Nothing more clearly reveals the hypocrisy of the whole concept of "hate crimes" than the contortions of the police and city government of Charlottesville, Virginia, in trying to avoid charging 10 blacks accused of assaulting and beating several whites with racial hatred—unless it's the contortion of the press in trying to avoid seeing hate where the press doesn't want to see it.

In Charlottesville the 10 blacks—all but one adolescents—are accused of beating and in at least one case robbing the whites, who are students at the University of Virginia and include males and females, in incidents between last September and January of this year. As will appear shortly, the crimes were almost certainly motivated by black animosity toward whites—hate crimes—but that's not how either the local powerbrokers nor the national media want to see it—or want you to see it. The attacks are a big issue in Charlottesville, but not so big for the Washington Post, which managed to ignore them entirely for nearly a month.

When the Post did alert the Northern Virginia region it covers, it also managed to distort what happened and why.  The Post's coverage of the Charlottesville attacks was dumped in the Metro section, [College Town Confronts Issues of Race, Washington Post, February 27, 2002Page B01], which immediately tells us that "hate" (racial animosity) is not the issue. If hate were the issue, the story would be on the front page—at least so it was when a black, James Byrd, was murdered by whites in Jasper, Texas in 1998, and the Post wouldn't follow a double standard, would it?

The Post started off its account of what it called the "sometimes-brutal assaults" (sometimes, you see, attacking people and beating them up isn't brutal, so not all these attacks are really very serious anyway) by telling us that "police believe" the victims were beaten up "just for the thrill of it." (One would think that beating people up "just for the thrill of it" is by definition always-brutal, but let it pass.) In fact the Post is wrong.

Police do not "believe" the victims were beaten up "just for the thrill of it." As the Post later admits, "a police investigator [originally] announced that three of the suspects said they had chosen targets because they looked different." Well, better, but still not exactly. What Charlottesville police Lt. J.W. Gibson actually told Media General News Service in a Feb. 3 interview was that "assailants did say the victims were chosen on the basis of race."

Leave aside also that "looking different" and race are not the same thing. Lt. Gibson was citing what the suspects themselves had said—not leaping to a conclusion or inferring from evidence—so it seemed pretty clear that Charlottesville had a hate crime on its hands. But as the Post also explains, "the police chief hurried to say that the investigation was continuing, that more students could be charged as accessories and that it is premature to assign motive." Why was that, do you think? Have the black suspects recanted their admission of racial motivation? No one says so.

What happened was that the NAACP and the usual squadron of black clergymen descended on the mayor's office to explain to everyone that race just couldn't be the motivation. The Rev. Alvin Edwards, who had three of the suspects in his congregation, says "class, not race, lies at the root of the assaults." How he could know that is never clear, but no one really seems to care. "We know they don't hate white people," a black teenager told the Post. Do they hate rich people, then?

Of course the evidence, as Lt. Gibson originally presented it, shows clearly that the suspects themselves admitted that racial animosity was their motive, but neither the Post nor the police nor the city government nor (are you kidding?) the NAACP or local blacks are willing to accept that. The conclusion on which they insist, formulated entirely apart from the evidence and the facts, is that race had nothing to do with it. It was "thrills"; it was robbery; it was "class"; it wasn't really brutal anyway, and it's premature to say what the motive was, and it certainly wasn't hate, because today the racial-political dogma, enforced by all authorities from the White House down to City Hall [send Charlottesville Mayor Blake Caravati email], is that blacks cannot be motivated by racial hatred and cannot commit hate crimes. Only whites can commit hate crimes.

That is precisely why the Charlottesville attacks expose the lies and racial-political power agenda behind the whole concept of "hate crimes" so clearly - the lie that only whites are driven by racial hate and that only non-whites can be victims of it.

And that is also why you haven't heard of the Charlottesville crimes—and probably won't hear about them much more.

COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

March 04, 2002