The murder of eight people at three Atlanta-area massage parlors led the news. Six of the victims were Asian and the killer is white, a fact that sparked liberal shouts of “hate crime” from the media, including the New York Times.
Taking it further, the Times even blamed year-old Trump statements accurately pointing out the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, and other fingers pointed at amorphous white racists allegedly targeting Asians -- even as official Justice Department statistics show most “hate crimes” against Asians are committed by minority groups.
Friday’s front-page story, “Twin Biases Shadow Asian-American Women,” by Shaila Dewan, blamed Trump’s factually accurate statements about China’s responsibility for the coronavirus outbreak.
With reports of anti-Asian attacks surging after the Trump administration repeatedly emphasized China’s connection to the Covid-19 pandemic, there is evidence that most of the hate, unlike other types of bias crime, has been directed at women.
Another front-page story by Nicole Hong and Jonah Bromwich made similar claims (without citing statistical backup): “Mounting Cry To Recognize Hate Crimes.”
On a cold evening last month, a Chinese man was walking home near Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood when a stranger suddenly ran up behind him and plunged a knife into his back.
For many Asian-Americans, the stabbing was horrifying, but not surprising. It was widely seen as just the latest example of racially targeted violence against Asians during the pandemic.
But the perpetrator, a 23-year-old man from Yemen, had not said a word to the victim before the attack, investigators said. Prosecutors determined they lacked enough evidence to prove a racist motive. The attacker was charged with attempted murder, but not as a hate crime.
(The “23-year-old man from Yemen” is one Salman Muflehi, who seems to suffer from paranoid mental illness.)
While the Times was hesitant to identify Muflehi by race or even name, it did so with alacrity regarding the Atlanta murderer:
That frustration erupted on a national scale this week after Robert Aaron Long, a white man, was charged with fatally shooting eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday night.
Investigators said it was too early to determine a motive. After Mr. Long’s arrest, he denied harboring a racial bias and told officials that he carried out the shootings as a form of vengeance for his “sexual addiction.”
Again, Trump was singled out, as was a “white woman.”
Last year, the attacks in New York City that did get prosecuted as hate crimes typically involved people blaming Asians for spreading the coronavirus, echoing the rhetoric of former President Donald J. Trump, who has referred to the disease as the “China virus” and the “Kung Flu.”
For instance, a white woman was charged with a hate crime last March after she bumped into an Asian woman crossing the street in Manhattan and said, “You’re the reason why the coronavirus is here,” before spitting on her and pulling out some of her hair, according to prosecutors.
John Eligon, Thomas Fuller, and Jill Cowan reported along the same biased lines in “Atlanta Killings Shine a Spotlight on a Bigotry on the Rise.”
For most of the last year, Asian-Americans have sounded the alarm over the rising discrimination they have experienced and witnessed, fueled in part by racist language and false claims about the coronavirus by former President Donald J. Trump and other public officials….
Catie Edmondson's report from an all-too-timely congressional hearing was the most partisan: “‘I am Not a Virus’: Lawmakers Say Anti-China Messaging Is Fueling a Crisis.”
Lawmakers described the fear and trauma rippling through the Asian-American community, and they argued that the uptick in attacks on Asian-Americans was a direct result of the rise of anti-China messaging stoked during the coronavirus pandemic. At times, the hearing turned heated, as visibly frustrated Democratic lawmakers confronted Republicans on the panel for using language they said endangered Asian-Americans.
But is anti-Asian violence really being driven by factual statements from ex-presidents and by racist whites? No. Official statistics show anti-Asian violence, including the most recent wave, has come the most from black perpetrators. The Washington Examiner found:
According to the Justice Department, 27.5% of all violent crimes against Asian Americans in 2018 were committed by black people. That’s over 50,000 incidents in a single year. White criminals and Asian criminals each accounted for 24.1% of all attacks on Asians.
The horrific killings around Atlanta seem motivated by a mix of religious fanaticism and sexual guilt, not racial hatred. The Times ran one story on that impossible-to-ignore angle. But for the wokesters at the paper, it’s more satisfying to blame the killings on Donald Trump and “white supremacy.”
