On November 25, you may recall, three young Palestinian-Americans, Kinnan Abdalhamid, Hisham Awartani, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad were shot n Burlington, Vermont. Two of the injured were American citizens (not “Palestinians”); the other a legal resident. The alleged shooter, Jason Eaton, was captured and appears to be mentally ill.
Two of the students have been treated and released from the hospital, but the third was shot in the spine and may never walk again. This was a reprehensible crime that may have stolen a huge part of the life from one victim.
But was it a hate crime?
On December 1 I wrote about how desperately the media seemed to want it to be a hate crime, for it fit the narrative of “Isamophobia” touted by progressives. Muslims, too, seemed to share the notion that it must have been a hate crime. After all, two of the boys were wearing kaffiyehs, the Palestinian headscarf, and they were speaking Arabic to each other.
Now, eleven days later, it appears that there is still no evidence for the alleged perpetrator having a particular hatred for Muslims, even though his social media posts have been thoroughly scrutinized. And yet the desire for this to be an “Islamophobic” crime remains. Here’s from an op-ed in the latest Harvard Crimson (bolding is mine)
At Stanford University, campus police are investigating allegations that a student wearing a shirt with the Syrian city of Damascus written in Arabic on it was struck by a car, the driver of which yelled, “Fuck you people.” At George Washington University, students reported instances of strangers ripping hijabs from the heads of Muslim students. And at Yale University, a message declaring “Death to Palestine” was found written on a whiteboard inside of a student dorm building.
On Nov. 25, this bigotry turned into bullets.
That day, three Palestinian college students in Vermont were shot while speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves. That attack on Hisham Awartani, a student at Brown University; Kinnan Abdalhamid, a student at Haverford University; and Tahseen Ali Ahmed, a student at Trinity University, should remind the nation of the consequences of ignoring anti-Palestinian racism.
These racist attacks are not isolated incidents.
Note the complete lack of doubt in the bit above.
VICE News, an uber-woke organ, has combed through Eaton’s social media posts, and though there’s evidence of an unbalanced mind (Eaton struggled with depression and also went through 19 jobs in nine years), there’s not a hint of hatred of Muslims or Arabs. Nevertheless, the VICE article is called “Everything we now abut the man accused of shooting three Palestinian students in Vermont” with the dark subheading, “Social media accounts linked to Jason J. Eaton by VICE News show a number of troubling posts.” Troubling? Any sign of “Islamophobia”?
Nope; the “troubling” bit is that his posts often appeared unhinged. Here’s what VICE dug up:
But Business Insider also cited evidence, first uncovered by Vice, of a “conspiratorial” bent in posts on what appear to be Eaton’s social media accounts, most of which have since been deleted or locked. One, on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, said “Libertarians want trans furrys to be able to protect their cannabis farms with unregistered machine guns.”
Further evidence of Eaton’s worldview comes in 2004, when the Portsmouth Herald in New Hampshire, which belongs to the USA TODAY Network, reported Eaton was presenting a lecture at a local church about, in Eaton’s words, “taking back the money and power that consumers have ceded to multinational corporations.”
And there’s this:
One of Eaton’s struggles was with romantic relationships, according to a police report. On Oct. 21, 2019, two officers from the Dewitt Police Department in New York, near Syracuse, were dispatched to the residence of a woman who had a previous relationship with Eaton, but who said he was now continuing to text her after she told him to stop.
No mention of Muslims yet. Here’s an implicit accusation of anti-Muslim bigotry from a Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard:
THE FACE OF THE FUTURE?
THIS may be the face of the future—unless Americans address hate within. Jason Eaton was charged w/ 3 counts of 2nd degree attempted murder after allegedly shooting 3 Palestinian students. We need a moral makeover, if not plastic surgery. #Islamophobia pic.twitter.com/GKRJTcgVRc
— Rev. & Prof. Cornell William Brooks (@CornellWBrooks) November 27, 2023
You can find any number of Muslims who are convinced that this was a hate crime motivated by anti-Islamic sentiment itself inflamed by the war. Here’s part of an NPR interview with Abed Ayoub, National Executive Director, Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee (my bolding)
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William Brangham:
As we reported, we still don’t know what the motive is here, whether this was a random attack or whether these young men were specifically targeted because they’re Palestinian.
