Fake Hate Crime Database

It’s the tactic of social justice warriors: fake a “hate crime” and sit back and enjoy the self-righteous hand-wringing over how America is still a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or whatever nation.

Campus bureaucrats love these things, since they are a dandy excuse to add more bureaucrats with “diversity” or “inclusion” or “multicultural” in their titles.

But since the fake hate crimes are indeed crimes, they get investigated. And often they get revealed for what they are.

Fake Hate Crimes Database

Which brings us to “fake hate crimes: a database of hate crime hoaxes in the usa.” It’s a long list of such bogus crimes, together with sources supplying the details.

It’s good to peruse to see how the notion of a “hate crime” has been weaponized by the left. And happily, how often these hoaxes fall apart.

Bogus Racial Grievance at Portland Bakery

Bogus racial grievance. Black women claims she was not served because of her race. She walked in after the place was closed, and after two white women were refused service on the grounds that the place was closed.

This being Portland, the two employees involved were fired, and the very politically correct coffee shop abases itself and kowtows to the activists.

Lying About Supposed Anti-Muslim “Hate Crimes”

From Daniel Greenfield in Frontpage Mag:

Yasmin Seweid, a Muslim college student, claimed that Trump supporters had tried to tear off her hijab on the New York City subway and shouted, “Look it’s a f______ terrorist” and “Go back to your country”.

“The president-elect just promotes this stuff and is very anti-Muslim, very Islamophobic, and he’s just condoning it,” she complained.

It was all a lie.

Yasmin was charged with filing a false police report on December 2016. On September 2017, she pleaded guilty to falsely reporting an incident and disorderly conduct.

An Islamophobia hoax doesn’t get any more discredited than the Seweid case. But Islamophobia hoaxes never die. They’re rolled into hate crime statistics and reports even when they are completely false.

“Reported anti-Muslim hate incidents, rhetoric rose in year after election, report finds,” NBC News claims. Like The Nation, Think Progress and a variety of other sites, it’s touting a report by South Asian Americans Leading Together or SAALT.

The SAALT report, “Communities on Fire,” fits into an annual media tradition. Every year, fake statistics are used to inflate the Islamophobia threat. And the media reports every year that Islamophobia is getting worse. The statistical gimmicks of Islamophobia inflation vary from the clever to the terrible.

The Southern Poverty Law Center hit a new low when it claimed that the “number of anti-Muslim hate groups increased almost three-fold in 2016” by counting 45 chapters of Act for America as separate organizations after counting them as one in 2015. Another report documented a 66% increase when 6 cases increased to 10. But the SAALT report’s listing of discredited hoaxes is even more outrageous.

Even though the report was issued now, its list of incidents includes the Seweid case. “Three drunk white men repeatedly screamed ‘Donald Trump!’ and hurled anti-Islam slurs at a Muslim Baruch College student, Yasmin Seweid, before trying to rip her hijab off on an East Side subway.”

And that’s far from the only hoax on the SAALT list.

In Lafayette, LA, its report claims, “Two men knocked a young Muslim student wearing hijab to the ground with something metal and verbally assaulted her with obscenities before making off with her wallet and hijab.”

The Muslim student claimed that she had been attacked by Trump supporters. She was charged with filing a false police report. “She made up the entire story about being attacked, about her hijab being taken. There was no truth to any of it,” the Lafayette Police Department spokesman said.

In Ann Arbor, MI, the SAALT report claims, “A man approached a Muslim student and threatened to set her on fire with a lighter unless she removed her hijab.”

That story was also a hoax.

“Following a thorough investigation, detectives have determined the incident in question did not occur,” the Ann Arbor Police Department stated.

These weren’t just hoaxes. They were hoaxes from over a year ago. And SAALT still included them.

“An anti-Muslim message was spray painted on a residence hall on the Beloit College campus,” the report claims.

The student confessed to having vandalized his own door with anti-Muslim graffiti. He was arrested and charged with criminal damage.

“Two men confronted a San Diego State University student wearing hijab in a parking structure, made comments about President-elect Donald Trump and the Muslim community, and then took her purse and backpack. The men also took the student’s car keys and ran off,” the SAALT report claims.

The car turned out not to be stolen. No evidence of the attack was found and the student refused to cooperate with police.

Incidents like these, which were reported after Trump’s victory, play a crucial role in SAALT’s efforts to connect the supposed rise in Islamophobic attacks to him. The SAALT report mentions Trump nearly 200 times. It claims that, “One in five perpetrators of hate violence incidents referenced President Trump, a Trump policy, or a Trump campaign slogan.” But quite a few of those Trump “incidents” were hoaxes.

