#illridewithyou Was Even More Fraudulent Than I Thought

When an Islamic terrorist took hostages in a Sydney, Australia cafe this week, the first thing our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters did — before the siege was even over, before two of the hostages were killed — was change the subject.

The real victims weren’t the hostages. The real victims were Muslims who were too scared to use public transportation because of the imminent anti-Muslim violence that never happened. To combat this nonexistent threat, some genius proposed the Twitter hashtag #illridewithyou, which was supposed to somehow show solidarity with the “victims.” And of course, it went viral among journalists and other people who don’t care about the truth.

As it turns out, #illridewithyou was an even emptier gesture than I first thought. The incident that so inspired all those smug leftists worldwide didn’t actually happen. John Hayward explains:

What never occurs to the Special Snowflake Brigade is that their crusades amount to vicious slander against the people they collective accuse of harboring the darkest thoughts, and hovering moments away from taking the most terrible actions. While a real terrorist was subjecting his captives to hours of sheer terror that ended with gunfire and bloodshed, Jacobs was inventing an imaginary incident of cultural oppression to denounce her entire society for something it didn’t actually do.

In fact, she was doing exactly what she falsely accused Australians of doing to Muslims. She’s every bit as prejudiced as the imaginary bigots the #illridewithyou crowd took an ostentatious stand against; her bigotry simply has different, more politically correct targets. She wraps up her Brisbane Times column by trying to exile her imaginary hobgoblins from Australia, in precisely the same terms that would doubtless drive her incandescent with rage if they were directed at the groups she favors ...
It’s interesting to note that even the original version of Rachel Jacobs’ story was pretty thin, and relied heavily on her final encounter with the alleged “oppressed Muslim woman” for what little veracity it had; that parting scene confirmed that the woman had removed her headscarf as a concession to bigotry, and was grateful for Jacobs’ support to reclaim her dignity. That’s the part that occurred entirely as a delusional breeze wafting between the windmills of Jacobs’ mind. The #illridewithyou hoax only worked because so many people were eager to receive such confirmation of their prejudices, such validation of their feelings of superiority over the miserable cavemen who make up the quietly seething racist bulk of their societies. As America has been learning to its cost over the past six years, it is a very bad idea to put people who feel that way in charge of your government.
Now, are the global media outlets who pushed the #illridewithyou hoax so energetically going to pay equal attention to the author’s admission that she made the whole thing up out of whole cloth?