In 2004, John Kerry discounted advice that he should respond quickly and firmly to the swiftboating libels sweeping through the Internet with the infectivity of Avian Flu in a chicken coop. He paid the price.
Barack Obama and his friends had learned that lesson, and when the scurrilous campaign began months ago suggesting that he was a Muslim, they worked hard to beat it down. To set the record straight, a new website has even been created: IsBarackObamaMuslim.com. Web surfers curious about the answer to the question posed by the site’s domain name are answered definitively: “No.”
Despite these efforts, however, the lies have continued to circulate over e-mail and the Internet. Now, in the run-up to this weekend’s primary in Puerto Rico, they seem to have taken on a new form. A viral e-mail containing a Spanish-language Power Point illustrated with crudely photoshopped pictures of Obama repeats the old slander that he was born and brought up a Muslim and is, in effect, a terrorist sleeper posing as a Christian. It concludes by calling on voters — Latino voters, presumably — to “Vote for Hillary Clinton or John McCain but not for a radical Muslim, masquerading as a Westerner, who wants to be in the most powerful position in the planet.” An apocalyptic image of Obama, with hellfire ringing his head, accompanies the message. Its caption reads: “America will bow down to Islam”.
An indignant friend sent me a copy that had been passed on blithely by a former employee in Latin America, who obeyed the injunction at the end of the vicious display to send it to all her friends in the US.
And they have been sending it. My friend and I tracked the e-mail back through several iterations before the e-mail addresses were deleted. But it obviously has already enjoyed wide circulation from people who really should know better. Just scrutinizing the fuzzy photo credits reveals that several of the images were lifted from a site, www.freakingnews.com that actually runs continual photoshopping competitions! But few readers will check these things before passing them on. Indeed the English version claimed it had been verified by Snopes.com the web’s main hoax detector — which in fact had categorically refuted its accusations.
The Internet allows responsibility-free anonymous comment, and people happily infect the net with libel at the click of a “send” button. In this case, the beneficiaries — presumably friends of one of the other candidates back in the US — really can follow the spirit of Clough’s poem, which one suspects was hanging framed on Karl Rove’s bathroom wall:
“Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly.”
With the Puerto Rico primary coming up, and the Latino vote’s importance in the general election, it is obvious that someone on the other side is thinking ahead and — talk about elitism — assuming that Latino voters are as gullible as the average conservative. Ironically, we can be sure that Obama’s perceived integrity would suffer even if he ran a negative campaign based on the truth. In any case, Obama had better get himself some Spanish-speaking webmasters. And maybe Bill Richardson as running mate or secretary of state-designate.
But it is also time for some good citizens to get some antiviral e-mails out, truth phages. Surely someone should be out there pointing out in Spanish and English that not only is Obama no more Muslim than Carlos Menem, the former Argentinian president, indeed far less so, but that McCain’s sponsorship by a pastor who thinks that the pope is the anti-Christ may be of some interest to Latin American Catholics. Someone should even be out there mentioning that Wright was a welcome guest at the Clinton White House.
