12/30/2014
On Christmas day in Fresno, somebody vandalized a local mosque, and shrieking immediately began characterizing the damage as a hate crime, a thought energetically stoked by the media:
FRESNO POLICE CALLING ISLAMIC CULTURAL CENTER BURGLARY A HATE CRIME, KFSN-TV Fresno, December 26, 2014Police now have a suspect in custody after a cultural center promoting peace, is the victim of hate.
Fresno police say a lone suspect vandalized the Islamic Cultural Center in Northeast Fresno on Christmas morning. Police Chief Jerry Dyer will release more information about the suspect at a Saturday morning news conference.
Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer says it is clear the incident is a hate crime which is why the FBI is also investigating this case. The suspect went to the center twice Thursday morning, and the second time he dumped a bottle of bleach on the American flag …
Here’s a screen snap from the KFSN news report, emphasizing HATE:
But when the perp was identified as a local Muslim, Asif Mohammad Khan, the chatter changed completely. The family said the 28-year-old man was afflicted with “mental illness” and his sister apologized during a presser. The police chief said the felony vandalism was committed “for a very isolated reason” — whatever that means, as some sort of excuse apparently. So a Muslim committed the crime, not an American, and that makes it okay, or at least less bad. Hate all gone and diversity defended, phew.
Islam propagandists, particularly CAIR, pretend that anti-Muslim crime is huge and Americans are bigoted attackers of poor innocent Muslims. In fact, the FBI’s annual hate crime statistics show that Muslims are not long-suffering victims of cruel Americans. Of the 5928 incidents reported for 2013, only 2.3 percent were against Muslims. And one wonders how many of those were fake.
CAIR and their comrades worldwide advance the Hate meme to quash any reasoned discussion about the threat of Islam invading the west through immigration. Intimidation is an effective weapon, and hostile Muslims have been perfecting their world-conquest chops for 1400 years.
Incidentally, a Google search for Hate Crime Hoax can provide hours of educational fun.
Finally, in the spirit of year-end reviews of 2014, JihadWatch’s Robert Spencer compiled a list of outstanding anti-Muslim hate crime hoaxes:
The Top Anti-Muslim Hate Crime Hoaxes of 2014, Front Page, December 29, 2014On Christmas morning, a man drove up to the Islamic Cultural Center in Fresno, threw rocks through the windows, and then entered the center and destroyed things inside. The local ABC outlet, KFSN, reported Friday that “Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer says it is clear the incident is a hate crime which is why the FBI is also investigating this case.” But on Saturday, it turned out that the incident was not an “anti-Muslim hate crime” at all: the vandal was Asif Mohammad Khan, a Muslim. The destruction at the Islamic Cultural Center in Fresno was yet another in a long series of fake hate crimes designed to prop up the fiction that Muslims in the U.S. are routinely targets of discrimination and harassment.
According to Khan’s sister Samia, the vandal is (like the recent French attackers who screamed “Allahu akbar” while trying to kill infidels) mentally ill. She also said that he was a devout Muslim who prayed five times daily. Dyer revealed that Khan had in recent days written that Osama bin Laden was the most inspirational person in his life. Dyer explained that Khan’s vandalism of the mosque “was not geared towards the Islamic community, it was not geared to the Islamic faith or any of those things and was simply to get back at a few people at the center who had belittled him and in his eyes bullied him.”
Dyer and other law enforcement authorities were extremely unlikely to consider it as they investigated Khan’s crimes, but the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Muslims have on many occasions in the past not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating “hate crimes,” including attacks on mosques. CAIR and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat.
This has happened many times in 2014. Here are five of the most egregiously manipulative examples:
1. The Saleh and Akbar viral video.
In October, the Muslim bloggers Adam Saleh and Sheikh Akbar released a video entitled “Racial Profiling Experiment.” It showed the duo in Western clothing, coming to blows in front of an indifferent NYPD cop. In the second part of the video, they pass by the same cop in Muslim garb, arguing mildly — only to be harassed and frisked by the same policeman.
