Saturday’s New York Times featured a heart-tuggy photo on its front page, something it has done before in the service of diversity

The subject of the picture is a cutesy immigrant child gazing upon little paper hearts strung on a burned out mosque in Sweden. To my suspicious eye, the perfect composition and oddly folded hands of the girl suggest a posed photo rather than an image taken from life:

The paper could have featured the destruction by arson of hundreds of cars in the warped New Years tradition of France’s hostile young Muslims. Instead of a giving prominence to the story, the Times ran a one-paragraph AP squib on page A10 (France: Hundreds of Cars Set on Fire).

A little background is needed to understand how Sweden got to a place where mosques are being fire-bombed. In September 2013, the government of Sweden generously (or stupidly) offered to take in any Syrian refugees who could get there — potentially over a million persons. The reality of such a major demographic influx began to become recognized as costing a lot and difficult to organize. Housing and jobs for many thousands cannot be made to appear just by the fervent wishing of liberals.

A few days ago, a group of asylum-seeking Syrians refused to get off the bus for their housing in a small town out in the boonies. Many protested with a hunger strike because their new homes were not urbane enough. One man complained the icey streets made it “dangerous for me to be here.”

So the mosque fires have occurred in an atmosphere of growing tension.

However, not everyone accepts the official story of white Swedes attacking diverse immigrants. An article in The Local (Sweden rallies after trio of mosque fire attacks) has comments and the first one suspects Muslims may have bombed themselves for the sympathy, an opinion that got a lot of favorable up-clicks:

May be they see the SD [Sweden Democrats, the anti-mass-immigration party] is rising so they set fire on their own Mosques to frame it?

In fact, fake hate crimes are fairly common among advocates seeking sympathy for themselves or their cause. A black kid running for student government sent himself racist hate mail to get votes. Liberal professor Kerri Dunn claimed her car was vandalized by evil racists , but witnesses saw her doing the damage and she was eventually sentenced to prison

As for faked hate crimes carried out by Muslims, Robert Spencer recently listed five examples from last year alone: The Top Anti-Muslim Hate Crime Hoaxes of 2014. One was the murder of Iraqi immigrant Shaima Alawadi by her husband, who tried to make the killing appear to be an anti-Muslim hate crime committed by cruel Americans.

Despite the fact that no arrests have been made and therefore no perps identified in the Sweden case, the Times stuck with the convenient story of white Europeans attacking diverse immigrants. That may be the case, but the possibility of faked hate crimes is just as likely.