By
Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
When three Arab Muslim students were
shot and wounded in Burlington, Vermont, politicians and the media
immediately hyped it as the ‘Islamophobic Crime of the Century’.
President
Biden issued a statement declaring that “there is absolutely no place
for violence or hate in America.” Vice President Kamala Harris’
statement bemoaned that “far too many people live with the fear that
they could be targeted and attacked based on their beliefs or who they
are”. The three Muslim men identified as ‘Palestinian’, two of them were
wearing keffiyehs and Kamala, like many other leftists, was implying
that the shooter was ‘anti-Palestinian’.
“The idea that three
young men walking down the street get shot, perhaps because of no other
reason than they are Palestinian, is unspeakable,” Sen. Bernie Sanders
said. ”But I gotta tell you, this is not just a local phenomenon, this
is happening all over the country.”
Then he blasted Israel.
“I’m
heartbroken by yesterday’s senseless shooting of three
Palestinian-American students visiting Burlington. We do not tolerate
hate or Islamophobia in Vermont,” Sen Peter Welch tweeted.
“I do
want to be clear that there is no question this was a hateful act,”
Sarah George, a the local Soros DA, claimed without evidence.
“In
this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect
that it may have been a hate-motivated crime,” Burlington Police Chief
Jon Murad argued.
Anti-Israel groups
convened a rally calling for the destruction of Israel.
“I
stand here to stand with oppressed people who now fear for their lives
just walking down the street here in Burlington,” Vermont Lt. Gov. David
Zuckerman told the hateful mob.
A speaker
at the hate rally
with the antisemitic University of Vermont affiliate of Students for
Justice in Palestine blamed the shootings on Jews, calling them the
“shameless monsters who enabled this” and denouncing “a crime of
unspeakable racist hatred, a crime borne out of white supremacy, out of
fascist, genocidal malice, a crime borne out of Zionism.”
All of these claims, along with many others around the shootings, were based on lies.
The
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee falsely claimed that “a man
shouted and harassed the victims, then proceeded to shoot them. We have
reason to believe this shooting occurred because the victims are Arab.”
In reality, they had been shot by a local resident outside his house who did not say a word.
The
three Muslim men were returning home from a party on Saturday night
when James J. Eaton, a local resident with a history of mental
instability, stumbled out of a white clapboard house on the residential
street and without a word fired four shots at the three men.
Eaton had been described as
“that hippie guy” and
“progressive”,
an organic farmer who had posted a meme with a definition of “Amerika”
that called it “the worst sense of the United States, ie imperialism,
corruption and the global exportation of American culture.”
He appeared to be a Biden supporter
Media
outlets, anti-Israel activists and politicians attributed the shootings
to the Hamas war. Everyone from Biden and Kamala on down emphasized the
“Palestinian” identities of those shot and implied that Eaton had
attacked them because he was opposed to the ‘Palestinian’ cause.
In reality, Eaton supported Hamas.
On December 6,
Seven Days, a local news outlet
known for breaking stories about local politics, revealed that Eaton
had tweeted, “the notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state
from occupation is absurd. They are owed a state. Pay up.”
Responding to an article about a proposed ceasefire,
he wrote, “What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?”
Local
politicians were aware of this which is why in December a Burlington
City Council resolution from Councilman Ali Dieng, an African Muslim
immigrant currently running for mayor, trying to tie the shootings to an
attack on Israel failed, and so did a resolution pushing the false
claim that the students had been targeted because of their identity.
The latest Islamophobia hoax had fallen apart in Vermont, but still lingered nationally.
Media
outlets which had rushed to spread the false claims never retracted or
modified them. After a month of pushing the lie that the shootings were a
response to Israel’s campaign against Hamas or to the ‘Muslim’ or
‘Palestinian’ identities of the three men, the new information was not
reported, acknowledged or in any way addressed by politicians and media
reporters.
NBC
News, which had run an entire ‘live blog’ about the shootings, pushing
anti-Israel and Islamophobia narratives, did not provide an update that
would have contradicted its narrative.
Even in December, NBC News
still continued running articles falsely linking the shootings to the
Hamas war and attacking Israel. A Dec 5 article quoted one of the men
shot as spreading anti-Israel propaganda and claiming that “this is
happening to Palestinians across the country and, more importantly, in
Gaza. We’re mad at the system that’s allowing not three of us to be
injured but thousands and thousands and millions of us to be displaced
and injured and killed.”
