For the wicked and the deceitful open their mouth against me; they speak to me with lying tongue. Psalms 109:2
While claims of a spike in “Islamophobic” attacks are being used to condemn supporting Israel, a closer look reveals that many of these claims are based on lies. And an even closer look reveals that the mainstream media is complicit in this anti-Israel libel.
Three students of Palestinian descent were shot and wounded on November 26 near the University of Vermont. The victims were all aged 20 and college students. The victims were identified as Hisham Awartani, a student at Brown University in Rhode Island; Kinnan Abdalhamid, a student at Haverford College in Pennsylvania; and Tahseen Ahmad, a student at Trinity College in Connecticut. The three were conversing in Arabic and two of the victims were wearing keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves, at the time of the assault.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee released a statement saying that there is “reason to believe this shooting occurred because the victims are Arab.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) offered a $10,000 reward for information on the shooting and released a statement saying that the shooting was part of an “unprecedented spike in anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian hate and violence.”
The Anti-Defamation League listed the shooting as an anti-Muslim hate crime.
Members of the wounded victims’ families said they “have no doubt that our sons were targeted simply for being Palestinian.”
Sarah George, the local State’s Attorney, echoed this belief, telling the press “I do want to be clear that there is no question this was a hateful act.”
Senator Bernie Sanders labeled it an anti-Muslim crime even before the investigation was completed.
“The idea that three young men walking down the street get shot, perhaps because of no other reason than they are Palestinian, is unspeakable,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said. ”But I gotta tell you, this is not just a local phenomenon, this is happening all over the country.”
Sanders took the opportunity to call for reining in aid to Israel and declaring a Palestinian state.
The FBI was called in to investigate what was believed to be an anti-Arab hate crime. The next day, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arrested Jason James Eaton, aged 48. He was charged with three counts of attempted second-degree murder.
Soon after he was arrested, cracks began to appear in the claim that the shooting was “Islamophobic”. In an interview with the Daily Beast, his mother said that Eaton struggled with depression. His life reflected his mental instability. In his BrokerCheck report, Eaton listed 19 different jobs he held between April 2014 and January 2023, including stints as a farm assistant, night cleaner, carpenter, landscaper, driver, farm manager, sawyer, and maintenance person, mostly in small towns in upstate New York.
Eaton was a product of higher education. Eaton’s resume states that he went to the University of Idaho for a bachelor’s in general studies in 2001, where he focused on natural resource ecology and conservation biology but was seven credits short of graduating. He was also a research assistant at Harvard Forest, a 4000-acre laboratory in Petersham, Massachusetts, in 1999. The resume states that he “assisted in the LTER project examining CO2 flux in New England forest soils.” A 2001 Harvard paper on soil in New England forests acknowledges Eaton as one of the summer interns.
Unlike many politically motivated shooters, Eaton’s social media did not reflect an anti-Islamic ideology. On his Twitter account, he describes himself as a “radical citizen” who patrols “demockracy and crapitalism for oathcreepers.” His banner image features big bold text, saying “Libertarians want trans furrys (sic) to be able to protect their cannabis farms with unregistered machine guns.”
His archived posts are mainly filled with criticisms of the IRS and the Fed. He describes himself as a Libertarian and expresses support for both Democrat and Republican lawmakers or candidates. He describes his Substack account as “wandering ramblings of a reformed broker on the ADHD/ASD spectrum” but contains only one post, which is a lengthy essay offering advice to restaurants on how they can retain dishwashers. Previous posts that were deleted were anti-vaccine conspiracy theories
In response to a November 16 post responding to a VTDigger.org commentary by U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) that called for a cease-fire, Eaton wrote, “What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?… Brittan [sic] wouldn’t let ships with food sent by other countries into Ireland during the famine. My people starved.”
In an October 17 post on Twitter responding to a different article, Eaton wrote that “the notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state from occupation is absurd. They are owed a state. Pay up.”
Eaton’s un-“Islamophobic” motives were presented in an article written on Saturday in a Frontpage Magazine article written by Daniel Greenfield and titled “The Greatest Islamophobia Hoax in America Exposed”. Greenfield noted that Eaton was, in all probability, a supporter of Joe Biden.
And rather than harboring anti-Islamic views, Eaton supported Hamas. On December 6, Seven Days, a local news outlet known for breaking stories about local politics, revealed that Eaton had tweeted, “The notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state from occupation is absurd. They are owed a state. Pay up.”
Greenfield went on to note how this false narrative was perpetuated.NBC News ran a ‘live blog’ about the shootings that included anti-Israel and Islamophobia narratives. A December 5 article quoted one of the men shot as claiming that “this is happening to Palestinians across the country and, more importantly, in Gaza. We’re mad at the system that’s allowing not three of us to be injured but thousands and thousands and millions of us to be displaced and injured and killed.”
Greenfield cited a PBS article in December that quoted an uncle of one of the victims as saying that “even in this country, even in this town — that many of the risks that exist for my nephew and his friends in Palestine exist for them here.”
Greenfield emphasized that a false “Islamophobic” narrative is endemic to the left-wing media. When four Muslim men were shot in Albuquerque in August 2022, the motive was presented as “Islamophobic”. Biden even issued a statement declaring that “my administration stands strongly with the Muslim community”. Police later arrested the perpetrator; Muhammad Syed, a 51-year-old Sunni Muslim Afghan refugee who hated Shiites.
“Hasan Minhaj, the Netflix Muslim comedian, was recently exposed as having made up the stories of discrimination that he had built his high-profile career around,” Greenfield wrote. “During the campaign against Hamas, CAIR promoted a false claim that a Muslim man had been hit by a Jewish driver shouting ‘Kill all Palestinians,’ and ‘Long live Israel’. Before Biden and other elected officials could issue statements, the actual perpetrator turned out to be the victim’s own brother.”
Greenfield goes on to cite many other cases of false claims of “Islamophobic” attacks.
“The Burlington shootings were blatantly exploited to attack Israel and promote terrorism. Vigils in front of City Hall and at Brown University called for the destruction of the Jewish State,” Greenfield wrote.
“While the Burlington story has fallen apart, like the previous ‘Islamophobic’ hoaxes, the damage was already done. The larger purpose of Islamophobia hoaxes, like that of Islamic terrorism, is to reframe the perpetrators as the victims and to justify Islamic violence against non-Muslims.”
“That is why the truth matters,” Greenfield concludes. “Islamophobia lies kill, the truth exposes the killers.”
