chewing gum is rarely the object of national obsession, and little wonder: How much is there to say about it, anyway? In fact, it’s a wonderful way of getting a bit of peace and quiet. Give your spouse a piece to still their busy mouth. Offer it to the kids and they’ll have clean teeth and minty-fresh breath.

Or hand a stick to a colleague and get free sex.

“Don’t eat this, don’t buy that, don’t go to this supermarket. These rumors are spread by sick people who get their kicks from trying to dictate how we live. They manipulate our decisions to serve their own interests.”

That’s right: A few years back, chewing gum became a headline topic after families in Mansoura panicked over claims that teenage girls were stripping naked and giving in to their sexual demons after chewing pieces of what the media reported was “sex gum.” Reports at the time claimed 15 girls had filed complaints with police alleging they lost their virginity after encountering the infamous candy. Chew a piece, they said, and your resistance melts faster than the sugar, leading you to “jump and hump” the suitors who offered you the evil confection.

The parasitic press quickly jumped on the bandwagon, suggesting in their pages that Israel was behind the “vice gum.” Eventually, the minister of health himself appeared on television declaring there was no substance known to mankind that would have such an effect, but his words fell on the deaf ears of viewers trapped in bubbles of their own making.

Today, rumors offer us an alternate world in which it isn’t safe to bathe (the nation’s water supply is contaminated with bird flu), where a walk on a Red Sea beach often turns deadly (the Israelis are seeding the sand with HIV-infected needles), where you must ask yourself whether you can trust the consumer brands that surround you (God alone knows where those profits really go) and where it’s never safe to shop at a hypermarket (terrorist bombs, you know).

In a less-than-perfect world, rumors reshape our lives as the Rumor Demon fiddles with the realities on which we make decisions big and small: whether to trust a person, boycott a brand, go to the supermarket or, worse, give our children vital vaccinations. Wild, juicy rumors fill an information vacuum and gain credence with each retelling. It’s a feature common to societies with high illiteracy rates, experts note, saying rumors feed on a diet that includes inaccurate reports, a lack of transparency, half-truths and conflicting statements — exactly the legacy left by decades of decisionmakers who can be called mediocre, at best.

Amr Fahmy

In fact, the apathy that saw earlier generations of public servants deem confronting rumors hardly worth their valuable time has only given the rumormongers more credibility.

After a spate of explosive rumors in recent months, at least one senior government official has had enough, saying he won’t rest until Parliament signs off on his draft bill to establish a semi-autonomous National Authority to Combat Rumors and Disinformation.

Behavioral scientists, though, believe the quickest way to short-circuit gossip is by enhancing transparency and telling the truth — a goal best achieved not by new national authorities, but by embracing democratic practices and living by the simple rule we all learn as children: Liars go to hell.

“True, [people] need to give the new Cabinet a chance and see if it can earn their faith, but it’s going to take time — and officials are going to have to play by the people’s rules this time.”

Hesham Khalil, deputy chairman of the People’s Assembly’s Culture, Tourism and Media Committee and an engineer by training, sees himself as the champion of truth in the war against rumors. He can’t disguise the twinkle of excitement in his eyes as he talks about his pet project: the National Authority to Combat Rumors and Disinformation. It is high time, says our knight in shining armor, that officials crush the evil demons plaguing Egyptian society, adding that he came to his cause after nearly losing his mind when he heard claims that parents should refuse to vaccinate their children against polio because the Ministry of Health’s stock of vaccines had gone bad.

Amr Fahmy

“Rumors! Rumors! Rumors! They’re out of control!” he shouts. “They’re flying thick and fast up and down the Nile Valley — it’s outrageous, and true Egyptians can’t sit idly by and listen to them. Take the polio rumor: We managed to eliminate polio in Egypt. When you cast doubt on the vaccine, many a mother might panic and decide not to have her child vaccinated for fear it could kill. The result will be the return of a disease that could endanger future generations.

“Egyptian officials need to establish permanent daily channels of communication with the public — and keep them open. Knowledge isn’t something we hide in a drawer and drag out only when we’re cornered by a rumor.”

“Want another foul one? Powdered children’s formula: A special-interest group spread the word that the milk, produced by a local factory with investments topping LE 350 million, had gone bad. The aim was to hurt national production and push us to import formula from abroad. I could go on,” he says — and does. “Rumors that bird flu had contaminated tap water were clearly in favor of bottled-water companies. And long before bird flu arrived here, we found people spreading rumors that it already killed ‘x’ many people here and ‘y’ many people there.”

