Women's Building & Arab Businesses Attacked

Man Guilty of Hate Crime

December 12, 2002, 5:14 PM EST


NEW YORK (AP) A Westchester County man was convicted on Thursday of committing a hate crime by trying to set a synagogue on fire, Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson announced.

Mazin Assi, 23, was found guilty by a jury of attempted arson in the third degree as a hate crime, criminal mischief in the third degree as a hate crime and several other charges, Johnson said in a news release.

Assi faces up to 22 years in prison when he is sentenced on Jan. 22 by state Supreme Court Judge Steven Barrett.

Assi was tried separately from Mohammed Alfaqih, 21, for the same crime.

Alfaqih said in a written and videotaped statement that he did not play an active role in the attack. A second jury is deliberating in Alfaqih's case.

The two were accused of the October 2000 attempted firebombing of the Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The synagogue was unoccupied at the time.

The attack occurred on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.

Alfaqih and Assi, both of Yonkers, were tried under the state's hate crimes bill. The bill calls for people found guilty of hate crimes to be sentenced to penalties a step higher than their offenses would normally carry.

That's right, you won't find zionists writing anything in support of a WOMEN'S CENTER. They only know how to attack things.

If someone else is injured, zionists, like wild animals, surround and attack. They haven't yet reached the level of humanity where people show compassion for others when they are hurt. That's something they aren't interested in.

Rather than offer support, or say nothing, they try to push their own propaganda in people's faces. It's good this post stays up so everyone can see how low they really are.

thanks for showing your true colors - we didn't have to lift a finger.

Who would be interested in working to build some sort of defence group. If leftists and minority rights organizations went to unions like SEIU, HERE, ILWU and other unions with large minority memberships, we could work to build some type of patrols. The patrols could moniter the Mission, clean up the racist/bigoted graffity and attend left meetings as security. As opposed to looking to the racist cops and breeding illusions in them we could help organize workers and minorities to gain a sense of power and solidarity.

Yes, going in this direction, it's important to consider how people might achieve protection for everyone and their personal items in a just society. I refrain from saying 'law enforcement', because a lot of laws and their enforcement aren't particularly just right now.
For instance, this Chronicle article today indicates that the SFPD barely investigates lots of violent crimes, yet I know from anecdotal evidence that lots of people are still sent to jail for drug use etc: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/22/BA85710.DTL

"
The Chronicle stories detailed how San Francisco police solved only 28 percent of violent crimes between 1996 and 2000 -- the lowest solution rate among the 20 largest U.S. cities.

Police solved only 50 percent of the homicides that were reported between 1996 and 2000, the series found. Nearly 70 percent of the city's robberies and assaults were never investigated at all.
"

But what should the replacement be? The police aren't useful. I haven't extensively investigated what options for protection against violent people have been theorized under nonhierarchical or antiauthoritarian models of gov't. It is assumed that people who have less motive for property crime, but would violence go away entirely?
What could be done right now under a 'dual power' or dual society (basically, this is the idea that people should start creating and living right now under institutions that we would envision for a better society in the future, and then others could see this as a positive model, rather than arguing for some sort of revolution and leaving the details of living to be figured out later)?

It might be productive to set a trap. The defense group could pick, or paint, a mural that will attract vandals, and then lie in wait.

Hate-crime hoax

Michelle Malkin

A terrible racial incident took place at Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's alma mater last month. But you won't hear about it from Dan Rather or Time magazine or The Washington Post or the NAACP.

That's because what happened at the University of Mississippi in the early morning hours of Nov. 6 has all the markings of a fake hate crime: An apparent racial hoax committed by black students against black students, but blamed on whites until the suspects were nabbed last week.

Three black freshmen were accused by the college of scrawling racist graffiti on the doors of two other black students in the Kincannon residence hall on the Oxford campus. Also left on walls and doors spanning three floors of the dorm: A tree with a noose and hanging stick figure and vulgar references to genitalia drawn in blue window chalk.

The financial damage was estimated at roughly $600. But the cultural and psychological damage caused by such crude and twisted acts of Tawana Brawleyism is inestimable. The element of racial animus cloaks the hate-crime hoax with a false sense of legitimacy. It's a manipulative attempt to exploit old tensions and deflect suspicion from the actual perpetrators.

At the time the racist vandalism appeared, Ole Miss was commemorating the 40th anniversary of desegregation of its classrooms. Local and national observers immediately assumed the vandals were white.

Black students organized a "Say No to Racism" march and demanded more protection against white-on-black harassment. They blasted the school's president for not apologizing quickly enough for the racial slurs. The school's "minority affairs" director demanded that the university establish "programs and procedures" to ensure racial sensitivity and prevent hate crimes. The Institute for Racial Reconciliation and the Committee on Sensitivity and Respect convened meetings. Activists called for criminally prosecuting the perpetrators under state felony laws or federal hate-crime statutes.

