For many Asian-Americans, the stabbing was horrifying, but not surprising. It was widely seen as just the latest example of racially targeted violence against Asians during the pandemic.
But the perpetrator, a 23-year-old man from Yemen, had not said a word to the victim before the attack, investigators said. Prosecutors determined they lacked enough evidence to prove a racist motive. The attacker was charged with attempted murder, but not as a hate crime.
“Let’s call it what it is,” said Don Lee, a community activist who spoke at the rally. “These are not random attacks. We’re asking for recognition that these crimes are happening.”
The rally reflected the tortured public conversation over how to confront a rise in reports of violence against Asian-Americans, who have felt increasingly vulnerable with each new attack. Many incidents have either not led to arrests or have not been charged as hate crimes, making it difficult to capture with reliable data the extent to which Asian-Americans are being targeted.
That frustration erupted on a national scale this week after Robert Aaron Long, a white man, was charged with fatally shooting eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday night.
Investigators said it was too early to determine a motive. After Mr. Long’s arrest, he denied harboring a racial bias and told officials that he carried out the shootings as a form of vengeance for his “sexual addiction.”
The Atlanta shootings and other recent attacks have exposed difficult questions involved in proving a racist motive. Did the assaults just happen to involve Asian victims? Or did the attackers purposely single out Asians in an unspoken way that can never be presented as evidence in court? (...)
In the past month alone, several assaults on Asian victims have been reported to the police, including an attack on an older woman who was pushed outside a bakery in Queens. None of the incidents has been charged as a hate crime.
In fact, the only person who has been prosecuted for an anti-Asian hate crime in New York City this year is Taiwanese. He was accused of writing anti-Chinese graffiti outside several businesses in Queens. (...)
In the Chinatown stabbing last month, prosecutors said there was no evidence that the defendant, Salman Muflehi, targeted the victim because he was Asian or saw the victim’s face before stabbing him. Mr. Muflehi did tell the police afterward that he did not like the way the victim had looked at him.
Mr. Muflehi immigrated from Yemen to New York as a teenager. He has suffered from severe mental health issues for years, often getting into fights and landing in jail, according to interviews with his brother and mother. They say he has never expressed any hatred against Asians.
Mr. Muflehi immigrated from Yemen to New York as a teenager. He has suffered from severe mental health issues for years, often getting into fights and landing in jail, according to interviews with his brother and mother. They say he has never expressed any hatred against Asians.
He has previously been arrested on accusations that he assaulted both his brother and his father. Most recently, he was charged in January with punching a Hispanic man in the head, prosecutors said. (Prior news reports incorrectly identified that victim as Asian.)
by Nicole Hong and Jonah E. Bromwich, NY Times | Read more:
Image: CNN
[ed. The last part of this article is telling. I've been watching this issue build ever since a Chinese woman got mugged in SF Chinatown last month. It didn't appear at the time to be racially motivated or a hate crime, but the media was quick to jump on it as such. Now we have a national epidemic (which Asian Americans seem more than happy to exploit) of escalating copycat crimes and national marches. I blame the media for inciting this violence and sensationalizing something that just didn't exist in any significant measure until they made it a big issue, and Asian Americans themselves who were so eager to jump on the victimization bandwagon (btw, I'm Asian American).]
