Something wicked this way keeps coming.
For the third year in a row in America, hate crimes are on the rise, particularly against African-Americans and Jews. An FBI report identifies a total of 7,175 such offenses in 2017, a 17 percent jump from 2016 and the largest increase since 2001. Anti-Semitic crimes were up 37 percent from 2016. Crimes against blacks, which constituted more than half of all race-based incidents, were up 16 percent.
Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker deemed the report a “call to action,” adding that identity-based attacks on people represent “despicable violations of our core values as Americans.”
The problem: the divisive tone set by Whitaker’s boss, President Trump, has helped unleash the furies.
In 2015, Trump launched a presidential campaign rooted in fear and loathing of immigrants in general, and Mexicans and Muslims in particular. He subsequently ratcheted up the rhetoric — equivocating about the actions of “both sides” as neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville a year ago and of late demonizing struggling Central Americans as an invading criminal horde.
A week ago, a black White House reporter asked Trump if he believed that his adoption of a “nationalist” foreign policy empowered white nationalists. The President called it a “racist question.”
It wasn’t. Trump can’t stop hate crimes himself, but he can and must take great strides to change the tone in Washington — and across America.
— New York Daily News