14 DAY TRIAL // Believe it or not, the urban-legends tracking-and-debunking page Snopes.com has just nominated the erroneous claims of Barack Obama being a Muslim as the hottest urban legends of the moment. What, they ran out of pedophiles and candy from strangers? Nevertheless, there's been a viral counterattack from the Democratic presidential that stirred things up again.
Online media is the best media for these elections when it comes to quick spreading of any kind of news. No more having to wait for the five o'clock news for it, just check your e-mail and somebody's bound to have forwarded you something related to it. This has been the case of the persistent e-mail chain letters that claimed various things about Obama, all in connection with the fact that he is allegedly a Muslim.
The claims went from saying that he has attended a radical Islamic school in Indonesia, to trying to convince people that he was actually sworn into the Senate using a copy of the Koran. All of them were debunked by the counterattack staged on the Internet, with a page that contains three paragraphs and a YouTube video testimonial about the senator's background. What I found most hilarious was the "Powered by" line on the bottom right of the page. It reads "Powered by Hope [?]."
The problem with this kind of strong denial, Professor Bill Ellis from Pennsylvania State University told wired.com, is that it "makes some people think: 'Uh huh, we knew it. If he's taken the trouble to make such a strong denial, there must be some truth to it.'" That's pretty sad, it's almost like a lose-lose situation where he only has to think of damage control. Nevertheless, this is politics and he should have seen it coming ever since he signed on for the race for Presidency.