Courtney Love Appears To Be Right About Racial Hate Profiteer Sarsour Inventing A "Hate Crime" Where There Isn't One
I have definitively uncool musical tastes so I never really paid much attention to Courtney Love -- until Gregg and I met her at my friend Bob Morris' party for his sweet book, "Bobby Wonderful: An Imperfect Son Buries His Parents." There, I found her intelligent and nice.

I'm not surprised to see her speaking out on a supposed "hate crime" that apparently isn't in Columbus, Ohio.

The article from the Columbus Dispatch reveals that she's right. The headline on the piece reported by Beth Burger:

No hate crime in neighborhood brawl involving Somali woman, Columbus police say

A bit from the article:

The fight started just before 9:30 p.m. in the 2800 block of Pinellas Court after 31-year-old Samantha Morales said she saw a Somali woman strike a child in the face with a shoe.

The boy ran off. Words were exchanged.

Morales said the Somali woman, 28-year-old Muna Warsame, was swinging a stick at her, so she told Warsame if she struck her with the stick, she would hit back.

Morales called 911 and accused Muna Warsame, who is not related to Rahma Warsame, of confronting her and threatening to break windows to her home.

Muna Warsame called 911 too. She accused Morales of taking the boy into her apartment, which Morales later denied. Muna Warsame told dispatchers she had a stun gun for protection and she was headed for Morales' apartment.

Morales said Muna Warsame stunned her hand. Morales' screams can be heard on the 911 call as well as the electrical popping sound of a stun gun. She said other Somali neighbors began attacking her. Her boyfriend, 28-year-old Ricky Boice, came to her defense, she said.

"Race has nothing to do with this," Morales told The Dispatch.

Sasha Savitsky writes at FOX:

Courtney Love had a few choice words for pro-Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour.

Love called Sarsour an "anti-American fear mongering fraud" and a "vile disgrace to women and all mankind" in a series of tweets Wednesday.

Love hardly stopped there.

The 52-year-old asked her followers to "research more about [Sarsour] ripping people off" and said, "She's a fraud...an anti-Semitic fear mongering liar" and "a rat."

Love's tweets came after Sarsour raised more than $100,000 for a Somali woman named Rahma Warsame, who claims to have been the victim of a hate crime. However, police said there is no evidence to support Warsame's claim that "the incident involved any type of bias which would constitute the incident being investigated as a hate crime," the Columbus Dispatch reports.

Sarsour:

She added, "Welcome to America where a white woman 'celebrity' uses her platform to deny that a Black immigrant Muslim woman was brutally assaulted."

I see no benefit in this for Love other than the good feeling we get at pointing out ugly lies.

In fact, this is what I explain in my science-based book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," as "costly punishment." This is a term for people (like me) who have a strong sense of justice and act against injustice at cost to themselves.

Courtney Love will not win a new recording contract or a role in a movie because she spoke out against this. In fact, she may hurt her chances of these things because Hollywood is mostly left-leaning (and "leaning" is a bit of an understatement in many cases).

She has my respect for this. Also, as a person who was a friend of an iconic actor whose actions often got reported -- entirely wrongly -- in the media, maybe 1. We shouldn't believe everything we've heard about her; and 2. Maybe if some of that stuff is true, we should let her be the person she is now and not damn her for stuff she did or may have done in the past.

I'm increasingly tired of how we damn certain people -- like Monica Lewinsky -- giving them none of the leeway or compassion we'd give ourselves for our mistakes. I write about this in "Good Manners", too -- "behavioral attribution." To explain what this is -- how we offer ourselves the benefit of the doubt but are stingy about giving it to others -- I give the example of how our traffic mistakes we attribute to confusion or tiredness but how we assume the other guy is, oh, an asshole who probably sat outside our home and followed us just to fuck with us.

Recognizing our tendency to do this can help us grow the fuck up a little and maybe extend a little compassion and benefit of the doubt to others.