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washington  |  Then-candidate Barack Obama and his campaign team spent months debunking smears that he was a closeted Islamic radical. Now his critics, including GOP lawmakers, have given life to an already debunked rumor that the president signed an executive order allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees “with ties to Hamas” to resettle in the United States.

Though debunked in mid-February, the rumor continues to spread online.

Its latest appearance came March 10 in an article by Adam Hasner, the Republican majority leader in Florida’s House of Representatives, which appeared on the American Thinker Web site. Hasner, whose column criticized Obama’s Middle East policies on several fronts, represents a stretch of South Florida where Jewish seniors were said to be particularly vulnerable last year to the false rumors about Obama’s religious beliefs.

Hasner said that he had received around 20 e-mails mentioning the refugee order, and more than one lawyer said he had checked out the documents online and the claim appeared to be true.

Still, the Florida lawmaker said he had decided to strike the line because he couldn’t be sure of its veracity, but an error in the editing process led to its reinsertion into the piece. After the article was published, Hasner heard from a friend and expert in the field, who told him that the sentence about the refugees was incorrect.

It wasn’t the first time a legislator had been misled by the e-mail rumor. The day before Hasner’s piece was published, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) withdrew an amendment to a spending bill that would have prohibited federal money from going to resettle refugees from the Gaza Strip to the United States. Kyl acknowledged that the impetus for the legislation had been the false e-mail.

According to Snopes.com, a Web site that specializes in debunking — and occasionally verifying — Internet rumors, the e-mail came from a misreading of a presidential determination Obama signed shortly after he took office titled “Unexpected Urgent Refugee and Migration Needs Related to Gaza.”

The document stated that “it is important to the national interest” to provide $20.3 million from the United States Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund “for the purpose of meeting unexpected and urgent refugee and migration needs” related to “Palestinian refugees and conflict victims in Gaza.” It did not mention anything about Palestinians coming to the United States.

In fact, President George W. Bush had issued a similar directive in 2007 authorizing more than $29 million for refugee needs in Africa, the West Bank and Gaza.

FactCheck.org determined that the rumor apparently originated in an article in New Media Journal, an Internet publication which states that part of its mission is to provide “non-partisan, fact-based information on relevant socio-political issues important to our country, specifically ... the threats of aggressive Islamofascism and the American Fifth Column.”

In an article last month, the publication’s editor defended the original piece, arguing that the document was unclear and that the State Department office that received the funds is “charged with, but not limited to, resettling refugees in the United States.”

Hasner said he regrets that the charge ended up in the article but maintains that there were reasons to believe it was true.

“The Obama administration hadn’t denied it” or “put out a clarifying statement,” he said. “It was persistent for two or three weeks.”

Ira Forman, the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, slammed Hasner’s remarks.

If the Obama administration “had to spend their staff resources knocking down all the junk” the president’s critics were putting out, “they’d be doing nothing else,” Forman said. “They wouldn’t be able to attend to the economy or foreign policy.”

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