White Teen Set on Fire in Racial Attack; Media Silent (sort of)

The New American reports: “This is what you deserve. You get what you deserve, white boy.” So spewed the attackers of Melissa Coon’s 13-year-old son, as they doused him with gasoline and set him alight.  Police, they say, are “investigating” whether this is a hate crime.

The attack on the boy took place on the east side of Kansas City, Missouri. Fox 4 Kansas City provides some (sanitized) details, writing, “The victim is a student at East High School and regularly walks home after class. When he reached his porch, two older teens grabbed him, pinned his arms behind his back and then poured gas from a gas can on the boy. They then set the boy on fire.”

Thankfully, the teen victim had the presence of mind to pull his shirt up over his head and snuff out the flames. He was treated at Children’s Mercy hospital, having suffered first-degree burns to his face and head. And police said they were concerned about possible damage to his eyes and lungs.

The concern, however, isn’t translating into national media coverage — or honest coverage anywhere.

Of course, if you scrutinize the few local outlets reporting the story and cut and paste, you can piece the picture together. The Fox article excerpted above provides only the vaguest hint of the attack’s racial nature by quoting Mrs. Coon as saying that her family was told “it’s a hate crime.” KCTV 5 did a bit better, reporting that the victim was white and the assailants black; however, while they quoted the attackers as stating “This is what you get,” for some reason they omitted the “white boy” part. Then there was KMBC.com, which presented the latter but neglected to explicitly identify the race of the criminals, leaving the reader to wonder if the attackers were self-hating Norwegian immigrants.

Read the rest of the article here.

The media, in their desire to be so PC, purposely leave out the facts/details of stories.  But would you expect anything less?  If Muslims had set this boy on fire, they probably would have changed their names to protect the “innocent until proven guilty”. 

h/t Laura

DCG

A crime is a crime, right? Why is a special definition needed?

Lawyer: Lesbians’ assault on gay man can’t be hate crime

Boston Herald:  Three women identified by their lawyers as lesbians were arraigned Friday on a hate crime charge for allegedly beating a gay man at the Forest Hills T station in an unusual case that experts say exposes the law’s flawed logic.

“My guess is that no sane jury would convict them under those circumstances, but what this really demonstrates is the idiocy of the hate-crime legislation,” said civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate. “If you beat someone up, you’re guilty of assault and battery of a human being. Period. The idea of trying to break down human beings into categories is doomed to failure.”

Prosecutors and the ACLU of Massachusetts said no matter the defendants’ sexual orientation, they can still face the crime of assault and battery with intent to intimidate, which carries up to a 10-year prison sentence, by using hateful language.  “Someone who is Jewish can be anti-Semitic,” said ACLU staff attorney Sarah Wunsch. “The mere fact that someone is a member of the same class doesn’t mean they could not be motivated by hatred for their very own group.”

Erika Stroud

But Carolyn Euell, 38, mother of two of the defendants, Erika Stroud, 21, of Dorchester and Felicia Stroud, 18, West Roxbury, told reporters the alleged attack “can’t be hateful” because both her daughters are lesbians.

Prosecutor Lindsey Weinstein said the two sisters and one of their domestic partners, Lydia Sanford, also a defendant, viciously beat the man Sunday, repeatedly punching and kicking him after he bumped them with his backpack on a stairwell.

Felicia Stroud

She said the victim, who suffered a broken nose, told cops he believed the attack was “motivated as a crime because of his sexual orientation” since the three women “called him insulting homophobic slurs.”

But attorney Helene Tomlinson, who represented Sanford, told the judge her client is “openly identified as a lesbian … so any homophobic (conduct) is unwarranted.” She said the alleged victim was the aggressor and used racial slurs: “He provoked them.”

Felicia Stroud’s attorney, C. Harold Krasnow, said, “They don’t know what his sexual orientation is, just like he doesn’t know what theirs is.”  Krasnow later noted the low bail the judge gave the women, $100 to $500 cash, and suggested the prosecution’s case was weak.

Civil-rights attorney Chester Darling agreed. “No one should go to court. It’s knuckle justice,” he said. “It’s a fair exchange.”

But Jake Wark, a spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, said prosecutors will have no problem proving the women committed a hate crime, even if they are lesbians.  “The defendants’ particular orientation or alleged orientations have no bearing on our ability to prosecute for allegedly targeting a person who they believe to be different from them,” he said.

Why the need for a special definition of crime?  Isn’t the intent the same – to harm someone or commit an illegal act?  How can you really know the true intent of a crime anyway? Is it really that important to determine their specific motivation (they dislike gay people)?

Crime: An act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it and for which punishment is imposed upon conviction.

Hate Crime: One that involves threats, harassment, or physical harm and is motivated by prejudice against someone’s race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation or physical or mental disability.

And the mother argues that since her daughters are gay and attacked a gay person this can’t be a hate crime?  Let’s just call it what it is – a crime.  Period.

I understand there are different terms applied to murder and other crimes.  Yet for an assault, isn’t it just enough that you beat someone and call it a crime? If any law expert can provide more insight into this, please feel free to comment.

DCG

Obama and the Left Silent On Vicious Racial Assault in McDonald’s

Last week, on April 22, two female customers brutally assaulted another customer in a McDonald’s fast food restaurant in Baltimore County, Maryland. The attackers are black. The victim, 22-year-old Chrissy Polis, is white and reportedly a transgender.

McDonald’s employees stood by, doing nothing. Worse still, the video was shot by an employee who can be heard laughing.

Eventually, a good Samaritan stepped in to stop the attack. But the vicious attackers punched her too. Vicki Thoms, 55, told 11 News:

“I think it’s terrible. I think it’s inhumane. When they started really hurting her, to the point where I thought she was going to die, that’s when I decided someone needed to do something. I kept screaming, ‘Stop. Get off of her.’ And they wouldn’t stop. One of the girls said to me, ‘It’s none of your (expletive) business,’ and hit me in the face.”

One of the attackers, 18-year-old Teonna Monae Brown, has been charged with first degree assault and second degree assault. Her co-attacker, 14, is being charged as a juvenile.

Prosecutors said they are “considering” possible hate crime charges “based on sexual orientation.” It’s never a “hate crime” if blacks assault non-blacks! — as the ethnic Chinese community in Oakland, California know only too well. A year ago, two black teenagers brutally attacked and killed a middle-aged Chinese immigrant man, Tian Sheng Yu, at 18th St. and Telegraph Avenue.

Here’s Victor Davis Hanson’s comment:

“The past week a sensationalized video of a transgendered female in extremis went viral on the blogosphere. Two young African-American women beat her senseless at a McDonald’s restaurant. The African-American staff is shown in the clip as mostly passive bystanders to the brutality. Yet I know this nationally viewed abhorrence is not a teachable moment about much of anything. Unlike the Professor Gates mix-up, this public spectacle will not be used by the president to warn us about the wages of incivility or the need for a new racial tolerance and understanding. Nor will there be, among the homosexual community, much of a national Matthew Shepard moment seeking to present the public beating as a symbol of a wider hatred of the sexually ambiguous among us. There is about as much chance of a Hollywood movie about the incident as there is of a sequel to Rendition. At best, we are to accept such violence as inevitable, as the powerless sometimes thrash out against the more privileged classes and races; at worst, these are the tragic wages of prior oppression that must be contextualized and constructed in the proper narrative of the centuries.”

~Eowyn