President Biden on Thursday pounded his podium as he decried crimes targeting Asian Americans before signing a hate-crimes bill crafted in response to a reported rise in violence against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden and fellow Democrats have contended the rise is linked to former President Donald Trump’s branding of COVID-19 as the “China virus.” The bill gained momentum after the shooting of eight massage-parlor workers in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian.
But crime data and the many incidents captured on closed-circuit cameras or by bystanders tell a story that establishment media and politicians are unwilling to confront: Most of the perpetrators are not Trump-supporting white supremacists. They are black people who, some sociologists argue, are part of the legacy of Congress trying to make amends for the monstrous sins of slavery and segregation through massive welfare programs that have produced fatherless families.
Biden called the history of mistreatment against the “AAPI community” – Asian American and Pacific Islander – “un-American.”
“Silence is complicity. And we cannot be complicit. We have to speak out. We have to act,” he said.
“That’s what you’ve done,” he said, addressing members of Congress. “And I can’t thank you enough. I’m proud today.”
The legislation aims to expedite the review of hate crimes believed to be related to the pandemic and grant federal funds to local law enforcement to improve reporting of bias-driven incidents. The Justice Department is to designate a point person to assist with the expedited review of COVID-19 hate crimes and expand “linguistically appropriate” public education campaigns.
The House passed the bill Tuesday 364-62 after the Senate passed it last month, 94-1. The only senator opposed to the bill was Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who explained he regarded it as a threat to free speech. He said it “turns the federal government into the speech police – gives government sweeping authority to decide what counts as offensive speech and then monitor it.” In a previous statement, he said that “as a former prosecutor, my view is it’s dangerous to simply give the federal government open-ended authority to define a whole new class of federal hate crime incidents.”
The bill also drew opposition from 85 organizations that range from promoters of civil rights to gay rights, including the nonprofit 18 Million Rising and the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance, NBC News reported.
In a joint statement, the organizations said that, among other things, the bill “doesn’t address the reality that, at least in New York City, many of the attacks involve people who do have mental health issues, who are poor, potentially homeless … we have to address inequality in our society.”
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, said the legislation was of major importance to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders “who have often felt very invisible in our country, always seen as foreign, always seen as the other.” In the House, Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., of New York said that for “more than a year, Asian Americans all across our nation have been screaming out for help.”
See Biden’s remarks:
“Every time we’re silent, every time we let hate flourish, we make a lie of who we are as a nation.”
President @JoeBiden delivered impassioned remarks before signing a bill addressing anti-Asian hate crimes into law. pic.twitter.com/fotOJHoHYh
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) May 20, 2021
An African American Twitter user feared the bill “will be used specifically against Black Americans.”
“Any disagreement or any retaliation in self-defense against an Asian will be labeled a hate crime,” he wrote.
This bill will be used specifically against Black Americans….
Any disagreement or any retaliation in self-defense against an Asian will be labeled a hate crime…
400+ years of brutality and the Emmett Till Anti-lyching bill is still in limbo…#BothPartiesAreAntiBlack https://t.co/hIlw3Sx7JT
— J Brisenio (@JBrisenio411) May 19, 2021
Not a new problem
The problem isn’t new, and neither is the media’s unwillingness to tell the truth.
In 2010, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist cited a “community organizer” who acknowledged “San Francisco’s dirty secret” that Asian residents were being targeted for robberies, burglaries and intimidation by young black men.
The community organizer, Carol Mo, participated in a 2008 survey by the San Francisco Police Department analyzing 300 strong-arm robberies that found, she said, “85 percent of the physical assault crimes, the victims were Asian and the perpetrators were African American.”
The columnist, C.W. Nevius, reported hundreds of people marched into a Board of Supervisors meeting “to express their fear, frustration and outrage.” But officials seemed “intent on downplaying the role of race and its impact in the community.”
“The recent incidents of black violence against Asians is the perfect opportunity to open a dialogue about racism,” he wrote. “Instead, they are attempting to close the door.”
Nevius said “no one is saying the entire African American community is violent.”
“But ignoring the legitimate anger and frustration from Asians is disingenuous and unfair.”
‘Simply are afraid’
Earlier this month, an Asian-American writer and policy expert urged role models such as President Obama and black pastors to denounce the wave of black-on-Asian violence in America.
Ying Ma, the author of “Chinese Girl in the Ghetto,” says leaders “simply are afraid to utter the word ‘black.”
“What we need in this country is an uncomfortable but honest conversation about the prevelance of black crime in general and black-on-Asian violence in particular,” she said in an interview Wednesday night with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.
Ma, whose book tells her story of moving from post-Mao China to an inner-city neighborhood in Oakland, said she was “a big fan of President Obama when he bluntly talked about fatherless black households back in 2008.”
“That took courage, and that took honesty and leadership, and I do hope that he will display the same kind of courage and leadership on this particular issue,” she said.
“Especially given that President Obama grew up in Asia, in Indonesia.”
Leaders like that are needed, she said, to urge the black community “to engage in serious soul-searching.”
Ma said “there is great friendship between blacks and Asians in this country.”
“So, at this point, we are calling on our friends in the black community to please help, to please display some leadership on this issue.”
See the segment:
Data from the New York Police Department, which compiles the most comprehensive and detailed hate-crimes statistics in the country, support Ma’s concern.
The data show a black New Yorker is more than six times as likely to commit a hate crime against an Asian as a white New Yorker, points out Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald. In 2020, Mac Donald noted, blacks made up 50% of all suspects in anti-Asian attacks in New York City, even though blacks are 24% of the city’s population. Whites made up 10% of all suspects but account for 32% of the city’s population. If black Hispanics are included in the black category, blacks account for 60% of all anti-Asian attacks in 2020.
