Answer:  The notion that all crimes are hate crimes is a preposterous, indefensible claim made by some who oppose hate crime laws and pending hate crime legislation. 

We’ve even seen it said that if hate crimes exist, then crimes not deemed to be hate crimes must be ‘love crimes.’*  It’s difficult to fathom that people can be so simplistic and illogical.  It is patently false that all crimes are hate crimes.  In fact, it is not even true that all violent crimes are hate crimes.  The vast majority are not.  Where greed or financial desperation are the motives for crimes—as is the case of almost all burglaries, armed robberies, and muggings—there is no hatred toward the victims.  Criminals just want their victims’ money.  Even when a strong emotion drives a crime—such as a so-called crime of passion—that emotion is generally not hatred.  It’s typically something shorter-lived like jealousy or rage.  Additionally, when someone kills someone—because of some strong negative emotional state such as rage—generally it is not because they hate some socio-demographic feature of the victim, such as the victim’s race or ethnicity.  Typically, it is because the killer became enraged at the victim based on some aspect of their relationship.  This is why from 1996 through 2006, the FBI tallied 184,604 homicides in the United States, but only 118 hate crime homicides.  Even considering that some hate crime murders were not tallied as such, it is clear the nation’s crime data shows us that very few crimes are hate crimes.

What distinguishes hate crimes from non-hate crimes is that with a bias-motivated crime the victim is purposefully selected based on a hatred toward a socio-demographic feature that that victim has, a feature that often times has historical roots in oppression.  Gender, race, religion, disability status, age, ethnicity, and more recently and in fewer jurisdictions, homelessness status, sexual orientation, and gender identity are all categories from which hate crimes can be based.  In violent, non-hate crime offenses, the perpetrator intends to do harm because of who the specific victim is; in hate crimes, the perpetrator intends to do harm because of what class of people the victim belongs to.  From the perspective of the perpetrator hate crime victims are interchangeable so long as the potential victims have the same hated characteristic.  This differentiates crimes from hate crimes where strong emotions come into play.  For the husband enraged with his wife, only she is his target; for the Neo-Nazi, any Jew will do.  Thus, with hate crime perpetrators, their potential victim pool is large.   This is why hate crimes are seen as victimizing not only the specific person targeted, but also the class of persons the victim belongs to.  This too is why hate crimes are acts of domestic terrorism; they function to terrorize groups of people.  Just as all Americans were placed on alert following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 (and not just those residing in New York City or Washington, D.C.), all blacks are placed on alert when a race-based hate crime happens to a specific black person.  Because of the community-terrorizing feature of bias-motivated crimes, they are particularly pernicious, even though they constitute a small percentage of all crimes committed.
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*In a letter to the editor of an Augusta, Georgia newspaper in 2007.