Since 9/11, hate crimes have been almost steadily rising in America, as well as elsewhere in the world. There were a couple of years when the rise leveled off, but last year the increase continued apace. In 2006 there were more than 7,700 hate crimes in the US, a rise of more than 7%, according to the FBI.
I consider this to be part and parcel with the dominance of a political party, the Republican Party, that puts hatred and intolerance near the top of their agenda. This political agenda, cynically used to get votes and power and broadcast daily by the Fox Hate Channel, leads to real violence. The vilification of diversity by the Republican Party and their Fox mouthpieces encourages violence in America.
Here are some deatails about this rise in hate crimes, from BBC news:
More than half of the victims were attacked because of their race, while 19% were targeted because of their religion, the annual report said.
However, there were wide discrepancies, with northern states reporting far more hate crimes than the southern states, despite the South's racial history.
This is an interesting discrepancy. Some are claiming that this is misleading, since the reporting of these statistics is voluntary and each state has its own way of defining and reporting hate crime statistics, comparisons between states may be meaningless. Some argue that the reporting is more accurate and realistic in the Northern states, giving a false impression of more hate crimes. Needless to say, this is controversial and deserves further investigation, I would think. If the South really does have fewer hate crimes, it would be well worth knowing why. And if in reality it does not and the Northern states are merely more honest in their reporting of hate crimes, that also would be worth knowing.
More from the BBC article:
The FBI's report details incidents of hate crimes where people were attacked because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or disability.
More than half of the incidents were motivated by racial prejudice, with two-thirds of victims being black and one in five white...
Of the victims attacked because of religious bias, 65.4% were Jewish and 11.9% were Muslim.
Some 1,472 hate crimes were based on a person's sexual orientation - the majority of victims were male homosexuals.
More than 1,200 offences were connected to the perceived ethnicity or national origin of the victim, with Hispanics accounting for nearly 63% of those targeted.
Sounds like intolerance is being directed at just about anyone who doesn't fit Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter's view of who is a "pure" American. This also shows that anti-Semitism is alive and well in America, as I have been reporting for awhile now and been criticized for saying. And, as I keep saying, as long as the Republican Party and mainstream media justifies and encourages intolerance, we can expect hate crimes to continue to rise in America.
Hate Crimes
The South's has a longer history of anti-black racial bias than Northern, Midwestern and Western states because the nation's black population was almost exlusively located in the South until after World War II. African Americans began their exodus to Northern industrial cities in the late 1940s, a movement that accelerated through the 1950s as mechanized farm equipment began replacing manual labor in the cotton fields. This is why the worst race riots since the 1930s have always occured in cities outside the South. Although the nation's attention focused on the Little Rock crisis during the school integration era, school integration went smoothly in most Southern cities. The integration of Boston schools led to much more violence in the 1960s than the integration of Little Rock schools did in the 1950s, even though the courts ordered only a few of the school in Boston integrated. As a rule, the courts did not force Northern states to end "de facto" school segrations. In the few cases where courts did order Northern cities to integrate schools, white flight was the inevitable result. Detroit turned almost 100-percent black in less than a decade. Today, the trend is beginning to reverse, as blacks began returning to the South, particularly to cities like Atlanta with larger uppr and middile class black populations.