For over a month we’ve seen videos exposing
Hamas’s depravity. Its soldiers’ blatant disregard for human life and the
seeming joy with which they carried out their depravity was disheartening.
Sadly, this kind of depravity can be
found closer to home, too, where videos abound of black crime across America,
with people shot, pushed in front of trains, sucker punched, beaten to a pulp,
and even killed by individuals, gangs, or groups of “teens.”
In both cases, the perpetrators have
an ostensible enemy at whom their anger is directed. For Hamas, it’s Jews, and
for blacks, it’s whites. Apologists for both groups claim it’s the actions of
the “oppressor” that caused the “victims” to react. For Hamas, it’s Jews
“stealing” Palestinian lands. For blacks, it’s slavery and Jim Crow. In both
cases, though, the outsized violence against bystanders demonstrates that those
are just convenient justifications for evil people to gain power.
Hamas’s soldiers, while blaming Jews
for everything, often target Muslims as well. They also carelessly target their
weapons, striking their own people, while hiding soldiers and materials behind
women and children in mosques, schools, and hospitals. When Israel
retaliates and civilians die, the resulting images make great PR.
In America, even as the grifters at
BLM and Antifa claim that white racism is the cause of virtually every evil,
which inevitably creates black criminals who abuse whites or rob, plunder, and
destroy businesses, the reality is that most of the victims of black criminals
are themselves black. But that doesn’t matter to the race hustlers who use lies
and deception to keep blacks and naive white liberals angry. Democrat race
pimps don’t care that far more black blood is in the street because all they
need is one video of a white person acting or reacting against a black person,
and they’ve won the lottery, as they did with videos of Rodney King and George
Floyd did.
In reality, being an oppressed
minority is not necessarily a recipe for failure, as Thomas Sowell explains
in Discrimination and Disparities. He discusses the
relative success of various minorities around the world, including the Chinese
in Southeast Asia, Jews in Eastern Europe, Indians in East Africa, Koreans in
America, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and many other groups reviled in
the countries in which they live.
The reality is that American blacks
and the Palestinians have both had many opportunities to achieve success and
usually squandered them away.
First, the Palestinians. Up until the
mid-20th century, there was no such thing as Arab Palestinians. In the 2,000
years before the pre-Christian era, the one constant in the land was a Jewish
presence, whether as a nation or as a vassal of Babylonians, Persians, Greeks,
and Romans. After the Romans ended the Jewish nation and created a Palestinian
colony, there were the Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks and, eventually,
the Ottomans, and then the English.
The one constant was the Jews. Aside
from Bedouins and the Druze, who have been there for several hundred years, the
Arabs who identify today as Palestinians mostly drifted into the land beginning in the 1830s.
For the century preceding Israel’s
establishment, much of the area was sparsely populated with towns and tribes in
constant battle. In addition, the land was inhospitable, and agriculture
struggled (something that changed only when Zionist Jews brought in modern
farming techniques and hard work).
Jews were a majority of the population of Jerusalem as early as at
least 1875—and in the late 19th century began purchasing land from the Arabs.
By 1948, Jews owned 8% of the land that would become Israel, while 3.3% was in
Arab hands, and 17% had been abandoned by Arabs planning on returning after
Israel was eliminated. Britain owned the remaining 70%, which it took from the
Ottoman Turks after WWI. The local Arabs never owned it. Thus, it’s a lie that
Israel stole its land from the Arabs.
In 1924, Britain split the land in
two, with British-mandate Palestine going to the Jews and Trans-Jordan
(modern-day Jordan) going to the local Arabs. That didn’t stick. In 1948, after
the Arabs had already gotten Trans-Jordan, the UN split British-mandate
Palestine again, creating the State of Israel, which was liberally interspersed with an Arab state. The Arabs
responded by attacking the newly created nation to take it all.
In 1999, Bill Clinton negotiated a
treaty between the PLO and Israel that would have given the Palestinians 92% of
the West Bank, all of Gaza, and various concessions within Israel proper. The
Palestinian leader, Yasser
Arafat, rejected it and instead launched
a war against Israel. In 2005, Israel exited Gaza, removing 5,000 of its own
citizens, and allowed the area to be self-governing. The citizens elected
Hamas.
Since Israel exited Gaza, the world
has donated over $10 billion there. Sadly, instead of spending money
on building up the infrastructure and industry, Hamas put much of that money
into building a “Metro” of tunnels into Israel and buying weapons to attack
Israel. Imagine how different Gaza would be had its leaders spent that money
building schools and viaducts, training entrepreneurs, or enhancing the
agriculture industry.
Similarly, in the United States,
slavery ended in 1865, and Jim Crow was gone by 1965, but that didn’t stop the
victim industrial complex from poisoning the minds of many black Americans. For
four decades, the Democrat party, the media, and America’s schools have told
blacks they can’t succeed because of white racism. (This despite the fact that
American blacks have incomes that exceed the average of almost every country on the planet.)
They’ve told blacks that racist whites
are waiting to lynch blacks. Since at least 2008, they’ve told blacks that,
because of systemic racism, they cannot succeed and aren’t responsible for
their conditions or actions. Along the way, grifters like Patrisse Cullors,
Ibram X. Kendi, and Barack Obama got rich. When Barack Obama was elected race
relations were about the best they’d been in history. Not so
much now…
Imagine what America would be like today had he been a unifier and tried to
empower black entrepreneurship rather than being the race pimp he was.
At home and in Israel, we’re seeing
the same thing: People greedy for power and wealth tell specific groups they’re
victims incapable of helping themselves, thereby turning them into drones
committed to violent struggle. Then, say their alleged oppressors are subhuman
beings who deserve what they get. Do all of this, and it’s no surprise that
these “victims” embrace a savage mindset without empathy, making them not only
willing but enthusiastic about unimaginable and routine cruelty.
While the “oppressors” are the
ostensible targets, it doesn’t really matter if innocents get killed, which is
exactly what we see. Hamas is sacrificing Palestinians, and blacks are killing
blacks along with whites and Asians, all because they believe the lie that
they’re victims and their oppressors deserve what they get. Victimhood is a
bloody game but, sadly, a profitable one.
