Lately in the USA there has allegedly been an uptick in crimes against people of Asian descent since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020. Talking heads will tell you this is all due to Donald Trump referring to the Chinese-in-origin, it literally came from Wuhan, virus as the China virus. They will also tell you these attacks are deeply rooted in White supremacy. Filipinos have not been spared by this violence. But do the attacks have anything to do with Donald Trump and the China virus or White supremacy?
The first notable attack was back in February on the NYC subway.
A 61-year-old man was on his way to work on the L subway train when he got into a dispute with another man and was slashed across the face on Wednesday morning. What happened: Noel Quintana claimed the man was kicking his backpack during the commute, according to ABC7. When Quintana asked him to stop, the man attacked him and ran away when the train stopped at First Avenue and 14th Street.
A series of subway incidents: As the New York Post reports, this incident is the latest in a series of subway crime problems. Speaking to ABC7, Mayor Bill de Blasio, however, dismissed the crime problem.
This is a very cut and dry case. It involves no Donald Trump, no China virus, and no White supremacy. The next case is equally open and shut and involves an elderly Filipino in Arizona.
The suspect behind the killing of a 74-year-old Filipino in Phoenix, Arizona has been arrested, the police announced last week.
Filipino Juanito Falcon was attacked by the suspect, Marcus Williams, near 17th Avenue and Bethany Home Road, the Phoenix police said in a tweet. Falcon died two days later from the injuries. The police said it was still unclear why Williams attacked the elderly Filipino.
Williams allegedly punched Falcon in the face, which caused the latter to fall and hit his head. Williams fled but witnesses were able to identify his car before he sped away. Falcon was also able to tell the police the last two numbers of the vehicle’s license plate. Williams was found about three miles from the crime scene with his girlfriend; both of them refused to answer the cops’ questions.
Advocates say that the attacks against Asian-Americans were reminiscent of “yellow peril,” a racist ideology that arose in the 19th century that sees Asians as a threat to the Western world. Such crimes are allegedly linked to the spread of the coronavirus, which was first discovered in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
Again there is no link to the China virus, Donald Trump, or White supremacy. The attack was random and the attacker was black.
The next two cases are just like this one in that the victims were both randomly punched. The difference is that the authorities decided not to release mugshots of the suspects. In the case of the San Fransisco Police Department they decided to stop releasing mugshots in 2020 "as part of an effort to stop perpetuating racial stereotypes." That means we will never see the face of Jorge Devis-Milton who randomly punched Danny Yu Chang, a Chinese Filipino.
Danny Yu Chang was walking through San Francisco’s Financial District, clutching a packaged lunch from Trader Joe’s, when an assailant struck him from behind.
The blows were swift and brutal, Yu Chang recalled Wednesday afternoon, two days after a man knocked him unconscious at Market and Montgomery streets.
Former President Donald Trump’s inflammatory racial rhetoric about the coronavirus had helped create a toxic undertow, which has frequently bubbled to the surface as economic pressures and bitter emotions set in. A report released Tuesday by the national coalition Stop AAPI Hate documented 3,795 anti-Asian hate incidents from the beginning of the pandemic through Feb. 28. Of those, 1,691 took place in California.
A day after the attack, Yu Chang set up a page on the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe, asking supporters to help raise money so he and his wife can move out of state. That evening, police announced the arrest of 32-year-old Jorge Devis-Milton in connection with the battery of Yu Chang and a stabbing half an hour earlier, of a 64-year-old white man at the 16th Street Mission BART Station.
He is now among dozens of victims of violence who have become symbols of a national reckoning over rising hate and despicable crimes of opportunity — both of which have hit the Bay Area’s Asian American communities.
According to the San Fransisco Chronicle this man is not merely the victim of a crime but one of dozens who are now symbols of a nation reckoning over hate crimes against Asian Americans. Could anything be more ridiculous? That the media names the race of Jorge's stabbing victim but not his own race is a rather big clue to what he looks like. How likely is it a White man is named Jorge? The fact is it's not racism. It's regular criminality perpetrated by the criminals who populate the Bay Area. San Fransisco is a city covered in human feces, used needles, and homeless people. Burglary is up by 57%!! The city has major problems which the local government refuses to address properly. Instead they'd rather conceal mugshots of criminals. Let's jump down to San Diego where an elderly Filipino woman known only as Lola was punched while riding the trolley.
