Never underestimate the power of gossip, especially when partisan biases and the Internet are involved.
Remember that nasty rumor circulating around several right-wing websites suggesting that Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense was blocked in part because of his involvement with a shady organization called “Friends of Hamas?”
Not true, it turns out. “Friends of Hamas” doesn’t even exist, as Slate’s David Weigel revealed. (Although the fake group does have its own Wikipedia page!)
So how did such a wild rumor get started? Purely unwittingly, claims New York Daily News reporter Dan Friedman, who insists that he was the inadvertent source of the pseudo-scandal.
As Friedman explains:
Hagel was in hot water for alleged hostility to Israel. So, I asked my source, had Hagel given a speech to, say, the ‘Junior League of Hezbollah, in France’? And, what about ‘Friends of Hamas?’ The names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed–let alone that a former senator would speak to them.
But people did take it seriously. So much so that by the next day–Feb. 7–the right-wing website Brietbart.com was sporting this headline: “Secret Hagel Donor?: White House Spox Ducks Question on ‘Friends of Hamas.’”
The scoop caught fire, and “Friends of Hamas” began to spread all over the Internet, appearing on sites like RedState, National Review, and Arutz Sheva, among others. Soon the rumor made it to Capitol Hill, and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.—who endorsed a filibuster of Hagel’s nomination—said he found the information regarding “Friends of Hamas,” “more and more concerning.”








