The answer, IMO, is no, it wasn’t a hate crime. It may well have been good old fashioned bigotry, we really won’t know about that until more information is forthcoming on the story - but there’s every chance in the world that if it’s bigotry, and it’s not nipped in the bud, the hate crimes could come later on.
The upper-right-quadrant is all a buzz about the police in Lewiston, Maine investigating what they call “a possible hate crime“.
In a nut shell some kid at a middle school put a ham sandwich on a table where a group of Muslim students were sitting - ham is, of course, haraam (unlawful) in the Islamic faith. If the kid knew this what he did can be viewed in no other light than bigotry.
As bigotry is a learned behaviour, and given the age of the kid involved (11 - 14), it would probably be far more appropriate to be looking for who put him up to it, and dealing with them.
Painting a swastika on a tabernacle is a hate crime, throwing a bloody pigs head into a mosque is also a hate crime, and criminal prosecution is appropriate in those cases. What this kid did is bigotry, and the appropriate response in this case is for his dad, or his grand dad (unless they suffer from advanced bigotry or Islamophobia), to take him out behind the wood shed and speak to him in the universal language of the hand slapping padded skin - and inappropriate alarmist bunk like “Today it’s a ham sandwich, tomorrow it’s the world!� only simply helps spread the bigotry.
I blush a little when I think of some of the insensitive things I did in grade 5 or grade 8. You’re right that we need to be very careful about labeling the actions of kids as hate crimes. As long as there is someone to correct the behavior I see little harm in it.