An elderly Filipino woman who was attacked on the trolley last month shared her story with ABC 10News.
She is being identified only as Lola, a word that means grandmother in the Philippines. She said the attack last month still haunts her.
Through a translator, she said in Tagalog that she still cries when she recalls the incident. Lola said she had just visited a friend and was riding the trolley from Encanto to Downtown San Diego. She thought a fellow passenger was going to transfer trolleys, but instead she became the victim of an unprovoked attack.
“He punched me,” Lola said. “It’s very hard and then I cried… please, please help me!”
Lola said the man tried to grab her. Witnesses helped her until police arrived. She told ABC 10News she is thankful to God she’s still alive.
Police arrested James Winslow in connection with the attack. A police spokesperson said he faces assault with a deadly weapon with an elder abuse enhancement.
The trolley incident was not deemed a hate crime. However, attacks on elderly Asian Americans have been caught on video throughout the country.
After telling the story the reporter notes that this incident is not a hate crime but then adds an "However!" The truth is simply not good enough. The truth is that these two Filipinos who were punched randomly were both likely victims of the knockout game.
One does not have to wonder what the agenda of the American media is if they pay close attention. In Vallejo, which is just north of San Fransisco, on February 16th Filipino Marc Quidt was injured when his store was robbed. Rather than report it as a straight crime story reporter Dion Lim, herself of Asian descent, attempted to find a racial motive.
this video is horrifying and I’ll explain why I am posting it. It shows an armed robbery of an Asian American couple’s store last night.
The reason why I mention they are Asian is that they have seen all of the coverage of attacks on the API community and while we don’t know if they were targeted because they’re Asian...one can’t help but think it could be the reason these days.
How ridiculous! Crime is up in the area, the store has been robbed before, the video shows the usual suspects in these cases, and it is not the white man. Yet this lady just has to stoke fears about anti-Asian violence even as she admits she has no idea if the store was targets because it is owned by Asians! Even the San Fransisco Chronicle wants to tar this common place robbery as a targeted hate crime.
San Jose is not all that far from San Fransisco. On March 10th a Filipina, who only wants to be known as Tiffany, was talking on the phone with her boyfriend when she was suddenly assaulted while waiting for the train.
Police arrested a 32-year-old suspect who faces hate crime charges for attacking a Filipino American woman in a Caltrain station in San Jose on Wednesday morning, March 10.
The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office said on Friday that Johan Strydom, 32, will be charged with “assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury” and “assault with an intent to commit rape and assault” with felony hate crime enhancements.
The Filipina, a 26-year-old medical worker who requested to be identified only as Tiffany, took the Caltrain at San Jose’s Diridon Station on Wednesday at around 6:30 a.m. on her way to work in Palo Alto, according to KTVU.
Man, identified as Strydom, suddenly grabbed Tiffany neck from behind, reportedly pulling her hair back and cursing at her for her Asian ethnicity.
Tiffany began screaming when Strydom allegedly forced her to the ground and started tossing her back and forth. “He was saying f-u, f-u Asian, this is completely bull,” she said. “All while he was keeping me on the ground with his grip on my hair.”
Bystanders came to her rescue and yelled at the suspect to stop the assault. He tried to run away from the scene. Tiffany was not injured physically, Victoria O’Brien, Caltrain Deputy Director of Safety and Security, told KTVU.
Truly a horrifying ordeal committed by a white man. But does his whiteness have anything to do with it? How about Trump or the Wu-flu? According to his lawyer, "Strydom is allegedly suffering from a mental illness that is intensified by homelessness." Just like San Fransisco, San Jose has a homeless problem that has spiraled out of all proportion. That means more crime.
They’ve reported gun violence, had cars stolen and watched in outrage for months as trash piles up and homeless encampments grow around them.