Khalil says citizens receive tens of false messages every day — verbally, by email, by SMS and in the press — many of which harm the national interest.

“Don’t eat this, don’t buy that, don’t go to this supermarket. These rumors are spread by sick people who get their kicks from trying to dictate how we live. They manipulate our decisions to serve their own interests. All these rumors touch upon our national security, our political and economic future,” he asserts.

Hoping to save the day, Khalil spearheaded the parliamentary working group that came up with the national authority as the best way to address the problem. The team has drafted a bill for the PA’s consideration that would establish the authority under the auspices of the presidency or the Cabinet “to give it an official stamp,” he says, adding that it would function as a largely independent body.

Amr Fahmy

Khalil envisions the authority as being guided by a board of directors headed by an appointed chairman and including experts in psychology, politics and science. Its investigators would have the power to trace rumors back to their sources and question suspects in the process. Of course, he adds, there would be new, tougher penalties for those found guilty of having spread false information.

“It can’t be that anyone can drop a fly in a bottle of medicine, then spread the word that it was contaminated, hurting a pharmaceutical company or the whole industry. In whose interests are these irresponsible acts? Let me tell you, they serve special groups who want to see our economy remain fragile.”

Sensing that the conductor of the anti-rumor symphony is flatly assuming that all rumormongers traffic in false information, I suggest there is rarely smoke without fire. In fact, we’re not spreading rumors when we note that Prosecutor General Maher Abdel Wahed authorized an investigation last month of Minister of Health and Population Hatem El-Gabali’s claim that he believed the General Authority for Vaccines and Sera (Vacsera) was riddled with corruption. El-Gabali has suspended the authority’s director and the Financial Crimes Investigation Authority is looking into the charges.

That news has done little to comfort worried mothers.

“Listen, there’s corruption in Egypt — just like there is in the United States, France, Italy The difference is that here the topic is an obsession. Take the opposition: The only word they know how to say in Parliament is ‘Corruption!’ You can’t claim this banker is a thief or that company is corrupt without evidence! Look at how the Arab satellite channels portray Egypt and Egyptians in a negative light every day. It’s so upsetting!”

Clearly warming to his subject, Khalil continues to assure me that 70 percent of all rumors “are complete hoaxes. They’re like balloons that explode and vanish into thin air. Sure, the authority will investigate rumors to prove them true or false. If the government wants to hush up a scandal, we’ll declare them wrong. We would be given the power to speak to officials, inspect factories and visit retailers to bring out the truth and trace the rumors to their sources.”

But Waleed Sabry, a top behavioral psychologist, says your odds of tracing a rumor back to its source are about as high as those of tracking Osama bin Laden to whatever cave he’s hiding in today. Khalil, he continues, is going to be spending a good deal of his time tilting at windmills.

“It’s like in high school,” Sabry says. “You whisper something in someone’s ear, and by the end of the day, everyone in school knows the rumor — and the rumor isn’t the same as when you started it. We had a colleague who asked a friend at the office to loan him some cash, saying he had an emergency. The guy told him not to worry, he’d come up with something, only he didn’t have the money to loan, so he spread word that our coworker was facing a family crisis and asked everyone to pitch in. At quitting time, our boss called the guy who needed money into this office and handed him an envelope of cash and said ‘This is to help pay for your wife’s surgery.’ The poor guy refused the money and spent a month thanking us for the nice gesture, swearing that his wife was strong as an ox and the only sick donkey he knew was our colleague, the guy who invented the story.”

Sabry sees the anti-rumor authority as just the latest manifestation of state officials’ fetish for creating national authorities.

“It’s amazing: The answer to all our problems is ‘Lets create a national authority.’ As if the architectural atrocities that blemish our cities —the by-products of haphazard urban planning —will disappear just because we created the National Authority for Urban Harmony. And don’t forget: We have a National Disaster Preparedness Authority — see how well that’s turned out? My favorite, though, is the Air-Pollution Control Authority,” he says, laughing out loud.

Dr. Azza Koraim, head researcher and analyst at the National Center for Sociological and Criminological Studies, shares Sabry’s sentiments. Rumors, she says, are best described as an instinctive public reaction against a lack of transparency and years of being misled by officials with decrees and statements that have been proven outright lies.

“Be fair and tell me: Who spreads rumors, the government or the people?” Koraim asks. “Who is claiming prices will go down, and the next day prices in the supermarket have doubled? Who talks day and night about ridding us of unemployment even as another generation of young men sits in coffee shops with no hope of jobs any time soon? The legacy of false hope and lies sees no one trusting any official statement.

“In fact, we’ve reached the stage at which an official refutation of a rumor is taken as confirmation by many people because they simply don’t trust the source,” she adds.

Take the recent outbreak of avian flu in Egypt: The Nazif Cabinet was the first government in the world to beat the World Health Organization to the punch and disclose cases. Within hours of doing so, a comprehensive awareness campaign was on the airwaves. In the weeks since, Egypt has confirmed human cases long before the WHO has done the same, yet citizens aren’t buying it, Koraim says.

“Despite the ministers’ assurance that eating chicken is safe, people are boycotting it. They fear the government is giving false information to protect the industry and the economy. They think the government doesn’t really care about their health or safety, and they know that there’s widespread corruption in society. We have serious trust issues in this country,” she says.

Khalil may object to how Koraim expresses herself, but he agrees she hit the nail on the head when she said trust is the issue. He has a twist, though.

“We survive on rumors because people don’t believe in the truth,” he says, adding, “There’s a hidden war between the government and people, mostly because people are uneducated and don’t value change. They won’t take officials at their word because for a very long time, we’ve been taught that we have to accept what’s said as the truth whether we believe it or not. Today, though, people have the means to check out information for themselves, so there should be trust. Trust is the most important bond people — and between the government and citizens. Trust can only grow when citizens are willing to accept the truth when the government tells it. That’s already happening, to a degree.”

The reality, Koraim says, is more complex.

“Officials are grumpy, complaining that they tell the truth and are still not believed,” she notes, “but they have to accept that the nation has been burned by misplaced trust, that we’ve gone through many a series of disappointments. True, they need to give the new Cabinet a chance and see if it can earn their faith, but it’s going to take time — and officials are going to have to play by the people’s rules this time.”

And the worst thing officials who have been burned by the rumor mill and the tabloid press can do, she adds, is decide that “No comment” is the best option.

“Saying ‘No comment!’ is a natural form of self defense — they don’t want to open the door for more attacks. They figure people will eventually get tired and stop talking about it because there’s no way to verify the truth,” she explains, adding that the best defense is to go on the offense and confront rumors with the truth — consistently, time and time again.

The no comment disease, she adds, means “we’ll never know if ballot boxes were stuffed during the elections or not. Many people will never know that bovine foot-and-mouth disease isn’t communicable to humans. Instead of having an authority to fight rumors, we need to teach ministers and senior government officials to tell the truth, to rise to the challenge and claim responsibility when something goes wrong at their ministry. We’re talking about responsible people here — they don’t need an authority to go investigate rumors. Instead, they need to become more adept at public relations.”

Sabry agrees, noting that to this day, no one knows who built the artificial islands in the Nile near Maadi despite the media furor that surrounded their sudden appearance three years ago. Was it a business tycoon? A ministry? “To this day, we know nothing about who’s responsible,” Sabry says. “Maybe a ghost snuck in at night and built them. That stands as a clear example of how government passivity helped in the manufacture of rumors.”

Fighting fire with fire often works, our experts say. While many welcomed the release last month of the uncharacteristically blunt Parliamentary report on the sinking of Al-Salam Boccaccio 98 (the document blamed the ferry’s owners and government corruption), Sabry says you don’t need to look at so high-profile a case to see that the right approach can work.

“Look at how the Ministry of Health responded to the polio vaccine rumor,” Sabry says. “The rumor was mostly spread through SMSes, and in no time, we received SMSes from Vacsera declaring the claims were false.” The initial furor quickly died down.

In all fairness, the Nazif government is far more skilled at dealing with rumors than its predecessors, and gone (at least for now) are the days in which the best jokes were about the government living in la-la land or being completely deaf to the calls of the people. As Khalil says, the current Cabinet is one of the best the nation has had, but it’s going to take time to get that message out.

“They need to communicate their message,” he says. “Maybe they need a PR company to send it out loud and clear.”

Media consultant Dr. Mona El-Hadidi, dean of the International Academy for Media Science, couldn’t agree more. “Egypt’s leadership, like those in other emerging economies, doesn’t prioritize learning communication skills, which should be one of the basic skills every official has, particularly those who deal with the public. They should learn the art of persuasion and dialogue, how to formulate and communicate their thoughts. In developed countries, this is a must-have if you want to get anywhere in politics — or any other leadership position.”

The timing and speed of response, as El-Hadidi puts it, is crucial in tackling rumors.

“Look at it as a chain reaction: Rumors usually spread in society when things are hushed up and people have questions bedeviling their minds. This means there’s a lack of — or insufficient — information available to them, which usually happens in times of political change or crisis. It’s worse when this is the political norm. Officials, on the other hand, don’t provide sufficient information to answer citizen’s fears, demands, or questions, giving some the opportunity to weave their own theories. Bureaucrats avoid answering those theories for fear of giving them credence, and when they finally decide to come out of their hiding place, they’ve lost so much credibility that they’re often not the right ones to correct the damage,” she says.

As El-Hadidi sees it, “it’s all about transparency. If you know, you tell. Egyptian officials need to establish permanent daily channels of communication with the public — and keep them open. Knowledge isn’t something we hide in a drawer and drag out only when we’re cornered by a rumor.”

And don’t think for a moment that the most popular rumors in Egypt revolve only around politics, El-Hadidi notes. Public figures and celebrities draw rumors as candles draw moths. Gossip, she says, comes in all colors, flavors and spices —and is distributed by every channel imaginable. Everyone has their most trusted medium.

“It can be the opposition press, satellite channels, national papers and new communication media have changed the dynamics: Once, rumors spread within and between groups by word of mouth. Now, you just type and click ‘send’ — via SMS or email or on a weblog — and your audience gets the message wherever it is.”

Koraim notes that citizens of underdeveloped countries are often completely unaware of the consequences of the rumors they help spread. Fewer still suspect that they may be serving someone’s agenda by doing so. El-Hadidi adds that some rumor campaigns are started to defame specific individuals, others to sow chaos or to nurture tension between two parties, El-Hadidi adds.

Malicious rumors are a particular problem for Khalil, who grumbles that the media helps nurture them. “They have absolutely no right to do so. They have to verify the rumor, not report it over and over again until it becomes fact to some people. When you make a statement that results in public distress or harms the reputation of a business leader, you should be held responsible for it. If you can’t prove it, you have to bear the consequences and face trial.”

Libel, he notes, is still a criminal offense in Egypt.

In fact, propagating false information is a state security offense punishable by fines and jail terms, says lawyer Mohamed Abdel Sayed. According to Article 102 of the Egyptian Penal Code, “Whomsoever intentionally propagates news, statements, false information or sensational publicity that disrupts public order, harms the general welfare of society, or sows panic in people’s hearts, will be liable to a sentence of jail and a fine of up to LE 500.” That text, from the 1937 edition of the Code, has subsequently been amended only to stiffen the penalty, imposing sentences of up to a year in jail and fines of LE 5,000–20,000 for first-time offenders.

“We all remember ‘Andy,’ the computer engineer who spread the rumor of the Nasr City serial killer,” says Abdel Sayed. “You know: the one the press said was slaughtering women and girls who were heading to coffee shops and nightclubs, the one who was cutting them into pieces? He started the rumor after two girls were found dismembered in two different areas. By the time the Interior Ministry investigation found the two were victims of very separate crimes, the city was in a state of panic and parents had imposed curfews on their daughters.

“If memory serves, ‘Andy’ was sentenced to six months in jail and fined LE 1,000.”

Khalil thinks the engineer got off lightly, saying the penalty should be stiffened to include a fine of up to LE 50,000 and a one-year sentence, with even harsher terms if the rumor results in death or serious injury to another party. “And if a person refuses to cooperate with the authority without good reason, they should be fined no less than LE 1,000 and not more than LE 100,000,” he adds.

“When you issue such a law, people will fear the consequences of starting a rumor. They’ll realize it’s not a fun way to pass time; they’ll think twice before they open their mouths,” Khalil declares triumphantly.

Sabry isn’t a big fan of that theory, saying there’s no sense losing sleep over rumors when most can be dealt with by hitting them head on.

“Let’s talk about how [Presidential Chief of Staff] Zakaria Azmy dealt with the rumor that connected him to the owner of the Salam ferry and claimed they were partners in business. Azmy did the right thing: He showed up on TV and said, ‘This man is a friend, not a partner. That’s all.’ And the controversy died down almost immediately.”

But what if people don’t want to believe what they hear? Gamal Mubarak continues to tell anyone who will listen that he has no interest in following his father in office. President Hosni Mubarak has said the same thing time and again, noting that Egypt is not a monarchy. Yet people continue to speculate and see a conspiracy lurking behind every sand dune. Why?

