Hate crimes and illegal immigration: O'Reilly reverses the reality
By David Neiwert Saturday Nov 22, 2008 11:00am
Earlier this week on The O'Reilly Factor, the Papa Bear did what right-wingers constantly do when discussing hate crimes: he conflated them with ordinary crimes in a way that deliberately confuses the public regarding the nature of these crimes.
As you can see in this clip (or from the transcript), O'Reilly starts out by discussing the horrendous hate crime on Long Island wherein a group of six young white thugs went out looking for Latinos to harm for "sport", and they wound up killing an Ecuadoran immigrant named Marcelo Lucero.
But then he seems to connect this crime to a completely unrelated tragedy involving the deaths of two women at the hands of a drunken driver who happened to be an illegal immigrant.
How are they connected? O'Reilly explains:
So, three human beings are dead because of irresponsible conduct and failed government.
The New York Times and Newsday have covered the Lucero murder extensively, as they should. It is a horrible crime, and seven young men may pay a steep price for being violently stupid.
But the Times and Newsday have pretty much ignored the deaths of the two women. This is a pattern in America.
People killed by illegal aliens can expect little coverage from a media that wants amnesty for foreign nationals here illegally.
But in the end, it is the federal government that is truly responsible for the deaths, and for the entire illegal alien problem. ...
It would be nice to think that O'Reilly simply doesn't comprehend the difference between a hate crime and an ordinary crime. I've explained this many times:
Hate crimes are message crimes: They are intended to harm not just the immediate victim, but all people of that same class within the community. Their message is also irrevocable: they are "get out of town, nigger/Jew/queer" crimes.
That's why bias-crime laws are about imposing stiffer sentences on their perpetrators: they cause more real harm to the community. This principle -- greater harm brings stiffer punishment -- is a basic element of criminal law.
Think, if you will, about the different effects of these two tragedies. In the Lucero case, the fully intended terroristic effects are clear: the Latino community on Long Island naturally feels vulnerable and fearful, and relations with the white community have been permanently stained. In the case of the drunken driver, the community is bound to feel somewhat more vulnerable to the effects of drunken drivers, but it doesn't require one to be an illegal immigrant to be one of those.
Indeed, as with most crimes, the rate for such crimes is actually lower within the immigrant community than with the public at large. There is in fact no correlation at all between immigration and crime.
Which is why when people like Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs constantly harangue their audiences with morbid tales of incidents involving Latinos who commit crimes or are responsible for tragedies, it not only distorts the reality regarding immigrants and crime, but it profoundly demonizes immigrants by linking them with criminality.
In turn, it is this very demonization, particularly in the mainstream media, that actually leads to more hate crimes.
So in effect what O'Reilly is doing is encouraging more hate crimes by suggesting that illegal immigration was the cause of those two women's deaths.
And at the same time, in a twist of logic one can only call bizarre, O'Reilly's inherent thesis is that somehow the federal government's failures on illegal immigration are responsible somehow for the death of Marcelo Lucero as well.
How so? Did that pack of white thugs go out looking for Latinos to beat up because of the failures of the federal government? That seems to be O'Reilly's logic here. Isn't that blaming the victims? And doesn't O'Reilly preach "individual responsibility" for minorities who commit crimes?
O'Reilly finishes up his tirade by demanding that Barack Obama adopt a "zero tolerance policy" towards illegal immigrants.
Better the rest of us develop a "zero tolerance policy" for Bill O'Reilly's hatemongering.
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A horrendous haste crime?
eom
Dildo has discovered that he can bend and warp facts into fiction and his overseers at FOX 'News' are go with it.
He's not about to fix something he sees as working well for him. He just doesn't see it as broken.
"Zero tolerance for Americans whose hatred leads to violence" Does that include you Billy?
Every time this dope speaks, he contradicts his own existance.
He ain't no "bold fresh piece of humanity" >>> more like a stinking pile of feces..
