The ratio between countries who have intolerance issues, and countries who dont have people of other races or multi-cultural societies is directly linked. East Europe (some retards in Serbia beat up a black footballer recently), Italy, Spain and lots of other places has issues with crap like this because they dont have the same history of multi-cultural societies as for example France, England and such.
Not gotten used to or not having encountered much of people of other races and cultures means they dont know (any better) and hence fear it , and that defacto means ignorance of it. And ofcourse racism and intolerance is the bastard child of ignorance.
So in short, its the opposite, its not strange, but common stuff like this occur in countries who hardly seen people of other races before (in Poland when we went over a school trip there years and years ago, in the streets, they were openly racist to me and other kids who werent white, in a restuarant, a girl in our class were even spit on...).