“Absolutely disgusting and outrageous” blared the USA Today headline this week when reporting on a brutal assault of an elderly Asian-American woman outside a luxury apartment building in New York City.
This continued a disturbing trend of attacks on Asian Americans the past year that garnered increased attention in the aftermath of the shootings of massage parlor employees in Georgia. The irony is the horrific March 16 killings seem not to be racially motivated, yet those finally caught the attention of media and activists to what folks like myself wrote about back in February.
We don’t know if Brandon Elliot, who was charged with two counts of second degree assault and one count of first degree attempted assault, attacked Vilma Kari, 65, because she was of Asian descent. Kari, who was on her way to church, is an immigrant from the Philippines. Elliot reportedly yelled, “F–k you, you don’t belong here,” as he kicked and stomped on her.
This probably was preventable, since Elliot was on lifetime parole following his release from prison after stabbing his mother to death in 2002.
He was living in a hotel — converted into a homeless shelter by Mayor Bill de Blasio — on the taxpayer dime. If I am guessing, he too has untreated psychological issues and was incorrectly released by a highly-liberalized parole board in a deep blue state. It’s another devastating failure of the criminal justice system and political leadership in left-wing locales.
“For the life of me, I don’t understand why we are releasing or pushing people out of prison — not to give them second chances, but to put them into homeless facilities or shelters, or in this case a hotel — and expect good outcomes,” New York City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea recently said.
After the Georgia massacre — committed by a mentally unhinged man with a psychosexual disorder — discussions of anti-Asian crimes naturally devolved into absurd clichés about “white supremacy.”
This flawed narrative constructed by media and their progressive allies is disingenuous, and its purpose is to hide facts, win ideological battles, and look away from evil.
Not mentioned in the USA Today story or bad faith media’s narrative about violence against Asian Americans is that Kari’s attacker, like many recently arrested for attacking Asian Americans, is black.
As I noted after George Floyd’s death when writing about the false narrative of an “epidemic” of police shootings, facts matter — even if they don’t to bored upper middle class progressives rioting in the streets.
As tabulated by the NYPD, a black New Yorker is over six times as likely to commit a hate crime against an Asian as a white New Yorker. In 2020, blacks made up 50 percent of all suspects in anti-Asian attacks in New York City, even though blacks are 24 percent of the city’s population. Whites made up 10 percent of all suspects in anti-Asian attacks in 2020 but account for 32 percent of the city’s population.
Dozens of recent violent attacks and murders of Asian Americans, many of them elderly, have been committed by black people, something the media has chosen to downplay or ignore, because the race of the perpetrators doesn’t fit the media narrative about so-called white supremacy.
It’s much easier to say “stand together against hate and racism,” as President Joe Biden and his sidekick pitifully did at Atlanta’s Emory University two weeks ago, than to use statistics or explain why innocent octogenarians are beaten to death by black teenagers. Horrifying acts of black-on-Asian crime have occurred for well over a decade in the supposedly tolerant Bay Area.
Some might even call it an “epidemic.”
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.
