MY VERSION - Commentary of August 30, 2006

The "hate crime" lobby wins another round; Jackie Mason versus the gasbag . . . and more . . .

"Mr. Minucci's words and actions and the very nature of the crime send out a deplorable message of intolerance and exclusion which impacts us all. . . . The fact that the crimes were committed as hate crimes makes them far more repugnant and deserving of an enhanced punishment."

That such words should come from a newspaper pundit or Op-Ed commentator would be perfectly acceptable. The fact that they come from a judge is disgraceful. The views of an editorialist or commentator, however misguided, can be tossed aside or taken to heart by those who agree or disagree with him. But what recourse is there from a judge with the power to punish, based on some bias in his own head concerning the proper way to think about race?

We have published at least a dozen articles on this site about the emergence of municipal and state "hate crime" laws. What more can be said about divvying up groups into those who deserve greater protection on the basis of their race or special characteristics, and those who do not? What more is there to say about a society grounded in freedom of speech, while its citizens allow for the punishment of thought? As predicted, it did not take long for "hate crimes" to encompass "hate speech."

The story of Nicholas Minucci's troubles began on the night of June 29, 2005, when the 19-year-old was approached by a friend, Frank Agostini, who said he had just been accosted by three black men attempting to rob a gold chain he wore around his neck. Minucci set out in his car with his friend to find the men in question. Their neighborhood was the predominantly white section of Howard Beach, in Queens, New York.

During their search, they spotted three black men, who Minucci claimed were acting "suspiciously" like the types who frequently came into their community to steal cars. Minucci grabbed a baseball bat from his car and chased the men, two of whom fled, while one slipped and fell. This was Glenn Moore, who Minucci then struck twice over the head with the bat. After being struck, Moore got up and ran away and went to a hospital under his own steam. From the manner in which he behaved in court a year later, it appears that the injuries suffered had not interfered with his ability to get on with his life.

Minucci's act was a foolish pre-emptive crime that deserved to be punished. We cannot decide that someone might commit an act we disapprove of, and attack on that basis. A punishment was certainly due, but for the crime itself. Minucci was sentenced to 15 years in prison. New York State Supreme Court Judge Richard Buchter added eight years to Minucci's sentence because, in the commission of his crime, he yelled "Nigger!" Syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff writes, "Those eight years were not because of Minucci's act (the beating of Moore), but for what he said. "

When Minucci went looking for the men who attempted to rob his friend, he skipped over several blacks when told they were not the culprits. If he had been looking for just any "niggers" to beat up, he had ample opportunities, which he did not take. He stopped purposely at three men who appeared to be casing the automobiles in the area. In court, the men admitted this is exactly what they were doing. (The modus operandi of a car thief is a pattern familiar to savvy New Yorkers.)

There is no reason why the court should not have accepted this motive-intention on the part of Minucci for his crime. None of the details concerning his speech should have been rationalized or thrashed out, as they were in court, because the only issue that should have prevailed was the defendant's unwarranted assault on the victim. In the course of the trial, the subject of Moore's fractured skull was all but lost. In fact, the New York tabloids began to refer to Minucci as the "hate-crime defendant," not the "assault and battery defendant." As far as they were concerned, Minucci was on trial for "hating."

Contrary to Judge Buchter's ridiculous claim, the thoughts that might have been in Minucci's head did not make his assault "far more repugnant and deserving of an enhanced punishment." If the judge personally found Minucci's thoughts repugnant, he was doing nothing more than expressing his own personal inclinations. However, his personal feelings about Minucci's attitudes should not have entered into the manner in which he conducted the trial or affected the sentencing procedure.

Buchter also claimed that the use of the "n" word was "an affront to Glenn Moore's worth as a human being." So, if we verbally affront someone's worth as a human being, are we deserving of eight years in prison? And just what would Buchter do with the tens of thousands (maybe millions?) of blacks who regularly use the "nigger" term deliberately as an invective against other blacks? Even if Minucci did harbor the malice described by the judge, since when did Americans lose the right to hold intolerant attitudes or to be exclusive? Again, Buchter, finding such notions "deplorable," simply gives us a view into his own mindset.

Minucci, known as a neighborhood tough, certainly had been in his share of fights with other white youths his age. What were the nature of the expletives he spewed out during those feuds? In a brawl with an Irish kid, for example, might he have pulled out all the stops, and delivered every denigrating insult he could connect to Irish ethnicity? Of course, there would be no "enhancement" of his prison sentence, under those circumstances.

In their book, Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics, James Jacobs and Kimberly Potter make the point that a great many, if not most "hate crimes" are committed by young people, a high percentage of them juveniles. The epithets that fly are often spur-of-the-moment outbursts, and are not motivated by hard-core ideology. To call a person a "racist," who succumbs to his anger and spews forth a verbal tirade against an adversary, is overreaching and is not accurate. Jacobs and Potter write: "Hate crime cannot be accurately counted because, given the ambiguous, subjective, and contentious concept of prejudice, it cannot be accurately defined."

