That's the head of Andal Devi, and just one of eight sacred likenesses that were defiled in a Hindu Temple set to open on June 1st. By defiled, I mean the statues were decapitated and dismembered.





It's pretty damned recent. The scoop is that vandals punctured walls and broke into a Hindu temple, ruined some Hindu Gods and left. Property destruction is never that focussed unless it's a deliberate attempt to intimidate. Nearby Churches went untouched.

Six hundred people attended the community meeting that followed, where reports of neighborhood Indians having their houses vandalized and egged were exchanged. The attending Police Captain, Tracy Stille, verified these stories.

And yet, the Police authority have not classified the Temple vandalism as a hate crime because they feel the vandalism happened "at random".

Here's a statute that was added to Minnesota's hate crime legislation in 2005:
Minn. Stat. 609.595
Includes damage to property because of the property owner's or another's "actual or perceived race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age or national origin."
more...

Way to protect the vunerable. What troubles me most when I study hate-crimes are how skewed the state-by-state statistics are. And don't ever undermine the influence that statistics have on those pressured to pass laws.

According to the FBIs breakdown of Hate Crimes in 2004, of the "1,480 reported offenses ...motivated by the offenders religious bias, 67.8 percent were anti-Jewish." As a non-Jewish minority who was born and raised in New York City, the benefit of having over five hundred participating ADL style agencies to report hatred becomes apparent in the above statistic.

The Minnesota Temple officials appear shortsighted when it comes to the destruction of their temple.
They don't care to label the bigotry as a hate-crime "unless it will help track down the vandals."
source
It's left to us to teach the state of Minnesota the meaning of civilization.

Contact Agencies that may have the contacts to get the story heard. When it comes to Minnesota civil liberties initiatives, I'm only familiar with Project Common Ground, who deal with racism in our schools. They're funded by the Wilder Foundation.

You can contact Project Common Ground with these numbers.

You Hindus are probably opting to do this in the most non-violent way possible, which is fine by me. And if you ever feel small in numbers, remember the Sunni brothers and sisters standing behind you in this country where we're all regarded as alien, inferior and potentially dangerous.