“According to Levin, hoaxes do crop up in hate crime reporting, as they do across the spectrum of criminal offenses. But he said they are a ‘tiny fraction’ of the hundreds of hate crimes reported annually.”
A “tiny fraction”? Really? What is his evidence for that? He has none, of course. In reality, anti-Muslim hate crimes that turn out to have been faked by Muslims are so numerous as to be commonplace.
Hate crimes are political capital. When real ones don’t exist, they must be invented. Hamas-linked CAIR and other Muslims have on many occasions not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating “hate crimes,” including attacks on mosques. A New Jersey Muslim was found guilty of murder that he tried to portray as an “Islamophobic” attack, and in 2014 in California, a Muslim was found guilty of killing his wife, after first blaming her murder on “Islamophobia.”
This kind of thing happens quite frequently. The New York Daily News reported that “a woman who told cops she was called a terrorist and slashed on her cheek in lower Manhattan on Thursday later admitted she made up the story, police said early Friday. The woman, who wore a headscarf, told authorities a blade-wielding wacko sliced open her face as she left a Manhattan cosmetology school, police sources said.”
We were told that a Muslim boy was attacked and beat up on his school bus in North Carolina — but a photo showed him without a scratch and no one on the bus corroborated his story. And recently in Britain, the murder of a popular imam was spread far and wide as another “Islamophobic hate crime” – until his killer also was found to be a Muslim. The Mirror reported that the imam “was targeted because he had made efforts to turn youngsters away from radical Islam.”
According to The Detroit News, a Muslim woman, Saida Chatti, was “charged with making a false police report after she allegedly fabricated a plot to blow up Dearborn Fordson High School to retaliate against the November terrorist attacks in Paris….Police say Chatti called Dearborn investigators Nov. 19, six days after Islamic extremists killed 130 people in Paris.”
And similarly in Britain, a Muslim woman was “fined for lying to police about being attacked for wearing a hijab. The 18-year-old student, known only as Miss Choudhury, said she was violently shoved from behind and punched in the face by a man in Birmingham city centre 10 days after the atrocities in the French capital on November 13.”
Ignoring all this and more, the execrable thug Nathan Lean, who has several times published on Twitter what he thought was my address in an obvious clumsy attempt to alert jihadis to my whereabouts and/or frighten me into silence, posits: “The reason this girl made up this story is because of the real possibility of her experiencing a scenario like this.” No, the reason this girl made up this story was because she was afraid of her father’s wrath over her being out late and having a non-Muslim boyfriend. The real danger that Yasmin Seweid is in because of her family’s devout observance of Islam is the only genuine way that she has been threatened — but you will never hear about that from the likes of Nathan Lean or other “Islamophobia” propagandists. If her father kills her for sullying the family’s honor by straying from the tenets of Islam, they won’t say a word. But if her father puts on a Trump hat and then kills her — well!
“Not #FakeNews: Experts Warn One Hoax Doesn’t Discredit Wave Of Hate Crimes,” by Allegra Kirkland, TPM, December 15, 2016:
The New York Police Department on Wednesday charged a Muslim teenager whose story about being harassed on the subway by a group of Donald Trump supporters had gone viral with filing a false report. The backlash was swift.
“#FakeNews: Media Hyperventilates Over Another Anti-Muslim Hate Crime Hoax,” read one headline on NewsBusters that claimed these kinds of stories “are nearly always proved to be hoaxes.”
Other websites and conservative commentators also targeted the media for spreading 18-year-old Yasmin Seweid’s account of three white men calling her a “terrorist” and trying to pull off her hijab on a 6 train as other riders stood by.
“Muslim Teen Arrested After Media Hyped Her Fake Anti-Trump ‘Hate Crime Hoax’ Story,” was the headline at Biz Pac Review, while Heat Street published a piece titled “What Yasmin Seweid’s Pretty Little Lies Reveal About ‘Fake News’ Media Hypocrisy.” Anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller patted herself on the back for predicting that the story was made up all along….
Yet hate crimes experts say Seweid’s fabrication is the exception, not the rule. Such rare “hoax” crimes bely the real rise of hate crimes in the United States, bolstering the narratives of those who believe Islamopohobia is an overblown issue or that bias crimes are the stuff of liberal fantasy.According to FBI statistics released in November, 2015 was the worst year for anti-Muslim hate crimes since 2001, when the terror attacks on the World Trade Center fueled a surge of Islamophobic incidents. Those crimes continued into this election year. The NYPD reported 375 hate crime complaints to date in 2016, compared to 282 incidents in 2015; the number of anti-Muslim incidents reported in 2016 rose to 33, up from 19 reports in 2015.
Yet even the hard numbers are fodder for disputing the rise in hate crimes in the U.S.
“I’m a criminologist and people have accused my reports of being biased when I’m using official law enforcement criteria or actual law enforcement data,” Brian Levin, the director for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, told TPM in a Thursday interview. “There’s something politically going on now that is different. These hoaxes have become symbols for some who want to promote the idea that most hate crimes are hoaxes. That’s important to rectify.”
According to Levin, hoaxes do crop up in hate crime reporting, as they do across the spectrum of criminal offenses. But he said they are a “tiny fraction” of the hundreds of hate crimes reported annually….
Yet those experts they say there is a reason why stories like Seweid’s resonate so deeply: the spate of legitimate bias crimes and attacks we’ve seen on the news and read about for months, many of which were caught on camera.
Nathan Lean, director of research for the Islamophobia project at Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, posited that Seweid used this particular excuse for coming home late because she knew the story would be “believable.”
“The reason this girl made up this story is because of the real possibility of her experiencing a scenario like this,” he said pointing to the “visibility” of Muslim women who wear hijabs.
“That doesn’t legitimate what she did,” he continued. “But if we were living in a climate where anti-Muslim sentiment wasn’t so intense and there hadn’t been a spike in hate crimes, her story would not have been received with the same credibility.”…