Donald Rumsfeld dubbed it "Camp X-Ray." But Al-Ahram calls it Camp Zyklon. On Friday, the government-controlled Egyptian newspaper reported Guantanamo Bay is "a base for torturing al-Qaeda members from Afghanistan, in a way unprecedented in history -- worse than what Hitler did to his rivals from among the Jews and Christians."

This isn't the first time the Arab media has "scooped" the West. Al-Ahram readers already know about the 4,000 Jews who didn't show up at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. Ditto the Osama bin Laden stunt double who appears on the smoking-gun videotape released by the U.S. government. They also know Pokémon is Japanese for "I am a Jew," and that Israel is attacking the Palestinians with poison gas. As for the ancient legend about Jews using the blood of gentile babies to make Passover matzos, Al-Ahram says it's true. A year ago, the newspaper published a full-page article reporting the discovery of Palestinian child corpses drained of blood. "The most reasonable explanation," the author wrote, "is that the blood was taken to be kneaded into dough."

What, we are left to wonder, is the least reasonable explanation?

The fairy tales I am describing here are not flash-in-the-pan urban legends -- like the story about the guy who safely "surfed" a World Trade Center girder to ground level. It's been almost five months since Sept. 11. Yet the story about the Jews who stayed home on Sept. 11 is still spouted by many Arabs.

Such conspiracy theories have become a running joke among journalists who follow the Arab media. Almost daily, I get an e-mail from one of my contacts detailing the latest ludicrous story from the Tehran Times or Saudi Arabia's Arab News. But their prevalence is dispiriting. It suggests a massive, deep-seated resentment against Jews and the United States that will take decades to erase.

In his famous 1957 book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Leon Festinger argued that people embrace wild rumours in order to reconcile otherwise inconsistent beliefs; and to justify pre-existing hatreds during wars. This explains why, during the Kosovo conflict, Serbs were convinced that footage of Kosovar Albanian mass graves had been filmed in Hollywood. Sept. 11 caused a massive dissonance reaction: Islam is a peaceful religion. Thus, no Muslim could have flown an airplane into the World Trade Center. The Mossad and the CIA did it. Allah willed it as a punishment of the Great Satan. The theory squares the circle. It allows the enemies of the United States to rejoice in the tragedy without taking responsibility for its grossly inhumane aspect.

Arab governments encourage anti-Semitic and anti-U.S. conspiracy theories as a means to keep national morale high and distract citizens from government repression and corruption. "Rumours and legends that create emotion may be useful if people bond socially with others who are sharing the same emotion [or] hostility toward an out-group," wrote two U.S. researchers in the December, 2001, issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The authors note that many of the most durable urban legends survive because they allow people to bond over "a shared contempt for a violation of social norms." In the West that means stories about sticking the family dog in the microwave or finding earthworms in Big Macs. In the Middle East, the stories involve a mosque being desecrated or Muslim women being raped on the hood of an Israeli jeep.

What is most depressing is the experimental analysis contained in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology report. In order to understand the mechanism by which urban legends propagate, the researchers presented a group of Duke University undergraduates with a variety of urban legends and asked them which ones they would be likely to pass along to their friends. By a wide margin, the research subjects picked stories that were shocking and rejected stories that were mild. No surprise there. But the subjects also made a distinction on the basis of plausibility. Overwhelmingly, they picked stories they considered credible and rejected stories they doubted.

Such evidence suggests the cognitive dissonance on display in the Arab world is very real: The ordinary Arabs who tell Western reporters that the Jews were behind Sept. 11 truly believe what they are saying. Changing hearts and minds so seemingly inured to evidence and logic will be a tough task.

But it will not be impossible. Back in early October, Slate magazine published an authoritative, detailed debunking of the 4,000-Jews rumour. (It originated with an "investigative report" produced by a Hezbollah-controlled television station.) Why not translate that article and have it read -- as a paid public-service announcement from the United States government if necessary -- on al-Jazeera and every other Arab-language media outlet service that takes payments in greenbacks? Better yet, how about a dedicated anti-conspiracy theory show on the Arabic-language Voice of America service? It would never want for material.

The Afghanistan war cost US$1-billion per month. For a hundredth that amount, the West might, over time, make Al-Ahram's editors look foolish. It would be money well spent. The information war is no mere sideshow. The legitimate bones of contention separating the West and the Arab world -- terrorism, Israel, human rights, weapons of mass destruction -- are intractable enough. If such differences are compounded by hateful fairy tales, then a lasting peace will be impossible.