Monday, September 17, 2012

Right-wing blogs spread ugly rumors about murdered ambassador

Last week, this country suffered an awful tragedy when several Americans were killed due to an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Amongst the people murdered was Ambassador Chris Stevens.

And unfortunately, according to Salon, Mitt Romney isn't the only person who has grossly capitalized on this incident:

Amid the questions about Stevens’ last minutes, there is another rather vile peripheral debate occurring in the right-wing blogosphere. Michelangelo Signorile from the Huffington Post sums up the various rumors:
1) Ambassador Christopher Stevens was gay; 2) that the Obama administration is responsible for his death because it had the supposedly terrible judgment to send a gay man to an Islamic country, or even did it as an intentional provocation, and; 3) that Stevens’ corpse was dragged outside and sodomized by an angry mob because that’s what Muslims do — they have sex with the dead bodies of gay men.
The gay rumors seem to have originated on Hillbuzz.com, the website of Kevin DuJan, who also believes that President Obama is gay. DuJan uses the very, very shaky sourcing of a “Serbian consulate employee [who] identified himself to me as ‘Dino’ and wouldn’t give me any more of a name than that, but told me it was no secret that Chris Stevens was gay and that ‘it was stupid to send him to Libya as the ambassador when he was a known homosexual.’”

The story was picked up by a number of right-wing blogs, including Breitbart.com, which offers this explanation for why Stevens being gay would be at all relevant: “It just seems like one more way the Obama administration needlessly enraged the passions of protesters in that part of the world.” A blogger for the Examiner even speculates that Stevens was sent by Hillary Clinton as an “intentional provocation” to Libya.
As for the claim that Stevens was raped, that seems to have originated from a story  on the Lebanese news outlet Tayyar.org that erroneously cites the AFP, and that was picked up by the Washington Times. The AFP told TWT that the “report falsely quoted our news agency and has no truth whatsover to it.”

What the hell is wrong with these people?




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2 comments:

Reverend Sam Tuttle said...

I don't get why they thing Muslims have sex with dead gay men. It's so much more fun to have sex with living gay men.

Anonymous said...

One of the easiest ways to tell if something is fabricated is that if you only get one element of data, E.g. a first name.

That makes the 'information' being offered highly suspect.

Of course Christian bigots don't have the mental capacity to figure that out.