Last week, I spoke of my outrage at an email that I had received from a journalist colleague of mine, who was equally disturbed by the email.

It was captioned "in the name of Islam" and showed a series of images of a young boy whose arm had been deliberately placed underneath a car front tyre. The email stated that this was Muslims in Iran, punishing the boy for stealing bread. Islamically, I knew this simply could not be true – and it wasn't – but, like my colleague, I too was overcome with the emotion triggered by the use of the imagery.

My initial reaction to the images was actually that of scepticism. I should have trusted my instincts; the images were not of anyone being punished for anything. The images were real though, and the event did take place in Iran, but it was a stunt, performed for the amusement of the public; nothing to do with Islam, nothing to do with Muslims, just a street stunt, performed for money, for entertainment.

In the actual, original sequence of images, the final image shows the boy in the stunt to be well and unaffected after the stunt. However, the final image is deliberately omitted from the anti-Muslim version of the email, which is tagged "in the name of Islam", completed with fake text saying that the images depict an Islamic punishment.

The stunt itself is still bad enough; heart-wrenching, in fact, from a child exploitation point of view. In the third world though, standards we take for granted here are not the priority of people who can resort to performing life- and limb-threatening stunts just to earn their next meal.

Now, normally, such an email would not pass my initial curiosity phase. This one did. The images and the explanation were compelling. The images looked real, because they were real. It's the explanation of what I was looking at that was wrong.

I'm not naïve. I could have taken the time to check, but like millions of people out there who wouldn't have, I didn't. And just like the millions of people out there, I too believed it.

In the media frenzy world we live in, image is everything. And right now, the image of Muslims is none too good. Anyone can say anything about Muslims, no matter how outlandish, how bizarre; people will tend to believe it. Heck, even Muslims believe it.

Part of the problem is that the Muslim world itself often appears replete with examples of corrupt, tyrannical and oppressive regimes, where the people are kept too weak, or too ignorant or too afraid to stand up for the truth, leading to societies that have lost virtually all the basis and inherent mercy of Islam. It is from such a quagmire of ignorance that we get images, for example, of the "suicide bomber" – a very recent phenomenon completely alien to Islam.

But when such imagery is associated with Islam as opposed to the real political or territorial objectives that it actually stems from, it serves only to put a wedge between Islam and the West.

Misinformation, like in the email, seeks only to widen that divide. Ordinary Muslims and ordinary non-Muslims need to work together to get our voices heard over those of fear and hate.

Both sides need to begin building bridges across the divide using the cement of understanding, trust and respect. We can start by challenging misinformation.

Any volunteers?