(January 6, 2017 at 11:04 am)A Theist Wrote:(January 5, 2017 at 11:51 pm)Tiberius Wrote: I'm sure we'll know for sure when the investigation is complete. As I said before, words don't make a hate crime; motivations do. Just because they didn't say "fuck disabled people" doesn't mean they weren't motivated by the fact the guy was disabled. These people were clearly motivated by multiple things since they mentioned Trump in their attack too.
The racist remarks they made in the video tape was pretty damning, (I'm assuming you watched it?). Unless there's some kind of plea bargain made you just know that the prosecutors in the case are going to be all over those remarks. They convicted themselves. There's no way around it. The attackers were motivated by racism, and the other multiple things you mentioned all led back to the guy being white, in addition to his disability making him an easier target. Yeah, they mentioned Donald Trump. But in their view, and there's blame to be shared by the democrats and the leftwing media for this, they were indoctrinated to believe that whites who voted for Trump are racists. The left has long been making that case against whites while either downplaying or completely ignoring that racism is also rampant among blacks. That's clearly evident in some of the other threads I was reading through this morning. There were not a few comments made that said if a person voted for Trump or a Republican, or if a person in Britain voted for Brexit, they were racist. Those four attackers were conditioned from their youth to be racists.
Again, that's not how motivation works. I'm not disputing that they were motivated by race; that much is clear from their words. However, as I've explained before, just because you don't use certain words doesn't mean you aren't motivated by other factors. If someone beats up a guy in a wheelchair purely because they have something against the disabled, that's still a hate crime motivated by the disability, even if the attacker doesn't say anything during the attack.
In addition, the video of the attack was only 30 minutes long I believe, and the actual attack took far longer than that, so I'm sure the police are investigating the entire attack rather than just the 30 minutes which were streamed on the Internet.
So to summarize: they were certainly motivated by race; nobody is disputing that (at least, nobody in this thread to my knowledge), but there may be other motivations such as the political ones and the fact he was disabled also. I'm not saying these are as clear as the racial motivation, just that they are possibly additional motivations the attackers had. We won't know until the police conclude their investigations. Nothing I've said negates the fact that this was a racially motivated crime, and if it's found that the attackers were also motivated by politics or the fact he was disabled, that doesn't negate the fact that it was a racially motivated crime either. People can have multiple motivations for committing crimes.
