It’s a common cry from Islamic groups, such as the terror-linked Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) or the British group Tell Mama, that Western nations are suffering from an epidemic of ‘Islamophobia’. But in so many instances, it turns out that many of the complaints about harassment that they claim Muslims suffer from, are completely fake. In the UK we’ve had fake claims of hijab pulling and street harassment. In the USA there have been similar false claims of ‘Islamophobia’; claims which have been talked up, both by elements in the mainstream media and by dodgy Islamic groups such as CAIR.

In the latest case of a fake hate crime being committed by Muslims themselves, a fire at a mosque in Des Moines, Iowa which had been publicised as an anti-Muslim attack, turned out to have been allegedly set by a Muslim woman.

The Pamela Geller website has a copy of an article from the USA Today newspaper showing that a mosque fire that had been claimed as ‘Islamophobia’ had most likely been lit, not by some rabid ‘Islamophobe’ but by a Muslim.

Here’s the article from USA Today via Ms Geller’s website. Although the news outlet appears to be trying to play down the fact that a Muslim was involved in this small fire, it is difficult for the paper to whitewash everything about this incident, although they appeared to have had a damn good go at doing so. As is usual policy for this blog, the original text is in italics whereas this blog’s comments are in plain text.

The USA today article via Ms Geller said:

Des Moines firefighters and police were called to the Islamic Center of Des Moines about 10 a.m. There had been a small fire on the carpet, according to a Des Moines police report.

What a strange time to deliberately set a fire. In daylight, when there is a much greater likelihood of the arsonist getting caught?

The fire was extinguished by the mosque’s staff by the time firefighters arrived.

Curiouser and curiouser? A small fire, set when there were plenty of people available to put it out and no offender in the immediate vicinity. As someone who has played around in the past with lighter fluid for pyrotechnic effect reasons, for entertainment purposes, I know how quickly this stuff goes up, how quickly it can cause a fire that can spread quickly to other combustibles, along with the sort of precautions you have to take to avoid this happening. Something seems really not right about this whole story. I doubt that the alleged assailant could have fled the scene so completely in the time-scale given, between the fire being set and then it being discovered and put out by those at the mosque. Something smells bad about this case, and it’s not just the residue of lighter fluid.

Security cameras in the mosque showed a woman, later identified as Aisha Ismail, pouring lighter fluid on the carpet and then starting the fire, said Des Moines police spokesman Sgt. Paul Parizek. Ismail was not on scene when police and firefighters arrived, according to the report.

I very much doubt that she would have got very far from the scene of the crime before emergency services arrived. Someone running or walking fast away from a crime scene would have attracted attention from the police and it’s odd that it took CCTV evidence to identify her, especially as she was an attendee at the mosque. I smell fake hate crime here, a fake hate crime committed either by Ismail alone or with the connivance of others, in order to get non-Muslims to feel sorry for the mosque and its attendees.

Police arrested Ismail at a west Des Moines apartment that evening. She was booked into jail on a charge of first-degree arson.

Good. I’m glad that she has been apprehended but I doubt that she will get the sort of gaol time that a non-Muslim would get for a similar offence. I suspect that there will be a mental health excuse used by the defence in this case, which will lessen the sentence. I certainly don’t expect her to face the 40 years imprisonment that is likely to be handed out to an Hispanic Texan man who burned down a mosque in Victoria, Texas.

There are no indications that this fire was a hate crime, Parizek said. Ismail attended the mosque, he said, adding that her motive for the fire was unclear.

“It doesn’t appear that she was trying to burn the place down,” Parizek said. “It seems like she was trying to make a statement.”

I doubt very much that the denial by the police that this is a ‘hate crime’ will stop Islamic groups from continuing to claim dishonestly that there was an anti-Islamic element to this incident. It appears to be the policy of groups like CAIR in the USA and Tell Mama in the UK that if you keep repeating a lie often enough, then people will start to believe that lie. I suspect that ‘Islamophobia’ monitors in the USA will continue to list this incident as ‘anti-Muslim’ even though it is so obviously not such an offence.

This is another fake ‘hate crime’. The more of these sort of incidents that are uncovered, the less likely are the general population to believe the words of Muslims who claim falsely that they have been targeted for attack.

I find it interesting, to say the least, that so often we have seen similar stories pumped out by various Islamic grievance-mongers, of mosques being attacked shortly after there has been some murderous Islamic atrocity. I do wonder whether all or most of these alleged attacks are indeed carried out by ‘Islamophobes’ or whether they are carried out by Muslims themselves, in order to gain sympathy for Muslims? That they so often occur at times when people are, quite rightly in my view, disgusted by the actions of those Muslims who see killing non-Muslims as justified, makes me ask the question ‘just how many of these attacks really are what they are portrayed as being and how many are self-inflicted?