Lying it on thick
Muslim teen’s sis blames cops, media
The sister of the Muslim teen who lied about being harassed to avoid punishment from her dad posted a Facebook rant Thursday blaming the police and media for the ordeal.
“The NYPD should have never been involved in the first place even if the incident did happen. It became super clear to me these past two weeks that the police’s first instinct is to doubt your story and try to disprove it,” Sara Seweid wrote.
Her sister Yasmin Seweid, 18, admitted Wednesday that her story about being harassed by three drunken white men yell- ing “Donald Trump!” was all a lie because she didn’t want to get in trouble with her dad for breaking curfew.
She was arrested and charged with obstructing governmental administration and filing a false report and was released without bail early Thursday, officials said.
“I’m not excusing what my sister did,” Sara wrote.
“I was horrified yesterday, and I’m still trying to grapple with the facts. Things snowballed out of our control because of the media . . . reporters made things so much worse for our family.”
Sara wrote that she and her family’s social-media posts were scrutinized by the police.
“I had more than one cop tell me that they’ve looked through all our social media . . . and it doesn’t look good that we’ve been vocal about certain issues they perceive to be anti-Trump, anti-white and even anti-men,” Sara wrote. She continued that no one understood the “extent of the emotional and mental trauma Yasmin had to endure.”
A police source said cops scrutinize every crime report — and that fake reports are just run-of-the-mill police work.
“This is normal. You’re going to have a certain number of false reports in any category of crime,” the source said. “Maybe it’s a person with mental illness, someone who’s afraid of something, someone who reports a robbery or grand larceny when they’re having a hard time with their insurance company. Every precinct, there’s going to be some false reports.”
Yasmin refused to speak when reporters in front of her home in North New Hyde Park, LI, asked for comment.
Her father answered the door and asked for “privacy.”
“No comment. Please just leave it that way,” the father said. Additional reporting by Shawn Cohen
TheT NYPD should have never been involved in the first place. Sara Seweid (right), aboutt sister Yasmin’s harass lie Things snowballed out of our control because of the media. . Sara on Facebook, about the firestorm started by Yasmin (left, on Thursday)
New York’s supposed post-election wave of hate crimes got less wave-y this week, as the NYPD announced that Yasmin Seweid had made up her story of being attacked by Muslim-bashers yelling “Trump, Trump, Trump” on the subway.
She’s now charged with filing a false report and obstructing government administration. Let us hope the lesson’s learned.
No, this doesn’t falsify any other similar accounts: Police are still pursuing other cases, including attacks and threats against two Muslim women, a city transit worker and an off-duty cop.
But it exposes the perils of buying too quickly into the “wave of hate” narrative.
Seweid is just 18, and apparently was trying to avoid her parents’ wrath for breaking curfew by making up her tale of three drunken men taunting her and trying to pull off her hijab.
What made her account stand out was her claim that other straphangers on the crowded train stood by and did nothing. That just didn’t ring true about our fellow New Yorkers.
Her problem, it turns out, wasn’t Islamophobia, but living at home in a traditional Muslim family that allegedly didn’t care for her becoming “Westernized” — dating a Catholic, drinking and staying out late.
On Wednesday, she appeared in court sans hijab and with a shaven skull. It seems that her father removed the long locks she usually covered in a headscarf — and her eyebrows, too. Do New York’s progressives have any comment on that?
This case has echoes of the 1987 Tawana Brawley affair — which also began with a young girl making wild accusations to avoid parental fury. Happily, Seweid came clean rather than embrace “help” from some 2016 equivalent of the Rev. Al Sharpton & Co.
Hate crime deserves to be taken seriously — and the NYPD does just that, devoting serious resources to following up any report. Yet false reports feed fear and suspicion.
In these times, New Yorkers need to be united, not divided by phantom menaces.