I received a message to check out a story floating around the blogosphere about a huge wedding involving hundreds of child brides in Gaza (I thought it a bit weird that the mainstream media had missed that big story). Naturally I wanted to know more, but as I dug a little deeper, I realized the real story was the deep distrust of Muslims in general, and powerful Islamophobia that exists on the web.

OK, maybe I’m partly to blame here; after all, I’m not exactly the biggest fan of the religion. I consider Mohammed a morally reprehensible character, but then again I think the same thing of Moses, David, Noah and all the men of old world religions. These guys are normally genocidal maniacs interested only in their own flock, content to murder the world to make their ideologies the only truth. But Mohammed’s 9 year old wife Aisha is not something you can ignore very easily, and child brides are not isolated incidents.

Still, the “webs” had a gigantic freak out, with rumors of hundreds of little girls being wed simultaneously floating around, all from a bunch of pictures that seem, at least in hindsight, to be fairly innocent (although the moms need to go a little easy on the damn makeup). Everyone is so ready to jump on the hate bandwagon that any amount of impropriety invariably leads people to assume the very worst. There was a wedding and little girls were there? They must have been all sex slaves I tell you!

Can we all calm down and take the time to check our facts people? And this is “The Good Atheist” talking here; I don’t exactly have the most stellar reputation when it comes to fact checking (hey, you try recording funny podcasts without going out on a few limbs), but even I can smell a rat that big. Let’s not look like total bigots, shall we?