On Friday night, two groups converged in downtown Olympia, and some became destructive, burning flags, smashing windows, and spray painting businesses and Olympia Mayor Cheryl Selby's home.

Selby and her family were not home last night, but her neighbors began texting her when the protesters arrived at her house.

"I'm really trying to process this," she told The Olympian over the phone Saturday. "It's like domestic terrorism. It's unfair.

"It hurts when you're giving so much to your community," she said[.]

[DAILYCALLER] The history of the looming anti-Muslim backlash that never arrives is instructive. Logically, the original post-9/11 anti-Muslim backlash should have been the largest and most ferocious of the various backlashes, and indeed George W. Bush, members of his administration and members of Congress frequently warned Americans not to blame all Muslims for the acts committed by Al-Qaeda.

Even an anti-Israel leftist like Rachel Corrie
...aka Saint Pancake. A member of the lefty International Solidarity Movement, she attempted to stare down an Israeli bulldozer in 2003...
Award recipient Delinda C. Hanley recognizes that there was no post-9/11 backlash. Writing in the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, Hanley gushed: "As a result of the effective campaign undertaken by America's leaders, non-governmental organizations and the media, a backlash that, in many nations, might have turned into a bloodbath was averted and, indeed, transformed into a celebration of diversity."

The group known as Human Rights Watch
... During the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011, HRW received a pledge from the Foundation to Promote Open Society, of which George Soros is Chairman, for general support totaling $100,000,000. The grant is being paid in installments of $10,000,000 over ten years.Through June 30, 2013, HRW had received $30,000,000 towards the fulfillment of the pledge....
however tells a different tale. It documents in the same era a series of attacks amounting to "a nationwide wave of hate crimes against persons and institutions believed to be Arab or Muslim." The numbers are notable either for the "ferocity and extent" as HRW puts it, or for the remarkable calm they convey compared to the predicted carnage. For instance the 17-fold increase in anti-Muslim incidents sounds more alarming than the fact that there were 28 such events in 2000 compared with 481 in 2001.

It gets more interesting when one reads that these numbers include behavior ranging from "verbal taunts to employment discrimination to airport profiling to hate crimes." Since no actual numbers are listed for specific "crimes" one might suspect that there are far more verbal taunts than hate crimes among the 481.

One rarely-cited statistic that deflates HRW's story is the number two: only two people committed murder attributed to the post-9/11 backlash: Frank Roque and Mark Stroman. Roque is the Arizona man who killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner, and Stroman is the Texas man who killed Vasudev Patel, a non-Muslim Indian gas station attendant, and Waqar Hasan. In a nation of over 300 million people, only two became murderers after 9/11 as a result of their anti-Muslim rage.

After Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, M.D. went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood, US Army General George Casey told CNN that he was "concerned that this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers." Worse yet, on NBC after having acknowledged Hasan's attack as a "tragedy" Casey added "if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."

After the ISIS attacks in Gay Paree on November 13, the media was awash with breathless prognostications about the imminent anti-Muslims backlash: The Atlantic,NPR, The New York Times
...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, The Huffington Post, and many more.

Most Muslim advocacy groups (like CAIR
...designated a terrorist group by the UAE...
and MPAC) are the prime movers of the backlash myth. In fact, the Attorney General's cautionary speech was given to a group called Muslim Advocates, which describes itself as a "national legal advocacy and educational organization." Her comforting words (to the Muslim audience) and admonition (to everyone else) might have been drawn from the Muslim Advocate's "study" titled "Anti-Muslim Bigotry Rises Alongside Hateful Rhetoric" which, as of this writing, lists 32 events comprising the post-San Bernardino backlash. Many of these purported backlash events are anecdotal. Most of the "assaults" are verbal. Four involve violence against Muslims or people perceived to be Muslims.

So while the left continues with its infantilizing condescension towards the American public, it ignores the FBI's own hate crime statistics which tell a different tale: 60.3 percent of all hate crimes in the U.S. are perpetrated against Jews while 13.7 percent are committed against Muslims. The anti-Muslim backlash is a chimera. If the Department of Justice gets its way, the real backlash will befall anyone questioning the received wisdom of the B.O. regime and its media supporters.