The elaborate story of an 18-year-old Muslim college student who claimed she was attacked by Trump supporters was completely fabricated – as predicted by Pamela Geller in a WND column Tuesday – and now the woman has been arrested and is being charged with filing a false report.
Yasmin Seweid, a New York Muslim girl, claimed three mean screamed “Donald Trump!” while attacking her. She said they called her a terrorist and tried to rip off her hijab on a Manhattan subway platform on Dec. 1.
“Seweid had numerous opportunities to admit the incident never happened but again and again stood by her story, [a police] source said,” the New York Daily News reported. “On Wednesday, after again being confronted with questions from detectives increasingly suspicious of her story she recanted and said she made it all up, citing family problems.”
In her Tuesday column, Geller had raised serious doubts about Seweid’s story.
“There is no video, no audio, no proof. Just her claims. Proof? Who needs proof? Muslims know that their claims of ‘Islamophobia’ run without challenge or investigation,” Geller wrote. “It was, of course, front-page news in America and across the world. Dead victims of jihad terror don’t get this kind of press.”
Geller noted that police hadn’t been able to locate the three alleged attackers. Seweid claimed she wasn’t able to call her family for help because her phone was dying.
“No one on the train helped her?” Geller asked. And then she didn’t immediately tell law enforcement or anyone on the platform at Penn Station? This is impossible to believe. Penn Station is teeming with cops. … No one on the subway car filmed it? Even more impossible to believe in this day and age. And she couldn’t identify anyone on the surveillance video. …
“Call me skeptical, but this whole thing stinks, like Fulton’s fish market. … Yasmin Seweid’s story has more holes than Swiss cheese.”
The police source said it’s appropriate to bring criminal charges against Seweid.
“We dedicated a lot of resources to this – and don’t get me wrong, this is what we do – but we had guys going back and forth, looking for video and witnesses. And we couldn’t find anything,” the source told the Daily News. “Nothing happened – and there was no victim.”
Also last week, Seweid was reported missing. Then, with no explanation, she resurfaced Friday.
Seweid’s story is just the latest in a series of false or questionable reports from individuals who claim to have been attacked by Trump supporters.
On Tuesday came news that a Florida man faked a pro-Trump KKK hate crime, set his ex-girlfriend’s car on fire and even staged his own kidnapping, leaving a bloody ransom note filled with racial slurs, the U.K. Daily Mail reported.
As WND’s Leo Hohmann reported in November, reports of a spike in “attacks” on Muslims and other minorities since the election of Trump have appeared in countless media outlets, with most of them based on a Southern Poverty Law Center list of 701 incidents of “hate crimes.”
The trend was so concerning to New York Gov. Andrew Coumo that he ordered the creation of a special task force to look into the “explosion of hate crimes.”
Most of the incidents on the SPLC list, while deplorable, crude and vile if they actually happened, have not included physical violence and hence the use of the term “attack” is misleading. Most involve uncorroborated assertions of verbal threats or racist comments that, while mean and nasty, don’t appear to pass the smell test required of a crime.
AÂ female Muslim student at University of Louisiana who accused a Trump-supporting man of attacking her and ripping off her hijab admitted a week later she made the story up, the Washington Post reported.
In another case, Bowling Green State University student Eleesha Long claimed to be attacked on the school’s Ohio campus by three white men wearing Trump T-shirts just one day after the election, Media Research Center reported. And the only problem with her story is that none of it ever happened.
In Atlanta, a Muslim teacher reported coming into school the day after Trump was announced the winner of the presidential election and finding a note on her desk that told her to “go hang yourself.” The validity of the note has been questioned and the school investigation has turned up no suspects, something a simple handwriting analysis would seem to accomplish.
In Malden, Massachusetts, a 20-year-old black man told police he was harassed by two white men who used racial slurs, referred to lynching, and warned him, “It’s Trump country now.”
That man later admitted he made up the story, the Boston Herald reported. He told police he wanted to “raise awareness about things that are going on around the country,” said Malden police Chief Kevin Molis.
Read more details in WND’s investigation of alleged “hate crimes” since Trump’s election.
