Sam Woodward, former member of Atomwaffen Division, was arrested in 2018 for murder of gay, Jewish pre-med student
Six years after his arrest, a former member of the Atomwaffen Division will face trial in a southern California courtroom over the killing of his former high school classmate – a murder that rocketed the neo-Nazi group to international notoriety and highlighted the wave of violence by far-right American extremists during the presidency of Donald Trump.
Sam Woodward was arrested on 15 January 2018 and charged with the murder of Blaze Bernstein, a former fellow student at the Orange County School of the Arts. Bernstein, a gay and Jewish pre-med student, had been missing for a week before his body was discovered in a shallow grave.
On the night of 10 January 2018, the two men met at Borrego Park in the Orange county city of Lake Forest, according to Orange county sheriff’s reports. Bernstein was home from the University of Pennsylvania on winter break, and re-established contact with his former high school classmate through Tinder, where the two had previously connected.
Bernstein did not hide his identity as a gay man. Although Woodward was not open about his, while in high school he made passes at more than one of his male classmates, according to reporting in Mother Jones.
Bernstein’s body was found with 19 stab wounds. Investigators’ attention quickly turned to Woodward, the well-off son of an observant, conservative Catholic family from Newport Beach.
Right. Thoughtcrime laws would never be used to instead lock up all the Jews for being Jewish, right? No one would ever do that, if we just abolished the 1A to make everything great.
The person said we need to be intolerant of intolerance and you immediately jumped to targeting Jews as a reaction.
Why did you make that specific leap when nobody else here did, and what does it say about you that it doesn’t say about us?
Sure, let’s pretend you’re asking this in good faith.
So you support intolerance because you are Jewish?
Yeah, I doubt that.
“I can imagine something bad” is a worthless counter argument. I can imagine a bad outcome for any situation that anybody has ever found themselves in.
But your imagination isn’t reality. There are so many steps between hate crime legislation and your fantasy land. Even the reality of the holocaust you’re alluding to had absolutely no resemblance to your racist-enabling gibberish here.
You really need to take a critical look at the people who taught you this shit.
Yes, being intolerant of homophobia that habitually results in murders such as the one we’re discussing is totally equivalent to being intolerant of people practising the Jewish faith peacefully!
Sure, we can use your logic and pick a religion that causes more murders - after all, without many Jews, there aren’t many Jewish murderers. Would you prefer we swap to Islam or Christianity?
And don’t think I missed you saying “peacefully”. The proposed idea is that we incarcerate “peaceful” homophobes. That’s the whole topic here, because we already incarcerate the violent ones.
Hate and prejudice for a group of people cannot be peaceful, “peaceful homophobia” is an oxymoron.
That would be intolerance though