Hating "Hate Crime" Legislation

My Domino's pizza had just arrived Thursday night when I sat down to a date with Hannity and Colmes. I could barely stomach the video they showed of this violent gang beating of two soldiers in Seattle who had just returned from Iraq. Suffice it to say, I had a pretty light dinner.

Michelle Malkin has a thorough roundup of this heinous crime, so there’s no point rehashing what she’s already said. One note of interest, however: Michelle spent three years at the Seattle Times in the late 1990s and has firsthand knowledge of what she considers abject incompetence and recklessness of Seattle PD leadership, which doesn’t necessarily bode well for all of us who want these brutal thugs to be brought to justice as soon as possible.

It’s now been two full days since this terrible incident has gotten national media coverage, and what gets me the most is the deafening silence of race hustlers who are the first to converge on such a scene declaring a “hate crime” whenever blacks are the victims of whites, or gays are the victims of straights. From what I could tell, one of the beating victims was white and the other black. And every single assailant or onlooker (and, sickeningly, photographer) on video was black, which begs the questions: Is it impossible for blacks to hate whites? Or for blacks to hate other blacks?

There’s probably a good chance the attackers had no idea their victims were soldiers, and I’d be willing to bet they didn’t give a hoot about the color of their skin either. This alone is enough to invalidate any perceived legitimacy of “hate crime” legislation. But the point remains: Beating someone senseless and then kicking and stomping them while they lay unconscious in the street is already a crime -- it hardly matters why it occurs.

But more disturbing than these crimes is the culture our “hate crime” mentality has created, where we get the troubling if only fleeting feeling that some criminal activity is somehow justifiable, so long as our criminals are already viewed as bigger victims than those they attack.