When Yasser Arafat died, the world's conspiracy theorists predictably went into a frenzy of accusing Israel of having poisoned him.
This was not a conspiracy theory.
Although it fits well into the conspiracy-theoretic world view because it shares some of the attributes of conspiracy theories, it lacks a key attribute by which we recognise conspiracy theories as irrational and as false. As we have said in the first post in this series, a conspiracy theory is:
- an explanation of observed events in current affairs and history (✓) … which
- alleges that those events were planned and caused in secret by powerful (or allegedly powerful) conspirators (✓), who thereby…
- benefit at the expense of others (✓, sort of), and who therefore…
- lie, and suppress evidence, about their secret actions (✓), and…
- lie about the motives for their public actions (x).
For the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to have had Arafat poisoned, he would not have needed to lie about his motives, only his actions. Sharon and his government had said many times that Arafat was a mass murderer and actively engaged in terrorism, so their publicly announced and defended policy of targeting such people would in principle apply. It was only out of expediency that they had decided not to kill him. This means that the operation, had it existed, would have required no dupes: the active cooperation of only a few senior officers, politicians, undercover agents, and possibly a military scientist or two would have been needed, and all of them could have been informed of the operation's real nature and its real purpose. Hence there would have been no need for the impossible task of promoting dupes to conspirators, which is an archetypal flaw of conspiracy theories.
Lest any readers misunderstand our example here, we must stress that it is not even remotely plausible that Sharon had Arafat killed. But that is because of the specific political, military and moral circumstances, and not, as in the case of conspiracy theories, because the idea is irrational in its form.
