Thursday, November 16, 2017



Hate Crimes Data: Similar Numbers, Different Percentages

FBI hate crime data shows little change in the number of crimes, but significant changes in race of offenders.

With the mainstream media blaming Donald Trump for promoting hatred and all the talk of America being a society steeped in “white privilege” and racist nationalism, one might expect to see hate crime statistics support such claims. The FBI has released its “hate crimes” data for the year 2016. Now, as we have argued in the past, the designation of “hate crime” injects a rather subjective standard into motivating factors for crime and it’s often used to artificially increase the level of guilt beyond the actual criminal act. Moreover, leftist social justice warriors love to implicate the criminal’s entire social, religious or racial group, so long as it’s white or Christian. But for the sake of argument, let’s accept the FBI’s designation and look at some things.

According to the data, over the past decade the total number of reported hate crimes has changed very little, with anti-black crimes remaining the highest reported percentage at 50.2%. However, over that same period there has been a significant shift in the percentage of white offenders. In 2007 — before the Age of Hope ‘n’ Change™ — nearly 63% of all known offenders were white; by 2016 and the rise of that big “hater” Donald Trump, that percentage had dropped to 46.3%. And while the percentage of white offenders has decreased, the percentage of anti-white crime saw an increase in 2016 to 20.5%, the highest level recorded since 2006.

It’s not surprising to see an uptick in the number of anti-white hate crimes, since those who have been widely demonized by politically motivated leftists will tend to see a greater backlash against them by other groups who feel newly justified in their anger.

Finally, one interesting stat not noted by the FBI were the number of crimes committed against politicians, particularly of the Republican variety. With all the rhetoric about Trump and Republicans supposedly fomenting hatred, it was Republicans who were violently attacked this past year, specifically when a Bernie Sanders-supporting leftist targeted and shot GOP House members practicing for a baseball game. And more recently there is Sen. Rand Paul, who is sporting six broken ribs after a blindside attack at the hands of his leftist neighbor. Are we the only ones detecting a pattern here?

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Islamophobia? Jews Represented 54% Of ALL Hate Crimes In 2016

With the constant refrain of Islamophobia parroted by the mainstream media, it might be interesting for them to note one telling statistic from the FBI as they tallied hate crimes in 2016: Of the 1,538 hate crimes motivated by religious bias that were reported by law enforcement, a whopping 54% were anti-Jewish; more than double the 25% that were anti-Muslim. After the precipitous drop from the anti-Jewish crimes to the anti-Muslim crimes, there was another huge drop to the third-most targeted group: Catholics, at 4%.

15,254 law enforcement agencies participated in the Hate Crime Statistics Program.

834 hate crimes were counted against Jews; 318 against Muslims, and 63 against Catholics. Hate crimes against Jews rose 9% from 2015.

In 2014, Jews in the United States were targeted 40.7% more than Muslims.

Interestingly, despite the fact that Jews were far more targeted than Muslims, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, speaking at the Muslim Advocates annual dinner on December 3, 2015, focused on anti-Muslim acts, saying, “Since 9/11, we’ve had over 1,000 investigations into acts of anti-Muslim hatred, including rhetoric and bigoted actions, with over 45 prosecutions arising out of that. I think sadly that number’s going to continue.”

As Carol Brown wrote at the time in The American Thinker:

One would think that as the attorney general, she would have a few basic facts at her command. For starters, the largest percentage of hate crimes against people based on religious affiliation are committed against Jews. According to 2014 FBI stats, 63% of all hate crimes against a religious group were committed against Jews, compared to 11% against Muslims. But I’ve never heard Loretta Lynch express her concern about anti-Semitism. Have you?

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Questioning gender fluidity is the new blasphemy

The capitulation of the establishment to the politics of transgenderism has been astonishing. I’m struggling to remember any other time when a new and contested ideology has been so uncritically embraced by the powers-that-be.

We have a Tory government pushing a Gender Recognition Act that would allow anyone to change his or her gender without so much as popping a hormone pill. An established Church which yesterday issued guidelines to its schools encouraging them to let kids ‘explore gender identity’. Police forces exchanging helmets for caps because ‘gender-based headgear’ is disrespectful to trans people. And of course a university system — the nurturer of future leaders — in which women’s colleges are throwing themselves open to people who were born male, students are told to use gender-neutral pronouns, and anyone who says ‘Men cannot become women’ can expect to be hounded off campus.

From the stuffy Tories to the armed wing of the state to the actual Church of England, one by one the core institutions of the nation have accepted an idea that we really should have more debate about, no? Namely that gender is fluid. And that children should be allowed to decide if they’re male or female. And that men who transition into women are actual women — full-on, legally recognisable, going-into-women’s-changing-rooms women — rather than transwomen, as they were respectfully referred to for many years. Anyone who claims that trans politics is edgy is kidding themselves: it is one of the most established, protected ways of thinking of our time.

Indeed, raise so much as a peep of criticism of the ideology of gender fluidity, or the wisdom of chest-binding for teenage girls who think they are boys, or whether primary schools really should let little lads wear dresses to school, and you will be shot down with accusations of ‘transphobia’. Even to suggest there are two sexes and that one cannot really become the other, to state what many people consider to be biological fact, is to risk being branded with the phobia tag.

So protected is the dogma of transgenderism that it now effectively enjoys its own blasphemy law. Suggesting people who were born male shouldn’t use women’s changing rooms in clothes shops is the 21st-century equivalent of saying ‘the Bible is nonsense’, as the Times’ Janice Turner discovered this weekend when she was subjected to a metaphorical tarring and feathering by the Twitterati for criticising trans thinking. In essence for being that thing that established and intolerant ways of thinking have always had a problem with: a woman who doubts, a woman who thinks. Trans activists should ask themselves how their campaigning came so closely to resemble old, unforgiving religions.

The institutionalisation of trans thinking is making critical debate tantamount to heresy. An elite, eccentric idea that has its origins in the rarefied land of Gender Studies department, whose language — cis, ze, gender fluidity — is the language of academic cliques rather than of pubs or bus-stops or barbershops, is being foisted on the land by religious and political institutions now more keen to cosy up to tiny groups of influential campaigners than to connect with the concerns of ordinary people. And this is wrong. The unilateral reorganisation of the basic categories of social life by aloof institutions is undemocratic and worrying. And it is not transphobic to say so.

Nowhere is it more worrying than in schools. The trans outlook increasingly holds sway in education. The CofE’s guidelines instruct teachers to let kids explore gender identity ‘without…comment’. That is, say nothing, pass no judgement, exercise no reason: just stand back and nod as the boy tells you he is a girl. Teachers who want to keep their jobs have little choice but to accept this advice. A Christian teacher in Oxford currently faces disciplinary action allegedly for ‘misgendering’ a female student who identifies as a boy. Worse, the teacher believes biological sex is defined at birth. This is heresy now. No matter that most people believe this, or that society has been organised upon this basis for centuries: overnight it has become the great unsayable.

We need to ask questions about the importing of trans thinking into schools because it shows how far down the rabbit hole of relativism our society has gone. I fear for the future if we will not even tell boys they are boys and girls they are girls. If teachers lack the authority even to say, ‘You’re a boy and should wear a boy’s uniform’. We are cultivating a new generation that will expect its every instinct to be instantly respected, and worse that the social infrastructure, from bathrooms to uniform policies, should mould themselves around their instincts. It’s so bizarre: we don’t trust kids to walk past chicken shops or read difficult literature, but we think it’s cool for them to choose their sex.

Well, ‘we’ don’t. ‘They’ do — the new trans-friendly rulers of society and policers of public discussion. More of us need to blaspheme against their eccentric strictures. Let me make this as clear as possible: trans adults should enjoy the same rights as every other adult, and by the same token, their ideas, their beliefs, their faith, should be subjected to the same levels of criticism and even ridicule as everybody else’s. People have rights; their ideologies do not.

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SEIU’s Sexual Harassment Scandal

While so much attention is being focused on the allegations of sexual harassment in Hollywood, there’s another sexual harassment scandal that is not getting anywhere near as much coverage. That scandal is at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a major campaign supporter of Democrats, and its Fight for $15 campaign.

SEIU, which is composed of janitors, security guards, child care workers, government employees, grad students, and adjunct professors, among others, is one of the largest unions in the country; its Fight for $15 campaign advocates for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The scandal began with allegations against Scott Courtney, formerly an SEIU Executive Vice President. Seven SEIU staffers accused Courtney of having sexual relationships with young staffers who were then promoted. Just last month, Courtney married an SEIU staffer. Furthermore, “more than a dozen current and former staffers … said complaints about top-level staff on the Fight for $15 were an open secret.” They also alleged “that complaints about abusive behavior by organizers who reported to top strategist Courtney led to no action.” Amidst an investigation, Courtney resigned from the SEIU late last month.

The Washington Free Beacon talked to a former Fight for $15 organizer. She spoke of the “the broad environment of misogyny at [the union],” and stated that she had “personally experienced sexual harassment from two people in supervisory positions.” The organizer claimed that, although she reported her harassers to human resources, it did not seem to accomplish much. Speaking of one of the harassers, she said, “His behavior didn’t change. He had an attitude of entitlement and misogyny and the feeling he could get away with really egregious comments.”

Caleb Jennings, who led SEIU’s Fight for $15 campaign in Chicago, was fired late last month. Jennings was accused of creating a toxic work environment and having a “sexist and aggressive” attitude. Over a year ago, 50 staffers signed a letter urging his firing. Included in the letter was an allegation that he had shoved a staffer into a doorframe and subsequently fired her. That former staffer, who is also an immigrant, filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB found that she was wrongly fired and awarded her $20,000 in back pay. She declined to take her old job back and stated, “I wouldn’t want to work for someone who assaulted me.” If the allegations against Jennings are true, it is unclear how he managed to keep a job at all, particularly one at an organization that claims to fight for workers’ rights.

Although no explanations have been provided publicly, two other Fight for $15 leaders have recently left their jobs. Mark Raleigh, who led the Detroit chapter of Fight for $15, was fired; and Kendall Fells resigned earlier this month. Fells departure is notable because he was the national organizing director for Fight for $15 and was a leading spokesman for the campaign.

After the latest departures, an SEIU spokeswoman stated the following. “These personnel actions are the culmination of this stage of the investigation which brought to light the serious problems related to abusive behavior towards staff, predominantly female staff.”

What makes the scandal even worse is the Fight for $15 campaign’s hypocrisy. On its website, the campaign asserts that “four in ten women working in fast food restaurants deal with sexual harassment on the job… This has to stop. WE have to stop it.” Yet, while the campaign was busy crusading against sexual harassment in fast food restaurants, it was ignoring serious problems in its own organization.

It is good that SEIU is finally decided to investigate its scandal and admit that it has had “serious problems,” but the union is still rather late in arriving at this conclusion. Because SEIU’s sexual harassment scandal was so widespread and reached so high into the organization, the Department of Labor should investigate to see whether any dues money from hard-working SEIU members was used to buy the silence of sexual harassment victims.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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