Posted on 06/14/2007 11:13:10 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- What happened to Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, a young Knoxville couple out on an ordinary Saturday night date, was undeniably brutal. The two were carjacked, kidnapped, raped and finally murdered during an ordeal of unimaginable terror in January.
< snip >
But whether the attack was a racial hate crime worthy of national media attention is another question, one that has now ignited a fierce dispute over the definition of hate crimes and how the mainstream media choose to cover America's most discomfiting interracial attacks.
< snip >
Country music star Charlie Daniels, who lives 150 miles from Knoxville, contrasted scant coverage of the Christian-Newsom murders with the national media frenzy that erupted last year when a black woman accused three white members of the Duke University lacrosse team of raping her at a party. The white players were cleared in April after the accuser proved unreliable and no evidence corroborated a crime.
< snip >
"If this [Knoxville case] had been white on black crime, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their ilk would have descended on Knoxville like a swarm of angry bees," Daniels wrote on his Web site. "I guess the lack of TV cameras discouraged them."< snip >
Authorities say the couple's assailants, some of them ex-convicts, forced their victims to drive at gunpoint to a clapboard house in one of Knoxville's roughest neighborhoods, where both victims were raped and then killed. Newsom's body, shot and burned, was found dumped beside nearby railroad tracks, while Christian, who was strangled, was found bundled in plastic garbage bags inside the house.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
Anything that White people do.
"In 2005, there were more than 645,000 victims of cross-racial violent crimes between blacks and whites in the U.S. In 90 percent of those crimes, black offenders attacked white victims."
The NAACP representative says thinks it occurred in Cincinnati (instead of Knoxville)
A good brief definition. A more complete one might be along the lines of:
A crime committed by a white male or designated substitute therefor;
upon a person or object that is politically or materially considered to be inherently an object having ownership claimed by the political far-left;
wherein propagandistic benefit is believed to exist in potential demagogic efforts and related political advertisements of assertable criminal affronts; and/or wherein said benefit(s) may exist in the execution of extraordinary methods of punishment of said white male.
Combine that stat with these from the article
Blacks are also the overwhelming majority of victims of attacks recorded by the FBI as hate crimes. In 2005, blacks were the victims in 68 percent of nearly 5,000 hate-crime incidents nationwide, while whites were the victims in 20 percent of the cases. Whites accounted for 60 percent of known hate-crime offenders, while blacks accounted for 20 percent.
and it's pretty obvious that something is seriously out of whack with how "hate crimes" are determined. This is political correctness at its most vicious.
I know what a hate crime is, it’s stupid, and at its best is moronic symbolism and multi-culturalism run a muck. If you kill me or take a crap on my lawn, I am going to apply some logic and guess you didn’t do it because you liked me. If you did it because I was NDN or whatever, I couldn’t care less. All I want is for you to be brought to justice for killing me or hope that I have my mini-14 handy the next time you take a crap on my lawn.
I still cannot believe what those animals did to Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom has had no coverage in the MSM.
Write or call the MSM outlets and hold them accountable for their racist non-coverage of this story. As we saw in the OJ case, the lives of white people are worth less than those of others in this country. Call the Knoxville DA and charge him with cowardice.
A hate crime must be a crime which is neither a love crime or an indifference crime.
Lack of rabble rousers. That's the reason. Don'tcha know that news is just entertainment in disguise.
Remember: once you make a particular Thought a crime, or even an "aggravating factor" in another more active crime (like rape), and claim to be able to determine its existence at trial, any unpopular thought can be criminalized.
Hence Orwell's 1984, which apparently doesn't get read or taken seriously any more, perhaps because the "prophecy" was "wrong" (or just ahead of schedule).
I don’t think the replies in this thread address the issue correctly.
While assault, battery, murder, whatever, should be treated equally in all circumstances, hates crimes are a different breed.
As I understand it, a hate crime is terrorism against a particular group - an act designed to intimidate and cause fear against a whole class of people. While the hate crimes laws may not be applied perfectly, it’s understandable why attempts are being made to curtail these actions.
The arguments made by other posters are simply that they give groups special “rights”. I don’t buy that. In order to show an action was terrorism against a group, the criminal act must be shown to reinforce a reasonable, preexisting perception of ferocity - like a “I could be next” - in the entire victim class.
For example, a serial murderer who goes after skinny people only because he *hates* skinny people would not typically be considered a hate crime because, in general, skinny people do not feel persecuted or threatened.
On the other hand, a member of the gay community - which already has a higher rate of being murder victims and is continually condemned for who they are by entire religions, governments, and neighborhoods - who is murdered for being what they are is a different crime. It can reignite fear in an entire group of people and could easily be considered terrorism.
*flame suit on*
The entire concept of “Hate” crime is stupid. It is a socialist-liberal invention to exagerate a crime’s impact for more sensational media coverage. The crime is the crime. Murder carries with it the highest punishment anyway. Hate crime is just a media defination that has been perverted into a crime exaggerator by liberals with the power to vote and make themselves feel good.
What worries me is the tendency to try to criminalize not only acts, but speech. The tendency of the left to shrilly cry “hate crime!” every time they hear what they don’t want to hear is annoying; worse, sometimes the leftists access the prosecutors.
So, do we provide special defenses to groups that have a documented history of persecution? Do we protect free speech? What are the limits? Both are ideals; but the ideas clash. Such is democracy.
How a skinny, or gay, or fat, or white a non-victim of a particular crime "feels" about it is, or should be, entirely irrelevant, IMO. This goes beyond my previous post about the dangers of prosecuting people for their own thoughts or emotions, and travels into the uncharted and perilous region of prosecuting people for other peoples' thoughts or emotions.
That's a very bad place.
A good example of a hate crime: passing legislation which considers crimes against Democrat voting blocs to be more serious than crimes against non-Democrat voting blocs.
bump
A hate crime is whatever the libs don’t want conservatives to do. Of course, a minority or jihadist can’t commmit such a crime.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.