Business and property owners in downtown San Jose are demanding the city take action to end vandalism, theft and increasing illegal camping they say is destroying their livelihood.
And they are not mincing words — one man even calling homeless people parasites.
“We will soon see a hero before us to rid the world of these parasites who infect and destroy life and property,” Arturo Lionetti, plant manager at Airgas, wrote in an email to Councilmember Raul Peralez.
The email was part of an email thread obtained by San José Spotlight to Peralez from five business owners along Coleman Avenue — that started in 2019 — complaining about the problems. The business owners claim the city has turned a blind eye.
“If the city can’t provide the basics — if I have to continue to shoulder the costs to repair the ongoing, almost nightly, acts of vandalism and destruction to me and my customers’ property — I will be out of business by June,” said Rose Garden Auto Care owner George Fota in a Dec. 17 email.
This is a very old problem. There is even a website, sanjosehomeless.org, with the last update being 2015. According to one website, policyadvice.net, as of February 2021 in the USA 48% of homeless people are white, 61% of them are male, and 25% are mentally ill. It appears Johan Strydom being a mentally ill, white, homeless man is typical of what one would expect to encounter among the homeless. "Straight out of central casting," as they would say. Would anyone expect a mentally ill, homeless man to act like a functioning member of society? Just Google "homeless man attacks" and you will be greeted with plenty of news stories of mentally ill homeless men attacking people. Tiffany was not only the victim of Johan Strydom but also of a government which had been warned of this problem over the years and had done nothing to prevent it from happening. She won't be the last victim of an uncaring San Jose government.
GMA recently published a story with the following provocative title, "Filipino man verbally harassed in another New York subway incident." Alex P. Vidal, the Filipino man in question, was yelled at by a man on the NYC subway who was on a tirade against the Chinese. Instead of leaving like all the rest of the passengers this man stayed seated and began filming. GMA attempts to portray this as a hate crime yet offers no details when this happened and do not provide a link to the film. It is on Alex P. Vidal's blog. It happened at 11a.m. on March 12th.
Here is the full text of that 52 second video:
You got the Yemenis, the Saudi Arabians and all these different people so I ask myself, well, why would these people not associate? Why would these people stay away from each other? There must have been a reason for that. Another thing I had to ask is what are the Chinese, once again, doing with the Muslims locked up in their country? Why do the good Chinese have Muslims locked up in their country? For no reason other than being Muslim, could you answer that? Because you seem to be so ethical and you seem to be such a good Buddhist. For we know that Buddhism is not a Chinese religion, Buddhism is an Indian religion. Why are you going around touting yourself as a good Buddhist person? Why are you telling people Asian's don't marry outside of their race when Asians do marry outside their race? Do you mean you don't marry black people outside of your race? When the highest rate of intermarriage is between White males and Asian women.
Actually this is not the full text because while this man is spouting off Alex P. Vidal keeps turning the camera toward himself and saying he is alone and being harassed. When this man asks him, "Why do the good Chinese have Muslims locked up in their country?" Alex points the camera at himself and says, "He say I am a Chinese." Alex must not understand English because that is not what the man said at all. He simply asked a question about why the Chinese are rounding up the Uighers and placing them into camps. From the sound of it I would imagine that man is either a member of or familiar with The Five-Percent Nation or some other sect of the Nation of Islam.
For his blogpost dated March 18th Alex P. Vidal insensitively, disgracefully, and disingenuously dared to compare his being shouted at by a crazy man, who he could have evaded like everyone else, to spa workers who were shot dead in Atlanta by a guy with a sex addiction and to the first man in this article, Noel Quintana, who was sliced across the face.
I STILL consider myself “luckier” compared to those members of Asian community murdered in Atlanta on March 17 in another wave of hate crime perpetrated against Asian Americans amid the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic.
The massacre in Atlanta occurred five days after a lunatic man verbally abused me on F train bound for the Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York City at 11 am on March 12 for being “a Chinese.”
The bloody carnage in Atlanta happened almost a month after another Filipino-American, Noel Quintana, 61, was slashed across the face from cheek to cheek inside the L subway train while on his way to his job in Manhattan.
