Pitt professor provides education about hate crimes

If a person spray paints her name on someone else’s garage door, she might be in a little… If a person spray paints her name on someone else’s garage door, she might be in a little trouble with the law.

If she spray paints a swastika on a Jewish person’s door, she faces significantly bigger problems.

Kathleen Blee, a professor in Pitt’s sociology department, presented a lecture, “Hate Crimes and the Jewish Community 2004,” Sunday at the Heinz History Center. She used PowerPoint to teach a predominantly elderly crowd what constitutes a hate crime and to present statistics about both the victims and the perpetrators.

She defined a hate crime as a crime with an underlying motivation, stemming from a hatred of a certain “protected category” of individuals based on “race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, mental/physical disabilities, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation.”

If a person is found guilty of committing a crime of this nature, her sentence is enhanced because of the consequences inflicted on the larger community, she said. Blee cited as an example the difference in consequences resulting from garage vandalism if the perpetrator emblazons a Jewish person’s property with swastikas, rather than simply robbing it.

She described this type of crime as diffuse, low-level terrorism.

“It is meant to terrorize people, to point out their vulnerability and attack people on their deepest emotional level,” she said.

According to FBI statistics, there were 7,462 reported hate crimes committed in the United States in 2002; 1,426 of them were religious. Of these religious crimes, 931 were anti-Semitic, and fewer than 100 of them have been solved.

A study by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith showed that anti-Semitic crimes peaked in 1994 at around 2,000, and they are now holding steady at approximately 1,600 since 2002.

“Crimes against Jews are vastly disproportionate to the number of Jews in the United States,” Blee said, explaining that the connotation of the swastika has become a universal symbol of group hatred. She cited incidents of the Nazi logo being used to intimidate other groups.

Racist groups also use the symbol as a recruiting technique to signal to independent skinheads that “there’s a racial, anti-Semitic movement they could be part of.”

But anti-Semitism is declining over time, she said.

Many of the strongest anti-Semitic attitudes exist in people over the age of 75, whose physical health may render them unable to graffiti swastikas. The majority of the population has positive attitudes about Jews, she added.