From comments made in interviews, Minucci seemed sincerely perplexed by the "racist" tag being applied to him. He had, after all, spent so much of his life among other ethnic groups, having been raised in the racially mixed neighborhood of East New York, Brooklyn. Like most kids his age, he was preoccupied with "urban" music and similar past times. In interviews, he seemed genuinely put out by the racist label that the newspapers were fixing to him, which he found incomprehensible.

Ride the New York City subway and listen in on teenagers, blacks and non-blacks, interacting with one another, while the word "nigger" punctuates their conversation. In the intimacy of one another's company, they are oblivious to the offensive origin of the word, and think that "old fogies" are kind of nuts to make a fuss about it. No doubt, Minucci used the word in a derogatory fashion, when he pounced on Moore, but he had come to know the word on several levels of meaning.

As if understanding the nature of Minucci's dilemma, members of Glenn Moore's family graciously asked the judge for leniency in the sentencing of the defendant. But the judge was on too much of a personal "anti-racist" roll to be distracted by mercy.

Besides the judge's own prejudice in the case, Minucci had to face three other troublesome hurdles. These were the appearance of ambulance-chaser Al Sharpton, who felt compelled to call out the troops and do his rally-march thing; the interference of New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who could not resist grandstanding against "racism"; and the prior history of a similar crime committed in 1986, in Howard Beach, where the black victim, also a suspected thief, was not lucky enough to survive being chased into traffic by a white man.

A good judge, of course, would have seen to it that none of these extraneous factors interfered with fair treatment of the defendant standing before him.

Elizabeth Wright
Issues & Views - editor@issues-views.com
http://www.issues-views.com

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster. . . . The Cabinet cannot disclaim all responsibility. They receive little more news than the public: they should have insisted on more, and better. . . .

We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver the Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish Government, and to make available for the world its resources of corn and oil. We spent nearly a million men and nearly a thousand million of money to these ends. This year we are spending ninety-two thousand men and fifty millions of money on the same objects.

Our government is worse than the old Turkish system. They kept fourteen thousand local conscripts embodied, and killed a yearly average of two hundred Arabs in maintaining peace. We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armoured cars, gunboats, and armoured trains. We have killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. . . .

We are told the object of the rising was political, we are not told what the local people want. It may be what the Cabinet has promised them. A Minister in the House of Lords said that we must have so many troops because the local people will not enlist. . . . Cromer controlled Egypt's six million people with five thousand British troops; Colonel Wilson fails to control Mesopotamia's three million people with ninety thousand troops. . . .

The Government in Baghdad have been hanging Arabs in that town for political offences, which they call rebellion. The Arabs are not at war with us. Are these illegal executions to provoke the Arabs to reprisals on the three hundred British prisoners they hold? . . .

We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. All experts say that the labour supply is the ruling factor in its development. How far will the killing of ten thousand villagers and townspeople this summer hinder the production of wheat, cotton, and oil? How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?

-- A Report on Mesopotamia, by Lieut.-Col. T.E. Lawrence, August 22, 1920; from World War I Document Archive

Well, what's to be made of Jackie Mason? Over the years, he has tickled our funny bones with his piercing, dead-on humor, and has never avoided offering his astute pearls of wisdom on hot social topics, usually deemed too delicate for public discussion. Actually, in looking back on his past performances, his outburst in August should come as no surprise. It was Mason who was one of the few public figures to brazenly skewer lots of those black scam artists during the heady days when discussion of "civil rights" was conducted only in hushed, respectful reverence.

In candid interviews and in comedy routines, Mason exhibited a take-no-prisoners attitude when it came to turning his sharp-edged wit to the follies and downright bogus escapades of the Al Sharpton-Jesse Jackson types. Nor did he hesitate to deride the excessive charges of "racism" emanating from the so-called respectable black leaders and their organizations. He refused to suffer fools.

Yet, who would have thought that Mason would be so discerning about Abraham Foxman, of all people? Besides guts, that really takes a special kind of insight. Mason says out loud about Foxman (head of the righteous B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation League) what so many say behind closed doors -- that is, he's a colossal fraud, who has managed to get himself a nice, comfortable gig. As Mason put it, in an interview on Neil Cavuto's TV show, "This guy Foxman, this head of the ADL, another fake from top to bottom . . . Let's be honest about it -- anybody who makes a life out of fighting racism, in effect, has to blow up racism in order to justify himself in his job. Otherwise he'd have to go to work. Otherwise he'd have to get up in the morning and get a real job."