It’s not safe to be an Asian nowadays while there is still a pandemic. We still need to be extra careful in public and shouldn’t lower our guards down.
Quintana, who had been in a confrontation with another man while the two were riding on the train, said the emotionally disturbed man was kicking his backpack and when he asked him to stop, the suspect attacked him and fled when the train stopped at First Avenue and 14th Street.
Unlike Quintana, I wasn’t harmed but was a little bit frightened visibly.
I didn’t react violently and, thank God, I managed to “escape” unscathed physically.
https://alexpvidal.wordpress.com/2021/03/18/im-luckier-than-those-killed/
Is this "independent journalist" unaware that the Atlanta shooting was not motivated by hatred towards Asians or the pandemic? The shooter was a frequent customer of those spas. He had a sex addiction he could not overcome and in his frustration he shot those people. The REAL STORY there concerning crime and violence against Asians is that those spas were functioning as brothels. All across the USA there are Asians who have been trafficked by other Asians, particularly Chinese and Koreans, to work at such places. Those people are real victims and they remain invisible to society at large. The New York Times did a write up about these places in 2019.
"Thank God I managed to escape??" Alex P. Vidal could have escaped easily along with everyone else when they heard the man coming. Instead he chose to play the victim and not just remain seated in fear but record the man as he spit some knowledge and intersperse it with his own commentary about, "I am alone and being harassed." Just look at the fear in Alex P. Vidal's eyes as he bravely records the moment of his victimhood.
What a joke. What else could we expect from a man who admits that he falls asleep on the subway even though he knows he should not due to safety precautions? AS an Asian, I am guilty of being the No. 1 violator of the unwritten rule among Asian Americans in the United States, particularly in New York City nowadays: “Don’t sleep while inside a subway train.”
Mea culpa, I fell asleep for a few minutes on my way to Brooklyn morning on Friday, February 26. it’s a good thing I was safe.
And, oops, I did it again on my way back to Queens past noontime.
We have been supposedly warned to be careful while in public, especially inside the bus and the subway train now that hate crimes involving Asian Americans have soared in these past weeks.
I travel from Queens to Brooklyn vice versa via subway train four times a week and my travel time normally takes one hour and 15 minutes from 90th Station in Queens to Avenue I going Coney Island in Brooklyn.
After 10 to 15 minutes of each travel, I usually fall asleep as most passengers do. I wake up about five stations before my final stop.
Not anymore since three weeks ago after a 61-year-old Filipino passenger Noel Quintana, who looked like Chinese like me, received almost 100 stitches after he was slashed across the face by another passenger on the New York City subway on February 3.
Maybe he should just pack it in and return to Iloilo.
Let's look an one more story of a Filipino who was recently killed in the USA. The difference between him and all the rest is he died at the hands, or rather the knees, of the police.
When Maria Quinto-Collins started filming her son at her home in Antioch, Calif., on Dec. 23, he was already on the floor, unresponsive.
In the footage, a pair of officers with the Antioch Police Department can be seen rolling the son, Angelo Quinto, from his stomach onto his side. Ms. Quinto-Collins can be heard asking, repeatedly, “What happened?”
Mr. Quinto, 30, never regained consciousness; he died three days later. Last week, his family filed a wrongful-death claim against the city. It said that the two officers, who had responded to a call from Mr. Quinto’s sister, knelt on Mr. Quinto’s back for nearly five minutes to subdue him and that he had “died as a direct consequence of the unreasonable force used against him.”
John Burris, a lawyer for Mr. Quinto’s family, said Wednesday that Mr. Quinto’s mother and sister were traumatized and grieving and that they questioned the decision to invite the police to their home. “They thought that they were calling the police for help,” Mr. Burris said.
He added that the family was awaiting the results of an autopsy from an independent medical examiner. “We feel pretty strongly that this is an asphyxiation case,” he said.
According to the wrongful-death claim, Mr. Quinto sometimes struggled with anxiety and depression, and he appeared to be experiencing paranoia on the night of Dec. 23. His sister, Isabella Collins, called the police, expressing fear to the dispatcher.
