Spamwurst rides again.
Almost a year after they first appeared, hundreds of German-language junk e-mails are once more sprouting up in many people's inboxes. The first messages arrived Saturday with subject lines such as "Armenian Genocide Plagues Ankara 90 Years On," "Multi-Kulturell=Multi-Kriminell" and "Dresden Bombing Is to Be Regretted Enormously," the latter being a classic example of the passive-voice sentence that sounds as mellifluous in German as it sounds ridiculous in English.
The technological details come courtesy of Australian IT reporter Chris Jenkins: "A spokeswoman for e-mail filtering group Message Labs said the e-mails had been propagated by the 'Sober.q' variant of the Sober worm, the first generation of which appeared in 2003." Jenkins reported that the people who mounted the campaign used computers hijacked with the worm to double as the senders. This explains why the spam comes from all sorts of different address, including people whom you might know.
The content might not be as easy to determine for baffled recipients who don't speak German. For the most part, it constitutes a mixed bag of racist epithets, tirades about Germans being made to feel like strangers in their own land and arguments against allowing Turkey to join the European Union.
The timing seems to fit well with two notable anniversaries. The first came on April 24th, the date on which Armenians and others mark the Ottoman Empire's forced deportation of millions of Armenians, which began in 1915 and led to the deaths of 600,000 to 1.5 million people . The e-mails note modern Turkey's refusal to acknowledge the action as genocide and use it to argue against Turkey's bid to join the EU. (See this excellent writeup by Carl Bialik about the scholarly disagreements over the number of people who died between 1915 and the early 1920s.) Other e-mails point to an article in Der Spiegel describing how a Turkish woman living in Germany died after her brothers shot her on the street because she dressed and behaved in a "Western" manner.
This is an incredibly loaded issue. Many Europeans want Ankara to apologize for the Ottoman treatment of Armenians as one of several conditions on EU membership, but supporters of the Turkish bid claim that many of the high barriers to entry smack of religious intolerance and racism. Turkey's population is overwhelmingly Muslim.
The issue is even more extreme in Germany, where Turks arrived in large numbers after World War II as guest workers to rebuild the country. Many -- including members of Turkey's ethnic Kurdish minority -- continue to show up in Germany, claiming asylum and seeking work. Some Germans bemoan the Turks' presence, which now forms the country's largest minority, as well as their observance of Islamic law, or sharia. One spam e-mail links to a Web page that complains about Muslims slaughtering sheep "out in the open on the street" for a religious ceremony.
The second anniversary is May 8, the official date of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany 60 years ago. Some of the e-mails that showed up during the past weekend urged Germans to shed a "culture of guilt" imposed on them by the Allied authorities. Others wonder aloud why British and U.S. military leaders were not tried for "war crimes" such as the firebombing of Dresden, in which Allied forces incinerated the city and killed thousands of German civilians. While the e-mails often link to the extreme right-wing German National Party, no less a world leader than Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed similar sentiments in a joint interview with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder conducted by the Bild newspaper.
"The Western allies didn't abound with any special humanity," Putin said, according to MSNBC. "It's incomprehensible to me to this day why Dresden was destroyed. There was no military reason for it."
By now you're thanking me for the history lesson but wondering, "Should I be worried?" and "What can I do to avoid these?" The answer to the first question is "Probably not" and the answer to the second is "Not much."
I still don't know how many of these messages are floating around on the Internet, or who has received them. Some of you might have been hit hard, others left unscathed. I have received about 150 messages since Saturday, and they continue to trickle in at the rate of approximately two every 15 minutes. The problem with blocking them by conventional filtering methods is that many filters use English words to raise red flags.
These messages are spam, which makes them annoying. Their content is xenophobic, racist and far from politically correct, but if you don't speak German they look like gibberish. The best thing to do is to delete the messages without opening them. As for keeping them out of your inbox, you might be out of luck. Last year's barrage lasted two weeks before petering out. That is probably what will happen this time.
