One oddity of laws against “hate crimes,” in addition to their Orwellian thought crimes aspect, is that someone who commits a crime out of “hate” should by today’s liberal logic be punished less, not more, for the crime.

Hate aimed at entire groups of human beings is, at its core, a manifestation of irrationality, mental blindness, Pavlovian conditioning, rabid emotionalism, a kind of insanity.

Why, then, is not the mind-poisoning influence of “hate” regarded as a mitigating rather than punishment-enhancing factor in the judgment of wrongdoers?

Note that, like much else in our responsibility-denying culture, a criminal’s claim that the booze or marijuana or TwinkiesÔ caused his crime is a way of displacing guilt from the criminal. Its analog is the claim, for example, by people who chose to smoke pack after pack of cigarettes carrying warning labels that they are innocent addicts - and that the tobacco companies should be made to pay for their illness.

But like these other things, the idea of hating all members of a particular race or religion or other group of people can be viewed as a toxic pollutant that susceptible individuals absorb from their environment - from the racist notions given off by companions, movies, books - and from politicians eager to keep or expand their own power by using hate to pit one group of people against another.

When a person driven insane by toxic pollution goes on a killing rampage, the law does more than judge and confine the killer. It also increasingly looks for the polluter who poisoned his mind.

Behind virtually every “hate crime” perpetrator is some other person or persons who infected his mind with the germ of hatred. Our society protects freedoms of press, speech, and belief, even for those who are hateful. (University speech codes, and the legal “fighting words” doctrine that may legitimize somebody punching you if you slap him with too offensive an epithet, are intrusions on such rights.)

Behind almost every violent harvest of hatred lurks somebody who sowed its seeds. This sowing of discord should not be legally prohibited or legally punished under our Bill of Rights. But those of us who sincerely desire the withering away of hatred in our society and in peoples’ hearts should ostracize those who cultivate hate. Consider some recent examples:

1) Vice President Al Gore’s wife Tipper says that her prime effort as First Lady would be to help those who suffer mental impairment or illness. Yet she said nothing four years ago when her husband described his critics as “the extra-chromosome right wing,” a medical way of saying those opposite him on the political spectrum suffered the brain impairment called Downs Syndrome. Gore’s speech ridiculed and insulted every differently-abled person in America, especially the mentally challenged.

The Republicans countered by honoring a courageous young woman with Downs Syndrome at their 2000 National Convention, giving her the podium to make a speech filled with deep insight and love. The liberal press and establishment networks went out of their way not to cover her speech or link it to Gore’s hate-filled words. Perhaps they did not want to acknowledge the Republicans’ compassion.

In the present campaign, Gore allies have promoted the unverified notion that Gore’s opponent, Texas Governor George W. Bush, suffers from dyslexia and other brain-related problems. These things have been used to question Bush’s competence - and, by inference, the competence of everybody else who has such conditions (like American dyslexics George Washington and Thomas Edison) --, not to reach out with the love or understanding Tipper Gore claims to have for such people.

Gore allies and sock puppets have also launched a last-ditch effort to depict Bush as having too low an I.Q. to be President. David Corn of the ultra-leftist magazine The Nation declares that those he knows regard Bush as “deficient on intelligence.” Michael Kinsley of Slate.com calls Bush a “moron.” Leftist lackey Todd Gitlin in Salon.com discerns in Bush “mindlessness….ample evidence that he does not reason.”

The reason for their ad hominem shrillness is clear enough. This allegedly-stupid Bush bested their boy in three of three debates, rising in national polls after each encounter and now on the verge of beating Gore in the race for President. Unmentioned in their desperate attack, Bush earned a Bachelors degree from Yale University and a Masters from Harvard, and along the way he scored higher than Gore on his SAT and earned significantly higher grades. Gore flunked out of Vanderbilt Divinity School (perhaps, as Woody Allen joked, for peeking into the soul of the kid sitting next to him during a test) and, with near-failing grades, dropped out of law school.