The SAALT report lists violence that happened to Muslims without any evidence that it was motivated by their religion. It lists the drive by shooting of Mohamed Abdulkadir in Ohio, and the robbery and fatal beating of Ali Khan even though they appear to be ordinary crimes.

In Milwaukee, “A perpetrator beat a woman leaving morning prayers and pulled off her hijab,” the SAALT report claims. “She then pushed her to the ground, repeatedly stomped on her head, and took out a knife and slashed her clothing.”

The police report however quoted the victim as saying that she didn’t think it was a hate crime, that the man had not tried to take her hijab, but that the assault had to do with her lesbian daughter.

The SAALT report lists arson at the Islamic Center of Ypsilanti. But the police ruled that out as a hate crime. A Detroit mosque whose vandalism was also listed by SAALT was trashed by an African-American thief when he couldn’t find anything to steal.

The SAALT report lists the shooting of a 16-year-old Muslim in Ohio. The Muslim teenager claimed that his attacker had shouted racial slurs at him, but the attacker, Denzal Johnson, is African-American and his girlfriend appeared to be Muslim. Denzal’s religion is unknown.

The SAALT report claims that “Black Muslim girl, Nabra Hassanen” was killed after she and her group had “been at a late-night event at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society and were headed back to the mosque after a trip to a fast-food restaurant.” Nabra Hassanen wasn’t black and she was killed by an illegal alien gang member from El Salvador who got into a fight with her friends. There’s never been any evidence that her killer was motivated by her religion. And he was not charged with a hate crime.

Sometimes SAALT’s spin is deliberately dishonest. For example, it claims that, “a Somali Muslim woman, Rahma Warsame, who intervened to protect another Muslim woman from harassment by a white male perpetrator was beaten unconscious, resulting in facial fractures and the loss of several teeth. The attacker screamed, ‘You all will be shipped back to Africa’ prior to beating her.”

Rahma Warsame had actually gotten into a fight with Samantha Morales, a Latino woman. Morales claimed that a Somali woman had hit a little boy with a shoe. According to the police, another member of the Warsame family, had tased Morales. The only white male in the story is Morales’ boyfriend. The police couldn’t decide what really happened.

The SAALT report tries to attribute violent attacks on Muslims to “white supremacists”, but many of its more violent incidents are actually the work of African-American and Latino attackers. The Victoria mosque fire was set by a mentally unstable Latino man. The Islamic Center of Eastside fire was set by a schizophrenic African-American homeless man who may have previously tried to pray in the mosque and had smashed a window at NikeTown. Not exactly your typical Trump supporter.

A number of the acts in the SAALT report were actually committed by mentally unstable homeless people with a violent history. But SAALT has its own curious definition of white supremacist.

According to the report, Act for America 9/11 commemoration illustrated a growth in white supremacist Islamophobia. But Act for America was founded by Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese Arab immigrant.

The SAALT report lists the Freedom Center’s campaign against hate groups. “Palestinian rights activists at California universities were targeted with posters calling them terrorists.” The posters called out SJP and other hate groups that have expressed support for terrorists.

Many of the activists who were called out in these Freedom Center campaigns weren’t even Muslims.

The first name on the poster that SAALT is complaining about is that of Daniel Alvarez. The second name is Mohammed Hammad who was investigated by terrorism officials and the FBI for posting violent threats. These included, “I think about killing a lot/and some of you are usually the targets of my daydreams.” Instead of condemning Hammad’s threats, SAALT instead attacks the Freedom Center.

The SAALT report leaves out key pieces of information that might provide alternative explanations.

It mentions that Vibert White, was “forced to resign” from the University of Central Florida and sued the college. It neglects to mention that he had been arrested three times on domestic violence charges involving two ex-wives. It mentions the vandalism at the Ahram Halal Market in Maine, but not that a few weeks earlier its owners had been charged with fraud.

The multiple hoaxes that never happened and other incidents that were not hate crimes ought to be enough to raise serious questions about the credibility of the SAALT report. Unfortunately the media unthinkingly passes along Islamophobia inflation reports without ever fact checking them.

The SAALT report and the media stories about it exist to push the narrative is that President Trump is causing anti-Muslim violence. And the narrative is too good to bother checking the facts.

And that not only destroys the media’s own credibility, but hurts the people it claims to be trying to protect. When hoaxes, ordinary crimes and attacks by mentally ill homeless people are all treated the same way, then even real attacks will be drowned out by the torrent of fake incidents.

Yes, activist groups, and indeed the media, report things that fit a favored narrative, and don’t bother too much with fact checking.

