My latest in PJ Media:
If anti-Muslim hate crimes do not exist, they must be invented. They’re simply too politically useful to do without. And so it is that the Minnesota chapter of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) held a press conference Monday to demand the firing of a Starbucks barista who was so “Islamophobic” as to write “ISIS” on a Muslim woman’s coffee cup. CAIR also announced that it had filed a discrimination complaint with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights about the incident. If you think that the world is on fire and that CAIR should find more important things to be enraged about, you’re right, but there is a method to CAIR’s obsession with triviality, albeit a sinister one.
According to Sahan Journal, the hate crime took place last Wednesday, when a hijab-wearing Muslim woman went into the Starbucks that is inside the Midway Target in St. Paul, Minn., and ordered a drink. She told the barista her name, and the barista wrote it on a cup.
So far so good. But “Islamophobia” broke out when the customer received her drink and found that the barista had written “ISIS” on the cup.
The woman’s name? Aishah.
Anyone who has ever been in a Starbucks anywhere knows how easy it would be for a barista, without any malice whatsoever, to mix up two words that sound as similar to each other as “ISIS,” “eye-sis,” and “Aishah,” “eye-shah.” Anyone who has ever been in a Starbucks also knows that many baristas are not exactly intellectual giants, and for many, English is not their first language. Mistakes on names abound at Starbucks outlets all over the country, and most people shrug or laugh them off.
But not Aishah. “When I first received the drink I was in shock,” she said at CAIR’s press conference Monday. “I felt humiliated, I felt enraged, I felt belittled.”
Jaylani Hussein, executive director of CAIR’s Minnesota chapter, explained that the problem was a certain Islamic jihad terror group called ISIS that, he contended, Muslims abhorred so much that it was an open-and-shut case that the hapless barista had malicious intent: “Unfortunately, with Islamophobia, the No. 1 thing Muslims are … discriminatorily identified (as) is terrorists. Using this word for us would be the same as a Black man today being … (called) the N-word.”
There is much more. Read the rest here.