Several incidents occurred north of Toronto recently that point out the absurdity of current hate crimes legislation; being enacted not as a measure to deter or punish crime but simply to make proponents feel better about themselves.
Twenty-three-year old Shayne Berwick had gone fishing with a group of friends, many of them Asians, on the shores of Lake Simcoe, about an hour's drive north of Toronto. The group was confronted by another group of men who later pursued the fishermen (or as the CBC would say, the fishers). Berwick ended up being thrown from a vehicle and sustained serious life-threatening injuries.
It turned out that attacks on fishermen of Asian descent is quite common in the Lake Simcoe area. These incidents have been taking place since at least last April, and according to some locals, have been going on for years. The attacks usually consist of hooligans sneaking up on Asian fishermen who are fishing at night and throwing them into the water, sometimes with their gear. These incidents were kept quiet until Berwick ended up in a coma.
It's not surprising that these incidents happened in Sutton. After going down to Sobey's supermarket and watching George water the vegetables, there is not a lot for young people to do. For those Rush Limbaugh listeners, Sutton resembles Rio Linda, California. It is a blue collar town where every driveway has four or five cars up on blocks; destined to become the Olympic Village in a future Homeless Olympics. If eating in a restaurant without wearing a baseball cap was the only crime, the local residents would all be leading crime free lives.
The practice of throwing Asians into the lake is called "nippertipping", so-called after the derogatory term for Japanese. It is doubtful if any of the victims of this nippertipping were in fact of Japanese descent but of course to the redneck perpetrators, "they" all look alike.
The introduction of hate crimes legislation has nothing to do with punishment or deterrence of crime. It serves only to give those in the race business another excuse to get more taxpayer money to pursue their politically correct causes and their political ideology. Perhaps the greatest example of this was the killing of James Byrd Jr. in Texas in 1998. Byrd, who was black, was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck, driven by white racists. The refusal of then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to enact hate crime legislation was used during the 2000 presidential race to show he was unfit to hold office. Bush was simultaneously attacked for being the governor of a state that uses the death penalty too much. It didn't seem to matter to critics of how the state handles crime that two of Byrd's killers were sentenced to death; that wasn't enough.
The focus on what took place at Lake Simcoe shifted from the victims and the perpetrators of the attacks and focused on the York Regional Police who were slow to pursue these crimes as hate crime. That's all that seemed to matter. The force quickly complied with the pressure, beginning a hate crimes investigation, complete with a black police officer taking centre stage in the investigation.
The hate crimes aspect was used by the race industry to tell us how evil and racist, not the perpetrators of these crimes, but all of society is. Zanana Akande, the former president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations and living proof why Howard Hampton will never become premier of Ontario, was quick to point out that "nipper" is not far from "#". What nonsense! Notice how quickly a black activist brought blacks into the situation, even though these acts were aimed at Asians. It's a good thing that Roy Rogers is dead; he'd be in a lot of trouble for having named his horse "T....r".
Other than keeping the race industry going, hate crimes serve no real purpose. Judges have discretion in sentencing; that's the number one reason why violent criminals are back on the street soon after being incarcerated. Unless the sentence is mandatory such as that for first degree murder, judges have the discretion to consider aggravating and mitigating circumstances of a crime and can adjust their sentences to reflect crimes that are solely racially or ethnically based.
Instead of being concerned with "hate crimes" we should be concerned about arresting those who get their kicks from throwing unsuspecting strangers into the lake. But it seems like that it's a fairly low priority; designating these actions as hate crimes is more important that solving them.
