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Tag: hate crime
Georgia Sheriff Who Dismissed Racist Motive In Shootings Posted Anti-Asian Slur

Georgia Sheriff Who Dismissed Racist Motive In Shootings Posted Anti-Asian Slur

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in fatal shootings at three Atlanta-area businesses, was charged with eight counts of murder on Wednesday, with six of his victims being Asian or Asian American women. Four of the victims still have not been identified by authorities. One survivor, Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz, is in critical condition.

Law enforcement officials have said it's not clear that Long's motive was racist, but there are multiple reasons to doubt this. For one thing, one of the officers advancing this narrative was Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office. Long "was pretty much fed up, kind of at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did," Baker said. It didn't take long for Buzzfeed to locate a racist and indeed specifically anti-Asian post on Baker's own Facebook page: a picture of a T-shirt calling COVID-19 an "IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA."

"Loved my shirt," Baker wrote accompanying the picture. "Get yours while they last."

This is maybe not the best guy to assess what a racist motive looks like, and it certainly helps explain how he, in his role as sheriff's department spokesman, seemed at least as attuned to the suspect's basic humanity as to that of the victims.

As Rep. Ted Lieu responded to the "bad day" excuse from Baker, "All of us have experienced bad days. But we don't go to three Asian businesses and shoot up Asian employees." Lieu is calling for "the FBI to conduct its own independent investigation."

"We know hate when we see it," Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock said on MSNBC. "We'll get into the nuances of it, but only hate drives you to take eight precious lives in the way that he did."

While Long told investigators he had a "sexual addiction" and saw the spas and massage businesses he attacked as a "temptation," that hardly eliminates race as a factor considering that, as Twitter user David Dennis Jr. pointed out, "He was so wildly addicted to sex that he drove pass all the strip clubs in ATLANTA to only target establishments where he knows Asian women work." (If you haven't been to Atlanta, please trust that there are a lot of strip clubs.)

Multiple stereotypes of Asian people could have simultaneously fed into the specific targeting of women of Asian descent in these shootings. Helen Kim Ho, a Korean American founder of the group Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Atlanta, listed some of those for The Washington Post: "We're not really Americans, we're perpetually foreigners, and that idea plays out with women as being oversexualized," she said. "All of that had to have played out in this man's own mind. In addition to the unspoken notion that Asian people are easy targets."

"Racially motivated violence should be called out for exactly what it is and we must stop making excuses and rebranding it as economic anxiety or sexual addiction," Rep. Marilyn Strickland said on the House floor on Wednesday. "As a woman who is Black and Korean I am acutely aware of how it feels to be erased or ignored." In this case, specifically, the racial component of a mass killing is being erased and ignored by law enforcement.

There has been a surge of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. over the past year, with the group Stop AAPI Hate tracking 3,800 incidents, 68% of them targeting women. This came as Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans repeatedly blamed the coronavirus pandemic on China.

Aysha Qamar has compiled a list of resources for putting an end to anti-Asian hate.

Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes At Highest Levels Since 9/11

Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes At Highest Levels Since 9/11

Published with permission from AlterNet.

While many well-meaning Americans would like to believe that Islamophobia is limited to certain less tolerant parts of the country or certain hateful presidential candidates, anti-Muslim hate crimes have not only increased all over the country, but are at their highest levels since the aftermath of 9/11, according to a new report. Analyzing crime data from researchers at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernadino found that hate crimes against American Muslims were up 78 percent in 2015. Attacks against those perceived as Arab rose even more.

“The rise,” the report’s authors observe, “came even as hate crimes against almost all other groups — including blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays and whites — either declined or increased only slightly.” Using police data from 20 states, researchers found 260 instances of reported hate crimes against Muslims, which is the most since 481 were reported in the months after 9/11. As a New York Times article on the report points out, “victims are often reluctant to report attacks for fear of inflaming community tensions, and because it is sometimes difficult for investigators to establish that religious, ethnic or racial hatred was a cause.”

Among the crimes, a former Marine in Connecticut fired his rifle into the door of a local mosque. In Minneapolis, a man screaming Islam shot two men seemingly because they were wearing recognizable Muslim garb. Even in diverse New York City an imam and his assistant were shot dead during their walk home from Sunday prayers, though the authorities have yet to confirm hate crime charges. In another incident in Brooklyn, two women pushing strollers had their veils ripped off by an obscenity screaming woman.

While reactions to attacks like that of the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando this summer, and earlier events in Paris and Nice were partly to blame for these attacks, it’s clear our current political climate has played a role. Brian Levin, the director of the center that conducted the study, told the Times that the “frequency of anti-Muslim violence appeared to have increased immediately after some of Mr. Trump’s most incendiary comments.”

The report found that said rhetoric has a tangible impact on crime data: “Our analysis of daily data following terrorist attacks found a tolerant statement about Muslims by a political leader was accompanied by a sharp decline in hate crime, while a less tolerant announcement was followed by a precipitous increase in both the severity and number of anti-Muslim hate crimes.”

Ilana Novick is an AlterNet contributing writer and production editor.

Photo: Members of the Muslim community pray in a mosque in Marseille during an open day weekend for mosques in France, January 9, 2016. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/Files

After Orlando, a Small-Town Pastor Finds Her Voice

After Orlando, a Small-Town Pastor Finds Her Voice

Last Sunday started to bloom as it usually does for the Rev. Robin LaBolt, layer upon layer of her morning ritual gently unfurling.

