There was an odd -- and oddly-timed -- documentary on the July 2005 London bombings on BBC 2 last night. (You can see it on BBC iPlayer -- it's part of a series called The Conspiracy Files). Like the 9/11 attacks in the US, those bombings have unleashed an unsavoury mob of crackpot conspiracy theorists, determined to prove that the official stories of those tragic days are an elaborate cover-up.
The centrepiece of the 7/7 conspiracy theories is a documentary (I use the term very loosely) called "Ripple effects", produced and distributed on DVD by a man calling himself Muad Dib. Mr Dib, the BBC revealed, is a white bearded and pale-skinned Yorkshireman whose Mum knew him as John Hill. While masquerading as Muad Dib (a name he apparently took from a comic book), Hill also appears to believe that he is Jesus Christ. He lives in a remote village in Ireland and is currently facing extradition to the UK to face charges of fomenting hatred.
Also featured was a tweedy gent who had spent altogether too much time looking at train timetables and CCTV footage. He had managed to find one error in the Government's original story: the train the bombers were originally supposed to have taken from Luton to London was actually cancelled that day. However, this was scarcely germane to the unfolding events, and as soon as the error was uncovered (back in 2006) the Government promptly apologised. Only at the end of the programme did the BBC reveal that this charming man's main avocation is as a holocaust denier.
The basis premise of Hill and his tweedy sidekick is that the four young Muslims who carried out the attacks were duped by the Government in order to cover up an "official" terrorist attack, carried out either by MI5 or Mossad. Dib et al have no cogent explanation for why either of these would have wanted to kill innocent Tube passengers, but I suppose that's not the point. The BBC show painstakingly destroyed all of the supposed evidence advanced by Dib (the cancelled train; supposed advance warnings of the attack to the Israeli embassy; conflicting eyewitness accounts of the actual explosions; the presence of a van marked "controlled demolition" next to the bus that was attacked on Tavistock Square; and so on). By no means least, two of the bombers had left behind suicide videos, which might be thought to remove any lingering doubts.
It was all perfectly convincing, if you needed to be convinced, but it somehow left an uneasy feeling. The BBC has discovered that the "Ripple effect" documentary is widely believed among some Muslims in the UK, particularly those attending the main mosque in Birmingham. On the anniversary of the bombings this coming week, the mosque will be showing Muad Dib's DVD and holding a discussion session. However, this revelation, together with the timing of the show, had the effect of making the documentary look uncomfortably like Government propaganda, a clumsy (and surely unsuccessful) attempt to pre-empt the meeting at the mosque.
At one point in the documentary, the BBC listened in on a discussion of "Ripple effect" among some members of the Birmingham mosque. Most of them agreed that it presented a much more plausible picture than the official account of events. Now why would this be? Well, one of the discussants from the mosque made it perfectly clear. In the eyes of some Muslims, the Government had form. It had lied at every stage of the buildup to the Iraq war, so it might well be lying now.
Sadly, I don't think "The Conspiracy Files" will have done much to correct this impression, especially since right now, the same Government seems to be lying about almost everything. Is it better to allow "Muad Dib"'s evil nonsense to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, or should the Government actively combat it, which risks giving it far more publicity than it deserves? It's a tough call, but fortunately it's hard to foresee the extremely creepy Mr Hill making much of an impression on the majority of Muslims.
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