At the Sentinel, our guess is that no one at the Kansas City Star ever heard of “Punish a Muslim Day” until the Star’s Max Londberg reported a month after the fact about the alleged attack on a female Muslim student at Penn Valley Community College.
Londberg reports, “The incident occurred on ‘Punish a Muslim day,’ an Islamophobic effort that began with anonymous letters arriving in communities in London.” He writes this as though everyone knew about ‘Punish a Muslim day.’ We at the Sentinel confess our ignorance. As closely as we track the news, we never heard of it.
Apparently, “Punish a Muslim Day” is April 3 in Great Britain. At least that is what some anonymous letters promised. To give the Star story credence, one has to believe that an internationally-attuned student at Penn Valley heard that April 3 was to be “Punish a Muslim Day” and decided to insult a Muslim girl on April 3, strike her in the face, and push her down the stairs.
The FBI has to take these claims seriously. The Bureau is now offering a $10,000 reward which is what it does after having “followed all other logical leads.” In other words, the FBI has no evidence.
If the FBI has to take these claims seriously, the media do not. And yet they inevitably do. In August 2017 a Minneapolis mosque was firebombed. The alleged terrorist received tons of international attention. The $30,000 reward has gone unclaimed. The FBI conceded “it’s always a possibility” the crime may have been a hoax.
Weeks earlier, Canadian police dropped charges against a 57-year-old man after the Muslim man who claimed to have been attacked admitted he “exaggerated” the incident.
In late August 2017, an Indiana State University professor received one year probation for reporting non-existent anti-Muslim threats and an assault.
In June 2017, a fire at an Iowa stirred up the media until the police arrested a young Muslim woman for starting it.
In 2016, even the New York Times felt compelled to report, “An 18-year-old Muslim woman who claimed that three men attacked her on a Manhattan subway this month and tried to pull off her hijab was charged on Wednesday with filing a false report, the police said.”
In 2015, a “suspicious” fire at a Houston mosque turned out to have been set by one of the mosque’s own worshippers.
Also in 2015, a New York Muslim murdered his wife in front of his child after the police busted him for a false claim that his family were called terrorists and attacked.
“For every rare and bona fide act of ‘Islamophobia’ in North America,” writes Michelle Malkin, herself a minority, “there are multiple acts of Islamo-faux-bia ginned up to stir attention, milk public compassion, and generate unfounded fear.”
It is possible that the Penn Valley student was telling the truth. One would be more inclined to believer her, however, had she not tied it into an international event that none of her fellow students was likely to have even heard of.