In which, for a moment at least, I master my “lust for deception”

A couple of days ago, someone sent to me, on Facebook, an item about an ISIS fighter who had allegedly been involved in child sex trafficking but who has recently been killed by the Russians in Syria.

Since, as a few readers of this blog may know, I have some slight interest in the Middle East, and since I assumed the item to be accurate — after all, ISIS does engage in child sex trafficking, on a mass scale, so it was immediately plausible — I shared it on Facebook.  (I didn’t post it here, though.  Partly because I deemed one of the photos in the shared item to be just a tad graphic.)

The ensuing Facebook discussion soon indicated, however, that, while ISIS does engage in child sex trafficking — and in the wanton destruction of ancient treasures and in torture and in gruesome executions and genocidal mass murders, and so forth — this particular man, although he was, so far as I can tell, clearly an ISIS fighter, had not in fact been engaged in child sex trafficking in the particular photo that purported to show him so engaged.

I thought that the Facebook discussion covered things pretty well.  I assumed that the people who looked at the item on Facebook could read, and that they would soon be able to discover, just as I had quickly been able to discover, that there was a major inaccuracy in the item that had been sent to me on Facebook.

One Latter-day Saint woman, though, made an effort to correct my supposed belief that “all Muslims are evil, intent on the destruction of us all,” by sharing with me a pair of quotations (from Elders George A. Smith and Parley Pratt) that are very positive about Muhammad and Islam.  She took them from an article in the Ensign that was written by my friend and colleague Professor James Toronto.  In fact, I myself have used them in books, multiple articles, and many lectures over the past thirty years or so.  (I think that she and I now have things worked out on that score.)

Another apparent member of the Church, though — this one a fellow named Rick Douglas Richards, of Flower Mound, Texas — has proven more implacable.  Mr. Richards has demanded that I publish a retraction of “[my] post.”  I pointed out to him that it wasn’t my post, that I’d merely passed it on, that the subsequent discussion had pretty clearly demonstrated that the relevant photo in it had been inaccurately identified, and that I thought that everybody else could read this and understand it as well as I could.  Moreover, I tend to regard previous publications and posts and so forth as part of the historical record, in a sense, and I’m generally disinclined to alter them without powerful reason.  Finally, in that very light, I saw no great urgency in correcting the piece, since the man is dead and cannot be slandered, since I didn’t give (because I don’t know) his name, since he was in fact an ISIS fighter, and since ISIS does in fact engage in precisely the kind of child sex-trafficking activity mentioned in it.

Mr. Richards weighed in vigorously, with the same personal warmth and charity that he’s repeatedly shown to me at Facebook over the past year or more.

First, he pronounced an ironic comment that I’d made earlier (and that he’d completely misunderstood) “absolutely mind numbingly ridiculous” — which was what I had intended it to be — and then, with considerable exaggeration, declared the Facebook item “blatantly false.”  “This is very typical of the ‘Daniel Peterson’ way of doing things,” he wrote. “Post something inflammatory regardless of its accuracy just to get a rise out of your minions. Dude your credibility is in the toilet.”  “You are perpetuating a lie, a fabrication, propaganda,” he observed in a follow-up post.  “Have you no respect for truth?”  (He’s claimed for a very long time that I don’t, though, so the seeming tentativeness of his question surprised me just a bit.  Is he softening?)

“Hey,” he continued, generously undertaking to speak on my behalf.  “I’ll just post this because it will wind people up and stir up controversy, I don’t know if it is accurate or not. WHO CARES?!!”  “This,” he said, “is your modus operandi. You don’t recognize this?”

The fact that I haven’t yet made a public announcement that the Facebook item that I had initially accepted as authentic is actually inaccurate, said Mr. Richards, is evidence of either “pride or a lust for deception” on my part.  Obviously deeply concerned for my good name, he warned me that “I don’t think your reputation can take this kind of blatant evidence of your folly.”

More importantly, though, there have evidently been a few who, not reading through the Facebook comments, have taken at face value the item that I innocently shared.  I don’t happen to think that the very worst thing in the world, or even very important, since ISIS remains probably the single most evil organization of which I know, but . . . well, it’s true that the photo isn’t accurately identified.

Accordingly, I hereby announce to everybody out there who may have seen this item on Facebook — including all my brain-dead “minions,” as Mr. Richards labels them — that, although ISIS engages in child sex trafficking, this particular man was not engaging in child sex trafficking when the particular photo of him was taken that appears in the Facebook item.

When I next indulge my “lust for deception,” I think it will be on a different topic.  Maybe something a little more spectacularly false and unjust.  Stay tuned!