Once the inauguration proceedings are done and Congress convenes after the holidays, they should get to work on amending the current "hate-crime" laws to make people like O'Reilly, Coulter, Limbaugh, and so on (ad nauseum) be liable for accessory before & after the fact and charge them accordingly.
his job is to distact from conservative crimes, don't fall for it.
That is the only reason for their existence. To make millions of $$$$ convincing dupes that their is "something evil" out there trying to get them.
Of course, anyone with two I.Q. points at their disposal knows "that something evil" is the republican party.
Has dildo declared the war on xmas has started yet? I need to bag me some xian trophies ;)
Osama's Homo-bortion-pot-and-commie-jizz-podium. BYOB and popcorn.
help...
Is a hate crime.
but the economy is pretty much dealing with the illegal problem on its own
border crossing has become a trickle of what it once was, and illegals are going back home, as they cant find jobs here
and i do hope that the obama administration does not believe that amnesty and guest worker programs are the answer
and couldnt someone from afghanistan get some type of asylum as a result of the unrest in that country?
have granted more asylum requests to Iraqui people, than the whole of the United States.
Compassionate people that we are and all...
In fact just the small Swedish town Sodertalje (population 80000) has accepted more Iraqi refugees than the US and Canada combined
http://www.csce.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Cont...
Remember a year or two back when a brave soul jumped onto commuter line tracks in front of an oncoming train to hold down a man who had fallen onto the tracks, safely letting the train pass above them? Now suppose that this hero had been an illegal immigrant. Would Dobbs and O'Reilly be linking his heroicism to his illegal immigrant status as they do to the drunk driver's? People come in all stripes no matter how they got here.
Wasn't there a movie like that with Dustin Hoffman, Gena Davis, and the official Konkie the Robot Repairman?
I think that it is working... if they just keep it up to the point that the opposition gets physically sick trying to read their crap...
I still don't get the connection between the first case of hate crime vs. the second case of the apparent "illegal" immigrant.
BillO is such a fool. If the federal government has been trying to get rid of that Afghan "illegal," for 14 years, since the guy was only 6, didn't it ever occur to BillO that perhaps this guy had a drinking problem because the government has been hounding him for so long, since he was a little kid???? Maybe if the government had had some compassion on the guy; helped with his drinking; etc......jesus, this is just pissing me off more and more I think about BillO and his "crusade." Give me a break, BillO. The guy was only 6 when he came here....certainly he didn't have any grand scheme at that young age to come and terrorize people.
of drinking drunk and killing two innocent women. Being "harassed" by the government is not license to drive drunk, but your point is taken. If this guy has actually been harassed (which he probably wasn't, $100 bucks says O'Lielly made that part up to make the story sound more horrendous) that's a shame and makes the story even more tragic...
I'm not trying to excuse the guy at all.....drunk driving is wrong, and killing 2 women while drunk driving is horrible. I'm just more pissed at BillO and his rants against "illegal" immigrants. That guy apparently has been in this country for 14 years, since he was 6.....the problem isn't one of "illegal immigration".....it is one of drunk driving.
is the problem Billo AND the media ignore.
More people die from drunk drivers than from Illegal immigrants and hate crimes put together.
is a hate crime.
are you surprised that Billo is blaming the victims in this case? He does that all the time, when he goes off about rape victims. Obviously, they were raped because they dressed as sluts, they were asking for it. He's done that countless times now, totally disregarding the fact that that's not why rapists do what they do.
Then again, Billo loves to disregard facts. It's in his job description. :P
Wonder why Billo the Pillick hasnt been raped, he has been dressing and acting like a slut for years. But of course even sluts have their better moments, O'Reilly wont have his till he stops breathing.
But in the end, it is the federal government that is truly responsible for the deaths, and for the entire illegal alien problem. ...
Whatever happened to "personal responsibility", Bill-o? Have the wingnuts abandoned their empty mantra?
..."Gawd" is responsible for Everything ??!!
Correlation instead of causation. Its the most prominent form of spreading and justifying lies.
five days a week.
Has anyone pointed out to Billo the Clown that every American service man killed in Iraq is there illegally?
the most horrendous hate-crime modern-day America has seen: the torture and murder of detainees in American war-prisons.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_dai...
