Let’s start with the basics: What was so appalling about Liam Neeson’s behavior?

When he was a young man, the Irish actor learned from a friend that she had been raped by a black man. He responded, as he admitted in an interview with a British newspaper this week, by arming himself with a cosh (a short club that British and Irish people use to bash one another) and wandering about “hoping some black bastard would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him.”