I seriously doubt that if a white man had committed the assault, he'd have been out looking for any 'white bastard' to attack in retribution.
For all the 'I was blinded with rage and completely out of control' rhetoric, there's usually a calculated level of self-preservation in these kind of revenge attacks. Somehow the seeker-of-vengeance doesn't walk into a situation where there's a high likelihood that he'll come off worse. They target someone who's at a disadvantage: someone who's isolated, part of a minority, not surrounded by a crowd of supporters; someone who's not expecting an attack and won't know how to respond; someone who won't be armed; someone weaker, drunker, somehow incapacitated.
It's a rare seeker-of-vengeance who'll wade straight into a pub packed with '[insert target group here] bastards' and pick a fight he's going to lose in five seconds.
And even when they do, it's not a noble sacrifice. It's all part of this same toxic culture of male pride and male violence and men who can't be expected to articulate their feelings or control their actions. It doesn't fix anything and it has nothing to do with the victim of the original crime.
I'm so sick of this notion that men who are suffering great distress will walk around like a loaded gun. There's no innate need for it. It's not a spontaneous, too-fast-to-control response, like punching someone who just spat in your face. It's a choice, and involves thought processes and deliberate actions. It's about asserting control when you feel furious, devastated and helpless, and it's alternately tutted at (well, he really shouldn't have, but you can see how...), excused (how would YOU feel if your friend had been raped/your father had died/you'd lost your job) or fetishished (all those revenge films).
In general, there's no cultural assumption that women will assault blameless strangers in a fog of rage. We are expected to process our grief/fury/fear in a civilized way. And we mostly do. There's no physical reason why a woman couldn't pick up a gun and perpetrate the kind of mass shootings which are the extremist end of indiscriminate male rage (there's invariably a inciting incident: a loss, a humiliation, a bereavement) but somehow it rarely happens.
I think we need to be honest about how we tacitly accept or enable this behaviour. Some of the response to the Neeson interview reminds me of the Warwick controversy: but they've said they're sorry, nothing actually happened, what more do you want? There's actually a lot I want, but one thing would be not minimizing this into a whoops I was in the wrong/I'm sorry/oh that's okay then situation. It's bigger than that. I don't doubt Neeson does regret his actions, but the way he speaks about them is jarring, quite oblivious, and doesn't have the effect he intended.