Iranian boy punished under Islamic Shariah for stealing! Or is it a hoax?

Every week, I receive several emails from panicky friends - Muslims or from other faiths - asking me to respond to an email or online claim about some outrageous acts committed by those "vicious" or "inhumane" Muslims. Such original emails are usually concluded with a request to do one's patriotic duty by forwarding that email to all contacts in order to educate them about how horrible Islam, Muslims, and Shariah are.

Of course, the only problem here is that such emails are merely propagating urban legends, myths, and hoaxes.  And you, my friend, can either be the one extinguishing this fire or adding fuel to it.

One such example is an email forward claiming that a series of attached photographs show an 8 year old boy in Iran having his arm crushed by a car as punishment under Islamic law for stealing bread.

In these highly tense and polarizing times, it is important that we all refrain from forwarding hateful and demonizing messages about any group, especially when they are false. While most of us will be very careful before we forward something that is hateful about Jews or Christians, and rightfully so, we tend to lower our standards when it comes to Islam and Muslims. Islam is a religion of mercy and tolerance as it is followed and practiced by the overwhelming majority of its followers. Islam is not responsible for the crimes of its few misguided and criminal followers any more than Christianity or Judaism are responsible for WW1, WW2, the Holocaust, the Inquisitions, the Crusades, the atomic bomb, Vietnam War, Iraq War, etc. in which tens of millions of innocent people were killed. Every religious community has its bad apples; however, the religion itself cannot be blamed for the act of the bad few.

The photos about the boy and the truck are part of a false urban legend (see link below) that keeps getting forwarded by anti-Muslim bigots (and sometimes innocently by mis-informed people) in order to dehumanize and demonize Islam and Muslims. In reality, the photos are for a sickening street performance conducted for the entertainment of onlookers.

We should all be promoting tolerance and exposing the haters among us, regardless of the religion they claim. Of course, even if the photos have nothing to do with Islam, it remains reprehensible that anyone will exploit a boy to perform a circus-like show in order to make money.

Read more:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/gruesome/crushboy.asp
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/child-stealing-bread-iran.shtml

Here are the photos and the comments attached as seen in various emails and blogs.

Subject: Fw: THERE ARE NO WORDS TO DESCRIBE THIS

THERE ARE NO WORDS TO DESCRIBE THIS!!!!!
MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON US!!!

AN 8 year old child was caught in a market in Iran for stealing bread.

In the name of Islam he is being punished, his arm will be crushed by a car. He will loose forever the possibility to use his arm again.

Is this a religion of peace and love?

Another email stated: 
An 8 year old child caught stealing bread in a market of Iran is punished in a public place, in the name of Islam!!!

His arm will be crushed and will lose its use permanently. A religion of peace and love, they say? How can anyone believe them when they commit such inhuman acts?

 

The email ends with:

No religion can ever justify such hideous crimes

Pass it on ......let the world know what's happening in the name of Islam...

Pass this to all, for public awareness.
It must be sent WORLD WIDE!
Even if this message is sent to you more than once, just keep on passing it on!

Now you know. Let's all be more careful before we get forward happy and end up dehumanizing a whole group of people.

Email Urges Boycott of USPS Muslim Eid Stamp

The "Eid Stamp" Islamophobic e-mail seems to be back in circulation. I guess the bigotry business must be slow these days.

The e-mail applies typical bigotry language by listing terrorism incidents (that are clearly condemned by Islam and Muslims) in order to generalize about and demonize the whole religion of Islam and its 1.3 billion followers.

The same exact type of list of incidents could be prepared about any ethnic or religious group. Just think of any group and their negative stereotype.

The e-mail implies that we as Americans should not allow a stamp recognizng Eid because that would be "a slap in the face." Shall we also reject the Christmas stamps due to Hitler's crimes or the abortion clinics bombers? What an absurd logic.

The only true conclusion from this e-mail is that it is bigoted.

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Read the Urban Legend website that shows and responds to this hateful email. It has valuable information.

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl-muslim-stamp.htm

Scientific statistics to prove that bread is dangerous

Almost every day, I receive paranoiac urban legend emails making a case, through pseudo statistics and selective anecdotes, that Islam and Muslims are evil.

The ability to exaggerate and create fear is certainly a skillful task. Below is such an example which I received from someone as a joke.

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SCIENCE: BREAD IS DANGEROUS

1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.
   
   
2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households
   score below average on standardized tests.
   
   
3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.
   
   
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
   
   
5. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat, begged for bread after as little as two days.
   
   
6. Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cream cheese.
   
   
7. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey, bread-pudding person.
   
   
8. Newborn babies can choke on bread.
   
   
9. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 450 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than two minutes.
   
   
10. Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

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Of course, there is nothing dangerous about bread. Well, may be French bread is dangerous. You know those French are dangerous. I can show you the stats for that. :)

If Muslims Are So Terrible, Why The Need To Make Up So Many Lies?

If Muslims Are So Terrible, Why The Need To Make Up So Many Lies?

by Sheila Musaji

Yesterday I came across two articles that really brought home to me how much of what is printed about Islam and Muslims has no basis in fact, and how difficult it is to make any dent in the general negative attitudes such articles generate.

Dhimmi Watch had an article “UK: Nurses ordered to drop everything and turn Muslims’ beds toward Mecca five times daily” in which they pointed their readers to the original article about this “issue” from the British paper The Daily Express. This was totally untrue as reported by more than one source.