But the message of hate in Gore’s propaganda is injuring millions of others. It proclaims that those who purportedly have a low or average I.Q. are inferior, to be ridiculed, and to be denied opportunity to seek responsible positions. This is all the more ironic, as this column has reported, because Democrats are spearheading a major effort to register as voters past and present residents of mental health institutions - apparently because they expect the stupid and insane to vote Democratic. Does Tipper Gore approve of her husband’s denigration and hatred of those he believes to be his intellectual inferiors, a message akin to what Adolf Hitler used to dehumanize such human beings?

2) Ralph Nader, Presidential candidate of the leftist Green Party, is, according to some recent polls, attracting anywhere from 3 percent to 10 percent of voters in a few states that could be key in picking the next President. As Nader’s pivotal role has grown, so has press scrutiny over proper issues - his positions, his diversified investments in industries he has criticized, and the like.

But, in recent days, Nader has also come under racist attack. Liberal journals supporting Mr. Gore have warned readers that Nader is of Arab (Lebanese) ancestry, can speak Arabic fluently in private, is sympathetic to the Palestinians, and, more than 40 years ago, he published his first article in the American Mercury, a journal founded by H.L. Mencken that also published many major writers, but that late in its existence also published some anti-Semitic pieces. Nader’s article had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, as this new McCarthyite guilt-by-association attack implies.

The image of Arabs produced in the American mind by decades of news coverage and movies has been colored with negativity. Pinning the Arab-American label on Nader could therefore be an attempt to raise his negatives in the minds of voters.

Moreover, as ethnographer Dr. Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University has noted, only one out of 20 Jewish-Americans is in any sense a political radical - but that is enough to make half of all American radicals Jews. Logically, then, as a radical activist, Mr. Nader likely attracts a disproportionate share of his support from the Jewish community. Branding Nader an Arab-American sympathetic to Palestinians is an obvious wedge attempt to split off Nader’s supporters.

But this tactic is also racist, cynically using racial differences in a divide-and-conquer way to use hate and fear to move voters from one politician to another.

This tactic could backfire if radical activists and other progressives recoil against the candidate sowing racist hate against Nader for his own gain.

And, as a further factor, America now has more Moslems than Presbyterians. And the key battleground state of Michigan is home to more Moslems than Jews. Trying to ignite anti-Arab-American hatred in this first campaign to elect the first new President of the Millennium could be playing with fire.

[Joining in the jackal-pack attack on Nader is the selfsame Todd Gitlin, Professor of “Culture” at New York University, a founding father in the 1960s of SDS, the Leftist Students for a Democratic Society. Has he matured or moved towards the center in urging repudiation of Nader and voting for Gore? Or, more than 30 years ago, did Gitlin proclaim the dictator of Communist China, Mao Tse-tung, to be the Second Coming of Christ, before whom every knee should bow in Marxist obedience? Nader is a Leftist, but of a maverick kind. The Clinton-Gore Administration was reelected in 1996 after Communist China contributed millions of dollars for that purpose. Perhaps Gitlin continues to serve his childhood god.]

3) Racism is a form of collectivism. It erases people as individuals, telling them to think of themselves first and foremost as members of a race, a collective identity. And it teaches people, in an us-against-them fashion, to take sides with those of their own race and to live in tension with those from other races. It is a kind of genetic nationalism (although scientists have yet to isolate a “race gene” to justify this arbitrary and primitive ideology).

Racism, the basis of Nazism, is also an anti-diversity ideology. Real diversity is individualism, honoring the unique value of each person. Racism opposes diversity, teaching that one person of a particular skin color is interchangeable with another. Racial quotas at places like the University of Michigan (as reported last Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes”) assume that all people with black skin are somehow the same, but that they are all different in the same way from all people with white skin. Individuality to a racist is nothing. The collectivity of the race, or as Hitler called it the Volk (as in VolkswagenÔ), is all that ultimately matters. Marxists have a near-identical philosophy - the biggest difference being that their collective is the equally abstract and unprovable notion of class. Nazis kill Jews because they are Jews. Marxists kill Jews because they are capitalists. In the end, the dehumanizing effect is the same.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded to work against such racism, to advance us to a world where people would be known as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, not by the color of skin but the content of character. Pink also is a color, so we are all “colored people.” But during the closing weeks of this presidential campaign, the NAACP has put out a television ad that seems designed to inflame racial polarization and identification, the opposite of the color-blind society that was the goal of most past civil rights leaders.

