Michael Wolfe, 35, is being charged with armed burglary and criminal mischief after allegedly breaking into a Titusville, FL mosque on New Year’s Eve. According to authorities, Wolfe broke into the Masjid Al-Munin Mosque with a machete and proceeded to break windows and vandalize the place of worship before leaving a slab of raw bacon on the front door. Due to the burglary charge and the decision to pile “hate crime” charges on top, Wolfe could potentially face life imprisonment.
“Our charging decisions confirm how seriously we take crimes of this nature. When further investigation shows a crime is clearly hate motivated, it will not be tolerated,” said State Attorney Phil Archer.
That’s music to the ears of Imam Muhammad Mursi, who supervises several mosques in the area. “We have been hoping for that to happen,” Mursi said. “It was clearly a hate crime.”
Putting aside the overwhelming absurdity of putting a man behind bars for the rest of his life for destroying property, the decision to add hate crime charges simply exposes the ridiculousness of hate crime charges. How did this ever become a thing? What was wrong with simply charging people with the crimes they committed? Why is it worse to commit a crime out of “hate” than for any other reason?
Frankly, we would all be better off if Islamic terrorism was limited to this kind of mischief. We should make a deal with ISIS. Instead of beheading people, setting off bombs, and shooting up concerts, go ahead and smash up some Christian churches and Jewish temples. That would be great progress, in a way.
It’s simultaneously sad and hilarious how imbalanced the media coverage of these mosque attacks has been. Every time some fruitcake leaves a slab of bacon at an Islamic center, the press acts like civilization is on the precipice of collapse. These crimes barely deserve to be in the paper, much less treated as some kind of systemic Islamophobia. Half the time, Muslims themselves are the ones doing the damage just to prop up their eternal victimhood.
You’re never going to eliminate bigotry by force. The more prosecutors slap over-the-top charges on acts of vandalism and petty crime, the more backlash there’s going to be. Americans are getting fed up with these moralizing liberals who try to equate drawings and bacon with suicide bombers and mass shooters. Crime is crime and it needs to be punished, but this is getting outrageous.
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