During a recent broadcast on the Egyptian television channel Al Tahrir, the anchor Rania Badawy alerted viewers to what she called video evidence which “suggests that what is happening in Syria today was premeditated.” She then presented an 80-second clip from an episode of “The Simpsons” first broadcast in early 2001 and later dubbed into French and posted on YouTube.

After screening the animated clip — a parody of a music video that includes images of bombs being dropped on fighters in Middle Eastern dress — the anchor pointed out that the cartoon soldiers drawn in 2001 were pictured in a jeep decorated with a version of the Syrian flag that opposition protesters and rebels started waving in 2011. “The flag was created before the events took place,” Ms. Badawy asserted. “That’s why people are saying on Facebook that this is a conspiracy — in 2001, there was no such thing as the flag of the Syrian opposition.”

While the anchor called the inclusion of the flag in an episode of the cartoon a mystery — “How it reached this animated video nobody knows, and this has aroused a debate on the social networks” — she insisted that the image “raises many question marks about what happened in the Arab Spring revolutions and about when this global conspiracy began.”

State-run channels across the Arab world have frequently claimed that the uprisings against authoritarian rule in 2011 were the work of foreign plotters, so the accusation is not new. It is sobering, however, to hear the accusation broadcast on a station set up that year (just days after Hosni Mubarak was forced from power), named for Tahrir Square and promising to air the views of the young revolutionaries.

But by treating the cartoon flag as evidence of a foreign plot to destabilize Syria — a theory first articulated a year ago by supporters of President Bashar Al-Assad who claimed to have decoded the “subliminal messaging” of Zionist plotters — Ms. Badawy demonstrated a lack of familiarity with crucial aspects of both Syrian history and details of the “Simpsons” episode.

@syriancommando #SubliminalMessageing on #zionist networks. Nothine new. Signalling to each other ,tycoons, to do it. — HandsOffSyria _4521 (@Hicks_4521) 13 May 13

The first flaw in the theory is the fact that the Syrian opposition did not invent a new flag out of whole cloth in 2011, but simply adopted the old green, white and black tricolor used by Syria for most of three decades beginning in 1932. That flag was replaced by a red, white and black tricolor following a military coup in 1963 that eventually brought Mr. Assad’s father to power.

As an Egyptian, Ms. Badawy could perhaps have been confused by the fact that the Syrian government currently uses a flag identical to the one flown from 1958 to 1961, when the nation shared a flag with Egypt as part of the United Arab Republic.

Still, her apparent belief that the flag pictured in the “Simpsons” episode did not exist until 2011 is simply false. (That said, the Arab people of the Middle East have some reason to suspect that there might be “foreign fingers” behind their flags, given that both Syria and Egypt use designs and colors derived from the Flag of the Arab Revolt, which was created by the British diplomat Mark Sykes during World War I.)

Had she paid closer attention to the cartoon, the anchor might also have found evidence that the “Simpsons” animators were more likely to have been thinking of Iraq than Syria when they pictured a United States attack in 2001.

To begin with, listening to the English-language original soundtrack reveals that the bombing run comes as the characters flying the fighter jets sing, in a romanticized ode to the United States military:

There’s trouble in a far-off nation.

Time to get in love formation.

Your love’s more deadly than Saddam.

That’s why I gotta drop da bomb!

In addition to the direct reference to Saddam Hussein in the lyrics, there is also the fact that the cartoon appears to show a United Nations soldier in a blue beret among the Arab fighters on the ground. Mr. Hussein, the Iraqi president, was in the news about two years before this “Simpsons” episode was created when the United States bombed Iraq in late 1998 following a dispute over United Nations weapons inspections.

Strangely enough, the plot twist later in the “Simpsons” episode, “New Kids on the Blecch,” comes when a character discovers that the apparently nonsensical chorus to the pro-military song featured at this stage, rendered in titles as “YVAN EHT NIOJ,” is “Join the Navy” in reverse, and was intended to work as a form of subliminal advertising.