The ad features an old pick-up truck on a dirt road, trailing behind it a chain. This was the weapon racists used on June 7, 1998, in Jasper, Texas, to drag to death a black man, James Byrd, Jr. As the camera focuses on the moving truck’s bumper and a few feet of taut, twitching chain, Byrd’s daughter Renee Mullins is heard saying: “When Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate crimes legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again…. Call George W. Bush and tell him to support hate crimes legislation. We won’t be dragged away from our future.”

This ad, attributed to the non-tax-exempt arm of the NAACP (the National Voter Fund Drive) but carrying the NAACP logo, never mentioned that Texas already had a Hate Crimes law. It never mentioned that of the three killers, all had been convicted, two sentenced to the death penalty and one to life in prison; no greater penalty could be given, with or without a new Hate Crimes law. It never said the obvious: that racists as virulent as these killers would not have been deterred by any such law anyway.

When Hitler’s propagandists wanted to foment hatred and anti-Semitism, they put out movies showing crudely stereotyped Jews and other Nazi targets juxtaposed to images of swarming rats and other vermin. This created an impression of evil by association, a connection between rats, Jews, gypsies, and others marked for destruction.

The NAACP ad repeatedly linked the name of George W. Bush to a murder with which he had no connection whatsoever. It then suggested that somehow Bush had killed the murder victim “all over again.” And it left a clear impression that Bush was dragging African-Americans “away from our future.” The ad was apparently approved by NAACP President, former Democratic Member of Congress and prime time speaker at the 2000 Democratic National Convention Kweisi Mfume. The ad appeared just after news reports that African-American voter enthusiasm and turnout for Democrats was expectedly so low that it could cost Mr. Gore the Presidency.

“It’s not at all political. It’s not at all a partisan ad,” NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said on Fox News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes. “It’s not about Governor Bush.” Renee Mullins on the same show said, “I’m not linking Governor Bush to my Dad’s death.”

But veteran civil rights activist Roy Innis, National Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, disagreed. “It’s the race card,” said Innis of this ad. That is, the ad, in Innis’ judgment, was designed to stoke racial fear, polarization, identification, and increased voting along racial lines.

The ad seems designed to replace thought about issues in the black community with raw emotion. Emotions often motivate people more powerfully than abstract ideas, but the motive behind this ad seems more sinister. A majority of African-Americans, according to polls, have little enthusiasm for Gore. In cities such as Washington, D.C., 70 percent or more of black parents prefer Bush’s plans to give them school choice to Gore’s defense of status quo schools.

This ad insults African-Americans by treating them like sheep who can be herded by emotional scare tactics, like those the same propagandists are aiming at senior citizens.

This ad conveys different messages to different viewers. Thoughtful African-Americans are left wondering why this ad avoids any serious discussion of ideas. Does the NAACP assume that black adults are like children? That same question flickers in the minds of others seeing the ad. What is the NAACP saying about the intelligence of African-Americans when it treats them like children who can be brainwashed by brainless propaganda such as this? This ad actually reinforces in other races and blacks alike the untrue notion that African-Americans really are mentally inferior, if this kind of claptrap is how their own group talks down to them. The hidden aim of this ad seems to be to keep blacks as slaves, down and dependent, on the welfare plantation of one political party.

So what should those of us who honor human equality, dignity, and individuality do when we see politicians deliberately sowing seeds of hate - ridiculing the differently-abled? Identifying rivals by their race, and encouraging racist hatred against them? Using racist ads designed to foment fear and mobilize members of one race against another? Employing emotional manipulation to keep blacks in bondage to one political party? The national chairman and both national candidates of that party have refused all requests to ask the NAACP to stop airing this ad.

We should recognize that in such politics is the genesis of future hate crimes, bigotry, racism, violence, and war. We might agree with such politicians on other issues and be tempted to pick them as a lesser of evils. But for the good of humanity, we should reject the deliberate pollution of the environment we share - the common well from which our human community drinks - with this deadly poison of hate.