While the lefties are busy lynching Lott, a much nastier racial scandal is taking place at Ol’ Miss:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michelle/malkin.html
Don’t expect to hear cries of outrage from the likes of Chumpsky, though. The victims are white.
This ugly incident raises a number of issues.[ol][]Calling somebody a racial epithet is a hate crime; calling someone a racist is not. However, the accusation of “racist” is actually more severe. Trent Lott will likely lose his leadership postion for alleged racism. However, he wouldn’t have been harmed at all if he’d been called a “honky.”[]The OP says the victims are white, which is true. However, suppose the perps hadn’t been identified. Wouldn’t black students been just as harmed no matter who painted them? []Or, turn it around. Suppose white racists had painted these signs. Would they have helped the black community by giving them a grievance? The perps evidently thought so.[]The perps (perhaps) got less punishment than white racists would have, had they painted these racist signs. Maybe that’s because this wasn’t really racism. Or, maybe there’s a double standard by race.If Ole Miss failed to punish the perps adequately, it’s is a slap in the face at every black on campus. It’s a way of saying that Ole Miss accepts a lower standard from blacks.[/ol]
Racist hate crimes are indeed appalling, whether they’re perpetrated by actual racists or as “hoaxes” by members of the race the crime is directed against, and I don’t see why the punishment for them shouldn’t be exactly the same.
However, where are you getting the notion that such hoaxes are “rampant in today’s universities”? Malkin’s article contains the unsupported statement that “fake hate crimes are an abhorrently common phenomenon on modern college campuses”, but she does not cite any evidence, nor is there any supporting evidence in the OP. The only such incident I’ve ever heard of is this one at Mississippi (and that’s one too many).
LP: The victims are white.
The victims are not just the white students who were unjustly suspected of perpetrating the outrage, but also the black students who had to endure the appalling and hate-filled racial slurs. Racism doesn’t become “okay” or harmless just because it turns out to have been the work of other blacks who “didn’t really mean it.”
I just tried “hate crime hoax” in googleThere are 12,000 hits, beginning with
This site FAKE HATE CRIMES has a long list of such hoaxes as well as related material. It mentions,
Thanks for the cites, december, but you will note that your search includes all items on “hate crime hoaxes”, not just incidents at universities, which is what the OP is discussing. The “Fake Hate Crimes” page you linked to includes:
A 1998 article stating that “fabricated hate crimes occurred on at least four campuses last year.”
A 2000 article stating that “the Chronicle of Higher education reported last year that since 1997 police have discovered that headline-making claims of hate crimes on five other campuses [besides the incident at U Iowa discussed in the article] were fabricated”.
A 2001 article about a student faking a hate email campaign.
A story on a Muslim student’s faking post-9/11 anti-Muslim hate crimes.
All of those incidents are reprehensible, of course. But do they justify terms like “rampant” or “abhorrently common phenomenon”? It looks to me from the evidence you provided that we may be talking about, say, ten such incidents a year total on all US campuses. How does this compare to the incidence of genuine hate crime? Heck, even at my own hyperliberal multiculturally-diverse university we get about two or three real hate-crime incidents per year just on our own campus.
The National Criminal Justice Reference Service says that of the about 9400 hate-crime incidents in 2000, 11.4%, or about 950, took place in schools and colleges. So we seem to be looking at maybe several hundred actual hate-crime incidents on campus annually, as compared to what, five or ten hate-crime hoaxes?
Hate hoaxes are disgusting and should be punished just like other hate crimes, but how statistically significant is the incidence of them? Even one such incident is too many, but the scope of the problem doesn’t appear to justify concerns that it’s actually “rampant” at universities.