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Daniel Pipes

I published an article today, "'Islamophobic Prejudice' and CAIR," that documents how one Mirza Akram of Everett, Washington, plastered vile anti-Arab graffiti on the store he was managing and planning to buy before allegedly setting fire to it.

Well, the ever-vigilant Michelle Malkin, in a May 29, 2003 article titled "Myth of the Muslim hate crime epidemic" and a May 30, 2003 article titled "More Muslim hate crime myths" provides specifics of four other instances in which American Muslims – Ahmad Saad Nasim, Mazhar Tabesh, Nezar "Mike" Maad, and Aqil Yassom Al-Timimi – won themselves vast sympathy as victims of "hate crimes," only to have it turn out that they were actually the perps. She notes that what she calls "hoax crimes" have a real price: they "waste precious investigative resources, exacerbate racial tension, create terror and corrode goodwill."

In all, then, there are at least five cases proven or alleged hoax crimes since 9/11; how many more might there be that no one has counted? Malkin wonders about this too, noting that

    when it comes to cracking down on hate crime hoaxes by Arabs and Muslims, the feds—too busy conducting politically correct "outreach" with Muslim leaders who pooh-pooh hate crime fraud—have been appallingly negligent. There is no way of knowing whether fake hate crimes outnumber real anti-Muslim crimes because no law enforcement agency keeps track. (Note to frustrated cops: Send me your suspected hoax cases and let's get started.)

She also blames journalists for ignoring this phenomenon: "It's a shame so many in the media are more concerned with protecting the twisted cult of victimhood than with exposing hard truths." (August 25, 2004)

Sep. 30, 2004 update: Add a sixth apparent fraudster, Amjad Abunar, to the five above. Here is the text of an article titled "Hate-Crime Accuser Charged With Arson":

    McALLEN, Tex., Sept. 29 - The owner of a Middle Eastern meat market who had said he was the victim of a hate crime in this border town was arrested and arraigned Tuesday [Sept. 28] on a felony arson charge that he set fire to his own business. The man, Amjad Abunar, had complained that "Go Home" was twice spray-painted on a door of his Al Madinah Market before a fire on Aug. 6 that gutted the small delicatessen. Only last week, the graffiti and fire were cited as evidence by a Washington advocacy group that hate crimes against Muslims were on the rise in Texas. Bond for Mr. Abunar was set at $150,000, and he remained in jail on Wednesday. [DP: hyperlink added]

And which "Washington advocacy group" might that be? Why, CAIR of course. The article goes on:

    Representatives of the advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which had complained that McAllen officials were not investigating the fire as a possible hate crime, said they were stunned Wednesday to learn of Mr. Abunar's arrest. Ibrahim Hooper, a council official in Washington, said Mr. Abunar had assured him he had nothing to do with setting the fire.

One wonders if, after they get over being "stunned," whether CAIR will retract the strong statements it made about Amjad Abunar or whether – as it did in the case of Mirza Akram – just go mute.

Feb. 6, 2005 update: Belatedly, here is the scoop on a seventh "hate crime" hoax, this one perpetrated by Saleh Nawash, 54. A naturalized U.S. citizen who emigrated from Lebanon, Nawash is a leader at the Islamic Mosque of Cleveland. He owned a meat store called Halal Products (halal is the Islamic equivalent of kosher) and in July 2002 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy, attempted aggravated arson, and attempted insurance fraud. When Halal Products failed, reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer (not online), Nawash coveted the $100,000 insurance policy on the business and hired an arsonist to do the dirty deed. The prosecutor provided details on how he left kerosene in the building and how, to win sympathy, he plotted to make the fire look like a hate crime. Nawash received a jail sentence of nine years; his side-kick Ahmed Jaffal, 49, got eight years.

Nov. 13, 2005 update: Here is hoax number eight: Shehab Ahmed and his father Shahriar fulminated on March 23, 2005, David Reinhard recounts in the Oregonian, because the former had been kicked off an airplane.

    the father-son duo were the top story on KGW (8)'s 11 p.m. news. "The son of a prominent Muslim is told he can't fly home to Portland and tonight, his family is looking for answers," anchor Russ Lewis announced. Shehab, we were told, was coming home from UCLA for spring break when he found out he was on the FBI terror watch list. He was eventually allowed on a flight, but, said Shehab, "To know that the government puts me on the list as bin Laden and whatnot . . . that's scary."

But these charges were bogus, Reinhard explains.

