In response, the editorial board of the Dubuque Telegraph Herald warned that Nugent's "racially insensitive" remarks could have "spark[ed] a confrontation" and rhetorically asked whether the concert venue's employees should be expected to work in such a potentially dangerous environment. Noting that white concertgoers didn't express disapproval of Nugent's remarks, and in fact many had cheered him on, the editorial board concluded that racism is alive and well in Iowa: "Anybody who thinks racism is in Dubuque's past had better think again."
Now comes word that there were a number of racially motivated beatings at the Iowa State Fair this past Friday. Did white Iowans, riled up by the hateful words of the pro-gun, Tea Party-supporting rocker, assault innocent black fairgoers?
No. Of course not.
White fairgoers were brutally assaulted by a pack of 30-40 black youths who roamed the festival openly calling it "beat whitey night." One 36-year-old white man was hospitalized with "severe injuries to his eyes, cheekbones, and nose." Two police officers also suffered injuries.
According to one of the police reports, this was actually the second weekend in a row that black youths assaulted whites in or around the state fair. One officer's report reads, "A large group of black male and female juvelines was report[ed] to have started assaulting people again, like last Friday night." In one of the attacks the previous weekend, a white man was beaten by a group of black youths while onlookers shouted racial slurs and yelled "Just kill the white dude."
This isn't the first series of black-on-white beatings to take place in Iowa since Obama's inauguration. Last year, under the heading "Iowa City troubled by surge in downtown beatings," AP reporter Nigel Duara wrote of a series of unprovoked gang assaults that had shocked the "quintessential college town" of Iowa City.
Noting that the University of Iowa had just launched an "alcohol summit" to combat student binge drinking, Duara tried to pass the assaults off as something intrinsic to the college town's "bar culture" and suggested the violence was the inevitable result of the "mix of young people and alcohol."
While Duara tried to give the impression that drunken white college students were responsible for the violence, he left clues that that was not the case. Duara wrote that onlookers cheered on the assailants, and that bystanders who tried to intervene were beaten. The assailants seemed to be committing assaults purely for the "sheer pleasure of it," and police were worried by the "intense violence and random nature of the attacks."
The AP article didn't provide any suspect descriptions, but the Iowa City Police Department's web site confirmed my suspicion that black youths were responsible for the gang assaults:
"Witnesses reported that the victim had run to the aid of a college age male who was being beaten up by 6 to 10 black males. The victim, who was knocked unconscious to the ground, was treated for non life threatening injuries at Mercy Hospital. The suspects were last seen running north on Dubuque St, randomly punching other males as they ran by them."Whether verbally by the liberal media or physically by black youths, it seems that attacking whitey has become a sport in Iowa.
