Editorial: The message we must remember from website that maligned Muslim center in Wheaton

We must leave it to legal officials to determine whether a website falsely purporting to represent the Islamic Council of Wheaton committed a crime. But we don't need to consult any other authorities to recognize that the site was not, as its operators would have us believe, harmless satire.

The site, which included logos and a page design intended to suggest it was operated by the ICW, claimed the center was promoting implementation of Sharia law in Wheaton, praising the attackers in the San Bernardino and Paris slaughters, and showing images of children holding guns and Islamic State flags. After being sent a link to the site, Wheaton police opened an investigation - appropriately - and Police Chief Jim Volpe determined the site was "a spoof."

That may be. But even if so, that's small comfort for the members of ICW or Muslims anywhere, and it doesn't diminish the site's deplorable nature. On Wednesday, the operators of the site had removed the offensive material and replaced it with new, clearly satirical messages and images suggesting that critics don't understand what parody is and just can't take a joke.

That, alas, is often the case with people who are the butt of satire, but it doesn't excuse outright misrepresentations and the linking of an organization or any individuals to acts that they and any reasonable person would consider despicable.

Whether the site's so-called satire was "malicious" may be arguable, but its intent was clearly mean-spirited and divisive, and its implications - that ICW supports radicalism and terror - are demonstrably false. The center, like other mainstream Islamic groups in the Chicago area, has repeatedly denounced acts of terror and violence and works in cooperation with diverse religious and secular groups to promote a message of tolerance and peaceful coexistence.

Perhaps above all else, the site's appearance also emphasizes the importance of discernment by readers and consumers in an age when prejudices are easily aroused, messages, logos, images and photographs are easily manipulated or faked and online news and commentary sites are easily created, with no requirement for implicit or expressed efforts at balance, fairness or accuracy.

"It's not that uncommon for us," Volpe told our writer Jessica Cilella, "to get reports from citizens saying someone is putting something online that wasn't true. It's very easy to do, whether it's high school kids setting up fake Facebook accounts or somebody setting up a website. It's hard to track them."

If the operators of the website committed a crime, they deserve to be prosecuted. But if their sin does not quite rise above the level of sophomoric satire, they still deserve condemnation.

And, the rest of us, far from getting schooled in the nature of parody, have again been reminded of the need in our divided, blustery, uncivil technological spaces, to be very critical and very suspicious about the material we find online.