that the game was atheistic and meant to convince children that there is no God. In March 2001, Saudi Arabia’s Higher Committee for Scientific Research and Islamic Law banned Pokimon for promoting Zionism and “possess[ing] the minds” of Saudi children. Numerous Egyptian clerics followed suit, as did the media. In a late March issue of the Egyptian weekly Al-Midan, Sheikh Abu Bakr was quoted as saying, “Pokimon figures encourage Western thought, animal worship, and the theory of evolution.”

That was followed by an article in the April 12 issue of the Egyptian Gazette (edited by Samir Ragab), which stated that “Pokimons are a tool in the hands of the Jews to incite Egyptian youth to licentious behavior.” The rumor might have reached its reductio ad absurdum when it was speculated that the name of the main Pokimon character, Pikachu, actually was meant to sound like “be a Jew.”

At the time, these reports were repeated humorously stateside. An April 2001 blurb in Newsweek’s “Periscope” section repeated the outrageous claims with a tone of sunny bemusement: “None of this is likely to dent Nintendo’s sales, according to company spokesmen. But the credibility of these so-called clerics may take a long time to recover.”

Maybe their credibility was hurt in the eyes of Newsweek readers. But in Egypt, their ideas were repeated without skepticism and delivered to an audience ready and willing to believe them. And unfortunately, as Israel-Palestinian relations spiral further and further out of control, Egypt’s press will only exacerbate the situation in the region.

The same day, a front-page article in Al-Ayaam, one of the three main Palestinian newspapers (along with Al-Quds and Al-Hayaat Al-Jadeeda), reported that “the Occupation forces assassinated yesterday a student in Al-Quds University who was a member in Islamic Jihad, next to one of [the] university branches … in front of dozens of student and citizen eyewitnesses.” The article further described Himran as “married and the father of three children” who had “left the [university] bookstore around 1 p.m., and when he approached the road soldiers opened fire … Dozens of people saw what happened, including some children who were playing near the scene.”

The newspaper diligently quotes an unnamed IDF spokesman, who alleges, “Soldiers opened fire when [Himran] was shooting at our base.” But the story then dutifully refutes this charge, with four different reasons: the “base is hidden from the place Himran was assassinated … [and] is a kilometer away,” and “the place of the assassination is lower than the mountain” where the base is located, and “dozens of eyewitnesses said that [Himran] was unarmed.”

In Ha’aretz, Himran is described as a terrorist the IDF was justified — perhaps even happy — to have killed. Al-Ayaam, meanwhile, did mention that Himran belonged to the Islamic Jihad, but chose to characterize him as a student assassinated on his way from class, a family man who now leaves behind three children and an unarmed Palestinian shot dead by the “Occupation forces.”

One event. Two versions. Since violence broke out in this region on Sept. 29, more than 360 people have been killed and more than 10,000 have been injured, most of them Palestinians. Played out in the respective media, the “Rashomon”-style retelling of the deaths seems to lack any objective reality. Often, the spin is obvious, depending on whether the victim is described as “terrorist” or a “martyr,” or whether the victim was “killed” or “assassinated.” There’s also the difference, of course, in the lexicon: calling the Israeli army the “IDF” or the “occupying forces” conveys two extremely different ideas.

But as the beleaguered peace talks continue in the Middle East, what’s at stake is not only the immediate political future for the Palestinians and Israelis but a defense of each side’s version of recent history. The New York Times reported last fall that Palestinian textbooks don’t even recognize the current state of Israel, using pre-1948 maps of Palestine to teach children geography; Israeli textbooks, meanwhile, stick closely to heroic Zionist narratives and avoid any Palestinian perspective. Newspapers, the textbooks of the adult world, only continue the work begun by grade school teachers.

This can be seen as well in the coverage of a Palestinian man killed Nov. 9 in Beit Sahour, a Palestinian village southeast of Bethlehem.