The families, as you know, put out a statement today saying they clearly believe that this is a hate crime. And I want to read an excerpt of this. They place the blame on: “U.S. media and even elected officials from the highest levels of the government have repeated racist and dehumanizing language in recent weeks. This hateful rhetoric emboldens people to act with violence.”
I’m curious, do you share that same belief?
Abed Ayoub:
Absolutely.
Our belief has been that the rhetoric against Arabs, against Palestinians in this country, the dehumanization of Palestinians would eventually lead to these violent hate crimes we’re seeing. That’s exactly what’s happening. That’s what happened in Chicago to Wadea, the 6-year-old was stabbed.
That’s what happened in this situation and other examples that our office has been fielding across the country since early October. So the rhetoric, the way we’re being dehumanized and the way Arabs and Palestinians are being portrayed leads to these violent hate crimes.
And, unfortunately, this may not be the last incident we hear of, unless there’s an effort to change the rhetoric and to change the way we are being portrayed.
I could give many more examples, but you can look them up yourself The point is that people are willing to believe something without any evidence, and that “something” is what fulfills the ideological narrative they’ve embraced. One would think that Muslims and advocates of comity would be happy if there were no evidence that Eaton hated Muslims. Then it would be a simple “non hate” crime, perhaps one prompted by an unstable mind, and Islamophobia wouldn’t be as pervasive. But people seem to want that not to be true.
It’s also an example of how the divisiveness of people based on their identity has become embedded in society. If a Muslim, black, or Jew has been killed, we assume automatically that their race or religion was a factor. But really: we need some evidence before rushing to judgement.
I was just thinking the day before yesterday that this story seemed to have disappeared from the news.
Many, if not all, wokesters will feel a strong need that this should be deemed a so-called “hate-crime” motivated by Islamophobia, whether or not this contention is supported by any evidence. On the current cultural commandment that reality be defined by the imperatives of “wokery” regardless of the facts, Glenn Loury has just posted a very thought-provoking piece on SubStack (“Derek Chauvin Did Not Murder George Floyd”).
But then we should do it for all alleged hate crimes if there is no conclusive evidence, not just anti Muslim attacks.
Mr. Loury’s concern about the Chauvin case is about far more than hate-crime embellishment. It’s about the finding of guilt pure and simple, upstream from the hate part.
Of course attacks against specific groups in society need to be investigated fully to determine if the attacks had racial or religious motivations. Those investigations take time and in cases where there is no social media history expressing such ideas it is going to be hard to make the accusation of a hate crime stick because the accused would be wise not to admit to any motivation.
Not wanting to trivialize the issue but one just has to look at the supposed “war on Christmas” that so many conservative Christians want to embrace as it conforms to their preconceptions.
Sam Harris’s latest podcast is a short one, just explaining the problem of “islamophobia” as a concept.
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/343-what-is-islamophobia
The entire idea of “hate crimes” provides yet another incentive to separate people by their respective “identity groups.” Surely the idea of hate crimes intensifies divisions among groups. I’m not sure that it adds anything useful other than to offer the victim’s identity group a sense of recognition and retribution. The entire debate over whether the Vermont case is a hate crime or not just makes things worse, by focusing attention on hate between groups. How can this possibly be a good thing for society? It intensifies hate, rather than calms it.
It would be interesting to learn more about the theory behind “hate crimes.”
In law school 20 years ago I learned about them: “Just another stupid part of the justice system” I thought and learned the sentence enhancements they cause (as I needed to for the exam).
They are morally wrong as I see it, divisive as hell. If you shoot me because I’m white, or because I’m a Beatles fan or because I’m a dog lover: it shouldn’t matter. What matters is you wanted to shoot me and did. Mens rea shouldn’t be identity based IMHO.
I’m not sure they’re used much in criminal law (I was a defense atty in NYC) thankfully, they seem to go/get charged more where the publicity is.
D.A., J.D.
NYC
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
I can’t believe people are still talking about this nonsense, a regional story like it is some larger blip. Sad for the victims involved of course, but people get shot by nuts every day, randomness dictates some will “look” like important incidents.
When they’re not.
Randomness. Bigger than you think.
D.A.
