WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Federal investigators have been called in following a fire at a Kansas restaurant run by a Middle Eastern family.
The Petra Mediterranean Restaurant in Wichita was destroyed Wednesday. The words “Go back” were painted on a nearby storage unit.
The Wichita Eagle reports the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is investigating, and the FBI, which investigates hate crimes, has been notified. The ATF says it is trying to determine if the FBI should be more involved in the investigation.
The restaurant’s owners, Ranya Taha and Bashar Mahanweh, say the fire might have been a hate crime.
They also say they’re comforted by how the community has rallied around them. They say they’ve lived in Wichita for years and have always found the community to be loving and supportive.
I’m a Wichita native and still go back a couple times a year to visit family and friends. It’s that strange midsize city that leans Republican but still has a sizable progressive/sane population.
Anyway, stuff like this happening there is sadly not very surprising. But as that last line in the story indicates, there are many very good people there that have embraced the minority community in the face of persecution from the Republican majority in the city and state.
There was a story not too long ago about another Mediterranean restaurant in Wichita where some backwards bigot left a negative Yelp review because of the owners’ ethnicity. (The dumbass had been eating pita and falafel for years, but didn’t make the connection that the proprietors might not be white native Kansans.) The decent Wichitans rallied in support of the restaurant, filling up the restaurant in droves while staging a well-publicized boycott of the bigot’s business.
My larger point being, as is the case with too many “red” areas in our country, Wichita has thousands of very good, smart, decent people living in it. So when we heap scorn down on the perpetrators of this hate crime and the societal groups that endorse and enable such carnage, I would hope we can avoid issuing a blanket condemnation of all of the residents of Wichita or Kansas, many of which have been fighting an uphill battle against ignorant bigots for their entire lives.
They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Just local white boys that couldn*t handle their glass of beer .