    Here's what actually happened at LAX: Shehab Ahmed did miss one plane home to Portland, but only because he got to the airport late. When he tried to get on another flight, there was a problem—a momentary one. Shehab's name matched a name on the terror watch list. The ticket agent asked for ID, and Shehab was allowed on the flight to Portland.

    And here's what did not happen: Ahmed wasn't on the watch list or put on it. He was not told he couldn't fly home; he was allowed on the flight he wanted to be on after providing ID. He wasn't yanked out line or taken to a special room for questioning by government agents. In fact, government agents—TSA personnel—were not involved in any of this. What happened to Shehab that March day isn't found in any TSA or FBI report; there was no incident to report.

But the incident was written up – by Shehab himself on his blog. The original posting is now gone, but google.com has helpfully cached it. Titled "Apparently I'm on the FBI Watchlist," Shehab recounts the inconvenience he encountered that day. On telling his father what happened, he recounts, the latter responded oddly: "Instead of getting the expected response of ‘what? Seriously? Are you OK? What happened? Etc.' My dad was like ‘great, I'll call my contacts at Channel 8 and 6 and see what we can get.'"

When confronted with this evidence of his falsehood, the elder Ahmed for months did nothing. Finally, when approached for this story by Reinhard, he did acknowledge that he quickly learned his son was not on the watch list and said "I apologize for escalating it beyond that." (Apparently, the television station contacted him on another matter and he took advantage of the opportunity to tell his son's tale of woe.)

Aug. 31, 2006 update: Patrick Poole tells the tale of Musa Shteiwi and his son Essa, our ninth hoaxers.

    The story that developed in July [2006] was just too good to pass up: a Jordanian-born restaurant owner in Xenia, Ohio had been the apparent victim of repeated attempts to burn down his store. The day after the third attack, when a Molotov cocktail had been thrown through the front window of his business, yet another explosion rocked the store – the second attack in 24 hours – sending the owner and his son to the hospital with burns over 80-90 percent of their bodies. An employee in an adjoining store was also taken to the hospital for injuries.

    Just hours before the blast, the store owner had been interviewed by a local TV station vowing that he would never give in to pressure to close the store (video of the interview can be seen here).

Problem was, this story of anti-Muslim hatred in small-town America wasn't true.

    Arson investigators have determined that the final blast that severely injured the store owner, Musa Shteiwi, and his son, Essa, was set by the pair themselves. In a performance worthy of a Darwin Award, the Shteiwis were standing in a pool of gasoline that they intended to use as an accelerant in setting their store ablaze later that night when Musa Shteiwi took a break and lit up a cigarette, igniting the gasoline prematurely and causing the blast that inflicted their injuries.

    But there's more: prosecutors claim that Shteiwi had hired a former employee, Joshua Hunter, to commit the previous attacks against his store that CAIR had insisted were hate crimes committed by non-Muslim members of the Xenia community. Hunter has been jailed and charged with arson, and similar charges against Musa and Essa Shteiwi are pending until after they have recovered from their injuries.

"Islamophobic Prejudice" and CAIR


In the early morning on July 9, 2004, a fire burned much of the Continental Spices Cash & Carry, a grocery store in Everett, Washington, specializing in Pakistani, Indian and Middle Eastern groceries. The fire caused an estimated $50,000 in damages but no injuries. On putting out the fire, police and firefighters found a gasoline can, a spray-painted obscenity against Arabs and a spray-painted white cross. Rupinder Bedi, the proprietor of a 7-Eleven next door, told the Seattle Times how he found Continental Spices' manager, Mirza Akram, 37 and a Pakistani, crying and telling him "he had been harassed by some customers earlier this summer [and that] the verbal slurs didn't stop until he threatened to call police."

Further, the Everett Herald reports,

    The morning of the fire, the store manager told investigators he feared the fire had been set in retaliation for attacks on Americans in the Middle East. He claimed that the month before, two white men came to the store and became upset when they learned he had been born in Pakistan. They left the store angry.

That was the story. On August 19, however, the police arrested Akram in his store on a federal arson warrant. He stands accused of setting fire to the store to collect insurance on the building and its contents. U.S. attorneys explained in court that mounting financial losses led Akram to stage an arson and then make it look like a hate crime.

Specifically: Akram was in the process of buying Continental Spices from the Z.A. Trading Corp. of Seattle; having already paid $52,800, he owed at least another $32,200. But gross sales at Continental Spices dropped from almost $11,000 a month in 2003 to less than $3,000 a month just prior to the fire, a decline in revenues that apparently made it impossible to make the monthly purchase payment of $640 and rent payment of $1,200.

