the hate crime that wasnt

[Darth Sidious]

Has anyone seen Jesse Jackson around lately?
Kweisi Mfume? Al Sharpton? For persons whose
political antennae are ordinarily so
sensitive that they
can pick up racial tremors a thousand miles
away,
they seem to have overlooked a possible hate
crime
right here in the vicinity of the nation's
capital.
In April, a man armed with a knife
attacked and
killed an 8-year-old boy named Kevin
Shifflett as he
played outdoors in the Del Ray section of
Alexandria.
Then he fled, apparently by cab. Police
searching for
the suspect initially found the trail cold,
then focused
their attention on a paroled felon whose DNA
matched evidence found in the getaway cab.
As it happens, the so-far-unnamed
suspect is
black, and Kevin Shifflett was white. The
Washington
Post has turned up evidence to suggest the
suspect
had racial motives for the slaying. It seems
that a
witness to the attack says the suspect was
yelling
"something to the third-grader about hating
white
people before slashing his throat." Police
previously
had not mentioned the racist overtones of the
attack.
There's more. Police have possession of
a note
found in a hotel room where the suspect had
been
staying which says, "Kill them raceess whiate
kidd's
anyway." There's more still. The suspect had
previously been convicted of malicious
wounding
following a 1993 incident in Alexandria in
which he
brutally attacked a stranger with a hammer.
The
victim in that assault, Leonard Riddle, says
his
attacker called him "whitey" before the
beating
commenced. Sounds like hatred from here.
So where are Mr. Jackson and company?
Not
here. It seems that only white-on-black
crime, not the
reverse, constitutes a hate crime. In a June
28 column
in this newspaper, columnist Paul Greenberg
cited a
scholar who says a pre-biblical code of
justice seems
to apply now. "The crucial consideration
becomes not
an eye for an eye and a hand for a hand, but
whose
eye and hand are involved."
The point here is not that the suspect
in the
Shifflett case should face hate-crime
charges, but
rather that the notion of hate crimes per se
is morally
bankrupt. Boys like Kevin Shifflett warrant
no less
protection than anyone else. The sooner that
discussion of specious concepts like hate
crimes ends,
the sooner authorities can deal with more
important
questions, such as why a man with the
suspect's
record was out on parole at the time of
Kevin's
slaying. Answering questions like that may
improve
the chance that the parents of Kevin's peers
won't
have to cope with the sorrow his parents did.

--
--------------------------------------------------
"wipe them out.....all of them!"
Darth Sidious episode I

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