An 11-year-old Toronto girl says she was attacked while walking to school with her brother by "a man dressed in black" who came up behind her and started to cut off her hijab. 

The incident occurred in a Toronto suburb.  The little girl also told police that the man attacker her again, trying to cut off her hijab, even though she and her brother were walking with other pedestrians.

The attack set off a wave of indignation across Canada.

The Guardian:

"I felt confused, scared, terrified," Khawlah Noman, who is in Grade 6, told reporters at her school on Friday.

"I screamed.  The man just ran away.  We followed this crowd of people to be safe.  He came again.  He continued cutting my hijab again."

The Toronto district school board said it was "shocked" to hear about the assault which Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne called a "cowardly act of hatred" that did not represent the province.  Police did not have anyone in custody.

The attack comes as Canada approaches the first anniversary of a deadly shooting in a Quebec City mosque that killed six people at prayer.  A French-Canadian university student has been charged as the sole suspect.

Last month, a Quebec judge suspended a law banning people from wearing niqabs and other face coverings while giving or receiving public services.

Researchers have documented an increase in far-right extremist activity in Canada, much of it targeting Muslims.

This would be a terrible, horrific attack – if it actually happened.  After investigating all weekend, the Toronto police said on Monday that no such attack occurred.

CP24:

"There was an extensive investigation Friday and over the weekend and quite simply, investigators came to the conclusion, considering all the evidence they had, that what was described did not happen," police spokesman Mark Pugash said.

Pugash declined to call the incident a hoax, but said police now consider the investigation closed.

"I think we did absolutely what people would expect, which is we don't jump to conclusions.  We work on evidence and we invested a lot of time and a lot of effort over a fairly short period of time," Pugash said. "I think we owe it to everybody to examine particularly serious allegations in a detailed way and that's what we did."

No one was arrested and there are no charges pending on connection with the investigation, he said.

There was no indication from police or school officials as to why the girl would have made up the story if it did not happen.

So dozens of man-hours are spent investigating this incident by police, and when they discover it's a hoax, not only do they refuse to identify it as such, but they also refuse to arrest the perpetrator for filing a false police report.

The school district, who made a huge deal out of the incident when it occurred, holding a press conference with the kid and her family, maintained a stoic silence after releasing a statement:

The Toronto District School Board initially issued a short statement Monday saying they were thankful the assault never occurred and that they would not comment further.

However facing mounting criticism over the fact that the girl and her family were made available to the media Friday in a news conference at the school, the school board released a lengthier statement Monday afternoon explaining that they dispatched a spokesperson to the school after police tweeted about the incident.

"At no time did the TDSB call a press conference[;] however[,] spokespeople from the TDSB and Toronto Police made themselves available to answer any questions," TDSB spokesperson Ryan Bird said in the statement.  "This was done inside the school due to the bad weather outside.

"After expressing concern that they were going to be approached by media outside while trying to leave, as well as a concern that no members of the community be subject to the alleged perpetrator, the family was asked if they would like to join the TDSB spokesperson as she spoke to media.  The family members said they would speak to media and it was our understanding that this happened after, not before, they provided statements to police."

Got that?  They never called a press conference last Friday, but they held one anyway.  Any time the denial of what actually happened is as involved and convoluted as that one, you know they're lying.

Pam Geller, writing at Breitbart, lists some other hate crime hoaxes:

There are so very many of these instances, it's astonishing.  Last August, also in Canada, a Muslim claimed he was verbally abused and punched in a restroom; police found he had "exaggerated the interaction."  In London in July, a Muslima falsely claimed that her hijab was pulled off in what she called a racist attack.  In March, the General Teaching Council for Scotland accused a Muslim teacher of forging a letter from a colleague saying: "Don't trust Muslim teachers."

That same month, posters calling for the internment of Muslims at the University of California-San Diego were found to have been put up not by "Islamophobes," but by leftist students trying to smear opposition to jihad terror.  And in Montreal, a Muslim was charged with a terror hoax for allegedly making a bomb threat targeting Muslim university students.  Last February, an Ohio Muslim was charged with painting anti-Arab graffiti on the garage door of a Muslim family.  And in a notorious incident last December, a Muslim teen claimed her hijab was ripped off and she was verbally abused in a crowded New York City car by two Trump[-]supporters; after the story garnered international headlines, several reports said that she had made up the whole thing – apparently to avoid punishment from her parents for missing her curfew and dating a Christian.

There have been genuine cases of violence, even murder, against Muslims, but jumping to conclusions as the press and school district did in this case is typical of how so-called "hate crimes" play out.  The incident appears on the front page or tops the TV news, and if it is discovered that the crime never happened, it's buried or never even reported.

As long as a "hate crime" advances a politically correct agenda, it is covered.  When it might damage the cause when it's shown to be a hoax, correction of the record is given short shrift.