Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

240 • HATE CRIMESrecent years the HUM has been less active, likely due to the fact thatit has experienced an exodus of membership to Jaish-e Muhammad,which was formed by Azhar following his release.HATE CRIMES. Hate crime refers to criminal conduct motivatedby prejudice, particularly racial, religious, or ethnic prejudice. Acriminal act motivated solely by a personal hatred of a given personwould not qualify. Hate crime is legislatively defined by specificprejudices against specific protected groups; however, crimes motivatedby prejudice are not unique to one group and any group can bethe target of prejudice. Therefore the murder of James Byrd Jr., whohappened to be black, by three young white men who dragged him tohis death on 7 June 1998 was a heinous murder motivated by racialprejudice, which qualified as a hate crime. Similarly, the killings of12 people by Colin Ferguson on 19 December 1993, when Fergusonopened fire on a Long Island Railroad passenger train and killed over12 people, would qualify as a hate crime since Ferguson, who wasblack, stated, when asked why he had shot people who were perfectstrangers to him, that he hated white people.Attempts to ban prejudice itself violate the First Amendment of theU.S. Constitution and therefore “hate speech” codes enacted on manyU.S. university campuses have been ruled unconstitutional when challengedin court. “Group libel” laws were used in the 1920s and 1930sto outlaw anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice, but these werealso ruled unconstitutional in U.S. courts. Nonetheless Great Britain,Canada, Germany, and other nations have enacted group libel laws,which are also known as “communal hatred” laws, and have prosecutedpeople not only for violence motivated by bias but also for thesimple propagation of hate-mongering in itself. In the post–Civil Warera in the United States, several civil rights acts were enacted to punishattempts by anyone “acting under color [sic] of law, or otherwiseto deprive any citizen of their civil rights under the U.S. Constitution,”but did so without enumerating specific groups or prejudices; howevercurrent federal and state hate crimes statutes define enumeratedprejudices, predicate offenses, and substantive offenses.The Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990 (HCSA) defines certainoffenses as “predicate crimes,” namely, murder, manslaughter, rape,aggravated assault, simple assault, intimidation, arson, and vandalism,and also identifies certain biases, namely, any bias based on the