If you’ve been paying attention to the news recently, you will be aware of the recent attack on a young Muslim girl where, apparently, a man attempted to cut off her hijab. Twice a male came at her with a pair of scissors and allegedly tried to remove the religious covering while she was walking to school. Many people, progressive or otherwise, rushed to condemn this attack, right up to Justin Trudeau.
The follow up to that was a bit more muted—the fact that the original story was completely fake. The Toronto Police issued a statement saying, quite simply, that “it did not happen” and no further information on the matter has been forthcoming.
Whether or not a reported incident confirms or denies your pre-existing biases, the best course of action is to wait for the rest of the story to come out.
So, it appears that this was not in fact a real hate crime at all, and supposedly we will never know the full truth of the story.
Nevertheless, this is part of a distinct pattern of hate crimes that make big news, internationally, that in the end turn out to be entirely fake.
This is a pattern that seems to have ramped up substantially since Donald Trump ran for office. The reporting that these are in fact false attacks is often quite a bit quieter than their initial reporting, and I imagine most people end up missing the corrections. It does indeed seem to fit the general narrative of Trump having unleashed evil racists everywhere, so most do not complain.
One of the first ones that made headlines nationwide was the burning of a Mississippi church with a predominantly Black congregation. This incident took place one week before the U.S. election, and was big news.
Written on the church was “Vote Trump.” Everyone ran with the story as an example of the hate that Trump had unleashed. But now if you go to the Atlantic article, there is an addendum: the person that burned down the church was themselves a church member, who was also Black.
Many may recall the story of a Muslim woman who was attacked on a train in New York in December 2016. Apparently, three men attacked a woman on the subway, yelling “Trump,” and tried to remove the woman’s hijab. Again, the media ran with the story.
In the end, the woman admitted that the story was entirely false, and The New York Times reported that it was made up due to apparent problems with her family. She has now been charged with filing a false report.
These are the two largest hoaxes that I will show you, as they were widely covered in the media. But there have been many more cases where the media has picked up on a hate crime and in the end, it turned out to be entirely false. If I wished, I could make this a list, but that is not the point.
Now the purpose of this piece is not to say that legitimate hate crimes do not happen. They obviously do.
But, there is a distinct pattern over the last couple of years of some of the more widely reported ones turning out to be entirely false, and quite often, the reported victim ends up being charged with filing a false report. However, reported hate crimes do seem to fulfill the purpose of condemning Trump and his supporters as enablers of hate.
So, no matter how much a report may confirm one’s pre-existing biases, a strong suggestion for the future would be to wait for the investigation first before commenting.
Don’t be a Trudeau.
