The economy stinks no matter what people who earn their money from rigging the stock markets say. Unemployment is high, and throughout the land the hounds of hatred have been released by the usual suspects. And across the land we reap what they sow:
From Staten Island, New York:
Police are investigating the attack of a 31-year-old Mexican man Friday, as a hate crime.
The man was walking home after playing soccer in Faber Park when he was attacked by five young black males.
The group yelled anti-Mexican slurs and hit the man several times before making off with his backpack. […]
This is the sixth bias attack in Staten Island since April and the community is already furious over the repeated attacks.
Yes, Tea Partiers, hatred is not confined to white people in your party. Nor is Arizona the only place Latinos have been persecuted for being — well for being Latino.
For as always in America, land of the free to gang up and beat down those who we have been taught to despise, Staten Island is far from alone in this, The Long Hot Summer of Our Discontent With Those Not Like Us.
Even people in the “liberal” cities of the Northeast will join you and Tom Tancredo in your jihad against people who don’t speak English as a first language. When the flames of hate are fanned there’s no telling where the embers will fall.
Like for example on the head of a poor Salvadoran immigrant living in Summit New Jersey who was beaten to death by a gang of teenagers for being himself, apparently :
According to an eyewitness, at least a dozen young men were present last Saturday evening when Abelino Mazariego-Torres, 47, of Summit, was beaten so severely while sitting on a park bench that he died three days later without regaining consciousness.
More detail on Abelino Mazariego-Torres inexplicable (except by sheer unmitigated hatred) murder can be found in this story about his funeral:
It was crazy. It was violent. It was premeditated. Worse than all, it was sport. Poor Mazariego-Torres was the human pinata, there for the entertainment of a couple of cowards, and their follower-friends who wanted to record the whole thing.
He was an easy target. He was not a big man and spoke limited English. Maybe he had a little to drink. Regardless, he was outnumbered. He was alone, minding his own business, in his own town.
In a cellphone video, Mazariego-Torres is sitting on the bench, and a young man sits to his right. Behind him is another man. They seem to be joking, and Mazariego-Torres is totally relaxed. Then, with animalistic swiftness — and there really is no better word — Mazariego-Torres is suckered. His face is covered with his shirt, the young man on the bench gets up and throws a punch meant to take someone’s head off. There is no other way to say it. The boy reaches way back, and puts all he has into it. When some defense lawyer eventually says “they didn’t mean to hurt him,” remember this: Anybody who has ever thrown a punch like that, or been hit with one, knows full well the intent. This is not being called a hate crime, but it should be. There was hate behind that punch.
Yet, we are equal opportunity haters. Latinos and Hispanics may have been pushed front and center as the new Public Enemy No. 1 by the conservative media and blogs and viral emails, but they are not alone in being made the scapegoats for the anger and frustration of so many people in this country.
How about this story from Hoboken, NJ:
Keit Ngo is a man from Florida, in our area for business. But he says the attack has changed his focus entirely. He wants the person who assaulted him behind bars for a long time. […]
“I got 10 staples to the back of my head,” he said.
The injuries are the result of a brutal, unprovoked attack on the streets of Hoboken.
Witnesses say the suspect yelled racial slurs before knocking Ngo out cold.
Did you think Asians are immune from hate crimes in America? Think again. Not even minorities that people don’t usually associate with this type of vile and venomous hatred are safe on the streets of America from unprovoked attacks based on their race.
Here’s a more familiar example of hate (familiar because we have a long history in America of hating Jews) from Montgomery, Maryland where a Synagogue was vandalized with anti-semitic graffiti:
Montgomery police are investigating vandalism at B’nai Shalom of Olney as a hate crime after graffiti described as “Nazi related” was found on the exterior of the synagogue.
Yes, Americans, Neo-Nazis are back and active again. Just check out Free Republic.com or Stormfront on any given day and I guarantee you’ll find more than one rant against the Jews, among the many other groups at which the posters at those websites spill their bile.
You see, Whites and Blacks do have something in common. Too many of us have been conned by the mouthpieces of malevolence to detest Lesbian, Gay, Trans-Gendered and Bi-Sexual people (yes they are “people” my little haters, fellow human beings just like you and me).
And let’s not forget the nearly lethal hate crime against “liberals” that was stopped just in time this past week, when a lone gunman was prevented from carrying out mass murder against the ACLU in San Francisco:
A California man accused in a shootout with California Highway Patrol officers in Oakland early Sunday told officials that he traveled to San Francisco and planned to attack two nonprofit groups there “to start a revolution,” according to a probable cause statement released by police.
Bryon Williams, 45, a convicted felon with two prior bank robbery convictions, targeted workers at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tides Foundation, said Oakland police Sgt. Michael Weisenberg in court documents.
Officer Jeff Thomason, an Oakland police spokesman, claimed Williams targeted the two nonprofit organizations because of their political ideologies. The Tides Foundation works to advance progressive social change, according to its Web site. […]
Williams’ mother, Janice Williams, said to the San Francisco Chronicle that her son was angry with “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.”