But what drives the narrative? Quite simply, the intolerance of liberals and leftists, who can’t imagine that the Trump victory was driven by legitimate (or at least understandable) resentment toward elites. No, in their little world, only bigotry could explain who so many people did not vote as they did.

They Keep Coming: Another Bogus “Hate” Incident

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Former Petersburg City Attorney Brian K. Telfair asked a city employee to buy a prepaid cellphone that he later used to make a phone call to himself — a call that Telfair told police was made by an unknown “redneck” caller who made racist threats to the mayor and two other city officials, according to court records.

The phony call led to the abrupt cancellation of a Petersburg City Council meeting in February 2016 after city officials received word that residents were upset about high water bills and other financial issues plaguing the city, according to court records related to Telfair’s pending misdemeanor criminal charge of lying to police about the supposed threat to city officials.

Court documents allege that Telfair concocted the entire episode.

Just on the face of it, one redneck in a city the size of Petersburg isn’t a huge deal. Of course, any genuine threat needs to be thoroughly investigated and prosecuted, but there are lots of crackpots who make threats.

But the politically correct narrative that says America is awash with anti-black racists makes any racist incident seem particularly important. This, of course, provides a huge incentive to manipulate politics by producing bogus incidents.

Yet Another Bogus Claim of a Campus Racial Attack

We are slow getting this posted, but it’s significant, and we want to record it. From NBC News:

Three university students who claimed they were victims of a racially-motivated attack on a bus in Albany, New York, will now face charges for assault and misleading police about the alleged incident.

The three black, female students at the State University of New York in Albany told authorities they were called racial slurs and “harassed and assaulted” by a group of 10 to 12 white men and women on a city bus just after 1:00 a.m. on Jan. 30, according to a statement from SUNY Albany President Robert J. Jones released at the time.

All three said they were injured during the alleged attack and one of the students was transported to a local hospital with unidentified injuries, according to NBC affiliate WNYT.

But the University Police Department announced plans to charge the women —Ariel Agudio, 20, Alexis Briggs, 20, and Asha Burwell, 20 — on Thursday with assaulting a passenger on the bus and falsely reporting an incident.

Police said in a statement that evidence gathered during their three-week investigation showed the students’ initial claims “that they were victimized, were false” and that the women themselves allegedly assaulted a 19-year-old female passenger.

The charges against the women were supported by interviews with the 35 passengers on board the bus at the time of the incident, security camera footage from the bus and four videos taken by passengers on their mobile phones, according to the police statement.

So we have yet another bogus racial incident. Not only were the black women not victimized, they were the aggressors.

But what was the initial campus reaction?

The three female students reported being “harassed and assaulted” by a group of 10 to 12 white men and women, University President Robert J. Jones said in a statement Saturday, adding that “racial slurs were used by the perpetrators.”

“I am deeply concerned, saddened and angry about this incident,” Jones said. “There is no place in the UAlbany community for violence, no place for racial intolerance and no place for gender violence.”

[. . .]

On Monday afternoon, many of the hundreds who attended a rally in support of the victims chanted “black girls matter,” WNYT reported.

“It’s heartbreaking to hear something like that is happening in such a fine institution, in such a diverse community in 2016,” Darius Fair, a junior at the school, told the station earlier Monday.

More on the reaction here.

Interpretation

So what we have is another case of a knee jerk, politically correct response to a supposed racial incident. Since blacks are a supposed “marginalized group,” any claims of an offense against blacks are to be taken at face value. Indeed, they are an excuse for a lot of self-righteous hand wringing.

The politically correct atmosphere on college campuses thus victimizes black students. They learn that claims of grievance are rewarded. They learn that they can escape the consequences of their own bad behavior by claiming victimization.

But it only works up to a point. When the claims come under scrutiny of professional investigators outside the university, they get trashed.

This is much like claims of sexual assault. Campus kangaroo courts convict males with evidence that would not pass muster in a real criminal proceeding. Often, these males sue, and universities are forced to settle on terms favorable to the accused. The system outside the hot house atmosphere of the campus produces a very different outcome.

Which is to say, life on politically correct campuses is a poor preparation for the real world.

Yet Another Faked “Racist” Incident on a College Campus

It has happened with some regularity: some “racist” incident on a college campus that was actually faked by leftist “diversity” activists in an attempt to goad the institution into pushing a leftist agenda. This one, a few months ago, was at the University of Chicago.

As described by The College Fix:

University of Chicago plays down the lie that provoked a federal investigation

A University of Chicago student who claimed his Facebook page was hacked and filled with racist and violent messages against him and another student has now admitted he faked the attack.