Mason's vehement remarks were triggered when Cavuto asked for his opinion on the ugly fallout surrounding actor Mel Gibson's drunken rant about Jews as the creators of wars. For many of us, Mason's comments on the boring Mr. Gibson's plight were not half as edifying as those he expressed about the mountebank Foxman. This charlatan does get up in the morning and, unfortunately, his real job is doing exactly as Mason asserts -- blowing up racism, in this case anti-Semitism, to justify his existence. And what a successful job it is.

Thanks to a faint-hearted American population, Foxman has managed to appropriate to himself the power to direct the actions of police departments, the power to devise unconstitutional "hate crime" laws that have found their way into several state legislatures (as he proudly brags), the power to intrude the tentacles of his organization into the lives of private citizens.

Years of duplicity culminated in the mid-1990s, when Foxman's undercover operations against a host of individuals and groups came to light. In April 1993, police carried out a five-hour raid of the ADL offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. They discovered the ADL had copies of computer files on 12,000 Americans and more than 950 organizations. As reported in California's mainstream newspapers, the police also discovered that, under the guise of fighting anti-Semitism, the ADL had sold this information to intelligence agents of the Israeli and South African governments. And to whom else, one might speculate?

Among those on the ADL's hit list were several Congressmen, newspaper journalists, leading members of labor unions, a few professors, and people labeled "activists," whom the ADL suspected of possessing "anti-Israel" leanings. The police confiscated what they claimed to be "illegally obtained confidential police material." Someone had been feeding this stuff to ADL's spies.

Needless to say, such behavior ranks as felonious. But, of course, felony charges were never brought against the formidable ADL. Instead, in 1995, a settlement was reached with some of the plaintiffs. In addition to the ADL's payment of a piddling amount for legal fees, the court ruled that the ADL be prohibited from obtaining information on private citizens from government agencies. (Not for one minute does anyone believe that this directive has been followed.)

Foxman, through his shadow organization, which he boldly runs as an official branch of government, has acquired enough influence to intimidate bureaucrats in real government agencies. As self-appointed Big Brother, he acts as guardian and protector, not only of the rights of Jews, but of Americans in general.

[For one of the best appraisals of "anti-racist" crusaders, see Laird Wilcox, quoted here, and his website.]

There is good reason why Foxman, Chief of the Thought Police, in 2004, was voted, by the weekly New York Press, No. 37 of "The 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers." (Wonder if Jackie Mason had anything to do with that?) Here's an excerpt from the New York Press's send-up of Foxman:

The superhumanly self-righteous gasbag makes $450,000 as Likud's point man at the highest echelons of U.S. thoughtcrime enforcement, where he smears critics of Israel with allegations of anti-Semitism . . . . For the book on Foxman, see Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry, written by the child of two survivors. Foxman helped block the publication of one of Finkelstein's earlier books in 1998. Just another day at the ADL office.

Jackie Mason could not have said it better.

Elizabeth Wright
Issues & Views - editor@issues-views.com
http://www.issues-views.com

Pat Buchanan has often expressed bemusement at the Weekly Standard magazine, which from its inception, has identified itself as a "conservative" publication. The magazine's writers have a peculiar knack of painting as conservative in nature anything or anyone they choose -- be it a historical figure or an historical event. Along with others on the right, they clearly equate conservatism with a bloodthirsty drive by national leaders to punish and even exterminate innocent civilians. In describing the details of an article by one Noemie Emery, who gushes over that great "conservative" Harry Truman, Buchanan writes:

Harry belongs to us, insisted Ms. Emery. He was "heir to a great wartime president," she wrote. Would that be the same FDR who "lied us into war," whose regime was honeycombed with treason, who at Tehran and Yalta betrayed Poland and all of Eastern Europe to the barbarous tyrant he called "Uncle Joe"? . . .

And why is Emery "wild about Harry"? Operation Keelhaul? The defense of Alger Hiss? The loss of China to Maoism? The firing of General MacArthur? The offer to send the battleship Missouri to Russia to pick up Stalin and bring him over to respond to Churchill’s "Iron Curtain" speech? The "no-win war" in Korea?

No. Ms. Emery reveres FDR and Harry because they "planned, executed, and blessed a campaign so completely hair-raising that the horror remains to this day." FDR and Truman, you see, had the true grit to do Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. And so a "conservative" magazine claims Harry for our side.

What Ms. Emery’s piece reveals is that conservatism today is as shot through with corruption as the Church of Pope Alexander VI, two of whose brood of bastards were Lucretia and Cesare Borgia. . . .

Conservatives have seen their movement hijacked by ideological vagabonds and hustlers who are redefining it to mean what it never meant. We need to find who sold the pass. Before we can take back our country, we must take back our movement.

-- Excerpted from the symposium, "What is Left? What is Right?," in the special edition of American Conservative magazine, August 28, 2006.

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