PBS ran a similar article in December
quoting an uncle of one of the men as contending that “even in this
country, even in this town — that many of the risks that exist for my
nephew and his friends in Palestine exist for them here.”
This torrent of anti-Israel and pro-terrorist propaganda was based on absolutely nothing.
There
was never a single shred of evidence that the men had been targeted.
And the only basis for this claim that was ever cited was that two of
the men were wearing ‘keffiyehs’ and speaking English and Arabic when
they were shot. This entirely circumstantial information was amplified
with feverish claims and rushed statements by elected officials,
prosecutors and police.
The reality that has emerged is that
Eaton was mentally unstable, left-leaning, opposed to America and
supportive of Islamic terrorists. He was neither Jewish nor pro-Israel.
He had actually publicly stated his support for Hamas.
Eaton
could not have known that the three Muslim men were going to walk past
the house where he was living and it’s implausible that he would have
had the time to plan such an attack.
The
Muslim men were walking down the middle of a small narrow residential
street with no street lights at night and Eaton would not have had
enough time to realize the men passing by were Muslims, grab a gun, run
out and shoot them. That’s even assuming that he had spent the whole
evening by the window watching for incoming Muslims in an 87% white
Vermont city.
Most likely, Eaton, suffering from an episode, stumbled out and opened fire.
Shooting
four rounds at three men suggests this was not a planned mass shooting.
He might have just as easily shot at anybody on the street or at nobody
except the voices in his head. According to his mother and an
ex-girlfriend, he had a history of violence and mental illness.
All of this was well known, yet the media instead chose to push a false anti-Israel narrative.
The Burlington shootings were far from the first
Islamophobia hoax to gain a national platform.
The
killings of four Muslim men in Albuquerque were initially billed as
Islamophobia. Biden even issued a statement declaring that “my
administration stands strongly with the Muslim community” and warned
that “these hateful attacks have no place in America.” The attacks were
Islamophobic, but the perpetrator was a Sunni Muslim Afghan refugee
who hated Shiites.
Hasan Minhaj, the Netflix Muslim comedian, was
recently exposed
as having made up the stories of discrimination that he had built his
high-profile career around. During the campaign against Hamas, CAIR
promoted a false claim that a Muslim man had been hit by a Jewish driver
shouting “Kill all Palestinians,”and “Long live Israel”. Before Biden
and other elected officials could issue statements, the actual
perpetrator turned out
to be the victim’s own brother.
And then there
was the rash of Hijab snatching
hate crime hoaxes across the country which included
Yasmin Seweid,
an 18-year-old college student in NYC, falsely claiming that three
Trump supporters had tried to tear off her hijab while shouting, “take
that rag off your head”.
The Burlington shootings were similar to
a different category of hate crime hoaxes in which a crime did occur,
but the motive was misattributed to ‘Islamophobia’. One was the rape and
murder of Nabra Hassanen:
a 17-year-old Muslim girl in Virginia by a low-IQ illegal alien MS-13
member from El Salvador after a fight with her friends. Another was a
parking dispute in Chapel Hill that had nothing to do with Islam and where the shooter was
a Rachel Maddow fan.
(As in Burlington, leftists and Muslims seem to shoot far more Muslims than conservatives do.)
Despite
the facts of the cases, sustained pressure by Islamist groups led the
authorities to brand these crimes as being ‘Islamophobic’ which then
allowed groups, many of them with terror ties, to claim that any
criticism of Islam or Islamic terrorism would get Muslims killed.
The Burlington shootings were blatantly exploited to attack Israel and promote terrorism.
Vigils in front of City Hall and at Brown University called for the destruction of the Jewish State.
One
of the men, Hisham Awartani, told the hateful mob at Brown that his
shooting “did not happen in a vacuum” but that he was only “one
casualty in a much wider conflict” and “had I been shot in the West
Bank” and “the medical services which saved my life here would have
likely been withheld by the Israeli army.”
While the Burlington
story has fallen apart, like the previous ‘Islamophobic’ hoaxes the
damage was already done. The larger purpose of Islamophobia hoaxes, like
that of Islamic terrorism, is to reframe the perpetrators as the
victims and to justify Islamic violence against non-Muslims.
That is why the truth matters. Islamophobia lies kill, the truth exposes the killers.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