Intended to shame the school into making drastic changes around race and speech on campus, the hoax appears to have worked.

The students behind the ruse, the hoodwinked university and the school newspaper have argued that the hoax – which provoked a federal investigation – should not detract from fixing the school’s “culture of racial intolerance,” in the words of a petition demanding policy changes.

Anatomy of a Hoax

The hoax was the culmination of a long list of racial grievances leveled by the perpetrator, Derek Caquelin, and his friend and fellow activist Vincente Perez.

Indeed, before Caquelin admitted they made the whole thing up, Perez told The College Fix not to ask for more details on the racist Halloween incidents they alleged and instead focus on the hostile “culture” of the university.

The hoax started with an allegation against a shadowy hacker group that calls itself the UChicago Electronic Army, which has feuded with activists who circulated a list of men they claim were sexual threats on campus.

As reported by Chicago area media including Red Eye Chicago, Caquelin’s Facebook page was allegedly hacked by the group Nov. 18.

Caquelin initially said the hacked Facebook status was in retaliation for his online complaints about Halloween costumes depicting Mexican criminals and a corresponding push by Caquelin and Perez to address the concerns of minority students. The Facebook status also said Perez would be the next target.

The petition, co-written by Perez, called for the university to create a “campus climate survey” and “mandatory cross-cultural competency program,” as well as “clearly” lay out its responses to “racially insensitive actions,” incorporate racial and ethnic studies in the Core Curriculum and diversity the faculty, according to the Chicago Maroon.

The Fix could not reach Caquelin for comment.

In a hostile email exchange with The Fix days before Caquelin confessed to the hoax, Perez said: “Please do NOT try to focus on the individual students their identities and their costumes. This movement is about revealing the entire culture of intolerance at the University.”

Despite complaining about racist costumes in multiple Facebook posts and possessing a photo of the students who wore them, Perez said the issue was “not about the students who wore the costume, or the hacking, but about the culture that exists at UChicago where Admin does not address students concern for their safety adequately and promptly.”

Perez declined to refer Caquelin to The Fix for more details, saying it was a “disservice” to the activists “fighting for this culture to be challenged.”

Perez nonetheless shared the widespread media coverage frequently on his Facebook page in a bid to get visitors to sign his petition to the university.

Shortly after receiving a followup email from The Fix, Perez posted a screenshot of his response and claimed he was “exhausted” from responding to media inquiries: “This burden is unfair.”

Muted response to a hoax revealed

Campus leaders, even while acknowledging the hoax and the federal resources expended to investigate a fake threat, couldn’t bring themselves to call for any punishments against the students who cried wolf.

Instead, they endorsed the political agenda behind the hoax.

The university, which said Nov. 20 that the “hateful and anonymous Facebook posts” were part of a “larger pattern,” issued a weak retraction four days later.

“Based on our ongoing investigation we now are confident that the Facebook posting was not created by a hacker,” Karen Coleman, vice president for campus life and student services, told the community Nov. 24.

“That conclusion does not erase the seriousness of this episode, the harm it has caused to individuals and our broader community, or the consequences for those responsible,” Coleman said. “Whatever its purpose, the language used in this incident does not constitute discourse and will not be tolerated.”

Coleman said the school would host “special sessions” for students, faculty and staff who wanted to talk about the incidents and “get support.”

In a Facebook post the same day, Caquelin confessed to the hoax.

“Do not defend my name. I am behind this, and only I,” Caquelin wrote. “No others were involved, so I really would like to ask you to leave them alone. There is no excuse for hate, which includes what I did.”

The editorial board of The Chicago Maroon wrote Nov. 25: “The sentiments that existed before the Facebook post still ring true, and should be treated accordingly. The conversations surrounding diversity and inclusion on campus must continue in light of recent developments.”

The revealing of the hoax “should not de-legitimize the issues of racism that have been raised, or mitigate the seriousness with which they should be addressed,” the editorial said.

In fact, incidents like this should de-legitimize the “issues of racism” that have been raised by leftist activists.

If the evidence of racism is bogus, and the people pushing the cause are dishonest, rewarding these people by pandering to them is grossly irresponsible.

And the charade is made worse in that genuine racism is extremely rare among college students today, whether at Chicago or Marquette. So the activists have to find “racism” in the mere expression of politically incorrect opinions, or the lack of “sensitivity” to the overwrought sensibilities of the perpetually aggrieved or some “microaggression” real or imagined.

But college administrations, who lack the courage to tell the politically correct activists they are being silly, and who indeed welcome an excuse for more bureaucratic initiatives, are easy prey for the race (and gender and sexual orientation) hustlers.