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  • 2019-03-15 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a Muslim Student Set Fire to a Christian School to 'Protest' Trump? (en)
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  • On 15 March 2019, as much of the Internet reeled over the news that nearly 50 people had been killed during mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand, numerous social media users encountered an article reporting that a Muslim student had set fire to a Christian school in an effort to protest U.S. President Donald Trump: While this article was shared on various Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and Reddit threads in the days before the New Zealand massacre, those killings drew additional attention and comments to these posts. The above-displayed article refers to a genuine incident from January 2018. However, this article, which was originally published by NewsPunch, an outlet notorious for misleading reporting, gets a number of facts wrong. For one, these fires were not set in protest of Trump. A contemporary report from the Star Tribune reported that 19-year-old Tnuza Jamal Hassan set several fires at her former school in retaliation for U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report continued: Tnuza J. Hassan, of Minneapolis, allegedly told police that she wanted the school to burn to the ground and that her intent was to hurt people, according to the complaint charging her with one count of felony first-degree arson filed in Ramsey County District Court. According to the charge, Hassan said similar attacks happened on Muslim land and no one cared if Muslims were hurt. She told police and fire investigators, You guys are lucky that I don’t know how to build a bomb because I would have done that. Neither the words protest nor Trump appeared in any of the contemporary articles from credible news outlets that we examined. NewsPunch also used a misleading (and completely unrelated) image of a fire to exaggerate the blaze's impact. The photograph featured above does not show St. Catherine’s University. This image actually shows an abandoned church that burned down in 2006 in Quebec. We have not been able to locate photographs from the actual fires set by Hassan, but CBS reported that the fires were small and quickly contained, that nobody was injured, and that the damage was limited to furnishings. In addition to NewsPunch's misleading reporting, many people on social media made incorrect assumptions about this story after encountering it in March 2019. For instance, several readers were upset that Hassan only faced arson charges, rather than terrorism charges. In the months since Hassan's arrest in January 2018, however, she was indicted on terrorism charges: (en)
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