The video went viral. The Huffington Post hysterically proclaimed that it offered a “small glimpse into the ugly world of racial profiling.” Hamas-linked CAIR called for an investigation. But then it turned out that the whole thing had been staged. The Smoking Gun called the video a “cynical and duplicitous attempt to capitalize on New York City’s documented racial profiling problems.”
2. The German mosque arson.
Another “Islamophobic” hate crime took place in Germany in February, when there was an arson attack at the Central Mosque in Cologne. But in October, a Muslim who had been held in a psychiatric ward ever since he had been arrested (as the mainstream media and law enforcement officials have now apparently agreed that all Muslims who commit acts of violence are mentally ill) confessed to having set the fire.
“I wanted to make a clear sign,” the arsonist explained. “Because they treated me badly at the Koran school. It has always hurt me.” He also had tried to burn down two other mosques; it wasn’t reported whether or not he had been to Qur’an school and been treated badly in all three. But until he was apprehended, his arson attacks provided rich material for the “Islamophobia” mythmakers.
3. The burned Qur’ans in Dearborn.
Last June, after three burned Qur’ans were found in front of the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center in Dearborn, the mosque’s imam, Sheikh Husham Al-Husainy met with lawyers to discuss his proposal for a statute criminalizing the desecration of holy books. “We want all of the religions to cooperate with us,” he declared, “to bring respect to the word of God, whether the Quran, Bible, or Torah.”
But as it turned out, the Qur’an barbecuer was none other than a Muslim named Ali Hassan Al-Assadi. Al-Husainy opined that al-Assadi was (surprise, surprise) “mentally unstable.” Crazy or not, the discovery that al-Assadi had burned the Qur’ans threw a large monkey wrench into al-Husainy’s plans to use the incident as the cornerstone of his campaign against the freedom of expression.
4. The Montclair State University attack.
Combine the relentless Muslim striving for victimhood with the cult of victimhood on college campuses these days, and even non-Muslims get into the faked hate act. Last April at Montclair State University in New Jersey, a student claimed that three white men in jeans and hoodies assaulted him. They called him an “Islamic terrorist.”
MSU police began an investigation, only to find that the whole incident was a hoax: a student named Navjoat Aulakh had filed a false report. Aulakh may not even be a Muslim. His full name is Navjoat Singh Aulakh; “Singh” is a name closely associated with Sikhs. The Aulakhs are a Jat clan from the Punjab area, and while many Jats are Muslims, the name Singh here suggests that this young man is himself a Sikh. His Facebook page gives no sign that he cares about much of anything but sports and babes, but apparently he does have some significant political concerns. If he is a Sikh, this would by no means be the first time that Sikhs have served as useful idiots for the Islamic supremacist victimhood posturing enterprise. Sikhs even stood with Hamas-linked CAIR to call for the allowance of hijabs on an amusement park go-kart ride that had already seen one Muslima killed as her hijab was caught in the axle.
In this case, a Sikh apparently tried to aid the false Muslim victimhood narrative. And failed.
5. The Shaima Alawadi murder.
Last April in El Cajon, California, an Iraqi Muslim named Kassim Alhimidi was found guilty of murdering his wife, Shaima Alawadi, after she had told him that she wanted a divorce.
Before Alhimidi was arrested, this murder was widely reported as an “Islamophobic hate crime”: a note was found by Alawadi’s body that read, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.” Leftists and Islamic supremacists made a great deal of this, claiming that the murder was the work of an “Islamophobe” who hated Shaima Alawadi for wearing a hijab. They even staged a campaign, “One Million Hijabs for Shaima Alawadi.”
Reza Aslan, the celebrated author of Zealot, bashed out a sub-literate tweet blaming Pamela Geller and me for the murder: “If a 32 year old veiled mother is a terrorist than [sic] so am I you Islamophobic fucks Gellar [sic] Spencer et. [sic] al. Come find me.” This tweet indicated how much mileage the “Islamophobia” propaganda machine thought it could get from the Alawadi murder in its efforts to intimidate people into thinking it wrong to oppose jihad terror.
Yet it was another fake hate crime. And since the mainstream media remains so uncritical about Muslim claims of having been victimized, there will be many more in 2015.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.