Georgia Legislators May Finally Have the Hate Crime They Wanted. They Had to Bury a Lot of Other Victims First.

Last night, 21-year old Robert Aaron Long was captured after murdering eight people in so-called “massage parlors” in Metro Atlanta.  Long is white.  Six of his victims have been identified as Asian women.  It is likely the six murdered women were Korean.  In Atlanta, Korean mobs run the massage parlors; strip clubs are either all-black or predominantly white (Chocolate City, The Gold Club); so-called “lingerie modeling” enterprises are a glory of employment desegregation, as it were, and flat-up prostitution involves Hispanic or black or white women and girls — lots of girls — depending on where you are in the city.

The other two human beings Long murdered in the massage parlors were white — one male and one female.  But who cares about them?  Believe me, all around Atlanta, legislators and activists and journalists are waking up this morning desperately wishing he hadn’t killed those two white people — not because the murder of two humans is terrible, but because the existence of two murdered white bodies represent an inconvenient speed-bump in their excited jostling to get to the nearest microphone to grandstand the loudest about anti-Asian hate crime. ... 

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Another Hate Crime That Was The Wrong Kind of Hate

Among the many toxic effects of hate crime laws, the worst is that they destroy the ethic of equality before the law.  This ethic was the cornerstone of the civil rights movement and its most compelling argument, and for forty years — from 1955 to 1995 — appeals for equal treatment before the law for both victims and offenders swayed white Americans to understand minorities’ plight.

All of this changed when Eric Holder and Bill Clinton shoved through a highly politicized hate crimes regime in the late 1990’s.  From the beginning, this regime wasn’t about punishing hate wherever it happened; it was about weaponizing identity politics where they least belonged: in the courts.  It was about freezing America like a scared rabbit before the image of eternal imaginary Klansmen eternally burning down black churches and eternally lynching minorities. ... 

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Good Thing It Wasn’t A Hate Crime: Raymond Harris Just Tortures Women and Sets Them On Fire

He’s not a hate criminal, just a guy who likes to rape women and stab them and beat them to death or near-death while torturing them by setting them on fire.   Second City Cop has the only real coverage — nobody else is outraged by the fact that Illinois let this guy go, not once, but twice, after he raped and tortured and set a woman on fire, and tried to get another one, and now he’s attacked a third woman (surely there were more).  This time, the victim, a 73-year old nurse, died.

Raymond Harris, serial torturer and rapist of women.  But not a hate criminal. ... 

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Why Isn’t Mbarek Lafrem Being Charged With a Hate Crime? ***Updated 4/13/10***

Mbarek Lafrem

Take a good look at the face of hate. This is Mbarek Lafrem, a Moroccan citizen who nearly beat a pediatric nurse to death in a New York City nightclub last month after she had the temerity to refuse to dance with him.  The nurse suffered multiple head wounds, including a skull fracture, broken eye socket, and shattered nose.  She was beaten around the face.  She was also attacked sexually: Lafrem is charged with attempted rape.  And attempted murder, because the attack was so severe. ... 

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Case Update: Frederick Lee Gude’s three murders

Recently, William Steele wrote to this blog asking about the latest murder conviction involving Frederick Gude, who killed Mr. Steele’s father in southeast Atlanta (my old neighborhood) in 1969.  Gude received a life sentence for that crime but walked out of prison a mere eight years later — eight years for taking a life.  He was sent up again in 1983, got out again, then killed a second time.  For that “voluntary manslaughter,” Gude was sentenced to five years.  He  walked out of prison for a third time in September 2003, then four months later he stabbed his girlfriend to death with an ice pick.  Along the way, he accumulated the usual, heinous, un-prosecuted and under-prosecuted acts of domestic violence, and other serious crimes.  Earlier this year, AJC reporter Steve Visser interviewed Gude’s adult daughter, a Marine Lieutenant Colonel who said this of her father:

“There are some people who shouldn’t walk amongst us” [she said] … “This is his third killing. This is the third one that we know of” … [S]he knew her father as a child – when he wasn’t in prison – but her mother quickly left him behind after he was released from prison the first time. He used to beat her mother and he stabbed at least one relative. Violence, she said, was her father’s defining characteristic.  “Some people kill in the heat of moment,” the Marine said. “For him, every moment is the heat of the moment, if you say something he doesn’t like.” ... 

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