Hate Crimes Ignored

The national media and the nation’s politicians are consuming themselves over the supposed hate crime committed against actor Jussie Smollett. As of now, the information is slightly sketchy, but it appears that Smollett was being less than truthful in his account of the events. It even appears that he might be indicted for filing a false police report. Stay tuned.

Many politicians and media outlets are now wiping the egg off their faces… but do not expect anything to change. They have decided that hate crimes by white Trump supporters against African-Americans fulfill all the terms of their narrative. Thus, that it did not really matter that it happened.

Ben Shapiro reminds us that two hate crimes occurred on January 29. One was the supposed attack on Smollett. The other occurred in Brooklyn, NY. The perpetrators were African-American and the victim was Jewish. Thus, it did not merit any national attention.

Shapiro describes what happened:

That same night, a Jewish man in New York was beaten by three thugs. Nothing was stolen. The attack was caught on video.

Outside of a report in The Jerusalem Post, the story received virtually no attention.

Was this a one-off event, an outlier? Not at all. Shapiro continues:

This isn’t the only story of anti-Semitism in New York. Not by a long shot. Two weeks before that beating, a Jewish man, 19, was “violently assaulted” as he walked past a local laundromat by a group of teenage black males. In December, a 16-year-old Jewish teen spent a week in a hospital after being beaten by two other teens; witnesses said that the teens screamed “Kill the Jew.” The NYPD categorized the attack as “gang related” rather than a hate crime, angering Jews in the area. This weekend, vandals shattered the window of a Chabad in Bushwick as the rabbi and his family slept inside.

This list goes on.

In fact, according to NBC New York, “The city has seen a sharp increase in reported hate crimes so far in 2019, the NYPD said. Police had investigated 42 hate crimes through Feb. 4, compared with 19 at the same point last year. Most of those were anti-Semitic.” The New York Times reported in October of last year that “there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks. Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20.”

Why the lack of coverage? Simply put, the prevalence of anti-Semitic hate crimes does not fit the narrative:

Indeed, the narrative the Left wishes to push is that America is deeply discriminatory and bigoted, rife with hate. But by statistics, Jews are by far the most likely group to be targeted in America on a per capita basis. This is a problem for the intersectionality-oriented Left, which sees Jews not as victims but as part of the power hierarchy in the United States. How can the Left uphold its hierarchy of victimhood if Jews are the chief targets of hate crime – and furthermore, if such hate crime is largely perpetrated by non-white supremacists, people who supposedly lie higher on the victim hierarchy than Jews?

Furthermore, Jews are inordinately successful and well-treated in the United States; outside of Israel, there is no more philo-Semitic country on earth. So if Jews, the most statistically victimized group in America, aren’t particularly victimized, what does that say about the narrative of America as racist, bigotry-ridden hellhole?

And, by the by, let’s not forget that Ben Shapiro is routinely excluded from college campuses. He is simply too dangerous. 

So much for the marketplace of ideas. So much for reporting all the facts.