In Response to a Spammer at rally4israel.com

Last week I received some… colorful… spam through rally4israel.com, a project I started in April 2024 (and perhaps the subject for another post). My first instinct was to ignore the message, but over the next 24 hours a response started to form in the back of my head, centering on a passage I had recently read in Reza Aslan's No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. That turned into the email below, which I thought might be worth sharing (after some very light censoring).

Will my spammer read any of this? I don’t know. In the past, responses to messages like this have led to longer conversations, and I hope this one does too. If nothing else, I saw an opportunity to jot down a quick thought, and I took it:

Hi ____,

Thanks for your submission through rally4israel.com, which I've copied below. I'd love to engage in a more substantive way, as I have done with previous "across the aisle" respondents in the past.

As some initial food for thought, I am attaching an excerpt from Reza Aslan's No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which I happen to have just finished reading this past week. I picked up the book as part of a broader attempt to gain a better understanding of Israel's neighbors, and a large portion of its population. Towards the end of the book, Aslan gets into a discussion of modern Islamic governance, and how that ought to be balanced with democratic values. To my surprise, he points to Israel as a model, however imperfect, of the sort of society he wishes to see more of in the Islamic world.

I don't know what news sources you have been following over the past two-plus years. I assume some of the stories you have seen have been true, some have been false, and a large portion have been missing an enormous amount of context. (The same could, of course, be said of many pro-Israel news outlets as well.)

Please take the opportunity to read more about this conflict, and consider why Aslan would want the Islamic world to in any way emulate a "terrorist state" full of "genocidal freaks."

I would recommend starting with Benny Morris' Righteous Victims, perhaps followed by Micah Goodman's Catch 67 for more on the aftermath of the 6 day war.

If you have any titles you'd like to recommend to me, I'd be happy to add them to my list.

Thanks again,
Ari

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Original submission:

Chant:
B-llsack b-llsack eat my n-ts
Israel is a terrorist state and should be slapped on the b-tts

Notes:
Hope netanyahu gets s-d-mized you genocidal freaks