The internet is a place where rumors can be presented as fact, anonymous accusations can be leveled and spread publicly without the slightest evidence to back them, and unethical actions can be made up out of whole cloth and freely (though falsely) imputed to named individuals.

I’ve been a victim of this sort of thing for many years.  Most notably, but not solely, at the hands of the dedicated defamer whom I’ve labeled my “Malevolent Stalker.”

I just came across a false accusation a few minutes ago — apparently it’s yet another of his — that’s apparently been percolating on the nasty little message board where he holds court since at least sometime in early- to mid-August.

The accusation says that I was apparently so angry about somebody’s criticisms of me that I contacted the college or university with which he’s affiliated — I don’t know which one it might be, though I think I recall that it’s in Illinois, and I don’t know whether he’s a student or a member of the faculty, though I think he’s in philosophy — and tried to create difficulties with him there.  (Perhaps I was attempting to have him fired.  Who knows?  I surely don’t.)

“A lie,” goes the famous maxim, “can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”

That’s all too true, I’m afraid — whoever may originally have said it.  (The saying has been attributed to Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, and several others.)

Still, for what it’s worth, I want to publicly deny the accusation.

It’s entirely false.

It simply didn’t happen.  I didn’t do it in this case, and I’ve never done anything like it in any other case.

I would consider such an act entirely inappropriate, and perhaps — if this fictional case were as it’s been described — even unethical.

Such is the demonology, though, that’s grown up about me in certain circles.  It’s made them very, very gullible — indeed, overeager, insatiably craving more and more evidence of my unspeakable depravity.  No evidence is needed.  In fact, each new false accusation immediately becomes plausible because the previous fabrications have been swallowed hook, line, and sinker.  Thus, of course, there’s been much clucking in response to this latest fiction about how “despicable” my supposed action was, how it fits my general modus operandi, and so forth.

It’s not irrelevant, I think, that the Greek διάβολος (diábolos) — from which our words devil and diabolical derive — means “slanderer,” “calumniator,”  or “accuser.”

Under the above title, on the largely apostate/atheist message board where he’s pseudonymously defamed, caricatured, and misrepresented me for the better part of ten years now, a strange personality that I used to call my “Malevolent Stalker” has responded to my recent article in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture, which is titled “Seeing Ourselves Through the Eyes of a Friendly and Thoughtful Evangelical.”

He cites this passage, from near the end of my article:

I think that we Latter-day Saints can learn a great deal about our own faith and doctrines by trying to see them through the eyes of friendly and informed outsiders, as well, obviously, as understanding the views of others more accurately and sympathetically. Both of these are very worthy goals. And Richard Mouw is one of the friendliest and most theologically competent of such outsiders. He honors us by the attention he’s given to our faith, and we can profit considerably from our interactions with thinkers and scholars of his caliber.

He describes this passage and my article in general as representing “a remarkable development,” a “watershed moment” in the history of what he disparagingly calls “Mopologetics.”  It is, he suggests, a sudden about-face, brought on by some combination or other of cynicism and desperation.  Flailing about for friends and allies in the wake of my disgraced expulsion from the Maxwell Institute, thrown under the bus by the Brethren, I’m dishonestly pretending that I don’t regard Richard Mouw and others like him with contempt.  (The Stalker even has an apostate Mormon source, personally hostile to me, with whom I once had a brief conversation about something else roughly fifteen or so years ago, who assures him that I privately call Richard Mouw an “anti-Mormon” and that I once planned to “target” Professor Mouw for one of my typical “smear pieces.”)

The Stalker is, as usual, offering up a stew of inaccuracy and disingenuousness.  And anybody is perfectly free to ask Professor Mouw himself whether our interactions — which go back quite a few years — have been friendly.

But here’s something in the public record:

Back in 1999, well over a decade and a half ago, I published a piece in the old FARMS Review with my friend and colleague Bill Hamblin entitled “The Evangelical is Our Brother.”  I expect that my Malevolent Stalker is aware of that piece.  After all, he follows everything I do and say with weird obsessiveness.  And, anyway, it seems fairly obviously to be the direct source for his thread title.

Here’s an extended quotation from the last page of that sixteen-year-old article, which refers to the evangelical New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg (with whom I also have a friendly relationship) and to the 1997 book How Wide the Divide? A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation, which Professor Blomberg co-wrote with BYU professor Stephen Robinson:

The sentiment and spirit of the 1999 passage seems to me indistinguishable from that of my just-published 2015 article, which the Stalker nonetheless tries to depict as illustrating a suddenly and insincerely adopted new pose on my part, in which I “feign friendship” to evangelicals.

“The apologists,” says the Stalker, “have zero interest it trying to understand others’ points-of-view.”

Against which I offer, among other things, my teaching career — during the most recently completed term, I taught an introduction to Islam as a religion, an introduction to Islamic art and literature, and a course on the Qur’an in Arabic.  I offer my conception and founding and longtime direction of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (which publishes dual-language editions of classical Jewish, Eastern Christian, and Islamic works).  I offer the biweekly Saturday column that Bill Hamblin and I write for the Deseret News.  And my published biography of Muhammad.  And the two editions of my book on Islam for Latter-day Saints (Abraham Divided).  And the two books I’m currently finishing (on, respectively Islam in general and the Qur’an).  And my many BYU Education Week presentations on such topics as the classical Christian creeds, the Qur’an, the life of Muhammad, and basic Islamic beliefs.  And my scores of public lectures across the United States and on every inhabited continent on Islam.  And my participation in interfaith dialogues in Utah and Idaho, and Austria, and Israel, and Egypt, and Syria, and Iran, and elsewhere.  And so on.  And so forth.

My Malevolent Stalker may be deranged.  Or perhaps he’s just malicious, consumed with inexplicable hatred.  I have no idea.  In any case, “the truth is not in him.”

Sad.

It was a boring flight, which is always good.

I won’t be around my computer much over the next few days, so you’ll have to get your news and views from some source of equivalent value, status, and reliability (such as, say, the National Enquirer, the Onion, or the New York Times.

But here’s a note for my Malevolent Stalker and his coterie, as well as for more conventional criminal types:  Our house is neither uninhabited nor unprotected.  So don’t get any ideas.

Posted from Tel Aviv, Israel