Yes, Virginia, even in the Marxist State of Northern California, right wing “revolutionaries” plot to kill their Communist Overlords groups working for social justice and progressive political change. Gee, I wonder where this “patriot” got the idea that members of the ACLU and the Tides Foundation deserved to be executed because Congress passed health care and financial industry reforms. I’d never heard of the Tides Foundation before this story came out?
I wonder, could it have been Glenn Beck of Fox News?
We’re talking about people who say enforce the border and it is racism. We know that if they can cobble this together, they win the next election for the next 50 years. You use, infiltrate or corrupt the most powerful institute at your disposal.
Well, they have the education system. They have the media. They have the capitalist system. What do you think the Tides Foundation was? They infiltrate and they saw under Ronald Reagan that capitalists were not for all of this nonsense, so they infiltrated.
Now, they are using failing capitalism to destroy it. They’re using the churches through social justice. The media — do I have to explain that one? This is what progressives and all power-seekers do. They find something vulnerable. They latch on to it. They exploit it for power.
Shirley Sherrod was the victim of a hate crime too, but at least she didn’t get her jaw broken, or her head bashed in or shot at by a suspected Glenn Beck fanboy because of serial defamation performance artist Andrew Breitbart’s (and Fox News’) desire to take down the NAACP. Still, she is a victim of mindless hate, hate that is the primary emotion that fuels the political discourse in our nation. Hate from the right:
[M]ake no mistake; it is a right-wing political agenda that is successfully driving the direction of our public discourse.
Shirley Sherrod was the most recent victim of an insidious right-wing propaganda campaign to prove black racism against whites exists and is supported at the highest levels of government.
Her much publicized, heavily edited speech, to allegedly demonstrate Sherrod, who is black, was openly hostile toward whites is tragic on so many levels.
It’s tragic because her story was one of redemption. A story of how an individual whose father was murdered by a white man overcame her prejudices to do the right thing to help farmers regardless of color. […]
This is indeed a low point in American discourse. A heavily edited video, originating from an unreliable source on the Internet, goes unchecked, airs on national television, resulting in a woman being unjustly fired.
I’d like to point out recent left wing nutcases and bigots who listen exclusively to Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on MsNBC and then go on killing sprees against conservatives or Conservative Christians, just to be fair and balanced, but to be honest I can’t find any examples. And no, my right wing friends, Muslim radicals like Major Nidal Malik Hasan who took his inspiration from a radical Islamic extremist and spiritual leader Anwar al-Awlaki, now hiding out in Yemen doesn’t count as a “liberal” or a “Socialist” Democrat.
No, this is the season for hate and there are reasons for it. An unusually hot summer. High unemployment. And right wing politicians and media figures eager to point fingers at who is to blame for all your troubles, eager it seems to pepper us with talk of who deserves your ire. And, while I can’t say for a fact that they intend to see our society devolve into violence, you have to wonder what they think they are doing when they spread around rhetoric like this from Mr. Glenn Beck, to their listeners:
But in our country’s history, there is also a history, during the Wilson administration, of communist anarchists. And I know that sounds like an oxymoron. How can you have control of a giant state and want anarchy? You want anarchy in the same way that president Ahmadinejad wants chaos because chaos leads to something. […]
Tie that together with what is happening in Arizona: Intimidate and scare. What did Andy Stern say? We know where you live. We know who you are. Intimidate and scare. The Black Panthers: We’re coming to 8/28. We’re going to stand up. We’re going to show Glenn Beck what it is. Intimidate and scare. This is the tactic. This is the new phase that we’re entering in. Intimidation. They tried to do it just with SEIU during the tea party movement. That wasn’t enough. They also need, I believe, a race riot. They need the race riot.
Or what about this headline which Beck posted on his website back in January:
“Not ‘useful’? Progressives want you dead”
Or this from El Rushbo himself back in January:
“We are at war with our own president, we are at war with our own government”
Well, it is an election year. Fear and Hate are the principle attacks that Republican candidates make. Remember Sarah Palin in 2008? I do. And I expect our season of hate to continue for as long as the right believes it benefits them to divide Americans one from another.
They have no policies or programs or new ideas to create jobs or turn our economy around. But they do have fear and hate, and a group of corporations, media outlets, bloggers and useful idiots willing to ratchet up that hate in the hopes of derailing what progress we’ve seen under Obama and the Democrats. Already they have done everything they could to stop health care and financial reform, or water it down, all while scaring the gullible and their base.
Some Republicans have even gone so far as to say the First Amendment doesn’t necessarily protect certain religions from government restrictions because those religions are arguably just cults against which we can discriminate. Guess which one:
Now, you could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, way of life, cult whatever you want to call it. …
Now, you know, I’m all about freedom of religion. I value the First Amendment as much as I value the Second Amendment as much as I value the Tenth Amendment and on and on and on. But you cross the line when they try to start bringing Sharia Law here to the state of Tennessee — to the United States. We live under our Constitution and they live under our Constitution.
If those remarks weren’t designed to stir up hate against Muslim Americans for the benefit of the Republican candidate in question, what was the purpose for which they were spoken in public?
So, I see more and more hate crimes in our future. That’s unfortunately a prediction that I’m afraid will continue to come true so long as the right dominates our political discourse.