SOUL FOOD:

There are times when the information some people allow to sway their political votes leaves me wondering how our republic has survived this long with its representative democracy.

As primary elections began to take place around the United States, my e-mail inbox began to be littered with messages with subject lines such as “What you need to know about Barack Obama!”

The first came from a family friend in Alabama. Her message — a forwarded alarm — asserted Obama’s civil allegiance lies with Africa rather than our land.

It began by instructing me to forward it to all my family and friends to let “them know about this man who wants to be our president.” It suggested Obama might be a closet Muslim, noting that his middle name is Mohammed, which it is not; though it is Hussein.

“Strip away his nice looks,” the e-mail read, “the big smile and smooth talk, and what do you get?” Well, according to this e-mail you get “a racist.”

Had my family friend in Alabama been the only one who sent me this e-mail I imagine I’d have shrugged, deleted and let it go. But I got the same e-mail and others like it from people right here in Huntington Beach.

It should be noted that a great place to check the information in e-mail forwards is www.snopes.com. The site is relatively current and verifies common urban legends and myths.

Back to the e-mail about Obama.

I got one of a different but similar spirit, also about Obama, from the wife of a Christian singer-songwriter I once interviewed. She and her husband are Jewish believers in Jesus as the Messiah.

The message she passed on, on her husband’s electronic letterhead, asked, “Who is Barach (sic) Obama?” It described the senator as the son of “a black MUSLIM from Nyangoma-Kogel, Kenya” and “a white ATHIEST (sic) from Wichita, Kansas.” (The caps are original to the e-mail, not mine.)

It, too, insinuated Obama is, in secret, a Muslim who joined a Christian church only for politically expediency. The e-mail counseled readers to “remain alert” should Obama become the Democratic candidate in 2008.

“Muslims,” the e-mail message warned, “have said they plan on destroying the U.S. from the inside out.” How better to do that, it suggested, than to have the president of the United States be “one of their own.”

It claimed — in error — Obama was sworn into office as a senator with his hand on “the Kouran” (sic) rather than on the Bible. Several hours later I received another e-mail on the same electronic letterhead with a subject line that read, “Previous e-mail could be erroneous.”

Nothing “could be” about it; yet this second e-mail really took nothing back.

The writer and her husband had recently attended the Southern California Prophecy Conference organized by Jack Hibbs, founder and senior pastor of Calvary Chapel in Chino Hills. Speakers included Brigitte Gabriel and Walid Shoebat, among other strident anti-Islam activists. The message the singer-songwriter and his wife took away from the conference was, in her words, “Islam is on the move in this country and does want to take over our freedoms.”

I’ve been put on notice that Obama very well could be part of their grand plan — typos and falsehoods of forwarded e-mails aside.

Lebanese-born Brigitte Gabriel had been raised not to trust Jews even though she was a Christian, the singer-songwriter’s wife informed me as though this made her case. The irony of Gabriel now teaching her not to trust Muslims (as though Islam is monolithic and all Muslims are militant) is lost on her.

Gabriel is head of the American Congress for Truth, which seeks, according to its mission and vision statement, to wake the sleeping to the “threat of militant Islam to America, Israel and all of Western civilization.”

These words from a speech she gave at Duke University in 2004 characterize her reasoning: “The difference between the Arab world and Israel is a difference in values and character. It’s barbarism versus civilization. It’s democracy versus dictatorship. It’s goodness versus evil.”

If Gabriel’s beef is with militant Islam she rarely, if ever, mentions that scarcely 15% of Muslims are Arabs or makes a distinction between the two. By any name — Islamists, militant Muslims, Muslim terrorists — the percentage of Muslims who are a threat, as Gabriel envisions it, is equally small.

Listen to Gabriel long enough and you may come to suspect any Arab, regardless of his faith or his address, is barbaric, fascist and evil. She and Walid Shoebat paint broad generalizations, sweep nuance into the dustbin, and frame their personal wartime experiences in Lebanon and Israel in ways that polarize.

Walid Shoebat is the assumed name of a self-described former Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist born in Bethlehem to a Palestinian Muslim father and Christian mother. He now lives with his wife and children in the United States.

According to Shoebat, he was once imprisoned in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound for his incitement to violence and violence against Israel. At some point he read the Jewish Tanach, became a Christian and turned his back on the PLO. He has since made a vocation of it. He speaks widely at rallies, on radio and on television, appearing often on FOX and sometimes on CNN. He has written several books including, “Why I Left Jihad” and more recently, “Why We Want to Kill You.”

The tagline on his website reads, “From Hate to Love” but the books, CDs and DVDs available for purchase speak less to love than to fear. For worse or for better, Shoebat seems enamored of extremes.

My attempts to quell the newly awakened alarm instilled in the singer-songwriter’s wife have not yet gotten me far. Every concession is followed by a “yes-but.”

But I had to try. Whatever else they may disagree about regarding the 2008 presidential election, everyone seems to agree it’s an important one.

So if you, too, get e-mails like these, vet them for fact and fiction. Don’t let anyone — friend or relative — use religion to scare you blind.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].