Judging by media and public displays, one might assume the KKK recently washed ashore in the San Francisco Bay Area.
A tragedy occurred last month when Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old immigrant from Thailand, was fatally assaulted in San Francisco.
A rally among wokesters followed, with calls to “unite against white nationalism.” While it’s great to call out violence and racism, “my truth” does not count; facts still matter.
Antoine Watson, the 19-year-old charged with murdering Ratanapakdee, is black. Watson therefore probably is not a white supremacist. And most suspects in recent troubling attacks against Asian Americans are from other minority groups.
Across the bay two weeks ago in Oakland’s China Town, Yahya Muslim committed one of the highest-profile attacks on Asian Americans. Muslim is not a Klansmen either.
Matters aren’t helped when disingenuous outlets like CNN often avoid identifying the ethnicity of the recent assailants.
It seems progressive activists hope to use a spike in violent crimes against Asian Americans to ignore reality and promote their ideological agenda; unsurprisingly, this includes blaming former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric for the violence.
“There’s a clear correlation between President Trump’s incendiary comments, his insistence on using the term ‘Chinese virus’ and the subsequent hate speech spread on social media and the hate violence directed towards us,” Russell Jeung, a professor at the radical San Francisco State University, told Time Magazine. “It gives people license to attack us.”
Explain the “clear correlation,” sir.
Just after China released coronavirus on the world, Jeung launched Stop AAPI Hate, “to track Covid-19 related discrimination in order to develop community resources and policy interventions to fight racism.”
The New York Times could not resist chiming in, inviting a guest editorialist to claim the violence is an extension of 19th century white mobs assaulting immigrants.
Over the past year, we’ve seen a tragic rise in homicides in America’s increasingly dangerous major cities. One shouldn’t deny numbers showing a rise in attacks on Asian Americans, though crimes against Jews remain the highest.
Are these attackers inspired by white supremacism? Doubtful.
Like Jews in past years, Asians operating businesses in inner cities have been stereotyped as interlopers. This bigotry creates resentment.
Fifteen years ago, former Atlanta mayor, congressman and UN ambassador Andrew Young fanned these flames by saying, “You see those are the people who have been overcharging us. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”
Speaking at a convention of the Rabbinical Assembly only 10 days before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an ally of Young’s, addressed black anti-Semitism. He explained why bigotry and hate was the wrong response.
“I think our responsibility in the black community is to make it very clear that we must never confuse some with all,” the reverend and Zionist said. “We cannot substitute one tyranny for another, and for the black man to be struggling for justice and then turn around and be anti-Semitic is not only a very irrational course but a very immoral course.”
We need Dr. King’s wisdom and clarity.
No group has a monopoly on hatred or racism. And even though Democrats run New York, San Francisco, Seattle and most large, crime-ridden locales, this is not 1856, 1906 or 1956.
A.J. Kaufman
A.J. Kaufman is an Alpha News columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Israel National News, Orange County Register, St. Cloud Times, Star-Tribune, and across AIM Media Midwest and the Internet. Kaufman previously worked as a school teacher and military historian.
