Reinald Steck and the Commandos
The Little Green Footballs weblog has posted an e-mail message, purportedly from a Reinald Steck, addressed to a representative of an Israeli medical association. The message read, in part:

We will release the requested information to you after you become a MediConf customer: http://www.mediconf.de

Sincerely,
Reinald Steck

P.S. We are pretty sure that your previously so desperate need for information about medical conferences in San Diego in June and July has suddenly vanished! ;-)

P.P.S. Are you going to send an Israeli commando to kill us now, because maybe you don’t like what we wrote?

P.P.S. Why don’t you kill all the Palestinians? You have taken almost all their land, and they are all poor, inferior, brutish, violent terrorists anyway, aren’t they?

You might as well finish the job already started. Just a few million more.

Thank God all Jews are compassionate doctors (according to TIME magazine).

When I tried to access www.mediconf.de, the presented page was blank. However, Google has a cache of the site. Wonder if a denial of service attack is going on?

Needless to say, the original post in Little Green Footballs resulted in a slew of comments, many wondering if the whole thing was a hoax. Here are some sample comments:

I'm gonna go out on a limb, and guess that the various postscripts were not actually authored by "Reinald Steck", but rather by some antisemitic freak working in his office who thought (s)he was being clever. Hard to say for sure, of course, but it would seem odd that Steck would first write a very bland respond-to-customer letter, then add this dreck himself.

I'm a professional editor and feel that this has the earmarks of someone attempting to pull the wool over someone's eyes, though it's hard to tell who, and over whose.

I received this letter from several people whom I trust; and I was told it had been verified.

The only thing shocking about this is people claiming to be shocked. Especially Jews.

I don't speak German (although I took a couple of years in high school) but I've edited a lot of writing by non-native speakers, and I have guessed the mother tongue of the author based on the style of the English. Once I even knew the author of a piece I was translating from Hebrew into English was originally from Germany (his sentences were about five miles long, and he liked to put verbs at the end).

If this is a hoax, Mediconf will appreciate this and be able to marshall the resources to stop it.

Until we find out whether Reinald Steck is the PS POS, it's best to hold fire. If he's been spoofed, he has as much right to be angry as anyone else.

I too have a geat deal of experience spotting fakes and hoaxes, and to me this email has the ring of authenticity. I have little knowledge of the corporate world so it may very well be that someone else in the German company added the PSes without the original sender's knowledge. But either way, someone in Germany wrote those PSes seriously, whether or not it was Herr Steck. The atmosphere in Western Europe has become so saturated with anti-Israelism that someone immersed in it would feel natural and justified writing such a letter.

Well, mediconf.com does work, and it includes a copyright notice for Fairbase Database Limited. A description of the database is available here.