“Is it conceivable that Muslims did the killing on 9/11? Yes, they did. They killed 3,000 people.” — Ahmad Al-Rub’i, a former Kuwaiti minister of education, Al-Rai TV, March 27

Twelve days from now will mark the fifth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Since the attacks, the Middle East Media Research Institute has documented what the Arab and Iranian press has said about that day.

Its response to the attacks was immediate. “When the towers collapsed … my lungs filled with air. I breathed in relief, as I’d never breathed before,”a missive from the chairman of the Syrian Arab Writers Association read. “Millions across the world shouted in joy: America was hit,” the independent Egyptian weekly Al-Maydan wrote. “I have a sneaking suspicion that George W. Bush was involved in the operations of September 11, as was Colin Powell,” a columnist for the Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Samir Atallah, said.

Prominent journalists, members of academia, and leading religious figures shaped such conspiracy theories. Furthermore, Arab government officials were responsible in part for creating and spreading conspiracies about what “really” happened.

“I find it hard to believe that people who were learning to fly in Florida could, within a year and a half, fly large commercial airlines and hit with accuracy the towers of the World Trade Center, which would appear, to the pilot from the air, the size of a pencil,” President Mubarak of Egypt told Al-Ahram Weekly on October 25, 2001. “Only a professional pilot could carry out this mission, not someone who learned to fly for 18 months in Florida.”

Two weeks after the attacks, Sheik Muhammad al-Gameia — an Egyptian imam at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York and the American representative to Al-Azhar University, the highest religious authority in Sunni Islam — gave an interview to one of the school’s Web sites. He said, among other things, “If the Americans knew that the Jews carried out the September 11 attacks, they would do to them what Hitler did.”

More recently, an American Muslim scholar who is active in prominent American Muslim organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Salah Sultan, gave an interview to Saudi Al-Resala TV. “September 11 could not have been carried out entirely from outside [America] — by Muslims or others.… The entire thing was of a large scale and was planned within America in order to enable America to control and terrorize the entire world,” he said on May 17.

Notable conspiracy theories from the Arab world and Iran between 2001 and 2004 put the blame for the attacks on Jews, Zionists, Christian Zionists, born again Christians, the Vatican, Mossad, CIA, National Security Council, white supremacist groups, Britain, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many others.

These conspiracies have continued over the past year. “The 9/11 story is, in fact, a Zionist conspiracy,” an Egyptian cleric, Abd Al-Sabur Shaheen, said on Al-Nas TV on July 10.

Writing in the Oman daily Al-Watan on June 26, Abdallah Hammouda discussed the possibility that neoconservative Christians and Zionists planned and implemented the attacks.

The “real facts are not available”to explain what really happened on September 11, but besides Al Qaeda, it is possible Jews or even the “Americans themselves were behind it,” the chairman of the Somali Islamic Courts Union, Sheik Sherif Sheik Ahmed, told the Somaliland Times on June 9.

“I said that 9/11 was carried out by American agents,” the deputy chairman of the Egyptian Parliamentary Committee for Defense and National Security, Muhammad Abd Al-Fattah, told Ein TV on May 2.

“I am one of the those who believe these events”of September 11 “were fabricated from the outset,” an Egyptian cleric who once lectured in America, Hazem Sallah Abu Ismail, said on Saudi Al-Resala TV on April 14.

Throughout September 2005, Al-Jazeera aired a special titled “The Truth Behind 9/11.” Part IV, which aired September 30, was devoted to the Mossad’s involvement, including “agents … dancing and cheering in front of the World Trade Center.”

On September 13, 2005, Iran’s Jaame Jam 1 TV aired a program on September 11 conspiracies, including the “true” passengers on the planes that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and why 4,000 Jews did not show up to work that day. An Iranian TV documentary on Sahar 1 TV on September 11, 2005, suggested that the American government attacked its own people.

A retired Egyptian general, Muhammed Khalef, said on Al-Mihwar TV on September 11, 2005, that the planning for September 11, 2001, began in 1999 at the National Defense University. He claimed that Mr. Cheney told Mr. Bush, “It was an inside the White House job.”

In November 2002, Ain Al-Yaqeen quoted the powerful Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef, as saying: “It is impossible that 19 youths carried out the operation of September 11, or that bin Laden or Al Qaeda did that alone. … I think [the Zionists] are behind these events.” Prince Nayef’s statement was considered shocking and was immediately condemned. As NBC reported, it completely undercut a $10 million Saudi public relations campaign.

Unfortunately, as we approach the fifth anniversary of the attacks, statements such as Prince Nayef’s are now readily accepted in the Middle East.On June 22, Pew released the results of a survey that asked Muslims if they thought Arabs carried out the September 11 attacks. Only 17% of British Muslims; 48% of French Muslims; 16% of Indonesians; 32% of Egyptians; 16% of Turks; 39% of Jordanians, and 15% of Pakistanis answered “yes.”

Mr. Stalinsky is the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute. A documentary about the results of MEMRI’s survey of the Arab and Iranian press over the last five years, narrated by Ron Silver and produced by Interface Media Group, will air on www.memri.org next week.