But now that the race of the suspects has been revealed, some are seeking to minimize the crime as a "prank." The university will not be bringing criminal charges against the trio. Instead, each suspect faces charges involving five violations of the student code of conduct — not only for the racially explosive vandalism, but also on charges of making false and misleading statements to investigators.

That's right. It wasn't enough for these accused sickos to adopt racial terror tactics, destroy property, cast false suspicion on others and cast doubt on all bona fide victims of such perfidy. They apparently tried to lie their way out of it, too.

The Daily Mississippian student newspaper noted that an "irritated Chancellor Robert Khayat said the entire situation was 'regrettable,' but it taught the university community that no members 'should engage in abusive behavior' and 'before we jump to conclusions and start condemning groups of people, we should know what happened.'"

All well and good, but why allow a double standard of justice to prevail? If the attackers had been white, they faced possible federal prison time. Because the suspects are black, the most serious consequence they face is expulsion. Welcome to equal treatment under the law, 2002-style.

Where is the uproar over the hoaxers' callous use of lynching imagery and racial epithets — at Ole Miss of all places? And where is the national press on this matter? Fake hate crimes are an abhorrently common phenomenon on modern college campuses, where race-consciousness reigns in such a poisonous way that it would make integrationists weep. "Students of color" are herded into separate dorms, separate departments and separate graduation ceremonies.

Segregation is back all right. But while the media elite's crack reporters are busy rummaging through the dustbins of old history in an effort to paint all conservatives as racially insensitive relics, they continue to ignore one of the outrageous race scandals of the 21st century: How the young beneficiaries of the civil rights movement are squandering and desecrating its legacy of equal respect and justice for all.


Michelle Malkin is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of "Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores" (Regnery).

Hate Hoaxes on College Campuses

How do colleges react when campus leftists fake right-wing terrorism?

By Jon Sanders

When a campus leftist hoodwinks an entire college community into believing that it harbors a right-wing terrorist, the campus responds with shock, fear, denouncement of bigotry and promises to improve the campus climate for minorities. Upon learning the hoax, however, the campus response changes to shock, relief, denouncement of bigotry and promises to improve the campus climate for minorities.

Why the only change is the replacement of fear with relief owes to a cynical, Machiavellian streak among the academic Left. The incident, despite its fabrication, creates a platform for the leftists to influence their campus's move toward multiculturalism. Even a contrived crime shows, in their parlance, that hate could happen here. Therefore, not only do they ignore the reality of the hoaxes, they seek to continue the campus response against the fictional "crime" -- arrogating Malcolm X's philosophy of "by any means that are necessary."

"The Fist of God"
Fabricated hate crimes -- hate hoaxes -- occurred on at least four campuses last year: Eastern New Mexico University, Duke University, the University of Georgia and Guilford College. At Eastern New Mexico, threatening posters appeared last September around the campus. "Are you sick of queers polluting this great land with there filth?" asked the error-ridden fliers. "I thought so. Want to do something? Join the Fist of God. With his might, we can ride the world of there sickness. Ask around. We'll find you." The poster identified eight people on campus as gay and concluded: "Take us seriously, or we'll begin executing one queer a week following this list."

The four men and four women listed received threatening e-mail messages and letters, and shortly after the posters appeared, the person whose name topped the list was attacked. Miranda Prather, a graduate teaching assistant at ENMU and a lesbian, told police she was attacked in her home by a masked assailant. Prather escaped with rope burns and a slashed cheek. Other targets on the list reportedly went into hiding. One, Robert Rimac, an openly gay associate professor of communicative disorders, said the threats had made it impossible for him to sleep.

Surveillance cameras at a nearby laundromat had filmed a woman posting the threatening fliers there. Police later identified the woman as Prather and arrested her for filing a false police report and harassment. Prather denied responsibility and said that a woman named Jessica Forrester -- who she said looks exactly like her except for the way she parts her hair -- had coerced her into distributing the posters. Police found a kitchen knife in Prather's apartment that matched the weapon Prather used to cut her cheek, and they saw no need to search for Forrester.

Friends of Prather thought she was being scapegoated. Others, including Elizabeth Jarnagin, an editorial writer for the Amarillo Globe-News, ignored her authorship of the hoax altogether and continued to decry anti-gay bigotry. Jarnagin took issue with Prather's poster's comment about "queers polluting this great land with their filth."

"Let me tell you about polluting with filth," Jarnagin intoned to the poster writer, forgetting it was a hoax. "Hatred is polluting with filth. Instilling terror is polluting with filth. Bigotry is polluting with filth. Provoking violence is polluting with filth."

Jarnagin also used Prather's hoax to segue into an attack on American society. "Are we becoming a more closed, hateful and fearful society? Sometimes it seems that way," she wrote. "Few of us are as blatant about it as the Fist of God. Yet the hatred and intolerance are there. Too many Americans divide the world into 'us' and 'them.'"

Prather's trial ended in a mistrial on the request of her court-appointed attorney, who said he had doubted his client's credibility over a misunderstanding about a missing police sketch of the woman Prather said attacked her and thought, once the sketch turned up, that he could not provide the defendent good counsel.

"Duke hasn't changed"

At Duke, two black students last November hanged a black baby doll bearing a sign reading "Duke hasn't changed" from a tree outside Duke's Cambridge Inn, over the Class of 1948 granite bench, which they covered in black paint. The site of the mock lynching was the gathering place for members of the Black Student Alliance before their planned protest outside the office of the president, Nan Keohane.

The identities of the perpetrators were unknown for nearly a week, and many assumed white racists were responsible. In a letter to The Chronicle, Duke's student newspaper, for instance, Stephen Poon called the incident a "racial crime," because "the bigot ... obviously did not intend the doll to represent any other ethnicity than African-American. The connection between the crime and the BSA's protest later in the day is still unclear, but it's wasted optimism to hope that the crime occurred at the exact spot as the protest out of mere coincidence." Poon also warned of accelerating violence. "Maybe it won't be a doll next time," he wrote.

After the truth was known, some of the bigots' ideological kin rushed to their defense. "The idea behind the act," wrote Worokya Diomande in the Chronicle, "is being overlooked (as is usually the case). The idea is that the University has not changed. Blacks are allowed to be enrolled here, but the idea is the equivalent of the transition from field slave to house slave."

The day the doll was discovered, members of the BSA, including organization president Tobie Wilder, repeated that their organization was not responsible for the mock lynching. They also said the incident showed how caustic race relations on campus were and that it would help them continue the campus dialogue on race relations. Once the hoax was learned, however, they refused to comment on it.

"Are you next?"

This past winter a gay resident advisor at the University of Georgia repeatedly set fire to his own door and said he was being harassed because of his sexuality. The RA, Jerry Kennedy, set the fires to pro-gay literature on his door, later claiming that his harasser targeted him because he was openly gay.

The campus community understandably reacted with alarm at the arsons. Kennedy received support from his residents and fellow RAs. A student in Kennedy's dormitory, Oglethorpe House, wrote an opinion article for The Red & Black News, the student newspaper, in which he compared the unknown bigot to abortion-clinic bombers. The Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Student Union sent a letter to University President Michael Adams asking him to address the hate crimes by creating a hate-crime task force and obtaining a faculty advisor for the LGBSU. Meanwhile, LGBSU members wrote chalk messages around the Tate Student Center, including "Stop burning down our doors" and "Are you next?"

The co-director of the LGBSU, Joshua Stewart, told the Red & Black, "A hate crime, to happen to any minority, is a major concern for everybody."

Kennedy, meanwhile, basked in the spotlight and offered the student paper remarks that would prove, well, remarkable once the truth was known. After the third fire, Kennedy said he thought it was "strange that somebody, in order to get to me, would risk the lives of at least 500 people." Asked what he thought of the LGBSU's letter, Kennedy said, "It makes me feel like I'm doing the right thing, and I appreciate the support."

Shortly thereafter, the Red & Black learned that Kennedy had been the target of nine of the 15 hate crimes reported on campus since 1995, including the fires and also threatening phone calls and incidents of criminal trespassing. University Police Chief Chuck Horton said of Kennedy, "He's certainly had more [harassment] than anyone else I've known of."

One student in particular was relieved to learn of Kennedy's arrest. This student, Adrian Stowers, had been accused of one of the crimes Kennedy fabricated. "I felt I got singled out for some reason," Stowers told the Red & Black. Also, prior to Kennedy's arrest, another dormitory door on campus was set on fire, perhaps inspired by Kennedy's arson.

"Racism is a real issue"

The president of the Student Senate at Guilford College, Molly Martin, was assaulted in her office late one night in February. Her assailant knocked her unconscious from behind, opened her blouse and wrote "nigger lover" on her chest. Martin refused medical attention following the attack and asked campus security not to call the police.

The attack occurred a week after anonymous letters and fliers criticizing Martin began to appear on the Greensboro, N.C., campus. She had appointed two black students to the senate, and fliers warned students not to vote for her unless she wanted an all-black senate. Martin had also led the Senate the previous semester in endorsing a proposal for the creation of a full-time director of African-American affairs at the college, whose 13,000 students include about 90 black students.

