A couple of quotes:
— The worst enemy is one whose doctrines are founded in hate and are thus beyond debate. Tobsha Learner, in her historical fiction novel The Witch of Cologne.
— There is no passion more spectral or fantastical than hate. Lord Byron, in his play The Two Foscari.
Twice this year, the Kansas City area has been in the national spotlight because of horrific hate crimes.
F. Glenn Miller Jr., one of the nut cases who visited us with his particular brand of hate — anti-Semitism — came from Aurora, Missouri, southwest of Springfield.
The other, Ahmed H. Aden, was living among us.
Miller, as you know, shot and killed three people, including a 14-year-old boy, outside Jewish facilities in Overland Park in April. Recently, he told The Star’s Judy Thomas, “I wanted to made damned sure I killed some Jews or attacked the Jews before I died.” He was so blinded in his hatred that he didn’t even bother to identify Jewish people as particular targets and ended up killing three Gentiles.
Aden, a demented Christian Somali, killed a 15-year-old Somali Muslim named Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein…Killed him by running him down in his SUV last Thursday outside a mosque on Admiral Boulevard. He claimed he mistook Abdisamad for someone who had threatened him previously, but I’m not buying that for a minute. For one thing, why would a 15-year-old boy be threatening a 34-year-old man? No, Aden was after Muslims, that’s all.
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According to the FBI’s 2012 Uniform Crime Reports, most hate crime was motivated by race, accounting for 48 percent of all such reports. However, race fell significantly as a percentage of hate crimes, while sexual orientation rose.
Hate crimes motivated by religion stayed about the same, but between 1995 and 2012, the percentage of such crimes aimed at Jews dropped significantly, while the percentage aimed at Muslims rose significantly.
Take a look at these tables:
The shift is not surprising, considering the upheaval in the Middle East the last 20 years or so. But when you get away from the statistics and see living, breathing mad men like Miller and Aden do the things they did and think about them (and probably others like them) being among you, it is shocking and frightening.
There are a ton of goof balls out there, not to mention those who dedicate themselves to crime as a way of life, and any of us could become victims. Just because most of us don’t look like young Abdisamad, we should not feel safe. If a Caucasian youth had been standing next to Abdisamad, he might have been run down, too.
The hate that Lord Byron and Tobsha Lerner wrote about is reckless and unfocused, and it’s not limited to Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Just look at Glenn Miller’s victims, 53-year-old Terri LaManno, 69-year-old William Lewis Corporon and 14-year-old Reat Corporon. Hate does not discriminate among locale, age, gender, nationality or religion; when cut loose, it destroys whatever is in its path.