If these actions by the US government are not hate-crimes, I don't know what is. But of course, nobody says it, and FOX/O'Reilly would be outraged if anyone did.
At least the criminals in O'Reilly's example will receive trials, even if he doesn't know what a hate crime is.
When Black people participate in violent crime then its all about "personal responsibility"
When White people particiapte in violent crime then its all about "federal responsibility"
in short .... Bill is an ASSHOLE
Maybe I skimmed his comments too fast, but he mayn't accept the concept of hate crime. Some people don't,like Bill Maher. It's the fact that there's a dead body on the ground that they concerned themself with and they equate them.
Of course that's foolish talk. For example if you kill someone trying to break into your house that's the kind of extenuating circumstances that will likely result in no jail time. Hate crime is similar, particularly in states like Texas where the death penalty usually results from a murder involved in the course of committing another crime. However, since I'm sure there are plenty o'people here who are against Capital Punishment, then hate crime motiviation would feed into the intent of the perpetrator. In any criminal case, three elements have to be proved, Actus reus (the criminal act itself), Mens Rea (the intent to commit the crime), and concurrence (of the other two at the same time.)
So the drunk driver probably lacked the intent to kill anyone, but committed the civil crime of being here illegally, possibly federal crimes if he used fraud to remain (like false or stolen ID's), and possibly a previous record for driving drunk.
Put in simplest terms Hate Crime=Domestic Terrorism.
How can any of you *NOT* see how this makes perfect sense in the mashed potato-brained world of Bill-O?! It isn't like he spent more than 2 seconds making the correlation before B-I-N-G-O.. the string cheese synapse response of America's Greatest Moron put it all together and VIOLA!!
Either O'really, Dobbs, et al can produce historic visa papers granted to his ancestors by the native Americans, or they should shut up regarding illegal immigration.
Guess what the so-called illegals are actually more native to this continent than the pasty white assholes who berate them.
Ain't that a bitch.
I don't condone illegal immigration. I just think that very few people in this society have any sort of moral ground to accuse illegal immigrants of wrong doing. After all this is a country of immigrants, and most of the migration was done illegally and forcibly.
Vets trampled for showing up for the third Presidential Debate.
I have 0 tolerance for Americans whose hatred leads to violence....and that is especially true for Bill Orally.
Why are vets unpatriotic? Unlike all those draft dodging heroes who make up the modern day republican party.
This guy is such a C U Next Tuesday and a bully - that he doesn't believe that he is doing anything wrong.
I have watched this evil prick for years and - systemically - the amount of human blood on his hands is unimaginable.
A sad and shameful excuse for a human being ...
sad that tim russert, who was a great journalist dies, and billo the loofah boy spews on.... glad to see the right wingnuts keep on marginalizing themselves more and more everyday. clueless anti intellectuals who flame the fires of the peasants with pitchforks.
While I appreciate your thoughtful analysis, David, it's really a rhetorical exercise because I'm sure you knew why Bill-O was playing the conflation game before you even asked the question.
In Bill-O's twisted, hate-ravaged mind, the difference in intent is irrelevant. The only important factor is that supposedly neither crime would have happened if there weren't so many damned brown people running around.
Does it matter to Bill-O that his intellectual dishonesty probably foments more hate crimes? I doubt it. He's too egocentric to care about the well-being of anyone but himself, and he probably sees us all anyway as expendable casualties in the culture war that's raging in his own head.
In Bill-O World, if it takes a few bloody race riots to get the gov't to realize that we just need to get rid of all brown people to be a great country again, oh well, so be it.
The really tragic part is that he gets to be on TV spouting these hateful diatribes precisely because so many small-minded people agree with him. The only way to get him to shut up is to get them to turn the channel. Heh, good luck.
Didn't O'Lielly and Geraldo Rivera go at this topic in a "discussion" on the Nausea Spin Zone a few months ago?
But the Times and Newsday have pretty much ignored the deaths of the two women. This is a pattern in America.