The incident was proof to some that the Quaker college had strained race relations. "Guilford students weren't ready to start dealing with the issues we were presenting," Edward LaMont Williams, president of the college's African-American Cultural Society, told The Chronicle of Higher Education Daily News, "but the incident made the campus realize that racism is a real issue on campus that needs to be dealt with."

Along with increasing security, the campus addressed the issue by hastening its selection of the director of African-American affairs, inaugurating a series of dialogues on race relations and making changes to the curriculum to include issues of race.

Meanwhile, speculation arose that Martin had staged the attack. To ward off the criticism, she hired an investigator to give her a lie detector test, which she passed. Police later closed their investigation into the attack, saying they had no evidence to back Martin's account of the incident. Her office had been cleaned and she had washed the writing off her chest before she spoke with the police, police could not recreate the incident satisfactorily, she did not exhibit any bruising, and police thought it unusual that her attacker unbuttoned her blouse instead of ripping it or pulling it down to write on her chest.

In June, Martin withdrew from the school. She sent a letter to the campus apologizing "for acts that were inappropriate and that were injurious." Martin said she was referring to her inability to perform her duties properly as student senate president, not admitting to any wrongdoing concerning her alleged attack.

The college, meanwhile, plans to continue to address race relations on campus by revising the curriculum, hiring more minority faculty and even founding an institute on race relations.

"By any means that are necessary"
That these incidents were staged rarely affected the goals of campus activists, who had appropriated the incidents as proof that their campuses were as bad as they had been saying. In some cases, the activists and campus administrators continued to address the bigotry even after the hoaxes were discovered.

The effectiveness of holding "dialogues" or other campuswide attempts to address the bigotry of a single individual on campus is questionable anyway, but to persist in addressing a phantom bigotry is the sort of sophistic silliness one can find only on a college campus. It is precisely this silliness, however, that contributes to the hoaxed hate. In a society that believes the way to solve a problem is just to ensure commu-nitywide "awareness" of it, some of its more politic members will devise the means to bring that awareness about. Hence the hoaxes; hence the calls to ignore the hoaxes and focus on the "problems," which never existed in the first place.

Even hate hoaxes have victims, however. Students, faculty and staff are unnecessarily frightened. Some individuals are singled out unfairly for suspicion -- if not a single individual (Georgia), then an entire race (Duke, Guilford) or society in general (ENMU). The hoax at ENMU was as frightening to the individuals listed on the fabricated posters as any hate crime could be. The fires at Georgia, as the arsonist himself admitted, endangered the lives of all the students in the dormitory (and of other students, if his arson had inspired the second arsonist).

Part of the reason campuses continue to address their fabricated bigotry is because campus liberals expect terrorism from their ideological opponents. Another part is that liberals share a curious inability to deal with terrorism from one of their own. Compare how liberals treated Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, a far-right militia member, with how they treated the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, a former Berkeley assistant professor who was educated at Harvard and the University of Michigan. Both, of course, blew people to bits over politics. Liberals (rightly) excoriated McVeigh for his terrorism but warned us not to overlook Kaczynski's genius, ensconced within his Luddite "Manifesto."

Compound liberals' inability to denounce terrorism from the Left with professors' penchant for seeking obscure hermeneutics over obvious explanations, and the result is leftist academics praising the meanderings of a mad bomber, defending mock lynching as legitimate political speech available only to blacks and seeking to create an institute to study race relations after being duped into thinking campus race relations were skewed.

The resulting "solutions," spawned from misreading the actual problems, are ones that students find cumbersome but liberals find politically expedient. The cause of multiculturalism is advanced, after all, even if on a lie. By any means that are necessary.

"you won't hear about it from Dan Rather or Time magazine or The Washington Post or the NAACP."

Perhaps because it's a garden variety local incident, to be reported by local papers? A bunch of freshmen are hardly the same thing as Senate Majority Leader, and this kind of incident happens all the time, to all different types of people. ITS NOT NATIONAL NEWS. You don't see Dan Rather reporting about all the murders and arson that happen each and every day, because it is LOCAL NEWS. Trent Lott is NOT LOCAL NEWS. Trent Lott is NATIONAL NEWS. Dan Rather covers the NATIONAL NEWS. Get it now?

Next time, think first, post later.

"Fabricated hate crimes -- hate hoaxes -- occurred on at least four campuses last year"

WOW fucking amazing. A whole FOUR incidents. In a nation of nearly 300,000,000 people.(LOL) You're on to something.

"It might be productive to set a trap."

Good thinking.

I was driving south of market today and was almost overcome by the urge to throw something at signs like the Care Not Cash billboard across the overpass from Rainbow, and the Clear Channel billboard with a heart on it.

I hope someone can take care of some of those, maybe, late at night, while waiting for a capture?