The Nun: ...
Unless, that is, you subscribe to the the notion that sticks and stones and fists and kicks don’t hurt nearly as much as name-calling. From the N.Y. Daily News, which, like every other newspaper in the country, wouldn’t be covering this garden-variety Florida assault if it were not being labeled a hate crime:
David McKnight, 22, was playing the song “Wasted” by Gucci Mane when, he says, he was confronted by 14-year-old Joshua Lamb, WFTV.com reports. “The argument involved the black male suspect saying, ‘You shouldn’t be listening to rap music because you’re white,’ ” said Palm Bay police spokeswoman Yvonne Martinez. When McKnight, who is Caucasian, refused to turn off the music, Lamb and a group of friends assaulted him. “I couldn’t get away fast enough,” McKnight told WFTV. “One of them spit on me, punched me, knocked me down … I got a couple of kicks in from a couple of them.” McKnight told police Lamb was with at least seven others. “I told him to drop it. I was like, ‘Just drop it, let’s go, there is eight of you and one of me. Just drop it,’ ” McKnight said. “And he says, ‘I’m not dropping anything.’ Bam! [He] punched me.” McKnight did not retaliate and, according to the police report obtained by The Smoking Gun, he “fled before any further battery could take place.” But WFTV reported that he suffered a swollen eye, broken toe, concussion and choke marks around his neck in the fight. ...
. . . walking past the men to shoot them.
Gerardo Regalado ...
Mbarek Lafrem
Take a good look at the face of hate. This is Mbarek Lafrem, a Moroccan citizen who nearly beat a pediatric nurse to death in a New York City nightclub last month after she had the temerity to refuse to dance with him. The nurse suffered multiple head wounds, including a skull fracture, broken eye socket, and shattered nose. She was beaten around the face. She was also attacked sexually: Lafrem is charged with attempted rape. And attempted murder, because the attack was so severe. ...
The Florida Department of Corrections (headed by Walter McNeil) needs to stop pointing fingers and start taking responsibility for the escape of Tommy Lee Sailor. They’re the ones who screwed up by failing to notice when the violent serial offender absconded from his ankle monitor on New Year’s Eve, enabling Sailor to attack yet another innocent victim.
The Florida Parole Commission (headed by Frederick B. Dunphy) also needs to stop hiding and start answering questions about their decisions and policies that freed Sailor before his sentence was complete. ...
What happens if you sign a hate crimes bill, and then all the wrong types of people commit “hate crimes?”
Well, you keep your mouth shut about it. ...
In the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, more people are noticing the ways the media takes its marching orders from political activists, abetted by criminologists who use their position to promote political causes through a thin veneer of “academic” observation. This activism-disguised-as-expertise has played a central role in enforcing the orthodoxy of hate crimes activism for more than a decade.
So when ordinary people ask, “why is this crime not a hate crime?” the media answers by turning to activist-criminologists like Jack Levin and James Allen Fox, who spool out definitions that are utterly irrational on their face but go utterly unchallenged: it is an intricate dance designed to shut down discussion, not actually explain anything. ...
It’s criminal apologist week, and no criminal apologist week would be complete without a deep bow to Jack Levin, the Northwestern* criminologist who has made an art form of claiming that some brutal, senseless murders are serious ethical and social problems motivated by “hate” — while others are just acting-out caused by “ouchiness,” teenage angst, and our cruel lack of interest in understanding where brutal killers are “coming from.”
You can see where this is going: when someone uses certain slur words (not all of them — not the ones about women) while victimizing somebody, it’s suddenly a much more important crime, which means other crimes are less important, in every sense. Convincing the public that they must accept this inequality is a job for experts, and Levin is the go-to expert for insidiously psychologizing away certain offenders’ actions while demanding allegiance to the urgency of crimes he deems hate. ...
Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal: the logical outcome of these laws is that some victims matter less than others.
Let’s see. According the the silence of the “experts” in the face of Walter E. Ellis’ crimes, apparently it’s some number higher than seven. And counting.
So what constitutes a hate crime against women? Nothing, in practice. Not selecting and slaughtering woman after woman after woman. Not scrawling hate words across a murdered woman’s body. Not ritualistically destroying a woman’s breasts or sex organs. Not spreading fear among other women through your attacks. Not inflicting “excessive” violence, “overkill,” whatever that means. ...
What do you say to the judge in Athens, Georgia to justify kidnapping somebody, stabbing them repeatedly with a screwdriver, and leaving them for dead?
Well, your honor, she’s mine, and she deserved it: ...
As elected officials in Atlanta crowd the microphone to denounce Sgt. Scott Kreher for saying something importune about Mayor Shirley Franklin, the list grows . . . of elected officials in Atlanta grandstanding on Kreher while refusing to comment on the city’s grotesque treatment of wounded police officers, the real issue.
Here is a video Kreher helped create that details the systematic abuse of the officers by the city. And here is a petition supporting Kreher, a decent guy who lost his temper over real injustice. Not fake injustice. I urge you to read the text of the petition, if you want to know what really happened. ...