Hello? Anyone there?
For the second time in a week, the self-proclaimed champions of human rights are conspicuous by their absence.
The fact that two depraved children tried to murder a storekeeper in cold blood is bad enough. The official silence to the charge that the attack was a hate crime is inexcusable.
Fifty-year-old Jesmen Syeda barely fought off two knife-wielding children in her convenience store on Keewatin Street Sunday night. One stabbed her in the neck with a steak knife, the younger slashed at her and stabbed her in the hand with a smaller-bladed weapon.
They had no motive other than to kill her; they were regular customers, they knew they would be caught, unless they intended to remove the only witness to their crime.
"They didn't come for robbery. They just wanted to kill her," said her husband Rick Alam.
"I think it's a hate crime," he told CBC reporter Gosia Sawicka.
To her credit, she checked with police--- who gave her the official brushoff. There's "no evidence", they told her. Given that Alam told the CBC he had been the target of repeated racist actions, that's hard to believe.
Harder still when you realize they made the claim within less than 24 hours of the attack, hardly enough time to investigate the attempted murder, nevermind the racial hate aspect.
What they must have meant, of course, is that there's no evidence against anybody white.
Alam and Syeda are not white. Their surnames suggest East Indian or Pakistani origin.
Syeda's attackers were identified only as 14 and 10 years of age. But a posting on the Internet identifies the pair as native Indians from Gilbert Park.
Is that why the usual suspects are, once again, missing in inaction?
A year ago on New Years Eve, when members of a community caught a car thief red-handed and delivered a well-deserved thumping, the salivating human rights mob, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, screamed "hate crime" and demanded police lay charges. The thief was aboriginal in appearance and the citizens were not.
But when the suspects are non-white, the mob and the media are silent.
Last week the victim of a car jacking told a television reporter that the aboriginal thieves warned him to 'stay out of the North End white boy.'
Nobody stood up to condemn the racial threat. Nobody demanded the police hate crimes unit pair up with the robbery unit. Dead silence was the theme of the race baiters.
Now that there's a second incident of allegations of racial hatred involving the aboriginal community, let's see who stands to be counted. Who will insist there be no double standard.
In fact, the so-called "native leaders" should be the first to demand an investigation of their own, to show they do not play politics with claims of hate crimes, that they are not damaging peoples' lives with spurious claims to further their political agendas, but that they are serious about protecting the rights of all races.
We'll hold our breaths.