Friday, October 31, 2008

Battling Hate Email

"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Election day is almost here, and as a result I'm getting more and more desperate spam mail attacks on Obama. I received one today entitled "Please read...for your country's sake" and the large headline in the email was this "Can Muslims be Good Americans?" Then it went on to list all the reasons why they can not be good Americans, the email is full of lies and half truths. And of course ends with Obama is a Muslim, and he has sworn himself in on the Koran, etc. etc.

Here is a copy of my response (names have been changesd):

Susan,

This email is completely false. 100% untrue. Obama is NOT a muslim. He is a Christian, and always has been. You can look up similar accusations here http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslimfaith.asp

But the bigger issue here is that this email and others like it promote fear and hate of someone of a different race or religion. Look at how crazy this email is, would you even read it if it said, "Can Polish be good Americans?" This is the kind of stuff the Nazis used to build hatred for the Jews.

Attack Obama because of his policies, because of the issues, but please do not make baseless, false, hateful attacks. I love and respect you, but this email is racist, and only spreads hate and fear. If you think you and your family is exempt it's not, people can be racist against whites, too, and look at little Michelle. If she hasn't experienced racism yet just from the color of her skin, she soon will. And emails like this continue the cycle of hate and fear. What if people in the neighborhood started saying she was a Muslim, a Hindu. or whatever? What if they said that Kareem was? It's just not rational, there has been a lot of these emails going around that build a culture of fear and they are mainly tolerated because some people actually believe it's plausible, that well Obama is black and his father is from Kenya, so maybe it's true. But the exact same accusations can be said of Michelle, or of me for that matter. And they would be just as false.

I'm ashamed of my country when we resort to fear tactics like these, no one of either party should ever stoop this low.

With respect,
AJC

2 comments:

Designerd said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ajc said...

The above comment was just a reminder that I forgot to change one of the names. It's been corrected, but I deleted the comment...so the person's name wasn't listed.