Saturday, April 16, 2005

The Muezzin Did Not Call Mr. Gates

 
The Bill-Gates-Converts-to-Islam hoax has been put to bed. Commenter "Hoax" at the Museum of Hoaxes (typos and scare quotes in the original) says:
     Sorry to dissapoint all "believers". But this is just First of Apirl Joke.
It was intended to be a joke for users in secularkuwait.org
http://www.secularkuwait.org/vb/showthread.php?t=2369
One of the members fabricated the the news item as a first of April joke, and of course, the members soon discovered it was just a joke.
Normally, it would just end at that, but some how, someone Muslim apparently copied the faked image somewhere and the hoax started.
And Muslims WANT to believe it, so the hoax spread. They even write about it in newspapers nowadays.
Since people don't check their references, there is no such newspaper or magazine known as "Anwar Tunis", it was just made up. The whole thing was intended as a joke, but muslims so helpless psychologically in this time are clinging to anything to might encourage their spirits. I, for one, feel pity for them.
Over and Out.
As a postscript, the next commenter in the thread says:
    thank allah
if bill gates covert to islam cause he get the right way to allah to baradis
to be the best in every things , money, authorty, life, muslim
thaks allah

hope that rommer be right
please reply when confirm that
Honestly, you can't make this stuff up.


One final note: searchers looking for "bill gates islam" and similar combinations keep arriving at this site, hundreds of them every day. If you are one of them, please tell everyone you know that this is a HOAX.

1 comments:

Dymphna said...

Gates of Vienna was at the top of the Google list -- I checked. There were four search factors:

1. "gates" in GoV
2. "Bill" in Bill's Comments on the blogroll
3. "converts" from any # of posts
4. "Islam" from you-name-it.

Anyway, it's over as far as GoV is concerned. What started it has been discovered, and "Daily Pundit" supplied the reasoning.

Gates closed. They can keep searching if they want...onward and onward.