Among the recent incidents, New York’s WABC-TV reported an Asian woman in Manhattan was hit in the head with hammer by a stranger who demanded she take her mask off. The online report offered no details about the perpetrator, other than she was female, but video footage of the incident showed she was black.
See the WABC report:
In Mission Bay, California, a 26-year-old black man was arrested after repeatedly punching an Asian man who was walking with a 1-year-old in a stroller outside a store. A local KPIX-TV report identified the victim as an “Asian man” but the attacker was simply a suspect. However, surveillance video once again provided the full story.
A report by San Francisco’s KGO featuring an interview with the victim also emphasized that he was Asian but didn’t mention that the attacker is black.
KGO reported: “When asked if he thought the incident was racially motivated, Bruce said the thought did cross his mind, especially given the random nature of the attack and the number of attacks on Asian Americans in the past year.”
See the attack:
⚠️ TW / ASIAN FATHER ATTACKED IN MISSION BAY WHILE WALKING WITH 1-YEAR-OLD IN STROLLER
The attack happened Friday just after 2 pm outside Gus’s Community Market on 4th/Channel. SFPD was patrolling the area and immediately arrested the suspect – 26 yo Sidney Hammond.@KPIXtv pic.twitter.com/rcidGexoc7
— Betty Yu (@BettyKPIX) May 5, 2021
Police in San Francisco arrested a man suspected of stabbing older two Asian women, one who is 85 years old. Both women underwent emergency surgery.
Earlier this month, the NYPD hate crimes unit began investigating two other assaults on Asian-Americans, CNN reported. In one attack, a 52-year-old woman sustained minor injuries when she was pushed while waiting for a subway train in Brooklyn. And a 15-year-old boy was taken to a hospital with minor injuries after he was approached by three people who allegedly made anti-Asian remarks and hit him.
‘One all-powerful narrative’
Mac Donald argued that the media and the Democratic establishment are invested in “one all-powerful narrative.”
For example, the murder of 10 people at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, drew nonstop coverage when it was believed to be motivated by white supremacy. But when the suspect turned out to be a Muslim immigrant, media moved on to other stories.
In Atlanta, Mac Donald said, the false narrative that developed about the spa shootings in March “still has legs.”
“It represents a double lie — first, that the massacre was the product of Trump-inspired xenophobic hatred, and second, that whites are the biggest perpetrators of violence against Asians,” Mac Donald said.
Indeed, six of the eight victims of 21-year Robert Aaron Long, a white man, were Asian.
Protests across the nation featured signs declaring “I am not a virus”; “Asians are not viruses, racism is!!”; “End white supremacy now!”; and “All of us against racism.”
An organizer of a protest in Alhambra, California, told the Los Angeles Times: “I think it’s important for Black and Asian communities to work together on this because at the end of the day, it’s about dismantling white supremacy and speaking out against white racism.”
Vice President Kamala Harris announced the attack shows “racism is real in America and it has always been.”
But Mac Donald pointed out there was no evidence that Long was motivated by racism. He told police he had targeted the three spas to purge himself of his lust and his addiction to pornography. Long appears, Mac Donald said, to have targeted presumed sex workers who happened, given the demographics of the massage trade in Atlanta, to be Asian. In fact he told police he intended to target a business in Florida next that produced pornography, and the employees there were unlikely to be Asian.
Mac Donald noted that Reuters was reprimanded on social media for the headline “Sex addiction, not racial hatred, may have driven suspect in Georgia spa shootings.”
Reuters revised the headline to “Motive in Georgia spa shootings uncertain, but Asian-Americans fearful.”
Both Harris and President Biden dismissed the relevance of the motive. ‘Whatever the killer’s motive, these facts are clear,” Harris said. “Six out of the eight people killed on Tuesday night were of Asian descent.” And Biden said, “Whatever the motivation, we know this: Too many Asian-Americans have been walking up and down the streets and worrying.”
But when it comes to “hate crimes,” Mac Donald argued, “motive is the entire issue.”
‘They are pretending to care now’
Mac Donald recounted the details of numerous incidents of attacks on Asians in the Bay Area and New York City this year, noting “the suspects in all of these cases were black; the news reports rarely mentioned that detail.”
“Had the suspects been white, their race would have led each news report, as it did for Robert Aaron Long,” she wrote.
A former member of the Oakland police department’s robbery undercover suppression team told Mac Donald the racial pattern of the attacks and the lack of coverage is longstanding.
He said no one cares about Asian robbery victims.
“We used to follow around elderly Asians, waiting for the bad guys to start circling. This has been one of my long-term frustrations,” he said. “They are pretending to care now but ironically blaming it on white supremacy,” even though the suspects in Asian robbery attacks are almost exclusively black.
Inner-city animus against Asian small business owners is also longstanding, Mac Donald said, as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1990 Big Apple grocery boycott in New York City illustrate.
Mac Donald warned that the “lie about white supremacist violence is not innocuous.”
“It forms the basis of the Biden administration’s policy in national security and in a host of domestic welfare programs,” she said. “It is the pretext for Big Tech and Big Media’s silencing of speech. And the shamelessness with which that lie is constructed grows more brazen by the day. It must be fought with facts before it irrevocably alters our culture.”
Mac Donald is known for her extensive research of data refuting the claim of systemic racism in policing. In a presentation reported by WND , she cited mainstream studies showing a white officer is much more likely to shoot an unarmed white suspect than a black suspect. And a police officer is up to 30 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
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