Elaine Johnson, chair of the Human Relations Commission, chats with the two featured speakers, Morris Dees and Mark Weitzman, at "Combattng Hatred," the third annual international conference on human rights sponsored by the Human Rights Institute of Kean University. Dees is founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgovery, Alabama and Weitzman is director of government affairs and the director of the Task Force against Hate and Terrorism for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The confrence, held in Union in January, centers on hate crimes, defined as criminal offenses that are motivated by the offender's bias against the victim's race, religion, enthnicity, sexual orientation or disability. The FBI reports there were 7,59 incidents in 2007, with 759 in New Jersey.