conspiracy cab

This morning’s cab driver was both nice and safe, and since safe is becoming so rare (yesterday I saw one dead body and two nearly dead ones on the road at various times) I was grateful for that.

But he also had the wildest litany of conspiracy theories I’ve heard in some time. Most of them were familiar.

The one I hadn’t heard before is that the 9/11 hijackers were tricked into thinking that they were involved in a non-lethal operation to take hostages in exchange for freeing Palestinian prisoners. But in fact, they had been tricked by the Israelis into boarding those planes, while the Israelis remotely controlled the aircraft from the ground. The one strange concession this theory requires, of course, is that my cab driver had to admit that the hijackers did kill the pilots in order to make remote control from the ground possible. But the hijackers did this unwillingly, and only under Israeli pressure.

He also thinks the American NGO workers now being charged actually do have a plot to turn the Sinai into an autonomous Israeli puppet state.

The common element in all of his theories, I was disappointed to note, was the assumption that no Arab person is capable of doing anything wrong at any time. At least conspiracy theories in America usually blame Americans.

He was a nice guy, and a safe and efficient driver. But it was a very disappointing conversation.