May 14, 2001
Hate-Crime Follies
The legal aftermath to an attack on
Christopher Columbus in the city of Santa Cruz instructs us in
the folly of the current liberal obsession with installing hate
crime laws in every statute book.
On March 9 James Cosner, 31-year-old
self-described "revolutionary freedom fighter" took
a hammer to a statue of Christopher Columbus in Santa Cruz's
city hall, severely damaging the statue while denouncing Columbus
as a perpetrator of genocide. The statue is worth $100,000, according
to a deputy DA in Santa Cruz.
Cosner is now being charged with vandalism. If convicted he could
get up to three years in prison, but the prosecutor has added
a hate-crimes enhancement-which could add another three years
from California's penal code. So here's a fellow who did something
that's a crime, with enough destruction to draw a felony charge.
But suddenly that's not enough. Now we're into the issue of his
motive, namely the avenging of Columbus's destruction of the
Arawaks.
In other words, Cosner could
get an extra three years because of his ideology, not because
he made a mess of city property. An extra irony is that in politically
correct Santa Cruz the progressives have been big supporters
of hate crime laws.
The liberal obsession with
installing hate crimes in every statute book is one of the saddest
spectacles of our age. Let us now travel to North Side Chicago,
to the Shan Restaurant, a Pakistani bistro where South Asians
like to hang out, Among them on March 12 was Ifti Nasim, a 53-year-old
Pakistani writer and radical who's also a leading light of Muslim
gays, many of them mustered in the international gay Muslim
organization Al-Fatiha.
Nasim has been claiming that he was sitting in the Shan on the
night of March 12 when a man at the table called Salman Aftab
began verbally hassling him for being "too visible"
in his sexual orientation and an "embarrassment" to
South Asians. Nasim apparently likes heavy jewelry and displayed
himself in drag on the cover of his latest book of poems. Nasim
says Aftab told him, "I'm going to stab you up the ass to
tell God I'm getting rid of at least one sinner! I want to clean
up the planet after your type!"
Then, on Nasim's account, Aftab got a knife from the kitchen,
yelled out "gandoo," meaning "faggot bottom,"
declared an Islamic "jihad" against Nasim and gay
Muslims and lurched toward the poet. At which point two people
in the restaurant restrained Aftab, and Nasim dialed 911. The
first Chicago cops on the scene reportedly told Nasim it looked
to them like "an ethnic problem" and declined to take
Nasim's complaint. Then police Sgt. Mary Boyle arrived and ordered
Aftab to be arrested, charged with simple assault, a misdemeanor.
The Chicago police have declined
Nasim's request that they hit Aftab with a hate-crimes charge,
to the great fury not only of many Chicago gays but of the local
chapter of the ACLU. And indeed, For Chicago's gays it's become
a very big issue issue. The Al-Fatiha Foundation has been urging
gays across the United States to call Cook County State's Attorney
Dick Devine to demand that hate-crimes charges be filed against
Aftab on the grounds that the assault was motivated by Nasim's
sexual orientation and ethnicity.
The Chicago Anti-Bashing Network
has made the same call, and has prompted the ACLU's Pamela Sumner
to write a three-page, single-spaced letter to State's Attorney
Devine detailing why she felt he should pursue hate-crimes charges
in Nasim's case. Devine has refused to do so.
The cops and Devine are quite
right. It turns out that the initial quarrel between Nasim and
Aftab wasn't about the former's sexual orientation but about
an article he'd written. Aftab never attacked Nasim with a knife
(though Nasim insists he'd gone to the kitchen to get one). And
Nasim put up Aftab's bail money, though he still wants him hit
with a hate crime charge for calling him an insulting sexual
term. The Chicago Anti-Bashing Network supports this position,
which only goes to show how dementedly wrong headed progressives
are on the hate crime issue.
Now CABN has done good work
in Chicago on such issues as killings and torture by Chicago's
cops. When we called the group to ask for Sumner's letter CABN
cofounder Andy Thayer told us he was well aware of our opposition
to hate crime laws and indeed agreed that "the promotion
of hate crime legislation has generally been a distraction from
legal inequalities faced by lesbians and gays," also that
the "Democratic Party in particular has very cynically
promoted hate crime legislation while conveniently ignoring the
Defense of Marriage Act and the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy
that had arguably contributed to the climate requiring hate crime
laws."
After voicing these sentiments,
Thayer said he wants Aftab charged with a hate crime because
the law is on the Illinois books, and it was a useful way to
pressure states attorney Divine, who grandstands on his support
for hate crime laws. But the more he talked, eloquently, about
astounding cases of police killing (LaTanya Haggerty, shot to
death) and police assault (Jeremiah Mereday, face beaten to a
pulp) where the cops had escaped charges, the more we thought
he was making our case for us.
Why fool with such laws, with
their importing of thought crimes into the statute book, when
the issues at hand concern murder, torture or, in Nasim's case,
an allegation of assault? Why is the ACLU's Sumner spending hours
on a three-page letter urging hate-crimes charges against Aftab
when there are such urgent matters of everyday business as men
sitting on death row, put there by confessions elicited by torture?
And finally, why is Al-Fatiha
wasting time on hate-crimes issues in Chicago when their Muslim
comrades round the world are confronted by forces of intolerance
even grimmer than Mayor Daley's Blue Knights? Seven Islamic
nations prescribe the death penalty for homosexuality. But on
the issue of the death penalty Al-Fatiha's founder and director,
Faisal Alam, wrote earlier this year to Bill Dobbs of Queer Watch
(the gay justice group that opposes the death penalty and hate-crimes
laws) in mealy-mouthed terms, to the effect that "Al-Fatiha
continues to maintain a level of discretion when it comes to
dealing with what we perceive as 'political matters'. Al-Fatiha
maintains itself as a 'religious organization' So this means
that we have actively taken a stance NOT to directly get involved
with such situations."
Earlier this year Oregon State Senator
Gary George, a hazelnut farmer, introduced a bill making it a
hate crime to smash a Starbucks window or sabotage a timber company.
George told the press his real target was political correctness
on hate crimes. "Even the Scriptures tell you not to judge
a person's thoughts but their actions." His bill calls for
an additional five years in prison for an offender whose crime
is motivated by "a hatred of people who subscribe to a set
of political beliefs that support capitalism." The bill
was intended more to make a political point than as serious legislation.
But we could see it romping through the Oregon legislature.
This hate-crimes binge by the liberals is playing with fire.
CP
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