Ha’aretz reported that the 37-year-old man, Hussein Abayat, was killed by the IDF in a helicopter raid. The article quotes an IDF official who explained that Abayat, a senior Fatah official, “masterminded and carried out gunfire attacks in the Bethlehem area in recent weeks.” The Jerusalem Post, another leading Israeli newspaper, added that Abayat had been “responsible for a series of bloody operations against Israelis over the past six months.” In addition, the Post quotes Eitan as saying that “the attack was launched after the IDF received intelligence that Abayat was on his way to carry out an attack on [Israeli] soldiers.” Both Israeli newspaper articles also mention that two Palestinian women were “killed” in the helicopter raid.

The story according to the Israeli papers: A terrorist was justifiably killed.

Al-Quds, meanwhile, runs with a headline that reads: “Israel Assassinates the Head of the Military Team of Fatah, Two Women were Martyred in the Attack.” However, its article did not connect Abayat in any way to criminal activity committed against Israeli citizens. Instead, its article reported the particulars of Abayat’s “political assassination,” in addition to describing the lives of the two Palestinian women “martyrs” who were also killed by the “occupying forces.”

The story according to Al-Quds: Martyrs all the way around.

Still, at other times, the strongest spin is silence. On the morning of Nov. 8, at approximately 8:15 a.m., an Israeli woman was shot and killed on the border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.

The next day’s lead article in Ha’aretz, headlined “Woman Killed in Gaza Ambush,” reported that the 25-year-old Noa Dahan was the victim of a “terrorist attack” on her way to work. The article quoted two co-workers of Dahan at a customs terminal describing her as someone who “believed her work was a bridge to peace,” and that she “had done her best to help Palestinian merchants.”

Dahan’s death, meanwhile, was not mentioned in Al-Quds, Al-Hayyat or Al-Jadeeda. These newspapers instead ran articles on Palestinians who had been killed the previous day, describing the particulars of each “martyr” who had been killed at the hands of the “occupying forces.” In addition, each paper also reported that one of the wings of Alia Hospital, a major Palestinian hospital located in the West Bank city of Hebron, had been “attacked” in “barbaric bombings” by the IDF.

The damage caused to Alia Hospital, meanwhile, was not mentioned in Ha’aretz.

The two events most widely publicized since the violence began are the death of the 12-year-old Palestinian Muhammad Al-Dura and the killing of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah.

Al-Dura was killed on Sept. 30 in crossfire between the IDF and the Palestinian police, in the Netzarim junction section of the Gaza Strip.

Ha’aretz did not publish a paper on the following day because it fell on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when Israeli publications cease operations altogether. Still, Al-Dura’s death did not merit a mention in Ha’aretz’s next issue, on Oct. 2, save for a brief front-page article listing Palestinians who had died over the same weekend.

Furthermore, Ha’aretz did not attribute the boy’s death to either the IDF or the Palestinian police. In fact, a recent article in Ha’aretz cited an IDF spokesman, Gen. Yom Tov Samia, saying the IDF’s own investigation into Al-Dura’s death showed that due to the angle of the shooting it was “more probable” that the youth was killed by shots from the Palestinian police than by shots from the IDF.

In contrast, the young boy’s death received a maelstrom of Palestinian media coverage. The coverage in Al-Ayaam, for example, makes it clear who the newspaper thinks is responsible for Al-Dura’s death. The front page of the paper’s Oct. 1 edition shows a picture of Al-Dura nestled under his father’s arm moments before the young boy was killed. The text of the article was taken from Reuters, but the title — “They Killed Mohammed Between His Father’s Hands” — clearly was not. Although the “they” of the article’s title is left unsaid, the continuation of the article, on Page 10, made it clear who was guilty. Underneath a sequence of eight second-by-second photographs of Al-Dura’s death is the caption “televised pictures of the deadly moments showing the brutally barbaric crime of the Israeli occupation forces.” The article continued, “as if the human fear tempted an Israeli beast or more [Israeli beasts] to continue the crime on the father’s child so that he would die.”

