Okay so I've been following this George Zimmerman thing. I usually don't get caught up in the media trials, but this one had me for some reason.

George Zimmerman is a mixed race person from a mixed-race gated community. The community had been subject to a large number of burglaries and other police related matters. Zimmerman was the head of the neighborhood watch community and may have been its primary organizer.

On a rainy night last year George Zimmerman spotted what he thought was a suspicious looking person because the person was lingering in the rain in people's backyards. Mr Zimmerman called the police to report the person as he is done in the past with other suspicious people in the neighborhood. The police told him to stay in his car but he got out anyway because he wanted to track the person.

Trayvon Martin was the person he was tracking. Mr Martin was on his way back from the store. He was visiting his father's girlfriend who lived in the gated community. Mr Martin spotted Mr Zimmerman tracking him. There was an altercation between and Mr Martin got shot. Mr Zimmerman received a broken nose and lacerations to his head.

It seems pretty clear to me that Martin attacked Zimmerman, and that Zimmerman was on the ground being beaten by Martin before he used the gun. Zimmerman had lacerations on his head and a broken nose, while outside the gunshot wound that killed him Martin only had bruised knuckles. There were also eye witnesses who observed the two figures on the ground and heard screaming repeatedly. If Mr Zimmerman had the gun out before the fight had started, I can't see how he would have gotten the injuries he did. Mr Martin wouldn't have had the opportunity to inflict those injuries before Mr Zimmerman could have gotten a shot off.

The only reason this got the media attention it did was because Martin's father was friends with a high-powered civil rights attorney who pushed the issue and got it in front of the media. NBC mis-reported the story claiming Zimmerman originally brought up Martin's race in his call to police, and claiming that the Zimmerman had suffered no injuries in the fight. The media downplayed Zimmerman's actual ethnicity and tried to make this look like a race motivated white on black shooting.

Blaming Zimmerman for any of this is ridiculous in my opinion. Martin attacked him. Zimmerman was the head of the Neighborhood Watch Committee and he was following someone he thought was suspicious because of the high crime rate in the area and because of the way the person was behaving. It was raining and the guy was wandering around in people's backyards. If Martin were worried about Zimmerman, he should have called the police or ran to his father's girlfriend's house.

I am disgusted with the way the black community has reacted to this event. I am disgusted with the way the media has race baited this issue get ratings. There is no evidence that Zimmerman is a racist. He is half hispanic and has black ancestry. Zimmerman had recently been the lead protester at a rally when police assaulted a homeless black man in the area. There is no reason that George Zimmerman and his family should be facing death threats. Spike Lee, who I've respected in the past, gave out what he thought was Zimmerman's phone number to the public so people could call him up and harass him. The poor lady who actually has the phone number gets to listen to death threats every day.

In the city of 120,000 that my girlfriend lives in there have been two very disturbing police reports that have gotten none of the sort of national attention the Zimmerman case did. In one case 3 African Americans attacked and killed a man in a bus stop. They beat him to death because they were playing a game to see if they could knock people unconscious. A few weeks later four African American men stabbed a man to death because they decided that he had no business being in their neighborhood. The reason these events got no attention nationally is because this sort of thing happens all too frequently

I feel sorry for Martin's parents. They lost a son. But their son attacked someone who shot him in self defense.