Victim speaks out after woman allegedly tried to light her hijab on fire inside Ajax library
Victim speaks out after woman allegedly tried to light her hijab on fire inside Ajax library
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Suspect attacked a complete stranger based on nothing but appearance, and in a manner that indicates the hijab was primary if not sole source of offense. How on earth do you not prosecute this as a hate crime? How is that even in question?
For a serious response to your probably hypothetical question, I would give enough leeway to consider mental illness if the attack was truly random and the victim happened to be a hijabi. Of course, that would have to be substantiated with a medical history and what the ("alleged") perpetrator said at the time of the attack, as the article is not specific about that.
I would add that the definition of hate crime is relatively fluid depending on cultural bias. For example, there are many Jewish communities that invest heavily into tracking the nature and number of hate crimes suspected to be related to antisemitism. As a result the threshold is often lower to define such crimes as hate crimes
This isn't to say that those hate crimes are overcounted, rather it's that other groups are more likely to have crimes be dismissed / written off as for a reason other than 'hate'.
People within a group can almost always tell you when a crime is due to hatred but unfortunately we often don't take it seriously unless they have a foundation with millions of dollars and a team of lawyers behind them.