Will Get Fooled Again

There was a big Rolling Stone article about a woman who was horrifically gang raped by a student fraternity as part of an initiation ritual. There appears to be one small problem with the article- it is complete horseshit.It wouldn't be so bad if it was the first time the press had fallen for obviously bogus claims about being gang raped by "privileged" white male college students but it isn't, as anyone who can remember the Duke Lacrosse case a few years ago can say.

If the boy who cried wolf lived today he would never run out of dupes willing to believe his lies.

Fake victimhood appears to be particularly common among left wing activists on college campuses though certainly not exclusively - there have been conservative activists who've faked attacks by violent mobs of Obama supporters as well as a Jewish activist who was the victim of a phony neo-nazi assault. This site documents almost 200 hate crime hoaxes in the USA alone.

Fake criminal attacks are only one aspect of bogus victimhood. As long time readers will know, misery memoirs are wildly popular, WH Smiths used to have a whole section devoted to "Tragic Life Stories". Quite a lot of these turned out to be fraudulent as well- there's a hilarious and brutal takedown of one of the most successful misery memoirs "A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey, here. The reviewer, John Dolan, was calling "bullshit" years before it was actually exposed as a fake.

There have always been schemers and liars and that will never change, what feeds them is other people swallowing their claims wholesale. The college fakers do it because there is a large pool of people who want to believe that white, male college students are running amok and getting away with murder, the misery memoirs abound because the appetite for such melodramatic nonsense  exceeds what reality has left us with.

Hate Crime Hoaxes

I've written before about the phenomenon of hate crime hoaxes, in which people fake attacks on themselves or their favoured group in order to drum up sympathy for themselves and hatred for their ideological enemies.

Yet another high profile example in the United States has occurs. The interesting thing about this case is that people in internetland have been pointing out for months that it was an obvious hoax, while the established media was still cluelessly citing it as an example of right wing hate.

When they keep falling for the same trick you have to wonder whether there is some kind of agenda.....

A New Development In Hate Crime Hoaxes?

The stabbing of a Muslim taxi driver in New York was immediately linked to the protests against the proposed mosque at Ground Zero, until it emerged that the main suspect, Michael Enright, is an activist in a group that supports the proposed building and promotes interfaith understanding.

Since the story has been the subject of much speculation with various groups and pundits using it as an opportunity to condemn opponents of the Mosque for stirring up hatred I shall give my guess as to the motivation behind the assault.

It looks to me like a variation on the ubiquitous "hate crime hoax" craze, in which someone stages a bogus attack against themselves and then milks the ensuing publicity to denounce their political opponents and draw attention to the cause they are promoting. Except instead of staging a bogus attack on himself, Enright carried out a real attack on someone else in the hope that it could be used to delegitimise his opponents.

Hate Crime Hoaxes- A Question Of Incentives?

I missed this story when it first appeared, the story of a Muslim 'Community Leader' who was abducted by BNP members. Which is just as well as it appears to be a hate crime hoax.

Although if the police are still using the MacPherson rules in which a racist incident is one where the victim perceives it to be racist then I guess it is still a racist incident regardless of whether it actually happened or not.

Hate crime hoaxes have been common in the United States for years and have also occurred in France and elsewhere. I was going to say that they have spread over here from the US but that probably isn't quite true, because anyone who reads about fake hate crimes being discovered isn't likely to want to emulate them, knowing the possibility of being caught. If they had read about previous hoaxes then they would probably be more subtle about their own versions.

So if the idea of faking hate crimes hasn't spread but has evolved repeatedly in many countries over many years then this suggests that the same incentives to commit hate crimes exist in many countries so that many people independently come to the conclusion that faking a hate crime is a good idea.

I'm guessing those incentives are the cult of victimhood and hyper sensitivity over race and certain other identity groupings which makes it possibly to drown out opposition by falsely linking them to dangerous and violent groups. Plus of course the 'victim' instantly becomes a hero for resisting such hate filled bigots. There are probably other motivations too that haven't occrred to me yet.

{via Julia at Ambush Predator}