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October
7, 2002 9:00 a.m. By David Klinghoffer |
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all the tragedy in the assaults that are variously and inconsistently
categorized as "hate crimes," these acts also generate no small
amount of bleak comedy. Read the small headlines in newspapers, the crime-blotter
columns listing random villainies in your metro area, and you'll see what
I mean.
In Anchorage, Alaska, one reads of the Arab-American owner of a printing shop whose premises were wrecked, a wall spray-painted with the message, "WE HATE ARABS." The alleged victim, Nezar "Mike" Maad, received $34,000 in donations from well-wishers but was later charged with trashing the shop himself to collect insurance money.
In Heber City, Utah, the Muslim co-owner of a motel reported that the fire that destroyed his place of business, the Alpine Lodge, was likewise a hate crime — until the FBI charged him with burning down his own motel, again apparently for the insurance money.
Other "hate crimes" have provided fodder for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which counts eight bias-related murders of Arab Americans since September 11, 2001. Except that in all but one of these, the motives turn out to be ambiguous — or not ambiguous at all. One such "hate crime" victim, a 21-year-old Somali, was found dead under a bridge in Snohomish County, Washington. Two other Somalis are now charged with murdering him after he annoyed a South Seattle drug dealer by urinating on the dealer's floor.
This may have been part of what a Snohomish County councilman, Jeff Sax, had in mind when he made (small) headlines in my local newspaper by vote against a resolution declaring Bias Crime Awareness Week. Mr. Sax commented that in his view, "Murder's murder, assault's assault, rape's rape."
Such common sense was heard in Los Angeles last week from an unlikely source.
A series of beatings in gay West Hollywood have homosexual activists protesting — less at the beatings themselves than at the fact that in one case, the apprehended criminals are charged with robbery and assault rather than with a hate crime. The victims "had just embraced on Cynthia Street," as the Los Angeles Times gingerly puts it, when they were approached by two men with baseball bats who proceeded to savagely beat them, but without voicing any anti-gay epithets.
Citing a lack of proof at to motive, the district attorney declines to add a "hate-crime enhancement" to the proposed criminal penalties for that assault, which is what drove 300 West Hollywoodites to march and shout into bullhorns at the corner of Santa Monica and San Vincente boulevards. The "enhancement" would add two years to a prison sentence of six to 19 years.
One of the protesters carried a sign that said, "HOW CAN A BEATING NOT BE HATE?"
That happens to be EXACTLY RIGHT.
Whenever somebody beats another person with a baseball bat — whether they're both white or both gay or one's white and one's an Arab or one's gay and one's straight — there has got to be a certain amount hate in the assailant's heart. The same must be true of anybody who commits any rape, murder, or assault. These are not acts of love, no matter who the victim and criminal are.
That sign, carried by an angry gay protester, says more that's true than the person carrying it knows. Rather than passing laws adding "enhancements" to sentences where "hate" is allegedly the motive, let's drop the whole concept of "bias crimes," assume that every single violent crime is motivated by hate, and "enhance" sentences across the board by a couple of years at least.
How can a beating, any beating, not be hate? Like the sign said, it can't.
— David Klinghoffer is the author of The Lord Will Gather Me In and The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism, to be published by Doubleday in March 2003.