Another article “United States Stamp Honoring the Muslim religion” claims that “There is a Muslim sword through the 41-cents mark on the stamp, because the Muslims do not recognize the unholy money of America and the only way they would allow a stamp honoring their religion is to put a Muslim sword through the US monitory symbol the 41-cents marking.” This one is simple to check, just look at one of the Eid stamps. There is no mark at all through the 41 cent marking, and no sword anywhere on the stamp. Although, every year someone comes up with something new to denigrate the fact that such a stamp exists.

The same article about the Eid stamp also makes another claim that is often repeated: “Remember the Muslim Assassin Sirhan Sirhan in 1968 who still lives after depriving us of Bobbie Kennedy”. Again, any brief fact check would show that Sirhan was a Palestinian Christian.

Bernard Lewis’ claimed that Iran would attack the U.S. and/or Israel with nuclear weapons on August 22, 2006. This Nuclear Apocalypse turned out to be milder than expected, and in fact never happened.

Many articles make the claim that all terrorists are Muslims - and this has been repeated so often that most people simply accept that it must be true. Again, a little research will show that this is not true.

Another of these ubiquitous claims is that Muslims don’t speak up against terrorism or violence. The American Muslim has devoted a whole section to debunking this nonsense.

Lots of other things never happened, or are simply not true. Arabs didn’t celebrate 9/11 at a Dunkin Donuts in New Jersey. Budweiser did not pull all its product from the shelves of a convenience store where there was celebration of the terrorist attacks - this never happened. An American Missionary in Africa didn’t face possible murder charges and hanging because of a traffic accident. There is no verse of the Qur’an on “The Wrath of the Eagle”. The supposed bomb threat made by an Arizona student that led to an evacuation of the school was a hoax by non-Muslim students. The story that Iran was considering forcing Jews to wear a yellow star appeared in several publications and it was totally false. The slaying of the New Jersey Coptic family was falsely charged to Muslims. The story about the British banks banning piggy banks so as not to offend Muslims never happened. Muslims are not more likely to support terrorism and violence than Christians or Jews. Muslims did not destroy the Library of Alexandria.

The fact that these “news stories” and articles are simply wrong doesn’t change the fact that they are “out there” and that they will be read and believed by many of the same folks who believe the supermarket tabloids. They will be forwarded or passed on, and commented on, and the stories will grow and more and more people will accept them as “facts”.

When Muslims are charged with something the word Islam or Muslim is attached to whatever crime they are accused of, and the story makes the front page headlines, when they are found not guilty or innocent, that goes somewhere on the back pages in small print.

The comments left on internet sites by the readers of these sorts of articles show the sort of response this sort of propoganda provokes. What I don’t understand is who gains by such demonization of an entire faith.

Urban Legends on Islam: the dehumanizing and demonizing of Muslims

Every few days, I receive emails from some "patriotic" Americans asking recipients to forward that message to as many friends as possible in order to "awaken" Americans to the "threat" of Muslims.

Such messages almost always contain some false urban legend to prove that Muslims are some sort of human monsters who engage in atrocious behavior. The purpose of such bigoted messages is to dehumanize Muslims and justify (or even promote) hatred and violence against them. It is tempting to ignore such messages, but we learned from history that the emotional charging of a populace, using false charges and rumors, lead to lynching of Blacks in America, the Holocaust against Jews in Europe, and the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia, among many other examples.

I have earlier responded to one such "urban legend" falsely claiming the presence of a verse about 9/11 in the Qur'an.

In the near future, I will respond to other ones that keep making the email rounds.

Urban Legend on Islam: The 9/11 verse in the Quran

Urban legends come in different types. Some are meant to entertain and others are meant to demonize and dehumanize a group of people. Once a group of people is dehumanized, it becomes much easier to discriminate against, harass, or even subject such people to a genocide. The examples of what happened to Jews by Nazi Germany, Bosnian Muslims by Serb Nationalists, and Chechens by Russians, provide us with tragic proof from our history.

Here is an example of an email that keeps surfacing on various lists, poisoning the minds of uninformed people.

Read down to the very bottom highlighted in green, IT'LL GIVE YOU GOOSE-BUMPS!!!

You don't want to miss this! ((*_*) )

VERY INTERESTING-

This is something to think about: Since America is typically represented by an eagle.
Saddam should have read up on his Muslim passages ...
The following verse is from the Koran, (the Islamic Bible)

Koran ( 9:11 ) - For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle.. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced; for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the l ands of Allah; And there was peace.
(Note the verse number!) Hmmmmmmm?!

I BETTER NOT HEAR OF ANYONE BREAKING THIS ONE OR SEE IT DELETED.
This is a ribbon for soldiers fighting in Iraq.
Pass it on to everyone and pray. Something good will happen to you tonight at 11:11 PM. This is not a joke.
Someone will either call you or will talk to you online and say that they love you.
Do not break this chain.

Send this to 13 people in the next 15 minutes

Now this would have been really amazing, except that there is no such verse in the Quran, not anywhere in the Quran. The lying bigot who originally wrote this message and the ignorant person who is forwarding it to others without verifying its accuracy are just willingly contributing to the anti-Muslim sentiment which is the cause of a growing number of cases of hateful attacks and discrimination against Muslims in the world.

Unless we all commit ourselves to dialogue, learn, and understand other people, most of us will continue to fall prey to such ignorance and deception.

Ironically, the actual verse 9:11 says:

But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then are they your brethren in religion. We detail Our revelations for a people who have knowledge.

What an irony. The verse speaks about repentance and brotherhood. It also reminds us that such revelation are explained and understood by those who have knowledge, not the ignorant ones; the same ignorant bigots who engage in forwarding such hateful messages to begin with.

Indeed, Allah/God is the Most Wise, the All Knowing.