I’m sure you have heard the rumor by now. You know, that one where vengeful Americans beat a horribly injured Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to death?
“When the Americans arrived they took him out of the ambulance, they beat him on his stomach and wrapped his head with his dishdasha, then they stomped on his stomach and his chest until he died and blood came out of his nose,” Mohammed said, without saying how he knew the man was dead.
This rumor brought to you by the same type of intellectual giants who are responsible for this:
We know that we are living in world of double standards. In Fallujah, they have created a new vague target,: AL ZARQAWI. This is a new pretext to justify their crimes, killing and daily bombardment of civilians. Almost a year has elapsed since they created this new pretext, and whenever they destroy houses, mosques, restaurants, and kill children and women they said “we have launched a successful operation against Al-Zarqawi.” They will never say that they have killed him, because there is no such a person. And that means the killing of civilian and the daily genocide will continue.
So you see, Zarqawi was an invention. He was made up so that people could pretend he was beaten to death by the evil Americans. Everyone point at the evil Americans. I heard they eat Iraqi babies, you know. My neighbor Abdul told me, so it must be true.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve received a chain e-mail from someone I would otherwise think of as intelligent, warning me about this or that grave threat or exhorting me to be more socially active in one way or another. Invariably, those forwarded e-mails are false, or only partially true. I can smell them a mile away. The above story has the stink I’ve come to recognize from those almost inevitably incorrect chain e-mails.