James Taranto:
Four “hateful text messages” appeared on the phone of a 16-year-old black student who was running for Student Council president at St. Peter’s Preparatory School in Jersey City, N.J. “We have NEVER and will NEVER have an (n-word) to lead our school,” read one of the messages, according to a report in the Jersey Journal:
The message went on to call President Obama by his middle name Hussein and used a racial slur in referring to Obama, a police report said. “We will never make that mistake again. Drop out right now . . .” it continued, a police report said.
Can you guess where this is going? The Journal reports that the unnamed student “sent the texts to himself, a school official confirmed last week.” (He lost the campaign for president, was elected vice president instead, and eventually complied with his own demand: “A source said he no longer attends the school.”)
This isn’t the only fake “hate crime” to come to light in the past week. Last March, as The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross notes, administrators at Ohio’s Oberlin College shut classes for a day and held “campus-wide teach-ins focusing on racism and homophobia” after “virulently racist, anti-Jewish and anti-gay messages” appeared around campus and “a person wearing a hood and robe resembling a KKK outfit” was spotted “near the Afrikan Heritage House.”
The perpetrators in the Oberlin case, Ross reports, turn out to be “privileged Obama-supporting white kids.” One of them, Dylan Bleier, conducted a voter registration drive for the 2008 Obama campaign and belonged to a group called Ithaca White Allies Against Structural Racism (apparently he was from the upstate New York town where Cornell University is located).
Hate-crime hoaxes are of course nothing new; the practice goes back at least to 1987 and Tawana Brawley’s fraudulent rape claim. We’d like to draw a connection to a phenomenon that is new: what blogress Ann Althouse has dubbed “counter-Trayvonism.”
Not this is not racism! Is it?
When the Zimmerman case was decided there was a twitter storm.
People purporting to be blacks widely threatened to kill them some cracka.
Who knows if they were REALLY blacks.
(I heard some black pundit on TV wonder if they were all really whites.)
But, since then, several whites have been beaten, shot, knifed to death.
And almost all of the assailants have been black.
The boy who cried “wolf”.
When I read something about any so-called “hate crime” of this sort my default position is “hoax”.
Just like cries of “racist”, the race baiters have gone to the same well far too many times for me to pay them any attention.
Hey, Jessie? Al? I just don’t care any more. Go away.
God, I’m tired of this crap.