Wrongly thinking Z.A. Trading Corp.'s insurance policy covered the store, Akram allegedly schemed for months to burn it down. (Ironically, the store was not on the policy.) On the evening of July 8. he met with an unnamed male friend (who has since turned state's evidence) at his home and told the friend how he had poured gasoline inside the store and lit incense above the gasoline, expecting the incense would ignite the gasoline.

Akram allegedly had the friend drive to the store in the early morning of the 9th to see if it was on fire. He called Akram and reported that is was not. Then, about 4 a.m. on July 9, the friend entered the store and dropped burning incense into the gasoline, causing a fire to erupt so fast that it burnt the friend's trousers. He "narrowly escaped" the building without injury.

Phone records obtained by investigators show 11 calls between Akram and his friend between midnight and 4 a.m. on the day of the fire. If convicted of arson, Akram faces up to 20 years in prison.

While Akram is presumed innocent until proven guilty, this tale points once again to (1) the need to treat claims of "hate crimes" with less than total credulity and (2) the unreliability and poor judgment of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Immediately on July 10, CAIR rushed a press release out the door, "Arsonist Torches Muslim Store in Washington," calling on "local and national leaders to address the issue of growing Islamophobic prejudice following an arson attack on a Muslim-owned business in Washington State."

That mainstream organizations persist in treating CAIR as a serious "civil rights" group baffles this observer. What more must CAIR do to make them realize what it is?

____________

Aug. 25, 2004 update: I put this case into context - giving many other examples of similar fakes - in a weblog entry, "More Muslim 'Hate Crime' Myths."

Sep. 8, 2004 update: The unnamed male friend aove who actually set the fire now has a name; he is Naveed Khan, a 22-year-old sailor, and the Seattle Times reports that a federal grand jury last week indicted him on charges of arson and conspiracy to commit arson. Yesterday, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service arrested him at Naval Station Everett and transported him to the federal courthouse, where the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives took him into custody. The ATF indicated that Akram offered Khan $2,000 to set fire to the Continental Spices Cash & Carry but Khan refused the money.

Aug. 31, 2006 update: Patrick Poole skewers CAIR for another incident of fraud, this one concerning Musa Shteiwi, his son Essa, and the supposed burning-down of their restaurant in Xenia, Ohio, which was in fact set by they themselves. When the story first broke, Poole relates, into it

    jumped the Cincinnati-area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – the self-proclaimed Muslim "civil rights" organization suggesting that anti-Muslim hatred was at work. An item posted on July 14th on the national CAIR website screamed the headline, "Blast at Arab-American Restaurant ‘Suspicious'." Karen Dabdoub, the local CAIR spokeswoman, was quoted in the local media saying, "Anytime an attack like this happens, the perception in the Arab and Muslim community is that it is ethnically or religiously motivated. Especially in the absence of perpetrators being caught by law enforcement, that's the fear. Until that (motivation) is discovered, people speculate, rightly or wrongly."

When it turned out that the Shteiwis has set fire to their own restaurant, CAIR went silent. "Since the arrest of Shteiwi's associate, CAIR has refused further comment and has offered no apology for its shameless kafir-phobic behavior to the community they falsely impugned."

Poole then quotes some of my work on this subject to put the topic in context, and goes on:

    To date, so far as I can tell, not only has CAIR not apologized for falsely accusing non-Muslims of hatred and bias in the respective communities where these hate crime hoaxes occurred, but the press releases on CAIR's website go uncorrected even after the truth is revealed. For instance, a press release related to a staged hate crime in McAllen, Texas still appears today without any correction or update whatsoever, even though multiple media outlets, including even the New York Times, had debunked the incident as a hate crime hoax perpetrated by the "victim" almost two years ago.

    Admittedly, CAIR's ubiquitous appearance in stories related to staged hate crimes denouncing supposed Islamophobia makes for great press releases and news stories, but does little too actually improve American-Islamic relations (CAIR's self-stated goal). Such [incitement] feeds the very prejudices that distances Muslims from their non-Muslim neighbors.

    Instead of building cultural bridges to achieve their social and political agenda, CAIR regularly burns those bridges by inciting kafir-phobia and carelessly making charges against non-Muslims. As Robert Spencer of JihadWatch pointed out in commenting on this latest incident, "Hate crimes are a big business: they enable the targeted group to claim victim status, which entitles that group to full-hearted Leftist support, and a free pass for all its own enormities."