Many, many of hate crimes are in effect terrorist acts. Or to put it another way, they are advertising of hate.

If they are not stepped on as a class, the advertising of ideological activity which they embody will tend to create copycat activity. Much more so (and intended much more so) than a garden variety murder for other reasons, or garden variety vandalism, or whatever. The society must not only take them seriously as such but be seen as seeing them as such.

It's clear to me, at least, that this raid on the Holocaust Museum was not motivated by black/white racism, but by antisemitism. The race of the guard killed was pure happenstance, regardless of the perpetrator's other attitudes on the race question.

Dave Oesterreich