NYC
Actually, people getting shot by crazy people is pretty rare. Most people who get shot are targeted by people they know in a dispute, or people committing a crime, or they are victims when someone else is shot at. Some guy coming out of his house and randomly shooting people for no reason on a sidewalk is extraordinarily rare, even in gun-crazy America. That’s why everyone suspects that what the victims were wearing and the fact they were speaking Arabic probably played a role. There’s no proof yet for it, but there’s no other reasonable explanation for why this happened.
However, the Stanford case has been questioned by some people: https://stanfordreview.org/breaking-stanfords-hit-and-run-hate-crime-is-dubious/
I agree with you. There will probably never be evidence for it as his lawyers have most assuredly told him to clam up. Unless they can find a social media feed or acquaintances describing statements said against Muslims then that will be the case.
Another case in which there has been a rush to treat a crime as a hate crime is the stabbing in England of Brianna Ghey. A trial of the two teenagers who have been charged is under way. The trans community has, from the beginning, regarded the case as an attack on the victim based on her being a trans girl. But I don’t think there has been yet any clear evidence that that was the motive.
In honesty, I find it incredibly improbable that he did NOT shoot these three men because they’re Arab.
First, we can rule out every OTHER motive for shooting – e.g., we know he didn’t want to rob them. And since the men were all total strangers to him, we know that he did not have any personal grievances against any of them.
Second, people who are visibly Arab are a very small minority in Burlington Vermont. If this man was just motivated to shoot people at random from his porch, it would be incredibly unlikely that the people he shot would be Arab, by total coincidence.
The upshot is that I think it’s more than probable that what triggered this man to get his gun and shoot these men was precisely the fact that they were identifiably Arab.
But at the same time, in the absence of any expressions of hate for Arabs by this man, his crime was far more likely to have been motivated by irrational FEAR – i.e., pathological paranoia – than Islamophobia. In other words, it’s far more likely that his crime was a result of paranoia, impaired reality-testing, and impaired impulse control resulting from some sort of mental illness or even early dementia. Arabs, in general, could easily have become an object of his acute paranoia at this time because he has no doubt seen many many images of Arab aggression on TV thanks to the Hamas massacre.
In short, I’m pretty sure that the reason that three innocent* young Arab men who posed no threat to anybody were victims of a violent crime was not due to hate, but due to the tragic conjunction of current events and one man’s pathological paranoia.
*I’m struck by the fact that the parents of these young men sent them to a Quaker school in Gaza, in preference to the regular schools. The regular schools are cesspools of hate mongering, while, as everyone knows, Quakers are uber peaceniks and preach unconditional love for others. This suggests to me that these young men would be the last to ever participate in Hamas or approve of its actions.
I agree with you that to the average person, the circumstantial evidence presented to them on day one would favor these boys being caught up in the swell of the current chaos – on the other hand, we have journalists from media chains concluding motives, and doing so aligned with the politics of the left. This is not a coincidence, and shows a deep rot within key societal institutions.
I may have not expressed myself properly. I don’t KNOW if this was motivated by the victims’ identities as Muslims. That could well be true. My point was twofold: that there is no evidence for a hate crime, and that evidence has to be far stronger than what you “suspect” to be true. Second, people seem to WANT this to be a hate crime, even in the absence of evidence, which I find weird.
I agree 100% that people WANT this to be a hate crime, whether or not it is. But it’s not the first time I’ve seen an ugly desire on the part of segments of the left to scream ‘hate crime’ without evidence or in the face of contrary evidence. For example, I remember the refusal of people to believe the massacre of the Asian massage parlor workers had nothing to do with their race, despite the overwhelming evidence. That was so perverse that it felt to me as if people WANTED hate crimes to be committed against Asians – not because they, personally, hated Asians, but because they were desperate to believe that OTHER people (white people) hated them.
I’ve come to believe that there is an ugly and perverse desire on the part of segments of the left to believe that the US white population as a whole is every bit as racist and white supremacist today as it was in 1960. Of course, it’s not true. As a result, the demand for hate crimes far exceeds the supply. That’s the bottom line reason why they insist on calling any possible crime a hate crime and are vociferous in rejecting all nuance or contrary evidence.
I would have shared that sentiment 10 years ago, but the percentage of the white population in the last few years has become more racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant.