In a June 6, 2015 article for the English-language UAE daily Gulf News, writer Dr. Khalifa Rashid Al-Sha'ali decried the Arab fondness for conspiracy theories, which he said is shared by the elites, the masses, and the media. For example, he wrote, the Arabs once thought that the "Zionist entity" and the U.S. were their supreme enemies, only to discover one day that it is actually possible to cooperate with them. Such conspiratorial thinking, he said, was responsible for many of the Arabs' defeats and problems – including the loss of Palestine in 1948 – because conspiracy theories provide a...