Surprise! Newsweek Blames Islamophobia for Hoax about Islamophobia

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[Update: In the time it took me to write this, Lucy Westcott - @lvzwestcott - has disappeared from Twitter.]

Yesterday, I reported on the case of Yasmin Seweid - the 18-year-old Muslima who made international headlines by claiming to have been harassed by Islamophobic Trump bullies on the New York Subway, only to later admit that she made the whole thing up. She has now been charged with filing a false police report. Towards the end of my post, I wrote:

I wager that the "aspiring fashion model" will come out of this just fine. Islamophobia forced her to lie, you see. How else could this powerless young woman get Americans to face up to their own racism? I predict she'll be a spokeswoman for CAIR (Council for American-Islamic Relations) within five years. Or some such.

I was honestly surprised at how quickly my prediction came to pass.

You can read most of the above referenced Newsweek article here.

To be fair, author Lucy Westcott doesn't explicitly blame only Islamophobia for Miss Seweid's malicious and dishonest behavior. There's an implicit bit in her article about possible pressures coming from immigrant parents who might be overly demanding.

Wait, isn't that a racist stereotype?

But the general theme is clear. It's tough to be a Muslim teenager in America, mainly due to . . . America. This might drive you to file a false police report and in the process publicly lie about non-Muslim New Yorkers (many of them are liable to assault you; many of the rest, if they witness it, will not lift a finger to help).

It's now being reported that Seweid invented the story in part to account for the fact that she was late coming home. I don't disbelieve this, but it doesn't completely explain it - after all, there are a million possible lies a teenager could tell her parents that don't involve being attacked by racist Trump supporters.

Or not. If we're going to absolve Seweid from all or at least most of her moral responsibility, I propose this: The ideology of Islam with its ever-present "us vs. them" subtext and its endorsement of "Taqiyya" or lying in the cause of Islam, coupled with the contemporary liberal obsession with hate speech/hate crimes/racism/Islamophobia, etc. presented the teenager with only one real alternative - or so it appeared in her own mind:

Fake a hate crime.

I'm all for trying to help liberate Miss Seweid from the pressures of Islam and liberalism. Can we at least put some kind of restraining order on, say, any further exposure to the Koran, or at a minimum, American fake-news publications like Newsweek?

You know, keep her away from the bad influences.

BREAKING: New York Muslima Who Claimed Islamophobic Assault by Trump Bullies, Admits She Lied - Now She's Under Arrest

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Pamela Geller correctly called it a few days ago: "Color me skeptical, but the whole thing stinks, like Fulton’s fish market."

Baruch College student, Yasmin Seweid, 18, claimed to have been the victim of an anti-Muslim hate-crime on the New York subway at the hands of three men yelling Trump slogans. But there was no surveillance footage of phone footage of the alleged perpetrators, no other witnesses and her story sounded suspicious and thin to the police.

Nevertheless, she became an instant international celebrity because her fake story fit the "Islamophobia" narrative. Headlines around the world touted her "story" (see end of post). If you thought Islamophobia in the United States was bad before (went the subtext), look how much worse it is now that Trump won the election. 

Then she mysteriously went missing for two days. Skeptics started to sense that she might be a Muslim Tawana Brawley. Anti-Islamophobes wondered whether she hadn't been kidnapped by white supremacists.

Today she admitted that she made the whole thing up, and the police are charging her with filing a false police report.

I wager that the "aspiring fashion model" will come out of this just fine. Islamophobia forced her to lie, you see. How else could this powerless young woman get Americans to face up to their own racism? I predict she'll be a spokeswoman for CAIR  (Council for American-Islamic Relations) within five years. Or some such.

In a just world, she would be sent down to Guantanamo for ten.

From the New York Daily News:

She made it all up — and now she’s under arrest. 

The Muslim college student who claimed she was harassed on the subway by three men who shouted “Donald Trump,” called her a terrorist and tried to rip her hijab off her head has admitted to detectives that she concocted the entire story, the Daily News has learned. 

Yasmin Seweid, 18, has been charged with filing a false report, a police source said. 

Seweid had numerous opportunities to admit the incident never happened but again and again stood by her story, the source said. 

Drunk men screaming 'Trump' attack Muslim straphanger, cops say 

On Wednesday, after again being confronted with questions from detectives increasingly suspicious of her story she recanted and said she made it all up, citing family problems. 

The police source said criminally charging her was appropriate. 

“This isn’t something we normally like to do but she had numerous opportunities to admit nothing happened and she kept sticking by her story,” the source said. 

“We dedicated a lot of resources to this — and don’t get me wrong, this is what we do — but we had guys going back and forth, looking for video and witnesses. And we couldn’t find anything. 

L.I. Muslim student who was harassed at MTA station is missing 

“Nothing happened — and there was no victim.” 

It wasn’t immediately clear what Seweid hoped to gain by lying to police. 

The Baruch College student claimed that on her way home to Long Island the night of Dec. 1 she encountered three drunken men on an uptown No. 6 train.
She said straphangers stood by and did nothing while the trio mocked her and tried to tear the religious garb from her head. 

Cops find missing Muslim student harassed by Trump supporters 

“It made me really sad after when I thought about it,” she said. “People were looking at me and looking at what was happening and no one said a thing. They just looked away.” 

She provided police a description of the suspects, one of whom police believed they saw on video following her when she got off the subway at Grand Central Station to look for police. At the same time, there were inconsistencies in her story. 

