Can't keep a good victim down.

|

Francis Boyle, one of the characters in my Reason story "E PLuribus Umbrage," is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign law school who last March claimed to have been victimized in an electronic hate-mail campaign because he is of Irish descent. His legal case over the alleged e-harrassment is still pending with the Justice Department, but now Boyle is claiming to be the victim of another e-mail hate campaign, this one singling him out for abuse because he supports the Palestinians. Writes The Nation:

Francis Boyle, for example, returned from a summer vacation to find 55,000 e-mails waiting in his inbox--most of them return-to-senders from a mass e-mail he supposedly wrote saying, "When I see in the newspapers that civilians in Afghanistan or the West Bank were killed by American or Israeli troops, I don't really care." Boyle--a former board member of Amnesty International USA and outspoken critic of the war in Afghanistan--spent four days sorting through the e-mails, deleting failed deliveries and apologizing to angry colleagues.

I suppose it's just a matter of time before Boyle is siccing the DOJ on the makers of "a very amusement game" and the widow of Jonas Savimbi.