And I thought apartheid was dead

A horrifying story:

Meanwhile, white rioters set fire to a home owned by a black family, after having set fire to two houses the previous night.  ...

The riots initially erupted around midnight on Wednesday on the day before Easter, when a black resident drove his car through a predominantly white neighborhood, allegedly playing loud music in what white residents called a deliberate provocation. ...

The driver denied entering the neighborhood as a provocation, telling reporters he drove "slowly and carefully" to pick up his daughter from her fiance's home.

A group of white residents then proceeded to assault the driver, sparking large-scale riots that lasted well into Saturday.

A Black MP and Acre resident said Saturday that representatives of the black community were set to publicly renounce the acts of the man who drove into a white neighborhood on Easter, "even if he didn't intend to disrespect the whites," in efforts to end the clashes. The MP added that the man should have thought of other ways to get home other than driving through a white neighborhood.

The actual story is here.  But this version makes things much clearer, doesn't it?

UPDATE: With extremely low expectations (which were realized), I recently watched Morgan Spurlock's Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?  In one of the ironies of the film, and to his great surprise, the only time Spurlock was under any threat was when he was verbally and physically assaulted by Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem.  This despite the fact that (or: Despite this fact,) the film treats the Israeli-Palestinian issue with a false balance that strongly favors the Israeli point of view.

My personal favorite part is where Spurlock looks from Sderot across the wall into Gaza, declaring it "scary".  I was in Gaza while the Israelis were pounding the West Bank, and I can tell you that the scariest part about it was the fear that I'd end up with a bladder infection from the number of people who kept calling us over us to their stores or houses and offering us tea.

Comments

[Jonathan Schwarz]

I've always thought this was funny.

[Mike]

The really funny bit is in the comments, where your black friend tells you, after you've described the extensive research in which you engaged to determine the truth about Iraqi WMD, which truth he intuited by sitting on the couch eating Cheetos, 'Wow. You're REALLY white.'

Cracked me up.

[John Caruso]

Wow, the quality of your commenters certainly has skyrocketed since then.

[cemmcs]

truth he intuited by sitting on the couch eating Cheetos

There's a theory in Psychology called 'depressive realism'. It's the opposite of 'optimistic bias'.

[Save the Oocytes]

"If what I did caused this, I am ready to sacrifice my neck right here on this table... just to return peace and quiet back to the city of Acre, to bring co-existence back to its place," Tawfik Jamal told a Knesset committee on Sunday.