Hate Crime ...PC Overdone

[RedGlitter]

Hate-crime arrests in Quran desecrations at Pace University



July 27, 2007, 8:33 PM EDT



NEW YORK (AP) _ A 23-year-old man was arrested Friday on hate-crime charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two separate occasions, police said.

Stanislav Shmulevich of Brooklyn was arrested on charges of criminal mischief and aggravated harassment, both hate crimes, police said. It was unclear if he was a student at the school. A message left at the Shmulevich home was not immediately returned.

The Islamic holy book was found in a toilet at Pace's lower Manhattan campus by a teacher on Oct. 13. A student discovered another book in a toilet on Nov. 21, police said.

Muslim activists had called on Pace University to crack down on hate crimes after the incidents. As a result, the university said it would offer sensitivity training to its students.

The school was accused by Muslim students of not taking the incident seriously enough at first. Pace classified the first desecration of the holy book as an act of vandalism, but university officials later reversed themselves and referred the incident to the New York Police Department's hate crimes unit.



The incidents came amid a spate of vandalism cases with religious or racial overtones at the school. In an earlier incident on Sept. 21, the school reported another copy of the Quran was found in a library toilet, and in October someone scrawled racial slurs on a student's car at the Westchester County satellite campus and on a bathroom wall at the campus in lower Manhattan. Police did not connect Shmulevich to those incidents.

Treatment of the Quran is a sensitive issue for Muslims, who view the book as a sacred object and mistreating it as an offense against God. The religion teaches that the Quran is the direct word of God.

In 2005, Newsweek magazine published and later retracted a story claiming U.S. interrogators at a prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, flushed a copy of the holy book down a toilet. The report sparked deadly demonstrations in Afghanistan and protests throughout the Middle East.

Pace University has 14,000 students on its campuses in New York City and Westchester County.

Messages left for school administrators and for officials with the New York and national chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations were not immediately returned Friday evening.

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the national CAIR office in Washington, D.C., has said the organization receives frequent reports of Quran desecrations in the United States, especially postings on Internet sites, but seldom makes them public.

He said CAIR decided to speak out about the Pace incidents because Muslim students are impacted by the creation of what could be viewed as a hostile campus environment.

[Galbally]

Hmmn, I wonder if you flushed "The God Delusion" by Dawkins down the toilet would that be classed as a hate crime against atheists then?









I suspect not.

[spot]

I can see circumstances where that in the UK, if deliberate and in a place where there was the potential for tension, would lead to very traditional charges of behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace. It usually leads to being bound over (and possibly fined in addition) - which is no active penalty unless the offender turns up in court again on a subsequent related charge, in which case it aggravates the new offence and affects sentencing.

[Accountable]

Stolen from http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/97A116AA- ... 9D42C18E9/ who stole it from the Washington Times:



A former Pace University student faces hate-crime charges for taking paperback copies of the Koran from the campus library on two occasions last fall and disposing of the Muslim holy book in toilets.

A search of Lexis/Nexis did not disclose any hate-crime prosecutions for destroying a Bible.

"One could take a copy of the Bible, the Torah ... abuse it in any way one liked, and never face a criminal penalty for the act of desecration," Mr. Myers said. "Anything goes — unless the keepers of Islam are offended, and then the power of the state must be brought to bear and the offender punished in a criminal court of law."

"The Supreme Court has ruled that Americans can burn the flag and remain immune from prosecution because it is considered to be an act of protected speech. But turn your wrath on the Koran, and you risk arrest and criminal charges. This is Shariah, plain and simple," he said, referring to strict Islamic law.



Burning a US flag is protected as free speech, and reacting with violence is against the law.



F*cking double standards

[spot]

Accountable;672275 wrote: A search of Lexis/Nexis did not disclose any hate-crime prosecutions for destroying a Bible.There are a number of stories of people prosecuted in which destroying bibles was part of the complaint but they involved other matters too, like assault.

However, I did find two pristine cases on Nexis, so I reckon that's a score. The first of them involves an acquttal because witnesses failed to turn up on the day, but the prosecution happened. It's in the Kenyan Nation of 19 September 1999:Four members of a Kikuyu sect charged with conspiring to provoke Christians by buying copies of the Bible and burn them were yesterday acquitted by a Nyeri court. Mr. John Mungai Kinuthia, Mr. John Bari Mwangi, Mr. Waitwika Murigi Muregi and Ms Martha Njoki Ngari who have been held in custody for more than three weeks, walked free after witnesses failed to show up for the trial. They belong to "Hema ya Ngai Wi Muoyo" (Tent of the living God) sect.

The prosecutor, Inspector Michael Kagambi, had just substituted the charge when the witness who included an assistant chief failed to turn-up after their names were read out by Senior Resident Magistrate Mrs Catherine Mwangi. The new charge stated that the four, jointly with others not before court, took part in an unlawful assembly at Kirima village in Nyeri on September 4. Initially, they had denied assembling at the venue with the intention of buying copies of the Holy Bible and burn them to provoke Christians living in the area.

My other tale is, at least, from not far from where I live even though it was a long time ago. One Thomas Pooley wrote in chalk on a gate in Cornwall on May 22, 1867, according to the rector of Duloe: "Duloe stinks of the monster Christ's Bible - Blasphemy - T Pooley". The words were wiped away that same afternoon.

In a conversation Pooley had later that day with labourer Richard Crapp at a pub in nearby Sandplace, talking about potato crops, Pooley asked Crapp if he knew how to safeguard them from disease. When Crapp answered he did not, Pooley said: "If folks would burn their Bibles and take their ashes for dressing, it would get rid of disease."

The judge is reported as saying "You have expressed the hope that your jurors are not Christians. I rejoice to believe that they are Christians, and I hope all the people in this court are Christians, and if you think it is happiness not to be so, then yours is a most unfortunate state of mind. I hope while you are in prison you will have the good sense not to refuse to listen to the advice given to you. You may then find that the superiority of knowledge and wisdom you may suppose you possess, is a matter of the greatest blindness. A new light may dawn upon you, and when it does, you will reproach yourself and repent in bitterness of heart for the words you have uttered and written." He then gave a sentence of six months each for the first two blasphemous counts and nine months for uttering a third to the police officer who arrested him, the nature of which was "too horrible to be repeated". So, that wasn't even burning a bible, that was just implying that it was of more value as a field dressing for potatoes than as holy writ and that Duloe would be better off without one.

[Accountable]

:wah:

[Indian Princess]

It's AMERICA Baby!!!!!!