“Chaffey Joint Union High School District Supt. Mat Holton said Zehlif was incorrectly identified as another student named Isis.” So somehow the two names got transposed — was the name Bayan Zehlif under Isis Phillips’ picture? This was either an innocent mistake or a prank. If the latter, the offending louts should get a detention or something — but national news? Come on. In my high school yearbook there is a full-page photo lifted out of National Lampoon’s parody yearbook, showing kids in shop class smiling happily in front of a saw, with several severed fingers on the table in front of them: we rogues on the yearbook staff sneaked it in, and laughed uproariously when it got through and no one caught it. Big deal. Kids will be kids.

Bayan Zehlif writes furiously: “The school reached out to me and had the audacity to say that this was a typo. I beg to differ, let’s be real.” How does she know? And even if it is a prank, why is it such a huge deal? The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is, of course, squeezing this incident for everything it can, but it actually betrays the poverty of their “Islamophobia” narrative: genuine incidents of “Islamophobia” are so scarce that they have to make a nationwide controversy over a girl getting called the wrong name in her high school yearbook. If Muslims were really being persecuted wholesale in the United States — murdered, raped, denied jobs, spat upon, what have you — they would be sounding the alarm energetically. Instead, all they have to shore up their preposterous claim that Muslims are being routinely victimized in the United States is…Isis Phillips.

Because of the infrequency of actual hate crimes against Muslims, along with the high premium placed on victim status today, Hamas-linked CAIR, designated a terror organization by the United Arab Emirates, and other Muslims have on many occasions not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating “hate crimes,” including attacks on mosques. A New Jersey Muslim was found guilty of murder that he tried to portray as an “Islamophobic” attack, and in 2014 in California, a Muslim was found guilty of killing his wife, after first blaming her murder on “Islamophobia.”

This kind of thing happens quite frequently. The New York Daily News reported recently that “a woman who told cops she was called a terrorist and slashed on her cheek in lower Manhattan on Thursday later admitted she made up the story, police said early Friday. The woman, who wore a headscarf, told authorities a blade-wielding wacko sliced open her face as she left a Manhattan cosmetology school, police sources said.”

And not long ago in Britain, the murder of a popular imam was spread far and wide as another “Islamophobic hate crime” – until his killer also was found to be a Muslim.

The Mirror reported that the imam “was targeted because he had made efforts to turn youngsters away from radical Islam.”

According to The Detroit News, a Muslim woman, Saida Chatti, was “charged with making a false police report after she allegedly fabricated a plot to blow up Dearborn Fordson High School to retaliate against the November terrorist attacks in Paris….Police say Chatti called Dearborn investigators Nov. 19, six days after Islamic extremists killed 130 people in Paris.”

And similarly in Britain, a Muslim woman was “fined for lying to police about being attacked for wearing a hijab. The 18-year-old student, known only as Miss Choudhury, said she was violently shoved from behind and punched in the face by a man in Birmingham city centre 10 days after the atrocities in the French capital on November 13.”

In today’s politically correct environment, hate crimes are political capital. They foster the impression that resistance to Islamic terrorism equals hatred of Muslims, and results in the victimization of innocent people. Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacist organizations want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they’re the currency they use to buy power and influence in our victimhood-oriented society, and to deflect attention away from jihad terror and onto Muslims as putative victims. Want power and influence? Be a victim!

Will Isis Phillips, er, Bayan Zehlif, get invited to the White House and the United Nations, like Ahmed the clockmaker?

“High school yearbook misidentifies Muslim student as ‘Isis Phillips’,” by Zahira Torres, Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2016: