Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Get Out of Town

Link

One of the more disturbing developments in the Middle East is a growing consensus among Israelis that it would acceptable to expel—in the words of advocates “transfer”—its Arab citizens to either a yet as unformed Palestinian state or the neighboring countries of Jordan and Egypt.


56 percent agree with the statement that “Arabs cannot attain the Jewish level of cultural development”;


And from Abraham Lincoln…

"If all earthly power were given me," said Lincoln in a speech delivered in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, "I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution [of slavery]. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land." After acknowledging that this plan's "sudden execution is impossible," he asked whether freed blacks should be made "politically and socially our equals?" "My own feelings will not admit of this," he said, "and [even] if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not ... We can not, then, make them equals."


No, heaven for forbid that they be made equals or approach those rarified heights of cultural development enjoyed by whites. This, of course, is how we justify the brutal violence that we inflict on “lesser” nations or peoples. Sub human, uncivilized, not amendable to reason, which makes it all so much easier to exterminate the vermin by starvation, bombing, or evicting them.

2 Comments:

At March 03, 2009 8:34 PM, Blogger Jonathan Versen said...

It's tempting to give Lincoln credit for "triangulating", in other words for trying to persuade others who were against freeing the slaves to try to see the other side, without painting the other side as too wildly different from the typical 19th c. white world view.

I'm guessing, however, that wasn't the case.

 
At March 03, 2009 9:04 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

Lincoln was a product of his time as we are of ours. World views change with time and events yet some things like “sending them back” seem to be universal based in tribalism, racism or likely both.

 

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