The NYPD is taking a break from investigating multiple shootings in four of New York City's boroughs, including the attempted murder of an NYPD Sergeant, to head down to the city's much overlooked fifth borough, Staten Island, to investigate a case of littering.
Muslims arriving at the New Dorp football field, a few blocks away from the New Dorp High School, discovered some bacon lying on the ground. The field is usually home to the New Dorp Central Cougars and the Staten Island Tech Seagulls, but that day instead of boys and girls running around joyfully in the sun, robed men had come to attend a Ramadan event. The media and police were quickly summoned and now the NYPD is investigating the bacon as a hate crime.
The Ramadan event had been organized by a local chapter of the Muslim American Society. The Muslim American Society is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, and some of its chapters have called for the murder of Jews. Calling for the murder of Jews however falls under freedom of speech. Unlike bacon which is a hate crime.
Staten Island had 226 robberies, 342 felonious assaults, 380 burglaries and 1,129 misdemeanor assaults last year. The figures are probably even worse this year and the NYPD has better things to do than train bacon-sniffing dogs to track down litterers. But the case of the lost bacon is not New York's most absurd Islamophobia witch-hunt to date.
Last year Osman Daramy, an 11-year-old boy, was charged with a hate crime for trying to pull off a girl's hijab in school. Osman had a long history of violent misbehavior but no real disciplinary action was taken against him until he went too far and pulled off a hijab. Newspapers, which generally avoid printing photos of children being arrested unless they murdered someone, gleefully ran pictures of him being led away in handcuffs and leg irons.
Somewhere in the middle of all the madness, Osman's stepfather explained to the press that the Daramy family is Muslim and that Osman participates in Muslim prayers. "How could a Muslim have (committed) another hate crime against a Muslim?" he asked.
The year before that, New York City was treated to an even more horrifying Islamophobic hate crime. On a hot August day, the wire services reported that a man had invaded a mosque, accused the worshipers of being terrorists and then urinated on their prayer rugs. "Start of a bigger trend?" MSNBC asked. "Without a significant response by mainstream political leaders, this disturbing trend will only continue to grow," a CAIR spokesman warned.
But the disturbing trend of mosque carpet urinators did not take off. The perpetrator, Omar Rivera, had been drinking for five straight days after the death of his sister and had never mentioned terrorists. His only crime was accidentally soiling some prayer rugs lying outside the mosque. The only hate came from inside the mosque which had an article on its website accusing the Jews of being responsible for homosexuality and AIDS.
Omar Rivera and Osman Daramy were swept up in the Islamophobia witch-hunt. But they weren't the only ones. Innocent New Yorkers, like Eddie Crespo, an off-duty MTA officer who tried to break up a fight involving a Muslim Imam, have also been caught up in the Islamophobia hysteria. And now the NYPD is hunting for bacon-lovers while prosecutors wonder how to convince a jury that littering is a form of intimidation, just like a swastika or a burning cross.
The Islamophobia witch-hunt is not the NYPD's fault. The NYPD is under severe political pressure to fight Islamophobia and it has to make the requisite number of arrests to show that it is serious about it. The Islamophobia establishment and its media allies are the ones responsible for unleashing the witch-hunt that led to a Latino MTA officer nearly losing his career and a grieving Latino man nearly being locked up for a minor offense. And even Muslim children, such as Osman Daramy, can be caught up in the hysteria of the Islamophobia witch-hunt when there aren't any actual bias crimes against Muslims to be found.
In the last five years there have been multiple Muslim plots to bomb synagogues. The NYPD is investigating bombs in synagogues, not bacon, because there really is a disturbing trend of anti-Semitic hate crimes. The best evidence that there is no similarly disturbing trend of Islamophobic attacks is that the NYPD is bagging and tagging bacon at a Staten Island football field.
Edward Cline