The Mandingo Factor, Or What makes a Dude want to Burn a Cross

I am pleased to report htat racial tensions are alive and well. Our Aristocratic Overlords should take solice that the strategy of divide and conquer works to their advantage. Play to the hatreds and passions of poor white folks by convincing them that government is all about transferring their wealth to undeserving negroes, and they will vote in favor of allowing the government transfer their wealth to undeserving rich people.

Works like a champ, so well in fact that I have the distinct pleasure of letting you know that in the heart of the Northeast, bastion of hedonistic secular "values" the old time religion has a home in Long Island, a place who's segregationist attitude might make fourties Mississippi blush (Ok a bit of hyperbole, I admit, but hey, this is my blog, and I like Hyperbole). If you thought that cross burning had been relegated to the ash pail of history, think again.

Burning Cross Left at Home of Interracial Couple on L.I.
By PATRICK HEALY

Awakened by a loud bang and the ring of their doorbell, an interracial couple peered out the front window of their Long Island home at 3 a.m. yesterday and saw a cross burning on the front lawn.

They said they immediately called the Suffolk County police, but by the time officers arrived, rain had doused the fire. The police removed the cross, which was three feet tall and made from the slats of a picket fence. By yesterday afternoon, the only remaining trace was a charred circle of grass outside the building, a two-family house in the southwest corner of Lake Grove.

Detective Sgt. Robert Reecks said that the police and the F.B.I. were investigating the incident as a hate crime, but that there were no suspects.

It was the county's first cross-burning since 1998, when a black family in Amityville returned home from church and found a burning cross on their lawn.

The Lake Grove home is a modest green split-level occupied by the couple, who rent the first floor, and another family upstairs.

The couple, who were not identified by the police, said that they had known each other for 30 years, had been married for 22 years and had lived in the house for 8. But they said that yesterday was the first time they felt attacked because of their relationship. The wife is white, and the husband is black.

"My first gut reaction was, how could this happen in the 21st century?" said the wife, who spoke only on the condition that she not be identified because she feared another attack. "I don't understand prejudice."
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Yesterday afternoon, residents in the neighborhood, a middle-class community of rental homes, said they were baffled and unnerved by the cross-burning. No one had seen anyone set fire to the cross or drive or run away, and no one had any idea why the couple had been singled out.

"I'm very scared," said Feroj Ahmad, 41, who lives across the street. "I know the neighborhood is good. All day long, it's very quiet. It's strange, this thing."

Conversations veered toward other occasions when bias has surfaced in the area.

Residents recalled a 1994 arson that destroyed a house that a black family was moving into in Nesconset, a predominantly white hamlet just west of Lake Grove. They also spoke of how, in 1997, the Ku Klux Klan planned a recruitment rally at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, only to be met by community resistance.

The wife said that although her husband remained furious about the cross-burning, she felt that discussing the incident could help to prevent a recurrence.

"My feeling is, let's talk about it, let's get it out there," she said, adding that that her anger toward those who set the blaze had subsided after a few hours, and that she had made up her mind to pray for them.

"Vengeance is the Lord's," she said. "God will repay. That's what the Bible says."

From the NYT, hat tip to Gilliard.