NYT Desperately Scours the Land for Islamophobia, Finds It in Tossed Beer Cans
By Clay Waters | February 17, 2016 | 8:33 PM EST
Desperately hyping up any instances of alleged “Islamophobia” it can find, the New York Times on Wednesday covered tensions between students living in a high-rise at the University of Arizona, and the members of an adjacent mosque. More proof that the Times is hypersensitive to at least one religion’s complaints of discrimination.
There’s not much newworthy going on in the story -- the worse bit of "Islamophobia" the NYT uncovered was a single instance of a regrettable, sophomoric insult (from someone who may have infact been a sophomore) yelled from a passing car. But reporter Fernanda Santos managed to spin it into the lead story of Wednesday’s National section: “University of Arizona Students Hurl Insults, and Litter, at Mosque in Tucson.”
Rania Kanawati, a Syrian immigrant, was walking to her car after Friday Prayer last month at the Islamic Center of Tucson when a beer can landed right behind her, then another one fell by her side.
On another night at the mosque, Ahmed Meiloud, a Ph.D. candidate from Mauritania who is the Islamic Center’s president, was leaving the building when someone yelled from a passing car, “Terrorist, go back to where you came from!”
The diverse congregation of the Islamic Center -- a squat copper-domed complex just outside the University of Arizona’s campus -- has endured taunts and vandalism ever since hundreds of students moved into two private high-rise apartments next door three years ago. In at least one instance, a shower of crushed peanuts rained down on the mosque; more typically, cans and bottles are flung from apartment balconies, usually on the party nights of Friday and Saturday.
“Yes, these are students, usually drunken students, but these attacks aren’t random,” Mr. Meiloud said. “We are the target.”
No one has been injured. But in light of the highly charged national debate about accepting Muslim refugees in the United States -- as well as the mass shooting by two Muslim terrorists in San Bernardino, Calif., in December -- tensions over the insults and vandalism here have run particularly high.
There was the obligatory cameo from the Council on American-Islamic Relations:
“We can’t ignore the backdrop against which this is happening, with all the hate crimes against Muslims, all over the place,” said Imraan Siddiqi, the executive director of Arizona’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Then followed a thin list of anecdotes from across the country.
Santos elevated the balcony-aided littering by jerky college students into “vandalism” and religious hatred, while again ignoring actual statistics that show “hate crimes” against Jews are committed at far higher rates.
According to the FBI's most recent Hate Crimes Statistics, by far most incidents of "anti-religious hate crimes" involve attacks on Jews: “60.3 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Jewish bias....13.7 percent were victims of anti-Islamic (Muslim) bias...6.1 percent were victims of anti-Catholic bias.”
The University of Arizona has a diverse student body, and students and professors described its culture as generally inclusive. But minority groups on campus say they are not immune from mistreatment and misconceptions.
The “racially charged episodes” at the University of Arizona also made for thin gruel. “Unhealthy generalizations”? Someone call the cops!
Meetings between faculty members and students were held in six campus cultural centers at the university during the fall, spurred by racially charged episodes at the University of Missouri and elsewhere. According to faculty notes on the meetings, gay students spoke of harassment by classmates, black students told of being steered away from disciplines and degrees that were perceived as white-only, and Asian students talked about “unhealthy generalizations,” in particular about Muslims.
Some of the acts cited sound like typical college behavior, which the Times strained to make sinister:
Ms. Obeid, 20, who was born in Tucson to a Syrian father and a Mexican mother, said a 5-year-old boy had come up to her holding a can of chewing tobacco he found on the playground
“What kind of message are we sending to our children when their place of worship is treated like a trash can?” she asked.
In December 2015 the paper did the same thing, with repeat offender Kirk Semple simply rounding up alleged anti-Islamic anecdotes from across the country, each incident falling well short of the heinousness of the purported cause of all the “Islamophobia” -- the massacre of 14 people by a radical Islamic couple in San Bernardino, Calif.
Source URL:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/clay-waters/2016/02/17/nyt-desperately-scours-land-islamophobia-finds-it-tossed-beer-cans 
