Zero Tolerance for Intolerance

Just when we think we're so enlightened around here, a bunch of teenagers assault a Sikh man because they think he looks like Osama Bin Laden. In fact the kids were so stupid that in addition to the assault charges, one of them got busted for possession of marijuana and intent to sell crack. Not our community's finest, I must say.

Gagandeep Bindra, who has a short beard, brown skin and wears a Patka, a scarf wrapped around his hair, said that it is not uncommon for people to call him and others with brown skin Osama bin Laden or a terrorist.

"This is like a normal occurrence after 9/11," Bindra said Friday. "Every night when I go out to Franklin Street, someone shouts out bin Laden.... They think anybody brown is Middle Eastern. Anybody brown is a terrorist."

The way people treated him after 9/11 changed, he said, but he expected he would be safe in a college community.

"[The assault was] just shocking at a university campus," Bindra said. "Franklin Street is supposedly the heart of Chapel Hill, and you basically get beaten. That's literally what happened, we were beaten by these guys." - Chapel Hill Herald, 4/3/04

The cops called it a "hate crime," but didn't charge the attackers with "ethnic intimidation." I might have done that differently, I don't think it woudl be terribly hard to prove. I'm not ususally into government doing things just to "send a message," but I want to fire up the bullhorn make it known far and wide that this kind of crap will not be tolerated around here!