In what has become a violent trend of attacking Asian Americans, a 28-year-old man was charged on Wednesday of hate crimes after he was identified as the assailant in a two-hour violent spree through Manhattan last Sunday. Steven Zajonc was charged with seven counts of assault and attempted assault and seven counts of harassment and aggravated harassment after he allegedly punched a 57-year-old Asian American woman without saying a single word, The New York Times reported. Ten minutes later, he was accused of the same crime, this time against a 25-year-old woman. Then there were two other victims in their 20s, a 19-year-old woman that Zajonc allegedly elbowed, followed by another woman elbowed, and a 20-year-old victim who was pushed to the ground, the Times reported.
“There was no prior interaction, and no statements were made,” police told the newspaper, having obtained an image of the assailant in surveillance footage at multiple locations.
Zajonc was arrested after guards at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, a New York Public Library, identified him as a regular and notified police.
There has been a 73% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020 compared to 2019, the FBI reported and Daily Kos staff writer Aysha Qamar highlighted. “Due to misconceptions and misinformation about the virus, violence against members of the Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI) community continues to rise nationwide,” Qamar wrote in a post about at least 70 attacks on Asian women in the Bay Area. “Women and the elderly especially are more susceptible as bigots continue to target them.”
A shooting spree at an Atlanta, Georgia, spa left eight people dead—six of them Asian women—last year, and video after video of unprovoked attacks against Asian people went viral. In footage last year, someone viciously pushed a 91-year-old man to the ground, sending him face first into the cement sidewalk outside of the Asian Resource Center in Oakland, California's Chinatown community.
New York Times journalist Karen Zraick wrote:
"Yao Pan Ma, a Chinese immigrant, was beaten as he collected cans in East Harlem in April and died from his injuries on New Year’s Eve. Michelle Alyssa Go was pushed to her death at the Times Square subway station in January. Last month, Christina Yuna Lee was fatally stabbed by a man who followed her into her Chinatown apartment. And GuiYing Ma, who was attacked as she swept a sidewalk in the Corona neighborhood of Queens in November, died of her injuries last week."
The increase in violence against Asian men and women seems to align with the timing of former President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that China is to blame for the spread of the coronavirus even though the country was able to get the spread of the virus under control much earlier than the United States.
The very night of the spa shooting in Atlanta, Trump called COVID-19 "China virus" in a phone interview with Fox News. At that point, Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit anti-discrimination organization, had tracked some 3,800 anti-Asian incidents, NBC News reported.
And about three months after Kelly Yang, a New York Times bestselling author, described being accosted at a San Francisco Bay Area dog park with her children, Trump tweeted in a since-suspended message on July 20: “We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!”
Yang tweeted after the attack that she was ”shaking.”
“I went to the dog park to walk my dog. These people came very aggressively towards me [without a mask], called me an oriental & told me to go back to where I came from,” Yang said in the tweet.
Researchers at the San Francisco State University Asian American Studies program found in March 2020 that since Trump referred to the virus as the “China virus” or “Chinese virus,” there has been an uptick in the news coverage of related discrimination against Asian Americans. “We’ve never received this many news tips about racism against Asians,” the founder of the Asian American news site NextShark told The New York Times. “It’s crazy. My staff is pulling double duty just to keep up.”
The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, a bipartisan effort aimed at discouraging hate crimes against Asian Americans in the wake of the deadly shooting in Atlanta, still received pushback from Republicans. Some tried to randomly tie the Hate Crimes Act to an amendment preventing police department defunding efforts.
Rep. Val Demings of Florida quickly capped that nonsensical argument:
Still, 62 Republican House representatives and one Republican senator—Josh Hawley of Missouri—opposed the hate crimes act. Hawley cited "big free speech questions,” according to CNN.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki used more precise language to describe that “free speech” Hawley spoke of during a press briefing in February. She called it “hate-filled rhetoric” that has been a driving factor in the increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans.
New York City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, who represents the district where most the recent Manhattan attacks happened, said in a statement The New York Times obtained that "condemnation is not enough."
"We must take action," she said. The councilwoman detailed plans for a round table to unify faith leaders, community members, and advocates in standing against "hate, racism, prejudice, and bigotry in all forms."
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