“Afterwards,” it went on, “[the IDF] killed the ambulance driver, Basam Balbisee, age 45, because he dared carry the child’s body.”

Pictures of Al-Dura are still posted on walls of Palestinian-owned shops and buildings throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as in the Old City of Jerusalem. Al-Dura has become the poster boy for the Palestinian community in the current fighting; he has become the Palestinian Elián González, decades of victimhood summed up in one innocent, tragic young face.

To Palestinians it is clear that the IDF shot Al-Dura, but to many Israelis it is not. Some Israelis, such as Yosef Duriel, an engineer who was part of the initial Israeli investigative team looking into Al-Dura’s death, subscribe to the theory that the Palestinian police shot Al-Dura themselves in order to shed a negative light upon the IDF and gain greater sympathy from the international public. (Duriel was dismissed from the investigative team after making this accusation.)

Similarly, the Oct. 12 deaths of two IDF soldiers by a Palestinian mob at the Palestinian Authority police headquarters in Ramallah caused two dramatically different accounts. According to an article published in Ha’aretz on the day after the killing, titled “A Fatal Wrong Turn,” the two soldiers “made the mistake of their lives, taking a wrong turn as they drove to their military base at Beit-El, near Ramallah.” Upon reaching a Palestinian Authority roadblock the “Palestinian [police] arrested the Israelis at gunpoint and ordered them to drive to the Ramallah police station.” Soon thereafter, “about a dozen [Palestinian] men climbed into the police station through a window and a few minutes later, gunshots were heard. Two men then opened up the window, sticking their bloody hands out. The crowd roared with approval.”

The text of the Al-Quds article was taken from Reuters, and was not significantly different than that of Ha’aretz. However, the end of it reports, “The Palestinians said that the two soldiers were under cover,” despite the IDF’s claims to the contrary. The theory that the soldiers had not made a wrong turn but were undercover IDF agents on assignment in Ramallah only received minimal mention in the article, but it has been circulated widely among Palestinians and within Arab media in general.

It was expanded upon further in the Oct. 19-25 weekly English edition of Al-Ahram, the daily Arabic edition of which is the oldest newspaper in the Arab world. It reads, “The two soldiers, disguised as Palestinians and reportedly carrying explosives, sub-machine guns and guns with silencers, were apprehended in downtown Ramallah while attempting to enter the funeral procession for a Palestinian youth killed by Israeli snipers. Nobody knows for sure what the two musta’arabin” — Israeli army commandos disguised as Arabs – “were planning to do. But most Palestinians, including two PA officials, seemed absolutely convinced the two soldiers were planning a killing spree.”

Ironically, perhaps the only thing both sides can agree upon is the unfairness of CNN’s coverage of the current crisis. On Nov. 14, the Jerusalem Post quoted a senior Barak official saying, “Israel feels that the coverage [by CNN] has not been objective.” In an op-ed in the Oct. 23 issue of Al-Quds, a prominent political analyst at a Palestinian think tank writes: “Since the first day of the Aqsa Intifada CNN’s top priority was to conceal or divert the attention of viewers from the massacres of the occupation … CNN [has] played with figures and statistics … concealing the hard facts.”

So regardless of what form of peace agreement may eventually be reached, the next generation of Israeli and Palestinian children will be learning two different lessons, especially concerning who can claim to be the real victims of the violence. The difference can be traced back to May 14, 1948, when the state of Israel was established. To Israelis, May 14, the Day of Independence, is a national holiday and is celebrated by many Jews around the world with music and family barbecues. Palestinians, however, engage in intense mourning on this day they call Al-Nakba, commonly translated as the catastrophe, or the uprooting. They raise black flags, protest against Israeli soldiers and most recently observed a communal, mournful moment of silence.

Regardless of how the violence is covered in the newspapers, the mourning will no doubt continue. And the media, knowingly or not, will continue to fuel the hatred that provides each day’s banner headlines.