U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder couldn’t wait to go before Congress and ask for expanded federal hate-crimes legislation after a neo-Nazi white supremacist fatally wounded a black security guard at the Holocaust Museum.__Specifically, Holder told the legislators that federal hate crimes laws need to be expanded to include crimes based on sexual orientation, gender and disability. So Holder wins, hands down, the 2009 award for the “Most Despicable Display of Using a Genuine Tragedy To Advance Your Personal Political Agenda.”__Lordy, where did President Obama GET this guy? Holder must have dragged the deepest, dankest depths of the Potomac to dredge up this kind of chutzpah.__Exactly two days after Holder’s congressional testimony, a group of 30-50 black youths attacked a white Akron, Ohio family. Holder has uttered not a mumble about this being a hate crime. This is the same guy who took the entire country to task or our “cowardice” in not discussing issues of race.
Let’s be clear what Holder was hinting at: he was talking about our lack of courage, not his. I’m sure Holder believes he’s Mr. Intrepid when it comes to discussing race, his not addressing that nasty business in Akron notwithstanding.__Holder’s craven and poltroonish silence shows, precisely, what is wrong with the notion of hate crimes laws. At least three things stand out. One is insidious, and thus more pernicious. Advocates of “hate crimes” laws don’t just want the crime prosecuted. They want the violator’s ideas and beliefs put on trial. They want the law to make a statement saying, “These ideas and views are not acceptable.”__People who commit crimes with race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and disability as a motive should ALWAYS be put on trial. Their ideas NEVER should. Hateful beliefs and doctrines should get an up-or-down vote in what’s been called the “marketplace of ideas.”
The anti-Semitic and racist beliefs of a James von Brunn, the suspect in the Holocaust Museum shooting, have already been given that thumbs-down vote; there’s no need to try von Brunn for them, especially since he’ll be tried for the far more serious offense of murder.__And while I’m on the subject of violent crimes like murder, I should correct Holder on one point. He said in his congressional testimony that “hate crimes victimize not only individuals, but (also) entire communities.” Two weeks ago in Baltimore a 5-year-old girl took a bullet to the head when a thug fired into a crowd of people. Didn’t this crime “victimize the entire community,” Mr. Holder?
Our attorney general believes some people need extra protections, while victims like that 5-year-old girl don’t. Under current hate-crimes laws, some groups will be protected, others not. Some people will be prosecuted; others have virtual immunity from hate-crimes prosecution. Two particularly outrageous and heinous examples from Maryland come to mind.
_In the mid-1990s Joel Lee, a Korean-American, was fatally shot in Baltimore. His friends testified at trial that his assailant killed Lee out of hatred for Asians. After a Baltimore jury cut him loose despite the suspect’s friends identifying him as the killer with a motive of hatred, the suspect’s uncle approached the U.S. attorney in Baltimore and said his nephew admitted to the killing and the motive.__”Wire me up and let me get him saying it on tape,” the uncle proposed to the feds. He was rejected out of hand.
A few years later, four black men sodomized and fatally stomped a white woman named Yvonne Fountain in Cambridge, Md. The Dorchester County state’s attorney told me that sodomizing and then beating white women was routine for this quartet, who were eventually convicted of murder.
Not one federal official stepped in and offered to prosecute the four for hate crimes. The NAACP Voter Education Fund – which one year later ran a scurrilous, despicable ad about then-presidential candidate George W. Bush’s reluctance to support hate crimes legislation – didn’t come forward either. Nor did the NAACP itself, which is technically a separate organization but nonetheless vigorously defended the NAACP Voter Fund ad.__”Expand the scope” of federal hate crimes laws, Mr. Holder? I challenge you to apply the ones we have to “people of color” who’ve committed hate crimes against whites and Asian-Americans.
Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is a journalist who lives in Baltimore.
