Look, no one’s saying season twelve of The Simpsons was great, but calling it part of a geopolitical conspiracy is going a bit far.

But that’s what an Egyptian news station seemed to wonder this week, when a newscaster reported a conspiracy theory gurgling up on Facebook alleging that the “New Kids on the Blecch” episode somehow predicted or machinated the Syrian Civil War.



On the off-chance you haven’t seen the episode a dozen-plus times (bah!), allow me to inform you that Bart, Milhouse, Nelson, and Ralph are conscripted into a boy band called the Party Posse that turns out to be subliminal recruitment ploy for the Navy (as opposed to the Navy’s “superliminal” recruitment technique of yelling at Lenny). The music video for the boys’ hit “Drop da Bomb” features fighter jets firing PP-brand explosives onto a group of Middle Eastern soldiers — whose flag is nearly identical to that of the current Syrian opposition. Here, have a side-by-side:

The conspiratorial flavor of the episode perhaps emboldened the Egyptian reading that the U.S. was somehow behind the events in the Middle East. “This is from 2001 — before there was such a thing called the ‘Syrian opposition,'” the newscaster said, according to Middle East Media Research Institute’s translation. “The flag was created before the events took place. That’s why people are saying on Facebook that this a conspiracy.”

She continued, without a trace of humor: “This raises many question marks about what happened in the Arab Spring revolutions, and about when this global conspiracy began.”

Could it be a coincidence that this “global conspiracy” seemed to have begun right around the time The Simpsons jumped the shark? Clearly malevolent forces overtook the show around this time. There’s just no other explanation for this.

Watch the clip below, via MEMI:

And the original video off some guy’s TV, because the Simpsons have scraped the internet clean of copyrighted material:

[h/t Foreign Policy]

[Image via screengrab]

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