History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Why Are They Surprised?

53 Comments

Now Lanny Davis is joining in the chorus of Those From Whose Eyes The Scales Have Fallen:

Helen Thomas, who I used to consider a close friend and who I used to respect, has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot. This not about her disagreement about her criticisms of Israel. She has a right to criticize Israel and that is not the same as being an anti-Semite.

However, her statement that Jews in Israel should leave Israel and go back to Poland or Germany is an ancient and well-known anti-Semitic stereotype of the Alien Jew not belonging in the “land of Israel” — one that began 2,600 years with the first tragic and violent diaspora of the Jews at the hands of the Romans.

If she had asked all Blacks to go back to Africa, what would White House Correspondents Association position be as to whether she deserved White House press room credentials — much less a privileged honorary seat?

Two points. OK, three. First, and this is a general point, not just to Lanny, but all those who thought that Helen Thomas was a friend. With all due respect, if you (and all the others who profess shock) are surprised at this, you are an idiot. I was completely unshocked. Of course, I was also completely unshocked that the president has proven to be both a massive redistributor and destroyer of wealth , indifferent to the interests of our friends and solicitous to those of our enemies, and (fortunately) utterly incompetent at carrying out his ultimate goals.

Second (or first point and a half). If Lanny thought that Helen was his friend, it was only because she was a Democrat, and generally (with a few interesting exceptions) carried the water for the Clinton administration, for which he was one of the chief butt boys.

Third point. There is a bizarre flaw in his logic. If one wants to draw an analogy with blacks, it would certainly not be a call for the latter to go back to Africa. Africa, is, after all, whence the blacks (for the most part, ignoring Australian aborigines, etc) actually came. A similar call for Jews to go to their homeland would be for them to go to…wait for it…Israel. Last time I checked, neither Poland or Germany were their ancestral homelands. Those were places to which they were forced to go to be oppressed, and then murdered en masse, after the Diaspora.

First Markos, and now this. Does no one on the left understand anything about history or geography? Even about their own people?

[Monday morning update]

Some Muslims are more equal than others:

I realize that nine Islamist activists who love to sing the evergreen “Death to Jews” — really, innocent folklore in those regions — killed by Israeli soldiers is an act without comparison in the world. It is the lowest and vilest thing that happened since the Holocaust. How dare they kill peace-loving Islamists who sing innocent lyrics like “Death to Jews”?

Still, think about what happened there in China. An astonishing 140 Muslims killed by the Chinese police. Okay, it’s not like nine killed by Jews, but it’s pretty bad.

Nah, it’s no big deal. Chinese, after all, are not Jews.

53 thoughts on “Why Are They Surprised?”

  1. Rand

    I would point out that the Romans were not in the Levant 2600 years ago, only taking over that area with the invasion by Pompey in 63 BC I think.

    2500 years ago it was the Babylonians.

    So, no Lanny Davis is a complete ignoramus about Israelite history. (like the ten tribes being taken away in 721 BC by the Assyrians but I digress).

  2. Holy crap, I can’t believe she said that. I skimmed your earlier post but I hadn’t realised what she had said was that bad.

  4. Roman Consul Pompey was just bringing humanitarian supplies to Israel’s “oppressed” Palestinians Herodians.

  5. “First Markos, and now this. Does no one on the left understand anything about history or geography? Even about their own people?”

    Rand,

    Since historical and geographic accuracy are important to you, I’d like to point out two such inaccuracies in your post.

    First, Australoids are not “black”, if by “black”, you mean African. Australoids are not more related to Africans than you are, and, given the ties between Africa and Europe and America, quite possibly less so. (Of course, the human genetic diversity within Africa means that two randomly selected Africans are likely to be no more related to each other than you are to them, or any of them to an Australoid.)

    Second, Ashkenazi Jews (my ancestors among them) were not forced live along the Rhine. Jews left Israel in waves due to the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and later the Romans, and a thousand or more years later, their decendents settled in the Rhineland. These settlers came because of economic opportunity. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews#Origins (Of course, this comment does not validate Thomas’ viewpoint in any way.)

    I welcome any corrections to these corrections.

  7. First, Australoids are not “black”, if by “black”, you mean African.

    No, by “black” I don’t mean African. In fact, like some on the left, I actually believe that race is a social construct. Which is why I refuse to answer on the government forms what mine is.

    Second, Ashkenazi Jews (my ancestors among them) were not forced live along the Rhine.

