January 24, 2008
One of the most dangerous weapons in the current war on civility is the “forward” function, the little click that allows e-mail users to pass on a message, no matter how ill-informed or unwelcome.
Among the most pernicious of such missives is a widely distributed e-mail smearing Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential hopeful from Illinois. Picking at threads of his biography, from his Muslim father to his middle name, it weaves a fantasy of a sort of Manchurian Muslim, intent on waging jihad from the Oval Office.
Obama was forced to address these laughable and easily falsifiable rumors, and it was heartening that so many Jewish leaders rallied to his side. In an “open letter to the Jewish communities,” leaders of nine Jewish organizations spoke out against the “hateful e-mails that use falsehood and innuendo to mischaracterize Senator Barack Obama’s religious beliefs and who he is as a person.”
The letter rightly portrays the e-mails as an effort to “drive a wedge between our community and a presidential candidate” and declares that “attempts of this sort to mislead and inflame voters should not be part of our political discourse.”
Those remarks were echoed in a second open letter, this from seven Jewish Democratic senators. Their letter states that they find it “particularly abhorrent that these attacks are apparently being sent specifically to the Jewish community. Jews, who have historically been the target of such attacks, should be the first to reject these tactics.”
And yet the e-mails still circulate, passed on by unwitting correspondents who should know better and malicious ones who don’t care. Considering the uses to which the Internet is put by various anti-Semites and anti-Zionists, there is no excuse for gullibility. E-mail users have a place for rumors. It’s called the trash.