Hatred by Willard Gaylin Page A

principle of responsibility. The revolution made a tragic and profound contribution to the moral relativism that has fudged the concept of evil, leading to a substitution of understanding for justice.
    Without a clear sense of responsibility, there is no morality. Without the same sense of responsibility, the law cannot function. Psychic determinism shredded to tatters our sense of human autonomy. Courts of law became courts of nonculpability, with itinerant psychologists acting as court jesters.
    On December 7, 1993, Colin Ferguson boarded the 5:33 P.M. commuter train to Hicksville, Long Island, pumped thirty rounds
of ammunition and sprayed his fellow commuters, managing to kill six people and wound nineteen others. The mayhem was limited only because a heroic passenger overcame him before he could reload. The ever-imaginative defense lawyer, Ron Kuby, a colleague of William Kunstler, decided that his plea of not guilty could be supported by the fact that Ferguson was suffering from “black rage.” What is black rage? Well you might ask. It turns out that it is some “malignant psychological state” black people endure by dint of being raised in a white racist society.
    What a blessing that most black Americans living in the United States have not developed this maddening psychological condition that drives one to mass murder. At the risk of being a spoil-sport, let me mention that Colin Ferguson was raised as an affluent member of the decidedly black culture of Jamaica. There he suffered the indignities of being chauffeured back and forth in an expensive limousine from his expensive home to his expensive private school.
    Even Colin Ferguson seemed offended by this defense. He refused to use the plea, firing his lawyers instead. Still, the “black rage” defense lives on. It has been used in many courtrooms to explain and thus exculpate not only gratuitous black violence against whites but also black crimes against Hispanics, Indians, Koreans, and assorted other minority groups.
    Not to be outdone, defense attorney Erik M. Sears introduced the equally compelling diagnostic category, “early Arab trauma,” in defense of his client, Rashid Baz. In March 1994, Baz had opened fire with an automatic weapon on a group of children on their way to a yeshiva. This was no impulsive maneuver. Baz planted himself on the Brooklyn Bridge, carefully timing the arrival of the bus. Because he was shooting at a moving target, he was able to kill only one student, sixteen-year-old Aaron Halberstam, but he managed to seriously wound three others.
    Attorney Sears—lacking any serious defense for this premeditated
slaughter of the innocents—emulated Kunstler and Kuby and proclaimed his client the victim. Baz had spent the first eighteen years of his life in Lebanon. He could not possibly be held responsible for this murder. He had been so psychologically scarred by the larger environment of his youth that he had no more understanding or control over his behavior “than a fire once lit understands why it’s burning.” All that was necessary was to locate an expert witness to lend scientific credibility to the defense. He had no trouble locating Nuha Abuddabeh, a Ph.D. in psychology, a practicing clinician, and the hostess of her own talk show, no less. It was she who introduced the disease “early Arab trauma” into the lexicon of psychologically exculpating conditions.
    Logically, this disease would seem to exculpate all people who were raised in an Arab culture for the first eighteen years of their lives from criminal charges of murder. If so, it could equally be grounds for banning this population—psychically incapable of controlling their murderous rage—from entering the country. While denigrating these defenses as ludicrous, I acknowledge both Ferguson and Baz to be “sick” people. But common people using common sense will almost inevitably convict them in a