    To paraphrase a Democrat president, that depends on what the meaning of “force” is. There was a strong societal pressure for them to do so. In any event, it is not their “homeland.”

  9. Ken, do you actually believe that Iraq is where humanity started out? It is true that (as far as we know) Iraq was where the earliest civilisation started, I’ll grant you that.

    If she was going to be really consistent, then she should have told the entire world to move to East Africa. There might be a slight problem with crowding…

  10. Rand, race as a social construct? Hmmm…

    It is undeniable that people from (for example) sub-Saharan Africa look considerably different from Norwegians, in general. (Referring to ethnicity of course.) Some people think there are more deep-seated differences as well; ethnic Japanese, for example, have a lower tolerance for ethanol than Irishmen. And blood group frequencies are different among different ethnicities, as well.

    However, given that there is more genetic diversity among Africans than among the whole of the rest of the world, the genetic basis of race is less important than some people seem to think.

  11. “Race” might be interpreted to have some non-arbitrary meaning. “Black”, however, is a term for rednecks whose pigmentation hides the red.

  12. I’d like to point out two such inaccuracies in your post.

    First, Australoids are not “black”, if by “black”, you mean African.

    Rand’s post is very accurate. He clearly excludes Australian Aborigines from the notion that they are not African. Bob just has inaccuracies in his ability to interpret Rand’s post, or more likely, as his norm, trying to shift to the topic.

    On topic, Helen Thomas’ comments are not shocking to me. Which is to say I’m not surprised to hear her say something along those lines. What is surprising to me is that these comments might actually get Helen Thomas out of the White House. She’s become to much the cynic that she is a useless jester; a critical pain to leadership yet too serious to find humorous. Besides, other people are losing their jobs, why not her? Certainly, her compasion for her readers hasn’t convinced her to question policies that have deepened the depression. But that’s not a reason to fire her; her deep rooted racism is the reason.

  13. Does no one on the left understand anything about history or geography? Even about their own people?

    Rhetorical questions or not, the short answer is – no, they don’t.

    In decades of arguing with leftists, I’ve rarely met one with a better grasp of history than I had accumulated by fourth grade. Of course having a father who had seen combat in many of the lands of the classical empires might just have had something to do with that.

  14. Why isn’t anyone ripping appart a WHITE person in NORTH AMERICA for telling jews born in israel to “go back where you came from”?

  15. So, attempting to square the circle, it’s possible he wasn’t even talking about that fact, and just have been saying “X are living in Y now, but were living in Z a few hundred years ago, should we have been saying they should be sent back?”. Which I think is a valid comparison.

    Also note that he was using “blacks”, so I think he was just going for the method I was talking about.

  16. Race is an amalgam of melanin level, point of origin (at some arbitrary point in the past), nation of birth, and ethnicity. Going back to the U.S. Census form there were choices of White, a color; African-American, a point of origin; Pakistani, a birthplace; and Hmong, an ethnicity; among others.

    “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

    “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”

  17. Holy crap, I can’t believe she said that.

    You act like she’s the first senior citizen to make an ugly unguarded confession. (On The Simpsons they referred to this trope in passing as, “geriatric profanity disorder.” A term so perspicacious deserves to be a genuine medical diagnosis if it isn’t one already. )

    But let us not brand her an anti-semite – she’s merely anti-zionist. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why Israel is the only illegitimate state on the planet, and it has nothing at all to do with “the jews.” /rolleyes

  18. Fletcher,

    There is genetic diversity among humans, but how we divide that diversity into subgroups is, as Rand says, a social construct. The notion of “race” is one such social construct. Among different countries, you can find varying notions of the notions of what constitutes a race of people, or how many races there are in the world. There certainly are ethnic groups, but where people draw the lines can be pretty arbitrary.

    My use of the word “Australoid” is a case in point — it is term proposed by a racist, and it covers such a large group of people (including outliers like Negritos (look them up)) that generalizations are often wrong. If I could edit my above comment, I’d refer strictly to Aboriginal Australians,

    It is a common misconception among Americans that Aboriginal Australians are more related to Africans than to Asians because their skin is dark and their hair can be kinky, but it isn’t the case. Rand, you like to talk about language from a prescriptivist viewpoint: what I was trying to say above that is that it is incorrect to refer to Aboriginal Australians as “black” when using American English. On the other hand, here’s a long conversation between Americans and Australians (including some Aboriginal Australians) on the subject which would allow you to come to whatever conclusion you want! http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2007/10/informal_survey.html Still, regardless of how the word “black” is used in Australia by various groups, it seems to wrong to use it to refer to Australians in an American context.