For awhile, police believed those to be nothing more than typical of someone traumatized, but detectives could not find witnesses or any significant video.
Then, last week, she left home and was reported missing on Thursday — only to turn up safe and sound Friday. 

Muslim student allegedly harassed by Trump supporters safely home 

That, sources said, increased the suspicions surrounding her tale. 

The Desperate Hours - Is This the Beginning of the End for Bergoglio and His Men?

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In the last two days these events have transpired:

1. The Pope and his close allies have started to promote the narrative that opposition to the agenda of Amoris Laetitia is part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. The conspiracy involves American bloggers, English and Italian journalists, dusty Catholic periodicals, the leading Catholic media company, cyberattacks by quasi-anonymous "trolls" and those who spread "fake news." They're all part of the "right-wing propaganda machine."

2. The Pope used an incredibly vulgar metaphor to describe his opponents (or those who he identified as spreading "fake news"). In an interview he said they are either sexually excited by, or like eating...sh*t. Needless to say, this shocked many faithful Catholics. It wasn't a mistranslation.

3. In the same interview, the Pope apparently confirmed that Amoris Laetitia sanctioned communion for the divorced and remarried. This is notable in that while he has now said much the same thing in a quasi-private letter and now in that interview, he has refused to say it "officially." Indeed, one of his men threatened to "de-cardinalize" four cardinals who asked the question through official channels.

4. A well-known and respected Rome-based journalist and Vatican "insider" claimed that the Pope is asking various allies to defend Amoris Laetitia.

5. The Pope and/or his allies signaled through the anonymous site Pope news (reputed to be another sock-puppet of the Pope's "mouthpiece" Antonio Spadaro, or the equivalent) that he has lost the support of EWTN. The broadcast network is now apparently part of the right-wing conspiracy.

6. Three of the Pope's leading opponents (and yes, I think it's fair to describe them as that) - Cardinals Burke and Bradmuller and Bishop Athanasius Schneider - made a joint presentation in Rome. Schneider spoke of a "schism" that was already a de facto reality, and likened the current "climate of fear" within the Church to that of the Soviet regime of his earlier days. It's probable that they are attempting to line up support for a "correction" of the Pope. The Pope fears this.

In my last blog post I made a Humphrey Bogart reference, likening the Pope's "mouthpiece" Spadaro to Bogart's paranoid Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. Bogart also starred in a film called The Desperate Hours about a family taken hostage by a desperate criminal (Bogart). It was a near thing but the criminal was finally defeated. I assume the "desperate" applied both to him and the members of that family.

Are we in the final reel of The Desperate Hours?

The Pope seems desperate and unhinged. Some of his allies (Spadaro, at the least) seem desperate and unhinged.  At precisely the same moment that Spadaro was commenting on the Pope's alleged patience and serenity, the Pope was lashing out at his "enemies," calling them sh*t eaters.

The Pope.

They're desperate. Does this mean a bright morning for the Catholics and the Catholic Church is about to dawn? No. Sorry to say it but desperate men sometimes win. Or even if they lose they manage to do a lot of damage. Hitler was defeated, but ask Europe whether that process was pleasant. 

And no, I'm not equating Bergoglio with Hitler. Hitler was a mass-murderer but as far as I know he didn't care one way or another about anyone's soul.

Bergoglio does. He wants to drag you with him to...well, you know very well where he wants to drag you to. You won't let him. And you will do all you can to prevent him from dragging others there.

But be on your guard. Cornered animals fight hardest when they are injured.

Desperate hours indeed.      

Obama Signs Executive Order Banning Fake News

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The headline of this post is of course a fake news headline. I made it up.

I want to say "fooled ya!" But I probably didn't.

In fact, though, I took the post's header photo from a real fake news story titled "Obama Signs Executive Order Banning the Pledge of Allegiance in Schools Nationwide." It appeared on the real fake news site abcnews.com.

Yes, there is such a thing as real fake news.

As opposed to fake fake news.

Fake news has recently been a burning topic in the media. Even Obama referred to it.

He really did.

It's been identified as a kind of scourge and perhaps the reason why Trump won the election.

Trump voters rely on fake news, you see. Most of us are rural and only got internet hookups a few years ago. Plus it's difficult to operate a computer or at least check sources while clinging to a bible in one hand and a gun in the other.

With me, it's a cocktail and a cigar but still.

Speaking of fake fake news, the whole controversy is actually almost entirely fake.

J.E. Dyer of the conservative website Liberty Unyielding analyzed one of the most prominent fake-news-is-a-scourge stories (from Buzzfeed) and found that if you actually looked at the examples discussed, virtually all of them were cases of perfectly ordinary interpretation or opinion, not fake news in the sense of abcnews.com.

And yes, they were mostly examples of conservative interpretation or opinion.

Now that many sources within the "mainstream" media have been exposed by Wikileaks as clandestinely collaborating with one side in a political election, there's already a counterattack against the rival "alternative" media. And that counterattack is based on lies.

Not interpretation or opinion but lies. Read the Dyer piece or the recent article by Paul Crookston at National Review which comes to essentially the same conclusions.

Is fake news, even real fake news, destroying the integrity of our democracy (or at least what's left of it)? No, but you are very often being lied to.

And not by abc.news.co, whose entire site is one big wink (or at least you'll recognize it as one big wink if you have even slightly more sense than, say, your average Hamilton chorus member).

You know who the liars are.

Don't be fooled.