The “Islamophobia” industry is in full swing. My latest in PJ Media:

As Trump’s inauguration approaches, the fake hate crime industry has kicked into high gear. A rash of widely reported “anti-Muslim hate crimes” have turned out to be hoaxes perpetrated by Muslims.

Hate crimes are political capital in our petulant, victimhood-idolizing society: when real incidents don’t exist, there is incentive to invent them. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Muslims have on many occasions not hesitated to fabricate hate crimes, including attacks on mosques. For CAIR and its allies, this is part of a larger agenda. They wish to deflect attention away from jihad terror attacks and plots, and to end law enforcement scrutiny of what is supposedly an unjustly despised and harassed group.

1. On Saturday, Washington’s Bellevue Reporter noted regarding the arrest of Isaac Wayne Wilson — who is suspected of an arson attack on the Islamic Center of Eastside — that “law enforcement officials are shying away from calling it a hate crime.” But why? Especially since Wilson “reportedly has a history of contentious interactions at the mosque — including a conviction for malicious mischief”?

Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Mike Hogan said:

At this point, we haven’t seen any evidence that this is a hate crime. A hate crime is proven by words or actions that the perpetrator was targeting a community because of feelings of animosity towards them.

If Isaac Wayne Wilson has “a history of contentious interactions at the mosque,” wouldn’t law enforcement officials have ample evidence of “words or actions” showing “that the perpetrator was targeting a community because of feelings of animosity towards them”?

Logically, they only would not have such evidence if his “contentious interactions” at the mosque had nothing to do with it being a mosque or with the Muslim identity of the people who go there. Is Isaac Wayne Wilson himself a Muslim? Is this yet another fake anti-Muslim hate crime?

2. At that very same mosque last week, a man was charged with malicious harassment — which is classified as a hate crime — for threatening to murder people at the mosque and for saying: “There is no place in America for Muslims.”

Yet the Seattle Times then tells us that the man, Kamal Samater, “self-identifies as a Muslim.”

The Seattle Times made no attempt to explain why a man who “self-identifies as a Muslim” would threaten people at a mosque and declare “there is no place in America for Muslims.” The Seattle Times made no attempt to explain why the man was being charged with a hate crime despite the circumstances. In light of the many anti-Muslim hate crimes that turn out to have been fabricated by Muslims, the Times could at least have looked into the possibility that this was another fraud. That, of course, would have required it to behave like a legitimate news source rather than a water-carrier for the media’s favored narratives.