    Leland, you are right — this is all off-topic, but Rand wanted to razz Markos because he said “Arab” when he probably meant “Muslim”, so I thought he’d appreciate a discussion about his own accuracy.

    Rand, your blog was the first to alert me to how poorly the Census question on race was set up. After debating whether to say “Human” or “American”, I decided that the Obama campaign’s approach was the best one, so I wrote in “Post-Racial”. 🙂

  19. It is amazing to me how Muslim oppression, either for or against, gets so little press outside of two contexts. The first being Jews against “Palestinians” and the second is the fear of backlash against Muslims after they blow up peaceful citizens somewhere in the world.

  20. It is amazing to me how Muslim oppression, either for or against, gets so little press outside of two contexts.

    ^^^ Here’s another one. I’m completely unsurprised by people being surprised by the status quo.

  21. Leland, you are right — this is all off-topic, but Rand wanted to razz Markos because he said “Arab” when he probably meant “Muslim”, so I thought he’d appreciate a discussion about his own accuracy.

    Once again, Rand clearly did not relate Aborigines to Africans, he excluded them, explicitly. You made the association, so you could make an imbecilic comment.

  23. To respond to Fletcher,

    Geneticists say east Africa, the bible describes Iraq. In cases where there is a dispute like this I find the secular tends to get adjusted over time to agree with the bible. It’s happened so many times regarding so many issues that I feel safely justified.

  25. “In cases where there is a dispute like this I find the secular tends to get adjusted over time to agree with the bible.”

    Maybe in Galileo’s day, but I don’t see many evolutionary biologists (the ones not promoting ID anyway) jumping at the chance to provide evidence to the Garden Of Eden story. Whatever the original verdict of the Scopes Monkey Trial was, in the end, the monkey won.

  26. Leland, I understand that Rand didn’t call Australian aborigines African, but Rand did call Australian aborigines “black”. I’m questioning Rand’s thought process and whether his usage was correct. As for thought process, many Americans assume more of a connection with the people of Africa than there is, based on skin color. As for usage, the link I provided shows that it is debatable, but often wrong in an Australian context and almost definitely wrong in an American context. Sigh. Your comments always provoke me into saying everything twice.

  27. Rand did call Australian aborigines “black”

    Traditionally at least, the British grouped anyone of sufficiently dark pigmentation as “black,” including Australian Aborigines and people in India.

    Considering that none of the people in any of those populations actually literally has black skin, our American distinction that limits the term only to Africans and those of African descent is as much a matter of (inaccurate) linguistic convention as that of the British.

  28. Jeez, Bob, if you’re post-racial then Captain Queeg is post-strawberry. Give it a rest, man.

  30. Huh. Interesting that the preview allows strikethrough but it doesn’t actually appear when posted. “has” and “retired” should’ve had strikethru.

  31. Maybe in Galileo’s day

    Actually, thousands of times more often in our day than Galileo’s. Modern science has a huge advantage.

  32. Referring to the “human race” and then asking people what “race” they are has got to be one of the silliest notions alive in America.

    Perhaps asking folks “What subset of the human race do you use as a label for yourself?” would be the way to go.

    P.S. Hal Duston, great comment!

  33. Your comments always provoke me into saying everything twice.

    Perhaps you should put more thought into your original comments, for instance:

    I’m questioning Rand’s thought process and whether his usage was correct.

    Try just reading him literally. His comment wasn’t what you suggested. Again, he excluded Australian Aboriginies from the group. He didn’t use, as you claim, a more racist term like Australoid, nor did he claim Aboriginies came from Africa. You made all those comments. They were your thought process.

    As for thought process, many Americans assume more of a connection with the people of Africa than there is, based on skin color.

    Indeed, that is Rand’s whole point about social construct. This is why Rand wrote the first time, carefully I might add, that if one wants to use an analogy to blacks, they could then try that very connection you are making. But then he, even more carefully, made the point that the analogy doesn’t necessarily hold because those who base race on a skin color might consider someone like Aboriginies to be “black” and thus from “Africa”, which would be incorrect. So he excluded them. Of course, this has taken numerous paragraphs, from several people, to get this point across to you.

