I wrote about the rash of suspiciously similar hijab hate crimes in which, mainly 18 and 19 year old Muslim college students claimed that they had been attacked by Trump supporters over their Hijabs.
Two of the stories I wrote about had been dismissed by police as hoaxes. Now a third hijab hate crimes hoax bites the dust. And it was one of the more outrageous ones.
A day or so later, a University of Michigan student claimed that she was forced to remove her hijab by a drunk white man who threatened to set her on fire. Despite the horrific nature of this supposed attack, no arrests seem to have been made.
That might be about to change.
A University of Michigan student who told police in November that a man threatened to set her hijab on fire could face charges after investigators discovered she fabricated the entire story, police announced Wednesday.
According to a statement from the Ann Arbor Police Department, detectives worked along with the U-M Division of Public Safety and the FBI to investigate the case, which had been classified as ethnic intimidation.
"Investigators conducted witness interviews and reviewed multiple surveillance videos of the area in question," the department said. "During the course of the investigation, numerous inconsistencies in the statements provided by the alleged victim were identified. Following a thorough investigation, detectives have determined the incident in question did not occur."
After the incident, the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for the incident to be investigated as a hate crime, saying the “alleged attack is just the latest anti-Muslim incident reported since the election of Donald Trump as president.”
The student made the report during a post-election increase in reports of threats, intimidation and racially charged violence around the country.
Except some of these incidents simply never occurred.
They struck at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Two white males ran out of a car, tore off her hijab, hit her and stole her wallet. One of these mysterious muggers was wearing a Trump hat.
The president of the Muslim Students Association claimed that the attack had rattled the campus. The ACLU was “outraged” and was as eager as the “victim” to connect the attack to Trump. It was even more outraged that the imaginary attackers had, “shouted slurs and wore Donald Trump clothing.”
It was only hours after the election and the media eagerly jumped on the story. But the 18-year-old Middle Eastern student had made it all up and police charged her with filing a false report.
This is the second of the hijab post-election hate crime hoaxes to be disproven. It may very well not be the last.