The authorities are Johnny on the spot when someone puts bacon on a mosque’s door handles or a paranoid race-car driver claims a garage-door pull rope is a noose. But a spate of Christmas tree burnings isn’t attracting much attention and generally gets sloughed off as mischief. In fact, after a Christmas display was vandalized at a Chicago park recently for the third year running, a media outlet sloughed the act off as the work of a “Grinch.”
So while leftists have often been called “tree-huggers,” it appears that reflecting their usual standard, some trees are more equal than others. Reporting on this Wednesday evening, Fox News host Tucker Carlson cited the case of a non-profit Chicago group called My Block, My Hood, My City, which aims to encourage virtue and responsibility in youth. Last Saturday afternoon, four members from this group went to the Windy City’s dangerous Bronzeville neighborhood to hang Christmas lights and were robbed by four hooligans; mere hours later, someone torched a Christmas tree they’d erected in a nearby park.
Unfortunately, these acts aren’t outliers. “Last December, the same group of volunteers in Chicago had another one of their Christmas trees burned to the ground,” reported Carlson; “the year before that, someone ran over the Christmas tree in Chicago’s Washington Park with a car.”
Then, in “Oakland, California, a few days ago, a still unidentified arsonist doused a 52-foot Christmas tree in Jack London Square with lighter fluid and then burned it down,” the host later stated.
And just “this morning, right after midnight, in the center of Midtown Manhattan, someone torched the Christmas tree right outside FOX News headquarters,” he continued.
Speaking of the deeper significance, Carlson pointed out that a Christmas tree is more than just an evergreen conifer but is a symbol of a culture and religion; thus, he said, these burnings are “an attack on Christianity.” But this doesn’t move the authorities. As the commentator further explained:
By current standards, destroying someone’s religious symbol would be called a hate crime. That’s a category much beloved and meticulously chronicled by the Biden Justice Department. The D.O.J. can tell you precisely how many Qurans were burned last year in the United States, but they don’t keep track of Christmas trees.
Why is that? Well, because they could care less.
Christopher Wray isn’t dispatching a team of F.B.I. agents to get to the bottom of Christmas arson. Merrick Garland is not going to issue a press release about it, trust us. The media, for their part find the whole thing hilarious.
After a Christmas display was vandalized three years in a row in a park in Chicago, most recently this past weekend, CBS News produced this headline quote: “Search on for Grinch who burned down Christmas Tree.” Oh, so it’s a Grinch, not an arsonist, not a dangerous anti-Christian psychopath. No, it’s a Grinch, an amusing dwarfishly cute cartoon character absolutely nobody can take seriously .
For sure, a mosque vandal would never enjoy such a kid-glove characterization. And, of course, how you frame a story influences how readers/viewers will estimate it.
In fairness, we don’t know that all the tree burnings are “hate crimes,” though probability dictates some surely are. Carlson’s point is, however, that when the structures or symbols of a politically favored faith are targeted, the “hate crime” assumption is reflexive and the media coverage unrelenting.
But this underlines, again, why “hate crime” law shouldn’t even exist. It smacks of an effort at thought control: In addition to the punishment someone would normally receive for a given act, such law adds extra punishment for…what?
Likely, the thoughts expressed through the act.
This means the government officials empowered as mind-readers are free to divine whose evil was inspired by hate (as opposed to love?) and who can get a relative slap on the wrist because, perhaps, his victims “needed a little killin.’”
Whatever we call anti-“religious” crimes, however, Christianity appears the most targeted faith. A report earlier this week holds that this is certainly true in Europe, with anti-Christian “hate crime” up 70 percent (and under-reported) from 2019 to 2020 alone.
Beyond Europe it’s even worse, a good example being how since 2015, more than 11,500 Christians have been murdered by Muslim jihadists in Nigeria. This story is thoroughly ignored by media, too.
Then there’s Canada, where in recent times dozens of churches have been burned based on a blood libel myth — sometimes with the tacit approval of public figures. And this story is thoroughly misrepresented by media.
Matters aren’t quite this bad here in the United States (yet). But aside from the tree burnings, the vandalizing of Nativity scenes has been an ongoing problem for many years.
This said, exacerbating the situation is the general climate of lawlessness encouraged by radical, criminal-coddling Democrat officials. Consider Craig Tamanaha, the man arrested for burning the Fox News-adjacent tree. He shouldn’t even have been on the street because, stated Carlson, according “to New York’s Police Commissioner, Tamanaha was wanted on several criminal offenses — quote: ‘He was issued earlier this year some appearance tickets and didn’t come back to court which is something we see all too often.’”
Obviously, whether you’re an anti-Christian bigot or just a pyromaniac, it follows that you’ll be more likely to act upon your dark urges if you’ve been conditioned to believe that accountability is passé.
As for hate, it takes many forms, including the passive-aggressive variety. For example, The New York Times’ headline about Tamanaha’s handiwork read, “FOX News Christmas Tree Catches Fire in Manhattan.” So perhaps it was the tree’s fault — though it’s nonetheless a cautionary tale for the Times. One day, after all, its papers may start spontaneously combusting, too.