“Well, there’s a certain type of rumor that we call the ‘floating type.’ They keep resurfacing every now and then because they pertain to a topic of general interest. That’s why you also continue hearing that tariffs on imported cars are going to drop, that gasoline prices are going to go up, that Cabinet is about to be shuffled,” says Sabry.

Hope and despair are near-equal sources of rumors, he adds. “Every time a rumor about a Cabinet shuffle hits the streets, every time we hear that a minister’s on his way out, it reflects citizens’ frustration and hope for change.”

Global events can trigger relevant local rumors, as well, he says. “Go sit in a coffee shop and you’ll find the man fixing your tea spreading the word that Egypt is next on America’s hit list. ‘They want to occupy us, that’s why we have to give in to their demands.’ People genuinely fear that America wants to occupy the Middle East, that they’re coming for our petroleum and our women.”

Policymakers can learn something from the fact that the most persistent rumors have to do with citizens’ bread and butter, notes Koraim, from cancerous pesticides allegedly used in agriculture (see the Youssef Abdel Rahman case at the former Ministry of Agriculture) to rising prices for staple commodities (sugar, she notes, has risen steadily in price this year).

But while Koraim and Sabry are most bothered by rumors that deal with health and welfare, El-Hadidi and Abdel Sayed are particularly troubled by those involving religion and superstitions. El-Hadidi says she can do little more than scratch her head when people claim dead religious figures appeared before the living in certain areas. This type of rumor, she says, spreads among the poorest of the poor.

Sabry has a theory to explain the phenomenon, saying, “We have all heard the story of the bad uncle who, after the death of his brother, took his two nephews and locked them in a tomb. The two kids stayed there for 17 days until someone heard their lament and found them alive. They said they survived on fresh fruit brought to them by their dead parents. That was the talk of the town for a while. You see, people want to believe in miracles. We don’t live in a time of prophets who can bring the dead back to life or speak to birds, so we love to believe in these emotional, mystical stories.”

And who hasn’t heard the story of the girl — said variously to be from Jordan or the Emirates or Saudi Arabia — who turned into a lizard because she wouldn’t turn down her music when her mother was reciting Qur’an? “Protest that story and you’ll be told that it’s within God’s power to do so — and that you’re an unbeliever if you don’t accept it,” Sabry says.

Amr Khaled, the young preacher who enjoys a near-cult following among the nation’s elite, was the center of rumors that he was forced out of the country because powerful people objected to his allegedly having convinced members of their families to take the veil. “That’s a favorite,” says Sabry. “People made an engineer who decided to educate himself about religion into a legend. He wasn’t in exile in London — he was there doing his PhD.

“I still remember the war people waged against the Lebanese singer Nagwa Karam as word spread that she called her dog ‘Muhammad.’ Muslims everywhere campaigned to boycott her until she came out saying she may be a bit crazy, but she’s not totally insane.”

Rumors treading on religious turf are particularly dangerous, says Abdel Sayed. False claims don’t just injure reputations or harm a company’s earnings —they can start sectarian strife and even touch off a war.

“At the height of the Danish cartoons controversy,” Abdel Sayed recalls, “a rumor spread via SMS that the Danish people were getting ready to burn the Qur’an in a public square in response to the boycott. This sparked the burning of embassies and killing of innocent people — rumors can nurture violence and hatred.”

How many times, he asks, have illiterate peasants been killed because of rumored ‘honor crimes.’ Newspapers’ crime pages frequently feature reports of villagers who kill loved ones after rumors spread about their alleged misdeeds. “A common one is about the daughter killed for allegedly sleeping with a stranger,” Abdel Sayed says, “and then we find during the autopsy that she died a virgin.”

Sabry nods his head emphatically as we discuss how rumors can kill, but is determined to end our interview on a lighter note as he recalls one of his all-time favorite rumor stories. Some people, he says, know exactly how to kill a rumor at its roots.

“There was this guy — his case was a favorite of the media for a while a few years back — and boy did he mess with the wrong person! The story went like this: In a village in Zefta, a woman was furious that this guy was spreading the word that she was a loose woman, that she was sleeping around. The truth was that she and her husband were feuding with the guy over a piece of land.

“So one night, this young woman, who was the beauty of her village, stopped by the guy’s house and invited him outside for a walk. They wander, talking, and wind up in a field. She starts complaining to him about her husband and how miserable and unsatisfying her marriage is. You know, really putting the moves on him. She goes on, then lures him in for a kiss — and proceeds to bite off a piece of his tongue as a souvenir.

“Now that’s one way to fight a rumor at its source,” Sabry grins.  et