by Aditi Roy
For all the talk about fake news after the election, there seems to be an influx of fake hate crimes being reported as well. While all sides of the political spectrum are guilty of post-election hate crime hoaxes, liberals seem to be working overtime in faking hate crimes to fit their “Trump’s racist-sexist-bigoted-homophobic-Islamophobic-transphobic-ableist-America” narrative. Of course, real hate crimes can happen to anyone. If they do occur, they should be reported and investigated, and the perpetrators should be punished. However, actual victims of hate crimes are less likely to be believed when hate crime hoaxes are happening so frequently.
After the election, many American Muslims were upset by the outcome. Some were scared for their safety, because they felt like half the country was against them. The mainstream media lies to them when they portrayed all Trump supporters as being anti-Muslim racist bigots, they lie to them every time they label any criticism of Islam as being “Islamophobic”, and they lie to them when they report Muslim hate crime hoaxes as real news. According to the 2015 FBI Hate Crime Statistics, anti-Muslim hate crimes made up less than half a percentage of all hate crimes in the U.S., but the mainstream media won’t mention that when they have a story to sell. Here are five of the many Islamophobic hate crime hoaxes that happened following the election.
Youtuber and professional victim Adam Saleh made headlines in December after he posted a video showing himself getting kicked off of a Delta airlines flight for speaking a different language. Saleh posted the video on his Twitter, which was retweeted over 800,000 times and picked up by media outlets all over the world. We were supposed to believe that an international airline company that services thousands of non-English speakers and flights to and from Muslim countries everyday singled out Saleh for speaking a different language. Turns out Saleh and his friend had been taking turns shouting to one another (in plain English) and several passengers complained about the disturbance, which is what actually got him and his friend to be kicked off the flight. His story was refuted by passengers on the flight as well as Delta Airlines. Earlier that week, Saleh posted a fake video where he put himself in a suitcase in order to smuggle himself on a Tigerair Australia plane. This is not possible, considering all luggage goes through an X-ray machine at the airport and would have caught a human inside of a suitcase, but nonetheless the video shows Saleh sweating inside the suitcase. Tigerair Australia released footage showing Adam boarding the plane as a regular passenger, and stated that the temperature at 36,000 feet above the ground gets as cold as -56 ℃. Had the prank truly been carried out, Saleh would not have made it out alive. 
This moron has 1.7 million subscribers on his main channel, 2.7 million subscribers on his vlog channel, and has a history of faking pranks for views and attention. The #BoycottDelta star has videos on his channel where he screams “Allahu Akhbar!” at bystanders and brings them to tears. He also filmed himself trying to start a fight with a black man and repeatedly called him the n-word. He sympathized with the Boston marathon bombers and tweeted they were innocent. He lied about a stop-and-frisk social experiment video, where he was dressed in Western clothes and Arab clothes, and was stopped when dressed in Arab clothes. The video was a hoax and went from being described as a “social experiment” to a “dramatization to raise awareness” after people started calling him out. This was the man that the media decided to defend.- Yasmin Seweid, an 18 year old Muslim student studying at Baruch College, claimed that she was harassed by three white males who shouted “Donald Trump” while attempting to rip off her hijab and tearing her bag on the NYC subway, claiming that no one helped her.
We were supposed to believe that in liberal haven New York City, no one helped a young, attractive Muslim girl from vicious racists on the crowded subway. After several inconsistencies in her story and questioning from detectives, she finally admitted to fabricating the whole thing to avoid getting in trouble from her parents for breaking her curfew: she was actually out late drinking with her friends. She lied to throw off her Egyptian immigrant parents because they disapproved of her Christian boyfriend. The young woman showed up to court with no makeup and had been forced to shave off her hair by her parents as punishment. She now faces up to one year of jail time. - A Muslim student at University of Louisiana at Lafayette claimed that she was beaten by two white males, one wearing a Trump hat. She accused them of stealing her wallet and her hijab. The Lafayette Police Department reported that as the investigation proceeded, the woman admitted to lying about the entire i
ncident. - On Christmas Day in 2015, a Houston mosque was set on fire. Media outlets wasted no time blaming the crime on The Donald for his hateful rhetoric.
The perpetrator of the crime turned out to be 37-year-old Gary Nathaniel Moore, who told investigators that he had been coming to the mosque to pray five times a day, seven days a week for the past five years. - Maha Abdul Gawad posted a Facebook status saying that when she was at Walmart, a woman told her to go hang herself with her hijab.
