On Friday evening, Stanford University sent a campus-wide community notification regarding a “potential hate crime.” A hit-and-run incident, which occurred earlier in the afternoon, involved a white driver who allegedly “accelerated and struck the victim, and then drove away while shouting ‘f*** you people.” The incident is currently being investigated by the California Highway Patrol.
The student in question is Abdulwahab Omira, an Arab Muslim coterm from Syria, identified earlier by other outlets. Omira is currently in the hospital after being hit by a car. However, the claim that he was a victim of a hate crime appears dubious. Students who know Omira personally refer to him as a “pathological liar,” and are deeply concerned that his story was fabricated. The Review confirmed this information with multiple students familiar with Omira.
Hours after the incident occurred, Stanford released the aforementioned “community crime notification.” That same evening, Stanford Interim President Richard Saller and Provost Jenny Duncan sent an email to the entire student body, stating they “are profoundly disturbed to hear this report of potentially hate-based physical violence on our campus.” National media outlets, including CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post, have picked up the story.
Altogether, Stanford sent three notifications to the student body, including a concerned letter from the University’s leadership, within less than twenty hours of the reported hit-and-run that injured Abdulwahab Omira. After the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel, in which hundreds of Israelis were brutally slaughtered, Stanford’s leadership took four days to send a letter to students denouncing Hamas.
The timeline of the incident and response is as follows: the reported incident occurred sometime before 2:00 pm on Friday, November 3rd; at 10:30 pm, Stanford sent out a “community crime notification”; at 11:47 pm, President Saller and Provost Martinez released their letter to the student body; lastly, on Saturday morning, a follow-up crime alert was released with a detailed description of the alleged perpetrator and their vehicle.
The alleged perpetrator of the hit-and-run was described by Omira in the follow-up alert on Saturday morning as a “white male in his mid 20s, with short dirty-blonde hair and a short beard, wearing a gray shirt and round framed glasses at the time of the incident.” From his hospital bed, Omira stated that the individual has “previously shown animosity towards my community.” He shared: “Today, as I share my story, my hope is to ignite a spark of empathy, a desire for change, and a call to action to foster a society where love overpowers hate, where understanding douses ignorance, and where compassion binds us in a tapestry of unified strength.”
However, students are increasingly concerned about the validity of the victim’s claims, and believe that Omira’s claim of a hate crime is likely fabricated. Multiple students describe Omira as a “pathological liar.” They also claim that he was also an alleged victim of another incident last year, which was also sent out in an email to the student body, in which “a stranger tapped a Middle Eastern student on the shoulder, called him a terrorist, and told him to ‘go home.’” The Review has confirmed these accounts with multiple students.
Those who know Omira also maintain that he has lied about and fabricated many other aspects of his life. In an Instagram post from 2019, a user who met him shared the life story that Omira had told him—the “craziest story” he had ever heard:
Many students doubted the truthfulness of this story, and shared additional stories of their own encounters with Omira on Fizz, an anonymous social media app restricted to members of the Stanford community. As of Sunday evening, the Fizz app is dominated by posts of this kind. Below are various screenshots of messages shared on the platform:
Suffice to say, whether or not Omira was the victim of a legitimate hate crime is now an open question among the student body. What is even more concerning than the doubts cast on Omira’s story, however, is Stanford’s asymmetrical response to this event compared to Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel, which sparked a nationwide wave of anti-Semitism.
The university’s Department of Public Safety releases crime alerts in order to notify the campus community of relevant incidents. All violent crimes and hate crimes are reported using this system. Unfortunately, the alert system has also reported false incidents. Last year, for instance, a university employee fabricated a serious rape allegation that was then sent out to the entire campus community. And for particularly salient current events, such the January 6th riot, the death of Tyre Nichols, and the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action, Stanford’s leadership will immediately release a statement expressing sympathy for those affected.
Remember, it took a full four days for Stanford leadership to release a statement condemning Hamas’ brutal assault on Israel that killed 1,400 innocent people. Unlike the alleged hate crime against Omira, the slaughter of Israelis occurred in plain sight, and the motive was anything but unclear. Elite universities across the country have clearly come under ideological capture. Ceding to the whims of the most vocal and left-leaning minorities, these institutions uphold their bold commitments of support only when their preferred minorities are victimized. Stanford ought to apply the same sense of urgency to an act of Jewish genocide as it does to an unverified and dubious instance of Islamophobia.
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