There've been some fairly wacky conspiracies surrounding cartoons over the years, but now an Egyptian TV channel is spreading rumours that The Simpsons is part of a huge international conspiracy that kicked off the Arab Spring.

Al Tahrir news anchor Rania Badawy recently speculated that The Simpsons episode "New Kids On The Blecch", in which Bart and his friends form a boyband called the Party Posse, contains subliminal messages that encourages the bombing of Arab countries. In the episode, the Party Posse performs a song called "Drop Da Bomb", which contains the lyric "Your love's more deadly than Saddam / That's why I gotta drop da bomb". 

Badawy points out that the jeep bombed by the Party Posse is adorned with a flag that looks like the one adopted by Syrian protesters and rebels. Except that the episode was made in 2001, almost a decade before the Arab Spring. Spooky! 

"How it reached this animated video nobody knows, and this has aroused a debate on the social networks," Badaway says, "This raises many question marks about what happened in the Arab Spring revolutions, and when this global conspiracy began."

Watch the news report below:

Simpsons producer Al Jean responded to the rumours with this heavily sarcastic one-line statement: "Yes, we had the amazing foresight to predict conflict in the Middle East."

This isn't the first time that conspiracy theorists have leapt on The Simpsons, although it is the first time the Arab Spring has been linked to the show. For years, tinhats have claimed that the show is heavily influenced by the Illuminati, with websites dedicated to exposing the show's use of Illuminati imagery such as the All Seeing Eye. Some even think that the cartoon predicted 9/11 with a 1997 episode in which Lisa holds up a magazine cover that appears to reference the tragic date: 

So The Simpsons – one of the greatest cultural artefacts of our time, or simply the propaganda machine of the New World Order?