A complete version of this piece appeared on CommonDreams yesterday. And it is on Barnabe Geisweiller’s site. We’re excerpting key portions below.
In July of last year, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, organized a mass wedding celebration for hundreds of couples in the Gaza Strip. The happy adult grooms, immaculately dressed in black suits and colorful ties, received $500 each from Hamas, no small sum in the besieged territory.
It might have been a joyous event if not for the fact that the brides were "pre-pubescent girls, dressed in white gowns and adorned with garish make-up," according to the article written by author and journalist Paul L. Williams, and republished by rightwing pundit David Horowitz’s Frontpage Magazine, who regularly appears on mainstream news networks such as Fox and CNN.
The photos show young girls holding hands with the grooms, and the article goes on to explain how pedophilia is inherent to Islam.
It would have been a sordid tale were it not for the fact that the article is a hoax. The married couples were, in fact, consenting adults, but this did not stop the story from being widely disseminated via a vast network of Web-based publications, blogs and mailing lists, and hundreds of readers left online comments.
The Internet is considered by many to be an information Wild West, where anyone can publish stories, often anonymously, and no matter how derogatory their opinions may be. False stories and hateful opinions about Muslims abound on the Internet and have begun to appear prominently in the mainstream discourse, say American Muslims and groups that monitor the media. Many worry that what one sociologist has termed "respectable racism" is having a corrosive effect on American society, and that hate expressed online has real-world implications. Rightwing extremist ideology is now the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
"Islamaphobia has moved to the mainstream in the years following the 9/11 attacks," said Ibrahim Hooper, the National Communications Director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), based in Washington, D.C. "Things that would have been completely outside the pale, like a letter to the editor saying that Islam is intrinsically evil, that would have never been published before 9/11. Now it’s published almost on a daily basis."…
The article alleging mass pedophile weddings took place in the Gaza Strip, "Hamas Plays Host to Pedophilia," was first published on Williams’ website "thelastcrusade.org" on Aug. 7, 2009, and generated nearly 500 reader comments. It was republished in Frontpage Magazine, the online publication of conservative activist David Horowitz.
Williams, an American Christian minister and author… lifted the first few paragraphs and quotes of his article from an Agence France-Presse (AFP) article he did not write, "Hamas sponsors mass wedding in Gaza," published a week earlier on July 30, 2009. But he stopped plagiarizing when he reached the following phrase: "The 450 brides shared none of the glamour, taking seats among the audience of around 1,000 party guests: most couples had already taken part in religious ceremonies elsewhere, with more marriages planned for the next few days."
In his own article, Williams went on to explain how pedophilia is commonplace in Islam, basing his analysis on the traditions of the middle ages and apparently unaware that marrying young, and what would be considered child abuse by modern standards, was a normal occurrence at the time in the ancient world of East and West.
The children holding the hands of the grooms at the celebration in Gaza were not their brides, as he alleged, but their relatives. This was confirmed by other news sources such as Sky News, a sister channel of Fox News. It was also not the first mass wedding to be organized by Hamas in Gaza, where the legal marrying age is 18 or 16 with parental permission if Egyptian Sharia law is followed.
Taghreed El-Khodary, who writes for the New York Times, covered a similar wedding for the paper on Oct. 30, 2008.
"These kids on the stage are the nieces or sisters of the grooms," she said in an email, referring to the young girls in white dresses. "It is a mass wedding in conservative Gaza; hence brides are sitting with their families. It’s a symbolic party to give credit to Hamas or whatever institution is funding it."
[read the full article…]
