ANOTHER ‘TOO GOOD TO CHECK’ MEDIA FAIL: THE ‘ILLRIDEWITHYOU’ HOAX
Media around the world swooned over the #illridewithyou hashtag, launched during the hostage crisis in Sydney to demonstrate solidarity with law-abiding Muslims. The creator of the hashtag, Rachael Jacobs, said she was inspired when a Muslim woman sitting next to her on a train began nervously removing her headscarf, no doubt fearful that a crowd of Australian bigots would set upon her and exact revenge for the actions of the Muslim terrorist. “I ran after her at the train station,” Jacobs wrote on Facebook. “I said, ‘put it back on, I’ll walk with you.’ She started to cry and hugged me for about a minute, then walked off alone.”
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Neither did the mockery from skeptics who noticed that these courageous stands against violent prejudice tend to be awfully… selective:
In the end, there was no “anti-Muslim backlash,” and no Australian Muslims required protective escort from hashtag enthusiasts, while the very real Islamofascist terrorist holed up in the Sydney cafe got two innocent people killed.
The epilogue to the #illridewithyou story is that Jacobs, in the course of telling her moving story of courage in the face of conjectured intolerance to the Brisbane Times, admitted that she made the whole thing up:
Media around the world swooned over the #illridewithyou hashtag, launched during the hostage crisis in Sydney to demonstrate solidarity with law-abiding Muslims. The creator of the hashtag, Rachael Jacobs, said she was inspired when a Muslim woman sitting next to her on a train began nervously removing her headscarf, no doubt fearful that a crowd of Australian bigots would set upon her and exact revenge for the actions of the Muslim terrorist. “I ran after her at the train station,” Jacobs wrote on Facebook. “I said, ‘put it back on, I’ll walk with you.’ She started to cry and hugged me for about a minute, then walked off alone.”
[clip]
Neither did the mockery from skeptics who noticed that these courageous stands against violent prejudice tend to be awfully… selective:
I wonder if the #illridewithyou heroes would be willing to accompany a Jew through a Muslim city.
— L (@OrwellForks) December 15, 2014
— L (@OrwellForks) December 15, 2014
#illridewithyoupic.twitter.com/t8aLkALpkj
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 15, 2014
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 15, 2014
In the end, there was no “anti-Muslim backlash,” and no Australian Muslims required protective escort from hashtag enthusiasts, while the very real Islamofascist terrorist holed up in the Sydney cafe got two innocent people killed.
The epilogue to the #illridewithyou story is that Jacobs, in the course of telling her moving story of courage in the face of conjectured intolerance to the Brisbane Times, admitted that she made the whole thing up: