From what I can see skimming this morning’s news, a lot of the reaction from Arab newspapers and television is that the Bin Laden video released by the United States yesterday is a fake.
This from a region of the world where newspapers regularly republish The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as if they were legitimate historical documents. In fact, television producers in Egypt are in the midst of creating one of the most expensive miniseries ever in that part of the world which includes a major subplot about a worldwide Jewish conspiracy taken straight out of the Protocols.
Add to that the commonplace Holocaust denial, and the recycling of medieval myths about Jews (such as Suha Arafat’s claim that Israel was poisoning the water that Palestinians drink), and you have to wonder what exactly the standard of evidence for authenticating documents is in the Middle East.