Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Rabbi Nesenoff's 25,000 Pieces of Hate Mail

Cross-posted at Jewish Techs

Before this past weekend, Rabbi David Nesenoff was a virtually unknown rabbi who lives and works on Long Island. When his teenage son finished his high school exams and uploaded a 2-minute video of Helen Thomas expressing her anti-Israel views on the Whitehouse lawn, Nesenoff gained global fame. That 2-minute video on his RabbiLIVE.com website brought Helen Thomas' long career in journalism to an abrupt and embarrassing end.

In addition to the media inquiries, Rabbi Nesenoff has also received some 25,000 messages of hate in the past few days since uploading the Helen Thomas video for worldwide consumption. Tonight, he updated the RabbiLIVE.com website to read:

RabbiLIVE.com reported a story from the White House lawn.

We received over twenty five thousand pieces of hate mail. Emails will be continuously posted TONIGHT.

"Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies." 
-Elie Wiesel

Nesenoff and his son, the site's webmaster, will post some of the nastiest, hate-filled email messages they received without concealing the sender's name or email address.

The first posting to the site includes the text "Helen Thomas was right" followed by profanity and an apparent threat to the rabbi and his family. The sender also attached a photograph of death row inmate and convicted mass murdering cult leader Charles Manson with a swastika tattoo between his eyes.

This is undoubtedly not what Rabbi Nesenoff expected when he posted the now famous Helen Thomas video.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The idea to "post some of the nastiest, hate-filled email messages they received without concealing" the name and e-mail address used by the sender is a very bad one. The senders may have used false names and addresses. Worse, someone could have used someone else's name and e-mail address as a prank. If the false information is posted, then what will happen to the reputation of the victim of the prank? This is really lashon hora at its worst: saying in public that someone has done something wrong, without knowing whether that was really the person who did it.