Hate Crimes
May Through July
Michael Hecht was not a Jew. None of his friends were Jews, and except for the accountant at the hardware store in which he worked part-time, no one he knew was Jewish. None of his uncles or grandparents had fought in Europe during World War II, and he had no connections to anyone who had been interned or murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. He had
never been to Israel and did not know anyone who had. Michael Hecht did not even particularly understand politics. He had an I.Q. of 86 and had a C average in school. He never watched any debates and could not with any degree of certainty name anyone in state politics.
Michael Hecht also did not personally know any Muslims. None of them were among his friends, family, or co-workers. No Muslim had ever been rude to him, physically attacked him, done harm to people he knew or loved.
All of this information came out during Deputy Sheriff Jaden Glover’s interview of Hecht following the twenty-two-year-old’s arrest. Glover had known Michael all his life; he’d once dated Hecht’s oldest sister, Maryanne.
“Why’d you do it?” Glover asked.
Hecht shrugged. He sat on a metal chair, his wrists cuffed to a D ring on the table. Another deputy stood by the door. Hecht had been Mirandized at the scene and again here in the station. He’d waived his rights both times.
“C’mon, Mike. You drove thirty-seven miles; you stopped to buy gasoline. You brought half a dozen of your mom’s Mason jars with you. And rags. You even brought a lighter and you don’t smoke. You had to have planned this.”
Michael Hecht shrugged again. His face was smudged with soot and he had some tissue stuffed into his nostril to stem the bleeding from where the building caretaker, Kusef, had punched him.
“You went to all that trouble,” said Glover, “and you put firebombs through all the windows. You burned the whole damn thing to the ground. What was in your head, boy? You upset ’cause Milt Ryerson’s boy lost his leg in Iraq? This some kind of personal vendetta?”
Michael Hecht did not know what a vendetta was. “Shit, I didn’t know Tommy lost his leg. Damn … that’s fucked up.”
Glover cut a look at the other deputy, who arched one eyebrow.
“You didn’t know about Tom Ryerson?”
“Nah … I ain’t seen him since graduation.”
“Then why’d you set fire to the mosque?”
Hecht looked confused. “What’s a mosque?”
“What’s a—Judas priest, boy, that’s what you just burned the hell down.”
“It wasn’t no mosque. It was a church. A raghead church.”
“That’s what a mosque is. A church for Muslims.”
“Fucking ragheads.”
“Do you have a reason to hate Muslims, Mike?”
“They’re fucking sand niggers.”
“You ever
met
a Muslim, Mike?”
Hecht looked away for a second. “No.”
“Then why did you want to burn down their church?”
Hecht was silent for a long time, his face contorting as he tried to think it through.
“Come on, Mike … I’d like to help you here, but you got to be straight with me.”
Michael Hecht leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “Ah, man … I don’t know. They’re just fucking ragheads, y’know.”
That was all they managed to get out of him. When the county detectives made a thorough search of Michael Hecht’s house, they also searched his e-mail accounts and backtracked his Internet usage. Hecht was subscribed to hundreds of message boards. Over forty of them were devoted to the Goddess. The most recent posting Hecht had been to was the last in a series of linked messages on Twitter. The first one read:
The Chosen will not tolerate the impure touch of the Muslim.
The intervening posts escalated up from there in racial hatred, culminating with the one that had, apparently, sent Michael Hecht out into the night.
Fire purifies.
Michael Hecht was charged with one count of arson and fourteen counts of murder. His state-appointed defense attorney tried to build a case on diminished capacity, but by the time the matter went to trial the attorney knew that he was trying to sell a sympathy verdict in what had become a landmark hate crime case. The jury deliberated for fourteen minutes. Michael Hecht was convicted in a Powell County Kentucky court and sentenced to death. He remains on death row to this day.
IN NEW YORK City, a flaming whiskey bottle was thrown through the front window of the 117th Street mosque during evening prayers. Several congregants suffered minor burns, and only the swift and combined actions of Azada, a teenage girl, and three of her friends, who grabbed fire extinguishers, prevented loss of life.
No one was arrested for the crime; however, witnesses saw a black male, approximately thirty-five, wearing a business suit, running from the scene seconds after they heard the sound of the window breaking.
IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA, four white males and one Hispanic were arrested as they emerged from the Al-Farooq Masjid mosque on Fourteenth Street. The young men had emptied two five-gallon cans of gasoline inside the building and had stopped to light a rock that had been wrapped in a gassoaked rag. Police cruisers, responding to a silent alarm triggered by the break-in, blocked the flight of the youths. All five were taken into custody. Fire department personnel worked with the caretakers of the mosque to clean up the building; however, early estimates were that it would cost forty thousand dollars to remove all traces of the gasoline and replace tapestries, books, and furniture damaged during the intrusion.
When detectives interviewed the boys, one of them admitted to having gotten the idea from the Internet. It was later determined that three of the five regularly followed forums and posts by the Goddess.
A week later the Catholic church attended by two of the boys was firebombed. No suspects have so far been identified.
Over the next month three mosques, two churches, and two synagogues were burned in Georgia.
WITHIN SIX HOURS of the Goddess’s “Fire purifies” post, arson-based hate crimes directed at Muslims rose nearly 4 percent. At the end of six weeks, taking into account retaliatory attacks that included arson, drive-by shootings, rapes, beatings, and bomb scares, the incidence of anti-Muslim hate crimes rose 39 percent. Corresponding hate crimes directed at Jews rose 26 percent, and hate crimes directed at Christians of various colors and denominations rose 24 percent. The total number of victims directly connected to these crimes, according to the Department of Justice, numbered 43 dead, 175 wounded.
The day that CNN broke the story and showed those statistics, the Goddess, using the name Enyo, posted this comment on over sixty social networks: