Race riot posted by Richard Seymour

"Riots have broken out in the mixed city of Acre, reportedly triggered when an Israeli Arab man drove his car during the Yom Kippur religious holiday.

"Dozens of cars and shops were damaged as hundreds of people took to the streets, Haaretz newspaper reported.

"For Jews, Yom Kippur is a sombre day of fasting, during which it is considered offensive to drive in much of Israel.

"The Arab man was reportedly attacked by youths who said he was making noise intentionally, Haaretz said.

"The Arab man is reported to have said he was simply driving to a property he owned in the eastern part of the city."

The usual procedure when reporting violence of this kind is to place a special accentuation on the ethnicity and/or religion of the rioters. Think "Muslim rioters". But here they only relate the ethnicity of the offending Arab. The second step, if I recall correctly, is usually to inveigh ponderously against the blight of religious intolerance and the threat to free expression and Enlightenment ideas. Curiously absent so far. And the third step is to engage in a surreptitious essentialism in which said violent intolerance is a fact of [Muslim/Arab] culture which is strictly opposed to and excluded from [Western/Anglophone] culture. I can't see it happening this time.

Labels: clash of civilisations, enlightenment, islamophobia, Israel, racism