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Posted on 04/02/2004 4:33:46 PM PST by DentsRun
L.A. County prosecutors want authorities to gather more evidence before they decide whether to charge Claremont McKenna College professor [Terri Dunn] with filing a false police report about a hate crime (vandalizing her own car with racial and anti-Semitic slurs)...
[However, even if police authorities can't decide what to do about Terri Dunn, the students apparently have made up their minds, if the protest signs on campus walls are any indication.]
"We support hate free campuses," was posted in large red letters after the vandalism was first reported. But the message was changed to "We support hoax free campuses."
Nearby, someone else created a sign with the images of a spray-painted car, shattered glass and the words, "Discover the liar within."
Days later, a message on the wall with the words, "Hate is here. What are you going to do about it?" read differently, as the word "deceit" was scrawled where the word "hate" was.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
It comes from an LA Times site. You have to register and pick a password (it's free) before you can view stories.
I think Kerri Dunn was a bit of a drama queen. There had been a couple of minor incidents at the Claremont-McKenna colleges in previous months. Some drunken students had stolen a cross from art class and burned it (not realizing the racial significance of such an act) and someone had written a racial slur across a portrait of George Washington Carver. These are not major events in the grand scheme of things but college students today react more to symbolic acts than they do to real ones (too much time on their hands?).
But to Ms. Dunn these were grand crises, calling for a major response. To fire up the student body, Dunn went on what she called a "soapbox" in her classes, demanding to know why the students were not outraged and marching at this series of hate times (the burned cross and the racial slur).
Apparantly when she couldn't get them worked up enough, she decided to stage a hate crime large enough to get everyone's attention. That's what happened. She went on a crusade against racism (of which there was precious little on the Claremont-KcKennna campus) and when that failed to ignite a controversy, she decided to drop the big one and stage a hate crime against herself. Except she was such an amateur that she slashed her own tires in full view of two students. Then when she realized they were watching her, she disingenuously asked them if they had seen who had done it. "Well yes," one of the students later said he was thinking, "we saw you pop your own tires lady."
There's another thread here today that says that the percentage of people who believe that the Jews killed Christ has doubled or tripled among young people since 1997. Presumably this is a long term trend, not something that just happened in the last month since Gibson's movie came out. But you watch, this poll will be cited (probably is being cited even as we speak) to prove that Gibson's movie is anti-semitic. (If they wanted an accurate poll, they should have done one the week before the movie came out compared to today).
Reporters do this all the time. If you have a crowd of 100 people, it's easy to find three people who will agree to virtually any proposition you put to them. Then the reporter writes a story reflecting whatever kick she's on at the moment, quotes her three sources and leaves the impression that it's cut and dried and everyone agrees. Reporters like that are of course totally irresponsible. But then a lot of reporters believe it's their mission to change society, not just tell the rest of us what's really going on in it.
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