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by James Lacey Recently released FBI hate-crime data show that crimes against Arabs and Muslims have increased more than 1,500 percent since last year. Presumably this seeming outpouring of ethnic hatred is related directly to the aftereffects of Sept. 11. Our shock at that terrible tragedy apparently has created a desire to lash out at innocents who bear a resemblance to the monsters who attacked us. However, before we drown ourselves in self-recrimination, some perspective is required. It does not take too much peering behind the numbers to show that rather than a nation wracked with hate, we are a people of remarkable forbearance. Before we look at those numbers though, it needs to be pointed out that hate-crime statistics are politically stacked and arbitrary. They require law-enforcement agencies to look past the crime and determine a person's intent and motivation. It is not enough to say Person A murdered Person B and prosecute accordingly. Now police must determine whether Person B was selected for murder (or any other crime) because he/she was of a different race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation than Person A. Determining what constitutes a hate crime leads to all manner of logical absurdities. For instance: Did a black thief target a white person for robbery because he is white, or did he study the latest socioeconomic data and see that by robbing a white person he is more likely to maximize his potential income? The first would be a hate crime. The second would not. Because determining a hate crime most often is a judgment call, it allows prejudice and political correctness to enter into the equation. When three white men chained James Byrd to a truck and dragged him to his death the incident was classified as a hate crime, which it surely was. However, when Colin Ferguson, a black man, boarded a Long Island Railroad train and systematically murdered six whites and wounded 19 others, it was not classified as a hate crime, despite Ferguson's long history of antiwhite outbursts. In 2001, the FBI recorded 1.7 million acts of interracial violent crime. Of that figure, 1.1 million were cases of blacks committing violent crimes on whites. Despite this, the FBI finds that blacks suffer three times as many hate crimes as whites and as a percentage of the population are almost 30 times more likely to be targeted for a hate crime. Somehow the FBI has peered into the minds of those who committed the 1.1 million acts of black-on-white crime, and determined that there was no racial motivation behind them. That is ridiculous. Assuming, for now, that law enforcement is equipped with a magical clairvoyance that allows it to look into the hearts of criminals, what then do the numbers tell us? The 1,500 percent increase in hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims represents 481 actual crimes--up from 28 the year before. Since Arabs previously had been classified as whites, there really is no way to tell if the surge is as great as it appears or if there is just a new sensitivity that allows Arabs to be broken out into a distinct new subset, which no one bothered to do before. In other words, there also may have been 481 hate crimes against Arabs the previous year, but the number was rolled into the larger total, and therefore hidden. It also is important to keep in mind what constitutes a hate crime as we consider the "crisis" of bate that Arab-Americans are facing. When people hear the term "hate crime" they almost immediately get an image of the vilest assaults. People may have an image of hate represented by Byrd being dragged behind a truck, but the reality is that most hate crimes are far more prosaic. If a person gets upset at an ethnic Arab and tells him to go back to his own country, for purposes of the record that is as much a hate crime as if he goes out at night looking for Arabs to beat to death. Still, 481 acts of ethnic hatred are 481 too many. But before the national castigation begins, that number needs to be examined from a new viewpoint. There are more than 3 million Americans of Arab descent (some estimates areas high as 6 million). This means that 0.016 percent of them were victims of a hate crime last year. This is about the same probability as being hit by lightning in a lifetime. Jews, by comparison, have a 0.019 percent chance of being the victim of a hate crime, which is almost double the chance of a black being the victim. Whites suffered only 891 hate crimes (0.008 percent) last year, but as we have seen, that number is suspect. For instance, the whites killed by hate-filled Arab fanatics on Sept. 11 were not classified as victims of a hate crime. Does the fact that the terrorists were targeting Americans in general or that members of other ethnic groups also were killed somehow mitigate the hatred felt toward any particular group? The happy fact is that while there still is hatred in the United States it is dwarfed by the good will and generous spirit of most Americans. In what other country could members of one ethnic group inflict such an incredible blow on a nation and the response be so muted? In the year after Sept. 11, 2001, only a small fraction of a percent of Arabs and Muslims reported being victims of hate. Out of approximately 3 million Arabs in the United States, 2,999,519 of them went about their lives without reporting the slightest bit of harassment. Americans can be justly proud of the tolerance that has been exhibited in the face of so terrible a disaster. As a side note, the FBI should get out of the mind-reading business. A crime is a crime is a crime, and justice should be applied accordingly. Hate-crime statistics are good only for feeding into the propaganda of race-baiting hatemongers who make their living inflaming racial and ethnic animosity. JAMES LACEY IS A COLONEL IN THE U.S. ARMY RESERVE AND A NEW YORK-BASED COLUMNIST WITH EXPERTISE IN FINANCE AND MILITARY AFFAIRS.
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