Jimmy Carter, Phony Hate Crimes, Etc.

Phony Hate Crimes Watch

Students at George Washington University awoke the morning of October 8 to a campus blanketed in posters that blared, "HATE MUSLIMS? SO DO WE!!!" The posters depicted a "typical Muslim" with "lasers in eyes," "venom from mouth," a "suicide vest," and a "peg leg for smuggling children and heroin," and purported to be an advertisement for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, an event Young America's Foundation in conjunction with David Horowitz's Freedom Center is hosting at GW and campuses around the country to bring attention to the threat of radical Islam.

Before you could say hate crime! the president of the YAF chapter had been asked by a university bureaucrat to sign a letter condemning hate speech, and was summarily dragged before a "peace forum" where he was booed and hissed by 100 of his inquisitor-classmates for suggesting, while he defended his group, that a minority of Muslims, however small, support radicalism and terrorism. Just as quickly, the story of an anti-Muslim hate crime at GW popped up on IslamOnline.net and reached papers as far away as India and Pakistan. Steven Knapp, president of the Washington, D.C., university, issued a statement: "We do not condone, and we will not tolerate, the dissemination of fliers or other documents that vilify any religious, ethnic, or racial group."

For what it's worth, THE SCRAPBOOK isn't sure if President Knapp was playing dumb or simply being dumb. Had he read the fine print on the posters, he would have seen that a group called "Students for Conservativo-Fascism Awareness" claimed responsibility and had posted a link to an antiwar video on the Internet. Even the Washington Post was quick enough on the uptake to caution in the headline of its story that "Posters May Be Intended to Mock Conservative Group."