CAIR Wants Bus Assailants Jailed for Hate Crimes

DU genuinely regrets the incident on an Ann Arbor public school bus this past week in a which a group of teens “taunted and jumped” a Muslim girl and her brother, snatching the girl’s hijab off and causing her a black eye and an injury requiring six stitches. (“Rights office urges Ann Arbor schools to cool ethnic tensions following beating”).

Kelvin W. Scott, the director of the Michigan Civil Rights Department, said they had been aware “that tensions between local youths of various ethnic groups were high even before Tuesday's incident. He said tensions may have been escalating in the days before the attack.” No one was arrested, but the four attackers responsible for the assault, two girls and two boys, were being referred to “conflict resolution training.”

Of absolutely no surprise, CAIR-MI is calling “for the incident to be investigated and prosecuted as a hate crime.” Our favorite civil rights leader is still having trouble recognizing the distinction between investigations that uncover the facts, and subsequent decisions about whether or not those facts point to a hate crime having been committed.

Actually, if I believed in hate crimes as a matter of law, which I don’t, I would probably concede that this does sound like an assault motivated by hate: most student assaults between races are motivated by hate, at least on one side, if not always on both sides. And in southeastern Michigan, the black and Arab communities are not known for their strong mutual affection.

When MDCR explains this incident in the context of already-rising tensions “between local youths of various ethnic groups,” Muslim vs. black, or Arab vs. black strife must have something to do with it. I expect the two Muslims siblings, (regardless of who said what first) found themselves in an argument with the four black students, who thought they’d settle it by opening up a can of whup-ass.

I’m sure this kind of thing happens in America only about five days a week. When you hear about kids like this getting sent down for “conflict resoluton training,” it's because they can't even imagine settling any disagreement, no matter how minor, without resorting to violence.

You can bet this isn’t the kind of case Walid and CAIR want to get their hands on, what with the assailants being black teens, instead of white kids whose parents watch Fox News. These facts don’t support CAIR’s Islamophobia theme, the one Walid has been repeating all these years without being able to back up: that white, non-Muslim, Americans have besieged and persecuted the country's Muslims on an ascending scale of savagery since about five minutes after news of the 9/11 attacks reached our redneck ears. But these are desperate times for Islamophobia.