Martin Dyckman: The Internet often gives us lies at light speed

Like many an invention, the Internet is a tool in the service of both good and evil. Nothing but television rouses or riles the public as swiftly.

But the Web makes no pretense of balance. The advantage goes to those who get there first. Although truth is the antidote to falsehood, the poison usually has a head start.

A current example is a screed circulating under the headline, “Pause and reflect…a little Muslim history lesson.”

Citing the failed Muslim invasion of France in 732, the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and the Battle of Vienna in 1683, this clumsy propaganda goes on to list every modern outrage involving a “Muslim male” — among them Robert Kennedy’s assassination, assorted airplane hijackings, the 1972 Munich Olympics, kidnappings, the bombings of several embassies and of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, along with 9/11 and the Boston Marathon.

It contends that the Transportation Security Administration should profile and screen all Muslim males, letting everyone else alone. Its broader purpose is even more pernicious.

It demonizes all Islam for the crimes of a radical minority. Selectively chosen facts assume the function of a lie.

Although this claptrap is circulating primarily on right-wing websites, including various Tea Party pages (and worse), it came to me the other day through Jewish circles.

This was personally disappointing to me as a Jew. We have had too much experience as the targets of stereotyping to be doing it to anyone else.

It’s no different from the venom being directed at Jews and Jewish institutions in Europe because of what the Israeli government does.

To his credit, the man who forwarded the “little Muslim history lesson” regretted doing so after getting pushbacks from me and, more effectively, his own son.

But the thing is spreading exponentially on the Internet. A Google search for a key phrase last week turned up 10,600 listings. A day later, there were 19,400. Few, if any, were rebuttals.

The anonymous author is a lousy historian. He or she claims that had the ancient European battles not been won, “We might be speaking Arabic and Christianity could be non-existent. Judaism certainly would be.”

In fact, Christianity and Judaism survived hundreds of years of Ottoman occupation in Greece, the Balkans and Hungary. Moreover, the occupiers spoke not Arabic but Turkish, a distinct language influenced by Arabic.

For seven centuries, Jews had been better off in Muslim Spain than anywhere else in Europe.

Islam tolerated other “people of the Book” provided they paid their taxes and did not proselytize.

Atrocities in the name of religion crowd the pages of history: among them the slaughter of the Canaanites, the Crusades, and the Thirty Years War in which millions died, Catholic-Protestant bloodshed in Northern Ireland, and the Christian massacres of Muslims in Bosnia. Among Muslims, Shiites and Sunnis have shed oceans of blood over who was the rightful heir to the Prophet 14 centuries ago.

Speaking of notable murders, it wasn’t Muslims who killed President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or who claimed God’s blessing for bombing abortion clinics and assassinating abortion doctors in the United States.

On receiving the so-called history lesson from his father, Rubin Feldstein of Asheville, his son Michael Feldstein, an educational consultant in Massachusetts, sent an impressive rebuttal. Some excerpts:

“Muslims are not all the same culture,” he wrote to his father. “Are you aware of any major parties in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim population, celebrating ISIL’s victory? And speaking of ISIL, have you noticed that some Muslims are at war with other Muslims?…

“I don’t understand how the list you forwarded, consisting of disparate violent acts committed by different people in different cultures, can be interpreted to be meaningful and not just a racist rant,” he wrote. “Every event on that list from the modern era can be attributed to one of just a couple of groups that represent a tiny minority of Islamic people and supported by a somewhat larger but still very small portion of Islamic people….

“Please don’t send me any more emails on this topic,” he concluded. “The world is FOX News-ified enough.”

The outcome: Rubin agreed that his son was right, and shared the correspondence with me. It takes a big man to do something like that.

I offer this as an antidote to the poison. Please share it on social media. The poison has a head start.

Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.