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NYC leaders unite against hate crimes

BY PERVAIZ SHALLWANI | Special to Newsday

November 30, 2007

Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Swaranjit Singh was walking along Rockaway Boulevard in Queens when a young girl approached him and asked if he was going to bomb the neighborhood.

Someone then drove by and admonished the girl for speaking with Singh, a Bayside real estate agent who is Sikh and wears a turban, saying he was a "bad man," Singh recounted at a conference yesterday about hate crimes. Later that day, police stopped him as he walked to ask him what he was doing, and another driver made an obscene gesture at him.

Singh's painful personal stories of ignorance were among dozens shared by residents across New York as part of efforts to shed light on an uptick in hate crimes citywide over the past year.

"Ignorance creates fear and fear creates hatred," Singh said during a forum with Holocaust survivors at Queensborough Community College in Bayside.

The "Day Out Against Hate" was sparked by recent incidents of a noose found on the Columbia University campus and swastikas at synagogues in Brooklyn.

Hate crimes in the city have increased 20 percent in the past year after years of decline, according to a report by the New York Police Department. The FBI has reported a 15 percent increase nationally in hate crimes, city officials said.

The day was organized by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and community leaders from the five boroughs, including the Rev. Al Sharpton.

"For there to be a 20 percent increase, there has to be a hate crime happening daily in every borough," Quinn said.

The events began with a prayer breakfast in Brooklyn and included a discussion in Queens with five Holocaust survivors.

A large part of the effort, which Quinn admitted was mostly preaching to the choir, was to get communities to be more conscious of hate and to look for ways to bridge the divide between ethnic, gender, religious and socioeconomic differences.

"We need to re-energize the drumbeat," she said, urging community leaders and clergy to be a strong voice in the community to squash the recent surge.

"When we speak out and say no ... and we say it and we say and we say it, everywhere and every time, a drumbeat starts," she said. "The drumbeat will be deafening."

"I think a secret in New York and around the country many of us don't want to deal with is that there is a spike in hate crimes and in hate reports," Sharpton said.

"I think that if we tell the story truthfully, from our pulpits, our children will understand."