Red Ken and his £100m mosque

This is bothering me.

Not the mosque, not the hundred million quid, not even Ken Livingstone being supportive of the idea.

What's bothering me is that this has just sprung up again, 6 months later, on blogs and forums around twinternet, embellished with juicy non-facts like "Ken Livingstone is planning to use tax payer's money to build an enormous mosque costing an estimated 100M in the docklands", and urging us to contribute to an utterly insignificant little internet poll which is not going to make the slightest scrap of difference to whether the thing goes ahead or not. I wouldn't be surprised to find that this whole thing was started by the webmasters thee to increase traffic. (Which, by posting the link, I've just joined in with. Ho hum.)

In fact, it's not even that. What it really is, is that this urban legend has been picked up on and passed on by countless internet users - including many who should know better - completely unchecked.

This kind of gullible chain e-mailing ticks me off. Have you people never heard of google?

So, I checked. It didn't take me long to establish that their is no reliable reference to any tax-payers money going into it. Or that joining in with this madness would align me with the British National Party and the likes. Or to find that the most recent article on the subject from what could be considered a reasonably impartial and reliable source was this one. Even the Christian Broadcasting Network managed to say 'The money for the project is coming from sources in the Middle East'.

Now I don't kow all the facts about this. But I haven't posted this, or e-mailed my entire address book, claiming that I do. And until I do know sufficient facts, I'm going to keep my mouth shut, even on irrelevant web polls.

For my part, I would like to urge you to completely ignore anything you might hear about this subject unless it's from a reliable news source. And please, don't pass on those emails you occasionally get from your Uncle Fred about the latest computer virus, or how you can unlock your car with a hairdryer.