by Daniel Greenfield
When three Arab Muslim students were shot and wounded in Burlington, Vermont, politicians and the media immediately hyped it as the ‘Islamophobic Crime of the Century’.
President Biden issued a statement declaring that “there is absolutely no place for violence or hate in America.” Vice President Kamala Harris’ statement bemoaned that “far too many people live with the fear that they could be targeted and attacked based on their beliefs or who they are”. The three Muslim men identified as ‘Palestinian’, two of them were wearing keffiyehs and Kamala, like many other leftists, was implying that the shooter was ‘anti-Palestinian’.
“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.”
Then he blasted Israel.
“I’m heartbroken by yesterday’s senseless shooting of three Palestinian-American students visiting Burlington. We do not tolerate hate or Islamophobia in Vermont,” Sen Peter Welch tweeted.
“I do want to be clear that there is no question this was a hateful act,” Sarah George, the local State’s Attorney, claimed without evidence.
“In this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect that it may have been a hate-motivated crime,” Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad argued.
Anti-Israel groups convened a rally calling for the destruction of Israel.
“I stand here to stand with oppressed people who now fear for their lives just walking down the street here in Burlington,” Vermont Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman told the hateful mob.
A speaker at the hate rally with the antisemitic University of Vermont affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine blamed the shootings on Jews, calling them the “shameless monsters who enabled this” and denouncing “a crime of unspeakable racist hatred, a crime borne out of white supremacy, out of fascist, genocidal malice, a crime borne out of Zionism.”
All of these claims, along with many others around the shootings, were based on lies.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee falsely claimed that “a man shouted and harassed the victims, then proceeded to shoot them. We have reason to believe this shooting occurred because the victims are Arab.”
In reality, they had been shot by a local resident outside his house who did not say a word.
The three Muslim men were returning home from a party on Saturday night when James J. Eaton, a local resident with a history of mental instability, stumbled out of a white clapboard house on the residential street and without a word fired four shots at the three men.
Eaton had been described as “that hippie guy” and “progressive”, an organic farmer who had posted a meme with a definition of “Amerika” that called it “the worst sense of the United States, ie imperialism, corruption and the global exportation of American culture.”
He appeared to be a Biden supporter
Media outlets, anti-Israel activists and politicians attributed the shootings to the Hamas war. Everyone from Biden and Kamala on down emphasized the “Palestinian” identities of those shot and implied that Eaton had attacked them because he was opposed to the ‘Palestinian’ cause.
In reality, 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.”
Responding to an article about a proposed ceasefire, he wrote, “What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?”
Local politicians were aware of this which is why in December a Burlington City Council resolution from Councilman Ali Dieng, an African Muslim immigrant currently running for mayor, trying to tie the shootings to an attack on Israel failed, and so did a resolution pushing the false claim that the students had been targeted because of their identity.
The latest Islamophobia hoax had fallen apart in Vermont, but still lingered nationally.
Media outlets which had rushed to spread the false claims never retracted or modified them. After a month of pushing the lie that the shootings were a response to Israel’s campaign against Hamas or to the ‘Muslim’ or ‘Palestinian’ identities of the three men, the new information was not reported, acknowledged or in any way addressed by politicians and media reporters.
NBC News, which had run an entire ‘live blog’ about the shootings, pushing anti-Israel and Islamophobia narratives, did not provide an update that would have contradicted its narrative.
Even in December, NBC News still continued running articles falsely linking the shootings to the Hamas war and attacking Israel. A Dec 5 article quoted one of the men shot as spreading anti-Israel propaganda and 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.”
PBS ran a similar article in December quoting an uncle of one of the men as contending 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.”
This torrent of anti-Israel and pro-terrorist propaganda was based on absolutely nothing.
There was never a single shred of evidence that the men had been targeted. And the only basis for this claim that was ever cited was that two of the men were wearing ‘keffiyehs’ and speaking English and Arabic when they were shot. This entirely circumstantial information was amplified with feverish claims and rushed statements by elected officials, prosecutors and police.
The reality that has emerged is that Eaton was mentally unstable, left-leaning, opposed to America and supportive of Islamic terrorists. He was neither Jewish nor pro-Israel.
He had actually publicly stated his support for Hamas.