Hate crime irony

It’d easy to point to any number of ways in which people who commit crimes based in hatred will be visited, inevitably, by irony. One such time is in the news right now.

As was first reported last Thursday on GayNZ.com, a lesbian couple in their 60s, who live about an hour north of Auckland, have had their property attacked in an apparent hate crime.

The end of the first week of January, the couple found that “Filthy Dikes [sic]” had been scrawled on the packing shed where they run their part-time business. “Dirty Dikes” had been scrawled on their house and “Dikes Trash” had been scrawled on their car. Police generally don’t pursue such property crimes and, the couple reported, didn’t seem very interested in this one.

The following week, however, the couple’s packing shed was so badly damaged in an arson fire that it must be torn down, making it impossible for them to run their seasonal business this year. Northland fire safety officer, Craig Bain, told the Sunday Star-Times, "There are definite signs that someone has broken into the place. It was deliberately lit. It's a real nasty, nasty crime." Police now say that the graffiti and arson are linked. Well, duh!

In my opinion, New Zealand Police don’t take relatively minor hate-related property crimes seriously enough: Very minor crimes like graffiti often lead to far more serious crimes. If the criminals aren’t caught now, one can imagine what his/her/their next crime could be.

One thing that's important to know is that this sort of thing is rare in New Zealand—so rare, in fact, that it makes the national news when it happens. As I've said repeatedly, Kiwis are generally a laid-back, accepting people and would never tolerate such crimes; an attack like this is really an attack on the entire community. Still, there are haters here, too, and mentally disturbed people, so even we aren't immune from hate-based crimes.

But there is a sweet irony in this disgusting attack. Most literate people, unlike the criminal(s), know that that the slang term for lesbian is “dyke”, with a “Y”. Dike? That’s the Greek goddess of moral justice. Hopefully, the criminal(s) will face that soon enough.