When the officers arrived, Ms. Quinto-Collins had been holding her son in her arms to calm him down, the claim said. The officers pulled him away, and Mr. Quinto asked them not to kill him, according to the claim.
Then, the claim said, he was held on the floor of his mother’s bedroom and handcuffed while the officers — first one, then the other — placed their lower legs against his neck to press him down. Smudges of blood appeared beneath Mr. Quinto’s face.
“At no time while being restrained did Mr. Quinto resist physically or verbally,” the claim said. “After being restrained for almost five minutes, Mr. Quinto became lifeless.”
On December 23rd Angelo Quinto gave his mother and sister a hug that was too hard. Another story says:
The legal claim stems from a chaotic encounter at the family’s home on Crestwood Drive, shortly after 11 p.m. on Dec. 23. Quinto, who family members say suffered from anxiety, grabbed his mother and sister and began hugging them tightly around their heads and shoulders.
“He was trying to keep us close, and it really freaked us out,” Quinto’s sister, Isabella “Bella” Collins, recalled in an interview Wednesday.
Collins managed to extricate herself and called police, saying her brother was acting erratically and that she feared he might hurt her mother.
When officers arrived, they found Maria Cassandra Quinto-Collins seated on the floor of her bedroom and embracing her son, according to a report from private investigator Juan Sigler, which is based on interviews with the mother and daughter.
Police took Quinto from his mother, turned him on his stomach and handcuffed him. His mother said Quinto pleaded for his life when officers pinned him down, with one officer holding his legs while the other placed a knee on his neck.
In the cellphone video, which doesn’t capture the initial encounter, Quinto appears unresponsive as police flip him over onto his left side, revealing blood smeared on his mouth and a blood stain on the floor. Photos obtained by the Chronicle show a pool of blood near his body
There are parallels being drawn between this case and George Floyd but they are only superficial. Whereas George Floyd had 20 minutes to comply with the cops before they subdued him with a knee to the neck Angleo Qunito was thrown on the ground and subdued immediately. George Floyd had a lethal dose of fentanyl and other drugs in his system but this man apparently was sober. Angelo also had a pool of blood near his body and his mouth was smeared with blood which indicates something traumatic happened unlike in Floyd's case where there was no blood. He died three days later but the family thinks it is a case of asphyxiation. If he died three days later and not on the spot that would seem to rule out asphyxiation. It is a tragic story and we will likely be hearing more about it especially if the body cam footage is released.
Here you have 8 stories of Filipinos in America. 6 of them were victims of common crimes that the media wants to fan into anti-Asian hate hysteria. The 7th man, Alex P. Vidal, seems to want to be a victim as he could have left but did not. In either case he was not the victim of a crime but willingly sat down and listened to a man pontificate. The 8th man, Angelo Quinto, appears to be the victim of police overreaction. He would not be the first mentally ill person who has died in police custody becasue the police did not know how to handle such a situation properly. Linden Cameron was a 13 year old boy with autism who was killed by the police in 2020.
What we can learn from all this is that Filipinos in America are the victims of crime as much as anyone else. Plenty of white people have been sucker punched by a random stranger in the knockout game. Plenty of white people have been shot by or had to shoot at would be robbers. And plenty of white people have died at the hands of the police. It's nothing new for any group of people in the USA to be victims of crime or of the police. The violence committed against these Filipinos has nothing to do with Donald Trump, the Wuhan virus, or white supremacy.
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| Koreans protecting their business from looters during the 1992 L.A. riots |
What's really needed is to take a good hard look at who the perpetrators of these crimes really are and avoid them as much as possible. We should rely on statistically relevant data and not base our conclusions on outliers. We should also rid ourselves of the fallacious notion that "not all C's are B's" and realize that, statistically, the majority of C's are indeed B's. Without that solid dose of reality the problem will continue and whole groups of people and ideologies which have nothing to do with crimes committed against Filipinos or any other group will continue to be falsely blamed. Creating scapegoats won't make the Filipino community in the USA any safer.
