American progressives shocked by bombshell court decision to jail two native Hawaiians for hate crime against white ex-pat from Arizona, “You have the wrong skin color. No ‘haole’ is ever going to live in our neighborhood!”

“The hate crime messed me up…(they) brutally attacked me out of hate for the color of my skin.” 

American progressives have reacted with horror, outrage, tears and fainting spells following the jailing of two native Hawaiians for beating hell out of an old man from Arizona who’d moved to Maui thinking the proximity to the ocean might help his wife’s multiple sclerosis. 

Last November Kaulana Alo-Kaonohi and Levi Aki Jr. were convicted for punching, kicking and using a shovel to hit Christopher Kunzelman, who suffered concussion, two busted ribs and head trauma, in 2014. 

It’s the first time the US has prosecuted Native Hawaiians for hate crimes, which ain’t to say it beat-downs of white devils don’t happen. 

The Magic Mike of surfing, the ageless, peerless, dick-swinging Mr Laird Hamilton, who grew up on Maui, knows. 

“There was a certain level of …of…of…aggression… on the land. Or should I say, instead of aggression, a certain level of separation. I was a white guy in a dark guy’s world. When you’re a minority in a racially tense environment you get used to being an outcast.”

Aki and Alo-Kaonohi’s lawyers said it wasn’t so much Kunzelman being a white devil so much as his “entitled and disrespectful attitude.” 

U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright didn’t buy it telling ‘em, “You were a racist on that day” and sentenced Alo-Kaonohi to six-and-a-half years and Aki to four years and two months in prison. 

Heat between the men began to simmer after Kunzelman and his wife, who has MS, bought a run-down oceanfront home in Kahakuloa for $175,000. 

“We loved Maui; we loved the people,” Lori Kunzelman told The Associated Press. 

Things got real heated when Kunzelman cut the locks to the village gates, saying residents kept locking him and out. 

“It was obviously a hate crime from the very beginning,” she said. “The whole time they’re saying things like, ‘You have the wrong skin color. No ‘haole’ is ever going to live in our neighborhood.’”

Prosecutors said Aki described Kunzelman to the cops as “rich Haole guy,” a “dumb haole,” and a “typical haole thinking he owning everything … trying to change things up in Kahakuloa,”

Kunzelman said the attack left him with lasting psychological damage. 

“The hate crime messed me up…(they) brutally attacked me out of hate for the color of my skin.” 

Interestingly, Kunzelman had a gun but didn’t use it which impressed hell out of the judge. 

“He had a right to defend himself,” Judge Seabright said. “He didn’t use that firearm.”

And, in a letter to the judge, Aki pulled out the old “some of my best friends are Jews/Blacks/Homos” defence.

“I have people who I love and care about who are white.”

The Kunzelmans’ love affair with Maui is over and they now split their time between Arizona and Puerto Rico although they still own the Kahakuloa house. 

“We couldn’t even sell it to anybody because it’s not safe,” Lori Kunzelman said. “It’s not safe because of the animosity that’s there.”