Family members of George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin, are demanding that Eric Holder’s [In]Justice Department charge the New Black Panther Party with a hate crime for putting a “dead or alive” bounty on Zimmerman’s head. The family is probably wrong in its specifics, but right in the overall principle. The problems with their specifics are A) that except in very narrow circumstances, the whole concept of “hate crimes” is seriously flawed because it penalizes the same action by different degrees depending on the “thoughts” of the perpetrator, and b) because even under an expansive reading of hate crimes, the bounty probably doesn’t qualify because it is not aimed at Zimmerman because of his ethnicity but rather for revenge.

But that doesn’t mean the Panthers should not be arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned — and ostracized for life. Their bounty appears, almost certainly, to violate numerous state laws, as former Justice Department official and whistleblower J. Christian Adams explained in a great column a couple of weeks ago:

Let’s start with solicitation to kidnap.  In announcing a reward for the seizure of Zimmerman, the New Black Panthers may have violated Florida Code 787.01.  It makes it a felony to “by threat, confining or abducting, or imprisoning another person against his . . .  will without lawful authority with intent to . .  . terrorize.”

Merely soliciting someone else to do this is also a felony in Florida under Florida Code 777.04.  “A person who solicits another to commit an offense prohibited by law and in the course of such solicitation commands, encourages, hires, or requests another person to engage in specific conduct which would constitute such offense or an attempt to commit such offense commits the offense of criminal solicitation.”

Meanwhile, this isn’t just a state matter. Again, Adams explains, this time putting the onus directly on the Panther-enabling Attorney General and race hustler Eric Holder to enforce federal laws against clearcut violators:

Here we go again.  Eric Holder’s Justice Department last month oversaw a guilty plea for solicitation of kidnapping, a federal offense.  Jayen Patel entered a plea in New Jersey for soliciting a purported white supremacist (actually an FBI agent acting as a white supremacist) to conduct a kidnapping…. Will Eric Holder at last open an investigation into the criminal conduct of the New Black Panthers?  Will there be arrests like in the Jayen Patel case?  It sure would be a way to put an end to the New Black Panther albatross that hangs around Eric Holder’s neck, and will through November.

Of course, this is the same national Panther organization against whom (in a story I personally co-broke in print) the racialist Holder and his racialist minions dropped charges in an abundantly manifest voter-intimidation case in the 2008 elections. Holder won’t prosecute them, perhaps because he thinks and has quoted and said that “No matter how affluent, educated and mobile (a black person) becomes, his race defines him more particularly than anything else. … [T]here’s a common cause that bonds the black United States attorney with the black criminal….”

Maybe that explains why DoJ won’t do anything to combat the bounty-offering Panthers, and won’t even comment on the matter (as reported by Kerry Picket of The Washington Times). (With regard to issues related to the earlier Panther case, Holder also is unconcerned about flagrant vote fraud, calling it “manufactured“, even though just in the last week new charges were filed in yet another of a nationally growing number of vote fraud cases, this time in Indiana.)

In these and many other cases, amply documented by Adams, by me, and by others, Eric Holder’s Justice Department aids and abets race-based thuggery, at the very least by deliberate and malign (not benign) neglect. When thuggery is encouraged, the encouragers themselves are morally no better than the thugs.

Therefore, Holder and his minions themselves are thugs.