I don't read Newsday, but the Times has indeed devoted several stories on the deaths of the two women, including one about why the alleged perp was out free (he had been charged with murder in 2006 but never tried.)
But then Billo never cares too much for facts, since they have a liberal bias.
bill o'reilly would of condemned ullysee s.grant for being a drunk
and ruining family values.
bill o'reilly would of condemned martin luther king as being an uppity black man and pushing his personal rights on a nation.
bill o'reilly would of condemned LBJ for subverting the constitution
and states rights by sending troops into alabama.
bill o'reilly would of condemned changing the original constitution for 3/5 th's blacks because it didn't meet the founding fathers intent.
Used to know a female sociopath who loved Dildo, said he was 'funny' and 'sexy'. I listened without comment, thinking to myself, 'funny and sexy'? Funny maybe in a kind of bent logic kind of way, but sexy? Maybe in a predator kind of way.
BillO does not know hate crime. Sexual harassment, yes.
/SEXUAL PREDATOR!
Papa Bear hates women as much as he hates immigrants, and he hates immigrants as much as he hates Democrats, and he hates Democrats as much as he hates atheists, and he hates atheists as much as he hates Muslims, and he hates Muslims as much as he hates protesters, and he hates protesters as much as he hates gays, and so you can see that all crimes are hate crimes to Papa Bear because he hates everybody.
For even O'Reiley trying to defend this shows you what little concern they have for a country. It's about a label to them regardless of the outcome.
Please, send all the Irish back to Ireland (including my maternal grandmather)
the Irish were second class citizens at one time as well. If anyone should understand hate crimes, or appreciate the injustice of them, Bill O'Reilly should. But being the un-self-aware person that he is, I guess he doesn't want to see that connection.
maybe fate has one of those drunken drivers lined up for o'reilly....not of course to eliminate him, well not nearly just close will do. he deserves to linger long and slowly in agony, for his disgraceful lies and beat ups on his fellow citizens
Look, that anything Blo-hard Orally says is relevant any longer is questionable. The deaths of all three are tragedies and the differences of one crime and the other obvious, but Blo-hard talks about the government failing, not the Bush administration mind you, but the Federal Government. Methinks he is prepping to whip his audience into a frenzy over the election of the young Senator from Illinois; Nah, couldn't be that, he's such a responsible journalist. He's a clown, America! Wake up!
Less appetizing than vomit.
is continuing his slow slide into oblivion.
As his viewers age, and the young ones realize what a twit he is, Fox will pull the plug on him.
Can't be fast enough IMO, but it will happen.
Anal plug?
"..Hate crimes are message crimes: They are intended to harm not just the immediate victim, but all people of that same class within the community. Their message is also irrevocable: they are "get out of town, n****r/Jew/queer" crimes."
Add 'Whitey' to that list (as in 'get out of town, n****r/Jew/queer/whitey') and O'Lielly might sign on.
Isn't Billo just being around a hate crime??
I detest O'Reiley and he certainly did conflate two cases.
However, David you are wrong in asserting that one was "a completely unrelated tragedy involving the deaths of two women at the hands of a drunken driver who happened to be an illegal immigrant."
Make no mistake, both cases involved murder. Deaths caused by drunk drivers, regardless of race, class, ethnicity, religion or gender, are nothing more than unadulterated murder.
This case is personal, and I know it far too well -- I knew the young clinical psychologist who was killed as a passenger in the livery cab. The female driver, a mother of two teen girls, was also killed. Both women killed were immigrants, as was their murder.
Drunk driving is not an accident. It's a selfish choice made by people who don't give a f**k about others.
Both the federal and local governments did fail in this case.
The driver had his license suspended some 15 times. Plus, the driver was arrested in 2006 when he and his "friends" were suspected of beating to death-- crushing the skull -- of a young guy outside of a NYC nightclub. Apparently no witnesses were willing to come forward and the DA could not bring about murder charges. However, the group was found subsequently in possession of and using the dead man's credit cards. I always thought that was a felony that could be prosecuted.
