Chain-letter follies

I recently received an e-mail from a distant relative. In the dozen or so years that we've both been online, he's never e-mailed me once: Not to tell me how his family is doing nor to ask me how mine is faring. But he made sure that I got this one: He sent it to both my e-mail addresses and even to an address that I abandoned some years back. His subject line read:

BARACK OBAMA IS A MUSLIM

The contents of the e-mail were your basic chain-letter rant and real tin-foil hat stuff, which included:

Barack Obama was raised as muslim, attended muslim schools during his childhood.


His middle name is Hussein.


Both his father and step-father were muslim and his father was "a radical."


He attended a madrassa, or radical Muslim school.

My cousin, unfortunately is letting his ignorance and his intolerance get the best of him. Nowhere does he acknowledge that Sen. Obama has consistently and openly professed his personal relationship with Jesus Christ for more than 20 years. And yet, my cousin is trying to convict a man of "being muslim" without a shed of evidence (there was also more than a hint of a generic hatred of muslims in that letter, which I believe borders on racism).

There are no accounts of Barack Obama praying in the direction of Mecca, no pictures of him entering a mosque to worship, and no records of donations to Islamic charities. The unfortunate e-mail exaggerates Sen. Obama's own accounts of his life from his two books to slander the Senator. The circumstantial evidence, that his middle name is Hussein and that his father was born in Kenya, where he was raised as a Muslim is just that, circumstantial.

Nowhere in this letter does it reveal that Obama's father was a confirmed atheist and that his stepfather was not a religious man. Nowhere did it discuss the influence of Obama's mother and grandparents.

When Obama's mother and step father lived in Asia, they sent young Barack to what schooling was available, and included Catholic and Muslim schools. The Muslim school he attended was not a madrassa, as it was not sponsored by Wahabbism, a radical branch of the Sunni muslim sect. In fact, when CNN finally tracked down the school in question, they found that this supposed madrassa was actually a public school and it had no particular religious agenda.

Case closed? Maybe not. Some people are dead-set on believing what they want to believe, despite any evidence to the contrary.  

So, what has happened to our society? When did gossip and slander become such hard political currency, but a man's actions and words mean nothing in judging his character? When did conjecture, ignorance, and rumor become treasurable qualities, but the truth become a detrimental accent? When did liars become heroes and honest people become pariahs?

I am saddened that so many people are spending so much energy trying to smear Sen. Obama and his family. However, I am even more saddened that so many people have lost all their decency and common sense because their hate is truly the stronger element of their psyche. It truly is a pity.