  34. Good on Helen for speaking some truths. Somthing Rand would never be able to say on any issue.

  35. Leland, Rand said: “Africa, is, after all, whence the blacks (for the most part, ignoring Australian aborigines, etc) actually came.” He wrote those words to be explanatory. He wasn’t putting words in anyone else’s mouth. He excluded Aboriginies because he believes (or believed) them to be “black”. I’ve written numerous paragraphs to get this point across to you, but I have no doubt that you won’t understand it even if I write many more.

  36. He excluded Aboriginies because he believes (or believed) them to be “black”.

    No, I excluded them because some people believe them to be black (for the reasonable reason that their skin is as dark as many Africans’).

  37. Re: the comment from the idiot “Go Helen.”

    It was moderated, but I approved it, just to show the kind of stupid cowardly anti-semitic slimebags we’re dealing with.

  40. Speaking of the “Garden of Eden”, I don’t think it was in Iraq. I think it was in the Persian Gulf when it was a dry verdant valley in prehistoric times.

  41. No, I excluded them because some people believe them to be black (for the reasonable reason that their skin is as dark as many Africans’).

    I think you would have done better to exclude southern Indians for the same reason. They are much more numerous than aborigines (certainly in the US). They are also far more familiar to just about everyone except Australians.

  42. I think you would have done better to exclude southern Indians for the same reason.

    Whatever. I think that the subject has been nitpicked beyond death (as in kicking a dead domestic animal).

  43. “And is it just me, or is Bob being particularly thick today?”

    Bob is doing what trolls do — diverting the topic of a post (which in this case is Helen Thomas) onto a side issue (Australian Aborigines), and by that means taking over the conversation and thus getting to have their little power trip.

  44. Sorry you feel that way Andrea. One aspect of Rand’s writing style I enjoy is the way he includes little parenthetical asides. He often does it to increase the accuracy of his writing, just what you’d expect from an engineer, but the tradeoff is that these off-topic asides invite “off-topic” commenting.

    Also, there is a well known Usenet rule that any posting which corrects another’s grammar error will include at least one grammar error of its own. Rand frequently falls prey to a corollary of this rule: when he asks “Does no one on the left understand anything about history or geography” he just about makes it inevitable that he’ll show some geographical or historical ignorance or misunderstanding of his own. I still admire Rand very much, in part because he steps up to bat.

  45. Pingback: Oh, Helen! « The Tiger on Politics

  46. Regarding southern Indians as opposed to Australian aborigines, one more reason why many people might think African blacks (particularly southern African blacks – Masai are different again) are related to Australians is that superficially Australians look much more like Africans than Indians do.

    African blacks, moreover, are a lot more diverse than many people think. Compare Bushmen and Masai for a couple of extreme examples, or for another two that live much closer to each other Zulus and Xhosa.

    Oh, and many of the different tribal groups hate each other as much as American blacks hate Caucasians.

  47. Rand, did you see David Frum’s piece today?

    Yes, see? Invasion isn’t so bad. What’s a little ethnic cleansing if in 30 years the violence is not noticeable. What Bob and Frum fail to notice is Turkey was the aggressor, Israel was not. Also Frum fails to mention Abu Mazen’s latest screed about the “flotilla”.

  48. I noticed — I think the analogy was garbled, as I said. Bill, do you have a link to Abu Mazen’s latest screed? I only read Abbas say things that weren’t different from what lots of peaceful countries around the world were saying — eg “piracy”, etc. (No, I don’t think they are right about it being piracy, etc, but I don’t think such countries pose a threat to Israel.)

  49. AFAIK the Jewish people originate from somewhere in the Fertile Crescent (i.e. probably Iraq). Then they resettled in Judea/Palestine/Israel/whatever for several hundred (probably thousands of years) with a couple of small migrations in between. Eventually a lot of people migrated, got converted to Islam, got killed, or whatever.

    IMO claiming the Jewish people have some historical claim to Israel because they lived there like 2000 years ago is vacuous. What if Bill Clinton declared Ireland as the one true land of the Irish American people and forcibly invaded the country, bombed British Hotels in Dublin, etc. Hmmm…

    What the Jewish people have is a de facto claim to the territory which they occupied in a fragile period between colonial rule and independence. Therein lies danger however. No matter how much I like Jewish people (which I really do) their nation was not born from the rule of law (few nations are) and is as such itself subject to being challenged using the same means they originally used to create their nation (i.e. armed force). If they want to keep their nation they must be ready to defend themselves by the force of arms, which they have indeed done admirably so far.

  50. PS: Oh and the blacks going back to Africa thing already happened. The country is named Liberia.

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