Pastor Robin, as her parishioners call her, awakened at 5:30 a.m. and headed for the kitchen of her home in Sycamore, Ohio — population 847, by the most recent census count. She made coffee for herself before strolling into the living room and settling into her favorite chair. She reached into the basket on the floor and pulled out her iPad to check the news.

She doesn’t remember which news organization’s headline she saw first. Doesn’t matter. They all said the same thing: Twenty people were dead and dozens more were wounded after a gunman opened fire in a gay bar in Orlando, Florida.

“Dear God,” she said aloud in the empty room. “Dear God. No.”

Her immediate conclusion: It was a hate crime. “He goes into a gay bar and starts shooting?” she said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “It’s a hate crime.”

Pastor Robin knew the challenge waiting for her at Sycamore United Church of Christ.

“We’re a small town,” she said. “It’s not exactly an LGBT-friendly area. Not that anyone says bad things about them. They’d just rather not talk about it.”

Last fall, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, she approached her church’s governing board. “I need to know if I’m going to be able to officiate these weddings,” she said.

Permission denied.

“They were worried about backlash in the congregation and in the community,” she said. “I was devastated.”

After the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, silence at Sycamore United Church of Christ was no longer an option, she decided.

At 8 a.m., Pastor Robin walked out her front door and across the street to the church where she has served as head pastor for seven years. She sat down at her desk to think about how to alter her sermon. She had planned to talk about community. She still would, she decided.

She didn’t write down what she wanted to say about the massacre in Orlando. She didn’t have to. Her mind was full of thoughts for the people she knew in Sycamore’s LGBT community.

Later that day, she would send a text message to a close friend who is gay: How are you? I have been thinking of you. I love you.

I love you, too, her friend responded.

She sent another text to the mother of a gay child: I imagine you may be afraid … I will continue to work to make this a safe community. The mother forwarded the text to her children.

“Sometimes people don’t want to talk,” Pastor Robin said. “They just want to know that somebody cares.”

At the 10 a.m. service, Pastor Robin talked about the church community, lifting up the good works of the congregation. She celebrated a woman’s fifth anniversary of church membership, too.

Then she turned to the tragedy in Orlando.

When she mentioned the 20 dead victims, she could tell by the look of shock on so many faces that most had not heard the news.

“Something took hold of me,” she said. “It really was one of those Holy Spirit moments when I suddenly knew what to say.”

She told them, “I’m not interested in what your personal feelings are about gay people. But I am interested in what God has to say about all of us. God loves all of us, without exception — period. And that’s what we are called to do, too: Love everyone.”

Immediately, she felt such relief.

“I felt no fear,” she said. “Not being as explicit about this as I’ve wanted to be has taken a toll on me emotionally and spiritually. I was respecting them at the cost of my theological integrity. It felt like a sin of omission. It felt like a betrayal to my friends and my family.”

Pastor Robin and a few members of the congregation are organizing a vigil for the Orlando victims on Friday at 7 p.m. on the Wyandot County Courthouse lawn. She hopes that other pastors in the community will join her. It’s a fitting ending for her, as she is leaving the Sycamore church later this month. Long before the Orlando shootings, she had accepted a new position at a more progressive UCC church.

“I took this church as far as I could,” she said. “There are wonderful people here, but I am an activist. Our LGBT friends need us, their allies, to stay strong for them, to speak out for them. And right now, they need to know that we support them, that we know they are grieving.”

Her new church is in Spring Hill, Florida, only an hour and a half north of Orlando, where 49 innocent people were killed and more than 50 others are injured.

“Yeah, I thought about that,” she said. “I am ready.”

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate.

Photo: People take part in a candlelight memorial service the day after a mass shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, U.S. June 13, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

‘Blue Lives Matter’ Movement Wins Big In Louisiana

‘Blue Lives Matter’ Movement Wins Big In Louisiana

The state of Louisiana has just expanded its hate crime law to include protections for law enforcement and first responders.

The bill faced little opposition in the Republican controlled legislature and passed with a vote of 33-3. Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, signed the bill Thursday, stating that having come from a family of law enforcement officers, he believes “They deserve every protection that we can give them.”

The new statute means that anyone found to have targeted a police officer, firefighter, or first responder because of their profession will face an increased penalty of five years in prison, and a fine of up to $5,000.

This is an unprecedented move: Every other state’s hate crime laws require the victim to have been targeted because of identity characteristics like race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity and sexual orientation. Specific professions have never been included in that list.

The bill, written by State Representative Lance Harris, represents a big win for the so-called Blue Lives Matter movement, a national organization formed by police and their supporters that emerged as a counter-force to Black Lives Matter in New York City in 2014 after NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were killed in the line of duty.

Harris cited the killing of Texas sheriff Darren Goforth, whom the bill is named after, as evidence of its necessity. “It looked like it was strictly done because someone didn’t like police officers, like a hate crime,” he said of Goforth’s murder last August.

The “Black Lives Matter” movement has yet to achieve the passage of any significant legislation to aid their cause, and this amendment to Louisiana’s hate crime law could heighten tensions even further between the two groups. Before the law was signed, the New Orleans chapter of the Black Youth 100 activist group released a statement condemning it and calling on their supporters to stop this “malicious trend,” and not allow for “the gains of the civil rights movement to be squandered away by police officers scrambling to avoid criticism from their constituents.”


Photo: A member of the Black Lives Matter protesters argues with a police officer as they shut down the main road to the Minneapolis St. Paul Airport following a protest at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota December 23, 2015. REUTERS/Craig Lassig