This is an oddball story that conveys the shaky nature of hate crimes and unraveling motive.
“In this attack of the Muslim woman, we know of no evidence that would indicate that this attack was anything but a hate crime,” Munjed Ahmad, a lawyer for the woman and board member of American Muslims for Palestine, claimed at a press conference held on April 14, four days after the 58-year-old woman was assaulted while walking home from prayer services at the Islamic Society of Milwaukee.
Ahmad and groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition and the left-wing Jewish Voice for Peace, all called the incident a hate crime. Milwaukee government officials echoed the claim.
“It concerns us tremendously because what we’re seeing again is specifically attacks and hate targeting Muslim women,” Janan Najeeb, the president of the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition, said at the event.
But what actually happened is far more complicated.
“I don’t know you,” she told the man. He responded as he approached: “but I know who you are.”
The woman said that the man, who was described as Hispanic and in his 20s, grabbed her and threw her to the ground and began to strike her in the head and body. Nothing was stolen during the attack, said the woman, who went to the hospital and was interviewed by police that day and several days after.
On April 12, a Milwaukee police detective visited the woman at her home. By that point, the attack had been reported in the news, and civil rights groups had started calling the incident a hate crime.
During a police interview the next day, the woman said again that she did not believe she was targeted because of her religion. She also said that her attacker did not try to take her hijab, as had been reported in the press.
In her April 13 police interview, the woman again said that she believed the assault was linked to her daughter.
“She stated she doesn’t approve of her daughter’s lifestyle and she is appalled by the fact that her daughter recently left her husband and she is now in a lesbian relationship with another woman,” the report reads.
“She feels that is why she was targeted.”
The victim has since gone on to contradict her statement to the police. Which makes her rather unreliable at best. But her description of the incident is not suggestive of an Islamic motive.
The media and its Islamist pet hate groups seek to wedge every incident into a simplistic hate crime narrative. But life is often far more complicated. There are acts of random violence that leave victims struggling to figure out why it happened. This may be another one of them.
Some assaults have no actual answer. But the media's answer to anything that happens to a Muslim is Islamophobia and to anything done by a Muslim is mental illness. It's simplistic and a lie.