October 29, 2023

For weeks, 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.

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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.

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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.

Image made using Dead End by freepik.

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).