Hate crime in Seattle

David Neiwert, who as a journalist made himself a specialist in radical-right politics and hate crimes, discusses the murderous rampage by Naveed Afzal Haq at the Seattle Jewish Community Center. Noting the mental instability that was an undoubted factor in Haq's crime as well as others that he discusses, Neiwert writes (When hate hits home Orcinus blog 07/31/06):

Marking off rampages like Furrow's, Huff's, and Haq's as "isolated events" caused by mental illness is a cop-out, however. Because, as the case of David Lewis Rice made all too clear, these mentally unstable types are almost always stirred up and driven to their insane acts by haters of various stripes, the kind whose voices seem each day to be growing louder in our public discourse. These cultural vampires have developed a real knack for inspiring mentally unstable people into horrific acts of violence.

Who did this in the case of Naveed Afzal Haq is still unknown. Certainly there is no shortage of anti-Semitism lurking among certain factions of Islam, and this may have been his inspiration. But it also lurks among certain corners of Christianity as well, and if these were among the "Christians" to whom Haq was exposed, then the source of his motivation may well have been some of the same far-right influences that were responsible for these previous cases.

Regardless of the source of the hate, there remains, in the face of it, only one appropriate response: the community must stand up and, contrary to the desires of the rampaging madmen and haters, build bridges where they hoped to burn them down.

Neiwert says that Haq's action clearly qualifies as a hate crime:

In this sense, questions about whether this was an act of "terror" seem beside the point: as I've explained in more detail, hate crimes indeed are a kind of terrorism. Specifically, this terrorism is the kind inflicted by our fellow citizens in an attempt to intimidate and deprive others of their fundamental civil rights. ...

However, there are some special considerations that complicate the picture in this case. It was not a "reactive" hate crime (the most common kind) in which a member of the majority community lashes out violently - rather, it was the rarest kind, a "mission" crime in which an unstable, usually psychopathic personality carries out a personal program to rid the world of a perceived evil.

Neiwert also notes that the local Muslim community has made it very clear after the shooting that they disapprove of such hate crimes. This is the kind of thing the Islam-is-evil crowd keeps saying Muslims have a special responsibility to do. But when Muslims actually do take a stand like this, the yahoos just keep saying the same thing anyway.

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