The status was picked up by BLM activist Shaun King and retweeted over 20,000 times on Twitter and shared over 146,000 times on Facebook. The incident supposedly took place in Denver, Ohio where police said they were never contacted. Also, there is no Walmart in Denver, Ohio where the woman stated that the incident occurred. It was later found out that the profile was fake and the images were stolen from another woman’s profile. Leave it to fake black guy Shaun King to share a fake hate crime against a fake Muslim woman.
These are just a few examples of several hate crime hoaxes. They happen more often than people think. A student group at Binghamton University invited a speaker from Yale to deliver a speech after the election. The speaker claimed that he had a friend who worked as a physician at the Yale Emergency Room the day after the election who told him about a nine year old Syrian boy that had been admitted into the ER after he was beaten up by Trump supporters. Upon monitoring the local news outlets in New Haven Connecticut after the speaker made this claim, there was no report to verify this.
Why are we seeing so many stories of Muslim hate crime hoaxes? According to Ibrahim Hooper from the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a U.S. based pro-Muslim group with close ties to the Obama administration and jihadist group Hamas, explained to ABC News that the Muslim community “is under great psychological stress and tension right now, and that that in itself can cause mental health issues that lead to these types of incidents.” In other words, Hooper wants us to believe that Islamophobia is causing a few Muslims to invent Islamophobic hate crimes against themselves which never actually happened.
It’s stuff like this that causes the term “Islamophobia” to lose all meaning. The word is greatly misused and gets thrown around to stifle discussion and silence criticism of Islam. Every ideology, whether it be religious, social, political, what have you, is allowed to be ridiculed and criticized. Islam should not be the exception. No one bats an eye when Family Guy, South Park, the Simpsons, etc. constantly rip on Christianity and Jesus. But when a satirical magazine in Paris draws the Prophet Muhammad and the result is dead cartoonists and employees, we obviously have a problem, and engaging in open and honest dialogue about it does not make someone “Islamophobic.” However, the Runnymede Trust, a UK based equalist think tank, would say the opposite. It suggests that criticisms of Islam are “closed views” and Islamophobic, but has no problem accusing conservatives of “racism” and Christians for “not being inclusive enough.”
The Islamic Human Rights Commission is also guilty of equating criticisms of Islam to Islamophobia. The organization holds an annual Islamophobia Award ceremony to “acknowledge the worst Islamophobes of the past year through satire.” An “Islamophobe of the Year” award is presented in the categories of UK, News Media, Book/Movie/TV Series, International, and Worst Overall Islamophobe of the Year. Recipients of these awards include Charlie Hebdo, just two months after jihadists murdered 12 of its employees for drawing Muhammad; Maajid Nawaz, a former radical Islamist who is now trying to reform the extremist portions of Islam; Raheem Kassam, a Muslim journalist who committed the great Islamophobic offense of criticising his own faith and for having the wrong opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and even Barack Obama.Apparently practicing Muslims can also be Islamophobic! Nominees include world leaders such as King Abdullah II of Jordan, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Abdel Fatteh el-Sisi of Egypt, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and even freaking Oprah. The group labels women who have escaped child marriage and barbaric practices as young Muslim girls as “Islamophobes” like Asra Normani and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was crowned Islamophobe of the Year in 2006. Their philosophy is basically “everyone I don’t like is an Islamophobe.” The organization has campaigned for the release of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing terrorist, as well as his lawyer for supporting convicted terrorists, and presented her with an award for fighting Islamophobia.
The bottom line is that American Muslims are a lot safer than media portrays, and it is truly pathetic that some people have resorted to faking hate crimes because they want to use victimhood as a form of currency. The term “Islamophobia” is not equivalent to criticisms of the religion, nor is everyone who questions Islamic ideology an Islamophobe. We are fortunate to live in the country where we all have the right to freely practice, criticize, or offend any religion.
References:
http://www.dailywire.com/news/11829/7-things-know-about-muslim-delta-storyteller-adam-aaron-bandler
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4035004/Police-NYC-Muslim-womans-bias-report-false.html
http://www.chron.com/houston/article/Federal-officials-arrest-man-in-connection-with-6727623.php
http://www.snopes.com/muslim-woman-told-to-hang-herself-with-hijab-at-walmart/
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2015/topic-pages/victims_final
http://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/islamophobia.pdf
http://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/ConservatismCommunityCohesion-2010.pdf
http://www.ihrc.org.uk/news/comment/10523-boston-bombing-islamophobia-and-sudden-ignorance-syndrome
Islam is a religion full of extremism, only a liberal can’t see this!
http://freedomnews.today/