Genuine anti-Muslim hate crimes are so thin on the ground that when a bus driver says to a Muslim girl wearing a blue hijab, “Hey, you with that blue thing, you don’t ride this bus and I’ve never seen you ride it so get off,” it becomes news. Clearly he was just using a quick identifier, the same way he might say, “Hey, you with the blonde hair” or “Hey, you with the red coat,” but Janna Bakeer says she “felt humiliated”: “I was just really embarrassed how everybody was staring.”

But isn’t getting people to stare the whole point of wearing the hijab in a place like Provo, Utah? Isn’t it a proclamation that the wearer is different, the wearer is modest and pious in a way that girls and women who are not covering their heads aren’t? Isn’t it a declaration that Muslims are now here, and here to stay?

Anyway, that Janna Bakeer and her parents would immediately leap to the conclusion that this routine incident was anti-Muslim discrimination shows that they have well imbibed the lesson that hate crimes are political capital, that they are of great use to Muslims in breaking down resistance to jihad and Islamic supremacism, and that where they don’t actually exist, they must be invented.

“Family claims daughter was discriminated against on school bus,” by Ladd Egan, KSL.com, January 9, 2017: