My mom sent me this email. She likes to forward all this kind of crap to everyone in her address book. This one she forwarded to a select few, me included. I have no idea why she thinks I would care. It just makes me mad, people continuing to make generalizations. It makes me want to actually bother to send out Christmas cards and to use other religions’ holiday stamps just to screw with people.
Do I send her a reply explaining that fundamentalist extremist Christians are evil, too, but that doesn’t mean all Christians are evil? She’s a smart woman, but as she gets older she seems to fall for this kind of crap. She just retired in July, and I swear she’s going soft already!
BTW, I already Snoped it and found it’s not a new email, but it’s new to my mom and me, apparently, so I included the edited version that was actually in the email here, since they seem to have gone wimpy and softened it a bit from the quotes in the Snopes article:
You owe her a Snopes link, at the very least. This sort of crap will never go away, but don’t be complicit in its spread.
Tell Mom to do some reading before sending the next one. If you’re lucky, she’ll thank you for helping her not look like a bigoted moron in front of all her friends.
If you’re feeling very naughty, you could agree with her vociferously, and then start forwarding her white power messages, increasing in crazitude with each one. Tell her that you want to wear your Nazi garb at the next family function. *
not really recommended. Intended in jest only. Do not try this at home.
My parents were going off tonight about some sort of weird “Islamic text” in a Best Buy ad. They had thrown the ad away, so I couldn’t see it.
Turns out that it was just a little bit of text, in English, that said “Happy Eid Al-Adha”. Since my parents couldn’t pronounce “Eid” I didn’t know what they were talking about until I went home and saw the ad myself.
Anyway, I went home and sent them an email about this “horrifying” ad:
I’m getting really tired of everyone being so anti-Muslim. Anti-terrorist is fine, but just because something has to do with Islam doesn’t mean it has to do with terrorism.
You could do what my Aunt does when my Grandma forwards this kind of thing. She replies not only to my Grandmother but to the original forwarder, usually a distant relative, with extensive citations, and basically argues obnoxiously until the other person shuts up and never forwards anything ever again.
This is usually what I do, but she still slips up occassionally later. (And I have the nagging suspicion that I don’t get all her forwards (possibly becauseof the original “get thee to a Snopes” missive from me) and she still sends them out with regularity to everyone else.)
Personally, I’d accompany the Snopes link with a reminder of how Christians should act (“with love towards everyone”). EvilTOJ, I like your “God likes spiritual fruit, not religious nuts” quote, mind if I steal it? The OP could probably throw that in to his/her mother as well.
My in-laws forward this kind of stuff almost weekly. A lot of it is at least a little offensive, some of it is downright evil, to the point that we now just delete any emails from them with anything other than text inside. They are nice people (really!). Basically they are just forwarding whatever is sent to them from their religious leaders, like a chain letter. A lot of the "letters’ have statements about not breaking the chain or some sort of crap about how Obama wants to stop them from speaking out so we have to forward this to all our friends.
I think of these emails as Chick tracts. Somebody told my in-laws to send this stuff, otherwise the terrorist win, and they are used to doing what they are told.
dhkendall, go right ahead! I’m not religious myself, but my dad is a deacon at his church and he tells the more, ah, passionate church goers that expression when they get a tad riled up.
SeaDragonTattoo, have you thought about asking your mother about this directly? “Thanks for that, mom. Is this how you really feel, or are you just forwarding e-mails without reading them first?” Or some less confrontational version of that.
Back when I was a teacher in Bulgaria, about a quarter of my students were ethnically Turkish, and Muslim. The day after Eid (which is Baihram in Turkish) they would come to school to share leftover baklava.
Anything that results in my consumption of baklava is awesome. I love Eid.
Honestly, I’ll never understand why anyone responds to these sorts of emails from “friends” and family with anything other than “Do not send me this shit. If you send me shit like this again, we are done, and I don’t know you any more. Have a nice day!”
It’s worked for me. The very few people who sent me shit like that again are people I don’t need to know.
I didn’t know all that about Eid - I just may forward that info to Mom as well, but only if it escalates at this point. I did send her a second email with the Snopes link. this is the third time I’ve had to direct her toward Snopes, part of it is that she’s adamant she won’t become “internet savvy” and I’m determined to make her at least only partially impaired!
The company she retired from gave her a super-duper-fancy laptop that she seems to be using more than I think she expected. Now that the only email she has to deal with is personal, I think she’s figuring out how fun the internet can be. If only I can figure out how to convince her that she doesn’t need Endora for her email, and that she doesn’t have to keep trying to sync everything between the laptop and the PC in the house…
The OP could probably throw that in to his/her mother as well.