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Article  Iranian schoolgirl “chemical attacks”: Mass poisonings or mass hysteria?

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https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/ira...-hysteria/

EXCERPTS: After several months and no concrete evidence of a toxic agent, no deaths, and nearly all victims being young girls who quickly recovered, reports of mass poisonings in Iran should be viewed cautiously, if not skeptically. In recent decades several eerily similar outbreaks were eventually identified as having a psychological origin. Most recently, the new report about the Cuban-based “Havana Syndrome” that turned up no evidence whatsoever for any acoustic weapon appears to be another example of the psychological origin of such incidents...

[...] Since November 2022, reports of schoolgirl poisonings in Iran have involved nearly a dozen separate schools. Media accounts of these “attacks” describe them with such words and “mysterious” “unexplained,” and “baffling.”

[...] The Afghan “Poisoning” Scare. Between 2009 and 2016, dozens of schools in at least seven provinces across Afghanistan were affected by incidents that were widely reported at the time as mass poisonings. [...] Not only did we conclude that the girls in Herat were suffering from psychogenic illness, a separate study by the World Health Organization reached the same conclusion based on an investigation of 22 schools...

The Palestinian Schoolgirl “Poisonings”. In March-April 1983, nearly one thousand Palestinian schoolgirls in the disputed Israeli-occupied West Bank region were stricken with headaches, dizziness, blurred vision, stomach pain, and weakness. Many of the victims lost consciousness. The episode made global headlines and led to alarming accusations of mass poisonings.

[...] Another scare involving the reported poisoning of Islamic schoolgirls by Israelis occurred in Egypt in 1993 after 1,500 students between ages 9 and 16 experienced nausea, headaches and fainting spells resulting in the closure of 32 schools. ... In recent history there have been several other instances where incidents of apparent state terrorism turned out to be psychogenic in origin.

[...] Why Islamic schoolgirls? Why Iran? Why Now? What do the outbreaks in Iran, Afghanistan, the disputed territories, and Egypt have in common? Nearly all involve young schoolgirls living under repressive conditions and with no means of redress.

[...] Similar episodes have been reported in strict Christian schools in Malawi, although instead of odors, these cases were driven by a belief in demons. Young Puritan girls living under prolonged stress and an oppressive political regime was the same recipe for the outbreak of twitching, shaking and trance states in the early 1690s that led to accusations of witchcraft at Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

If history is any guidepost, expect the next phase to be the search for scapegoats as people on the margins of society, in the wrong place at the wrong time... (MORE - missing details)

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