Three innocent couples were violently attacked walking down the street in three cities in America in the last few weeks, but the media treatment of the incidents varied wildly.  On August 25^th a Jewish couple was attacked by Muslim men with pro-Palestinian flags in New York City.  Two cars and several motorcycles surrounded the couple and both were physically assaulted by the men.  They were believed to be stopped because the Jewish man was wearing a Yarmulke.  On August 22^nd a white couple was walking out of a night club in Missouri, close to the Ferguson riots, when a group of black men began harassing the girl.  Caught on video, the men began to violently beat both the man and the woman.  On September 11^th a gay couple was walking down the street in Pennsylvania when a group of white men and women surrounded them, reportedly shouted anti-gay slurs and began beating them.  The attackers were captured on security footage before the attack.

According to the gay victims, one was asked if he and the other young man were boyfriends.  After saying yes, the group began calling them ‘faggots’ and began beating them.  One of the victims kept screaming “This is 2014, you can’t do this!”  All media reports insist on describing the attackers as “well dressed, clean – cut white” individuals.  A popular gay online magazine, Queerty, described this in their headline as a “gang of violent heterosexuals.”  This article describes a different beginning to the attack writing: “According to one of the victims, an assailant asked him if they were “fucking boyfriends,” to which he replied, “yes, this is my fucking boyfriend.” At this point, the assailant allegedly said “oh, so you’re a dirty fag?”  The victim says he responded to this with “yeah, maybe I am a dirty fag.”  The attackers were also intoxicated.  A quick Google news search reveals 12,100 news stories with multiple pages of identical headlines. 

The attack on the white couple was largely only reported on Conservative websites.  A Google news search reveals more than 7,000 stories but mixed results on the very first page.  The Huffington Post does not appear to have a story on the incident after multiple searches but a May 2014 article titled: “Black-on-White Crime and the Reasons for a Media Double-Standard” may provide some insight into that.  Lamenting a previous Drudge headline about a black-on-white attack the author writes: “Every angry right-winger looking for an excuse for their ridiculous false equivalences about white racism versus "black racism" had a brand new hobby horse to ride.”  In regard to a white-on-black crime vs. a black-on-white crime detailed in the article he states: “They're different in terms of outcome, they're different in terms of details and each have very different historical and contemporaneous contexts.”  He goes on to say “…there's a considerably wicked history in America of white racism, oppression and violence against black people, which, to an extent, continues today.  It's the historical and contemporaneous context that ultimately changes how these stories are, and should be, covered.”  He asserts that when a white person kills a black person is it done from a “position of power” and the opposite is impossible to be considered equal since the minority cannot oppress the majority.  He concludes with this: “Yes, there's a double-standard.  And until there's full equality and the long slow process of racial healing is completed, the double-standard has to remain.”

The Jewish beating received exclusively Jewish newspaper mentions with less than five total news stories appearing in Google. 

It appears that even though all the victims are likely innocent and all the groups involved in the beatings likely guilty, the value of the victims differs greatly.  Instead of viewing each case as people being beaten in the open on the street we are forced to focus on who did the beating and who was the victim in order to gauge our response.  Each has a certain narrative value and can be used to advance the agenda of one group or another.  We ignore black racism because liberalism must maintain a strict narrative that it does not exist.  We must loudly proclaim from the rooftops that anti-gay violence is our nation’s greatest threat because gay victimhood is more valuable than gay equality.  Jews being attacked by Muslims over Israel is simply ignored as it does not help the Palestinian victim story. 

Dozens of articles have been written reporting the frantic search for the ‘well-dressed, clean-cut’ white attackers, including a large-scale Twitter campaign to identify them through photos.  A group picture reporting to show many of the victims has circulated throughout social media with close-ups of the attackers marked.  Several suspects have been questioned by the police due to this aggressive search.  The street camera caught the group walking before the event and from that footage they identified the suspects.  The black suspects with similar video footage have yet to be found.  No effort appears to be in effect to find the Muslim attackers in New York City at all. 

It is reported that Pennsylvania does not currently cover hate crimes based on sexual orientation and so it is logical to expect a mighty push for this to be added to the law books.  As reported in a previous article, the hate crime rate against gays is remarkably low at just 0.01% of the gay population.  Of the 1,480 reported religious-based hate crimes in the United States in 2011, 63% were Jewish victims.  Racially motivated crime are as such: 16% based on “anti-white” bias with 72% as “anti-black” bias, but race of the offender is not specified.  There were 3,645 victims in 2011 in a country of 313 million people.  Interestingly the FBI’s Hate Crimes homepage features KKK members burning a large cross as its image. 

What does this tell us?  It tells us that hate crimes are a remarkably low threat to any particular group within the United States.  While some groups more openly verbalize bias crimes in various media than others, very few act upon the calls for violence for that motivation.  What we see are isolated events supported or ignored solely based on their relevance to the media narrative.  We do not need any grand social awakening or government intervention or investigations.  If anything the solution falls closer to home.  If a person is concerned about being targeted, this ceases to be an issue if said person is capable of defending him- or herself. 

Concealed carry, gun training, physical defense and rational situational awareness will protect more people than any hate crime law or campaign against ‘hate’ will.  More importantly, we will never appreciate equality if we, as a society, insist on magnifying only the incidents found to be useful to a particular and popular narrative.  Mr. Cesca of the Huffington Post in the article referenced above is wrong.  Racism, sexism or any bias towards another based on that person’s perceived or actual association with a group is equally immoral.  No group deserves more or less sympathy, blame or protection and this is especially true when it happens to an innocent couple merely walking down the street anywhere in this country.  While personal protection can save us individually, culturally we must stop picking and choosing who deserves attention and who does not. 

Chad Felix Greene (@Chadfelixg), author of Jewish Children’s Books, Non-Fiction and Social Commentary. www.chadfelixgreene.com