More on the debunked Egyptian 'crucifixion' hoax (and its 2009 ...

Earlier this week, I debunked the story ? spreading like wildfire on WorldNetDaily and other Internet sites ? that Christians were being crucified by the Muslim Brotherhood in front of Egypt?s presidential palace. As I noted, the story was based on nothing more than a social-media rumor that had been posted for a few minutes on the Web site of Sky News Arabic, before an alert Sky editor deleted it. From that small seed of nonsense, it traveled far and wide, as such urban legends do in the Internet age.

In response to my debunking, WorldNetDaily published a new article purporting to ?confirm? the original crucifixion story. But the only relevant new evidence WND provides is a link to a video that purports to show the deleted text from the Sky web site. Since I already reported the existence of the original, short-lived Sky article, I?m not sure what this is supposed to prove. (More generally, the article also supplies links to Arabic-media images of people who have been brutalized ? allegedly at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. I have no reason to doubt that these photos are genuine. But as I made abundantly clear in my original article, I don?t dispute that Egypt?s hardcore Islamists are a nasty lot. My article was limited to debunking the crucifixion claim. And none of the photos provided show any hint of crucifixion.)

Over the last day or so, I have had an ongoing email correspondence with Michael Carl, the WND reporter who wrote the crucifixion article. He tells me he is sticking by his story. When I asked him if he has ?any information from any of the tens of thousands of people who would have seen an actual ?crucifixion? if one really did take place in front of the presidential palace,? he told me that he had. Tantalized, I pressed him for details. Alas, he refused to divulge any of the evidence to me ? or anyone else. If he did, he explained, the Muslim Brotherhood ?would kill my sources.? And so ended our correspondence.

More enlightening than my emails with Father Carl (he describes himself as a priest, as well as a reporter), was a note I got from a reader pointing out that this is not the first time that Islamists in the region have been falsely accused of crucifixions.

As Nathan J. Brown pointed out in early 2009, on the web site of the Carnegie Endowment, an internet rumor circulated in late 2008 to the effect that Hamas was ?celebrating? Christmas by crucifying Gaza?s non-Muslims. And amazingly, it wasn?t just the conspiracy theorists at WND who got sucked into this one. According to Brown, it was featured in blogs connected to such respectable publications as The New Republic, National Review and Commentary. Even the Simon Wiesenthal Center was pushing the story.

Here is the real story, as Brown describes it:

Some officials of the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Justice (answering to Hamas) have been drafting a new criminal code based on Islamic criminal law. They have not released its work (at least outside of Gaza), but they did hold a workshop to discuss a draft. A copy of this document fell into the hands of a reporter for the Arabic daily al-Hayat. While that newspaper is generally reliable enough, the reporter made a significant mistake: He thought the draft had been fully and finally passed by the parliament, not that it was the subject of a small group discussion. And he quoted from some passages in the law ? including the title of a section dealing with categories of punishment that mentioned crucifixion (a legal category in Islamic criminal law). There was no evidence that the law went beyond using the term as a legal category. And since the reporter did quote some fairly strong provisions in other areas it seems unlikely that he would have missed the opportunity to mention any actual provisions for crucifixion. The small (and mistaken) article in al-Hayat was picked up by the Jerusalem Post (it also circulated in some Arabic media outlets) which ? in perhaps the only glimmer of responsible journalism in this strange episode ? added that it could not confirm the report. But that qualification got lost. So did the explanation from Hamas legal officials that no law had been passed. One Israeli activist working hard to circulate the charge (Itamar Marcus) actually went so far as to cover up his mistake by claiming that the Hamas denial (which was actually quite accurate) was simply a ?lie? ? And so columnists (generally on the right side of the political spectrum) began to claim that Hamas had legislated crucifixion ? in the more lurid report ? for any ?unbelievers,? ?enemies of Islam,? or even Christians. And few could resist mentioning that the timing coincided with Christmas.

The people reporting this false story were not deliberately lying. As I noted in my original post, they have simply become so wrapped up in the idea that we are fighting an existential war against militant Islam, that they are willing to believe any nonsense story they come across without checking it. If it sounds like it could be true, then it must be.

The first casualty of war, as always, is truth.

National Post
jkay@nationalpost.com
Twitter @jonkay

Source: http://amongthetruthers.com/2012/08/more-on-the-debunked-egyptian-%E2%80%98crucifixion%E2%80%99-hoax-and-its-2009-precedent/

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