The Question of Hate and Criminality.

I had an email this morning from Avaaz, the campaigning organisation, asking me to sign a petition. It concerned an incident in Australia recently when a bunch of white men went to an aboriginal sacred area and beat local tribes people – including women – with iron bars while shouting ‘white power.’

Some of the perpetrators have, apparently, been identified and charged with assault, but Avaaz say this isn’t enough. They say that it should be treated as a hate crime, the implication being that a crime driven by hate carries – or at least permits – a stronger punishment than the same crime committed without such motivation. And so I considered the rationale of such a position.

Hate is an emotional feature residing in the mind, and I have to consider the logic of criminalising a mental faculty. It seems absurd to do so because we are surely all free to hate just as we are free to love, daydream, become excited, or whatever. Hate is, I concede, a negative emotion, but it’s still firmly settled in the human consciousness and is never likely to go away. To criminalise an action makes sense because actions have physical consequences, but to augment the action by reference to the motivation makes the motivation itself a crime, and that surely brings us into the area of thought policing.

There are politicians on this planet who I hate (even though the spiritual gurus tell me I shouldn’t), but as long as I commit no action such as hitting Mr Ben-Gvir with an iron bar, I have committed no crime. And it seems ironic that the Avaaz worker who wrote the email probably hates the yobs who committed that horrible crime, and probably also hates the concept of thought police.