The driver is reported to have been born in a Pakistani refugee camp and came to the states with his family. I would have thought this would have made his deportation from the U.S. a no-brainer given the Bush-era policies of throwing immigrants who have done NOTHING wrong into INS "holding cells" or sending them back to their country of origin on trumped up terror-related issues.
Not in this case. The driver could not be deported according to news reports, because no country would take him. Or is there perhaps a deeper story here related to perhaps his families connections -- no evidence on my part, merely a hunch.
As far as O'Reiley's contention that the news media did not cover this story, that's a crock of sh@*. The story was in the news cycle for days in NYC. Even Billo's beloved NY Post saw fit to attack the D.A.'s office in an editorial over the murders.
The bottom line is two women are dead because of the actions of a man who should not have been allowed to walk freely among us. I don't care about where he was from nor his status here. What I do care about is that he was known in the criminal system because of previous actions, yet he could still go to night clubs, get drunk get behind the wheel of a Land Rover and plow it into the side of a car killing two women. Of course he walked out of his vehicle with no visible signs of injury. His actions are no different than taking a gun, pointing it into a crowd, pulling the trigger and acting surprised that an innocent person fell dead after being struck by the bullet.
Immigration policy did fail in this case. And yes, O'Reiley's conflating it with the murderous hate crime that occurred on Long Island is disgusting.
Marcelo Lucero was targeted because he was presumed to be an immigrant and a lesser human being by the "star athlete" and his friends. As you make clear, O'Reiley and the anti-immigrant clan perpetuate nationalistic hate crimes when they "profoundly demonizes immigrants by linking them with criminality."
They are using murder for ideological gain.
Does he ever mention the American born racists that are very noisey about assassinating Obama?
So much easier to deal with an issue involving immigrants. They can't stand up for themselves even if they are right.
to borrow a phrase....what a pinhead. Do the carpets match the drapes?
could torture be prosecuted as a hate crime?
peas!
The taxi driver came here illigally when he was 6? Makes him sound like a child criminal mastermind. Seems more likely he was brought here, but that might put a different "spin" on things.
This left-wing site and all of the people that have contributed below should take a good hard look in the mirror and remember that you are just as guilty of hate as you allege, the right-wingers are. I myself am a middle-of-the-roader, and I can understand exactly what O'Reilly was getting at. Something tells me all of you can too, but your agenda requires that you dismiss it. On the other hand, I can understand the liberal "amnesty" point of view. One side is not stupid and the other smart. One side are not assholes and the other humble. It is simply a matter of opinion and it all depends on whether you believe that immigration laws that exist on the books now should be enforced.
If you believe that they should be, any crime, any wrong, that is committed by an illegal alien stems from the lack of enforcement on the part of the federal government, and these so-called ‘Sanctuary Cities.’ To say there is no correlation between illegal immigration and crime is preposterous if you believe in enforcement of immigration laws because each illegal immigrant has inherently broken the law with their mere presence in this country. Every job for which they receive payment under the table, is an illegal act. In short, every time an illegal immigrant commits a crime, he is simply adding a crime onto the one he has already committed. Since his illegal presence and the opportunity to commit other illegal acts could be cured through enforcement and the use of deportation mechanisms, those other illegal acts can arguably be considered the result of a lack of enforcement. O'Reilly isn't stepping over the idea of personal responsibility in this bit. It is just the opposite. He is advocating for deportation, which would hold illegal immigrants personally responsible for their crime (illegal status).
As for the incident on Long Island, O’Reilly is obviously not denying that the young men should be punished and accept personal responsibility for their disgusting display. Instead, he is suggesting that this violent act stems from a civil backlash against illegal immigrants in general. Again, if the federal government enforced the immigration laws in the first place, this growing resentment towards the immigration community, of which, many are here illegally, would not be as prevalent. However, this point is not as persuasive considering the history of violence towards legal immigrants in this country as well.
The point is, enough with the agenda. Listen to what is being said and either agree or disagree, and give your reasons why. We’d all be a lot better off if this was the type of discourse that took place on an everyday basis. Instead, we’re all consumed with agenda-ridden BS!
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