Liberalism And Its Victims

There are disturbing but definable patterns common to the manner in which both the black community in America and the Palestinians in the Israeli territories have evolved over the last several decades, and very much in evidence in events as they have unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri, and the latest Hamas war against Israel.   The various and differing pathologies that have come to characterize both groups share a common source, a prevailing influence and condition that plagues and deforms both.  That universe of thought and ideology that has held sway over the fortunes of the two communities can be described as patronizing and debilitating, which is also to say “liberalism” or modern liberalism, that is, which is very distinct from the classical understanding of that term - liberalism at the national level in the case of blacks and the international realm for the Palestinians.

Liberalism is no longer recognizable as a governing system or a coherent ideology.  Where once it promoted a congenial view of the American enterprise, defended vigorously our interests abroad, and favored the workingman, it has long since devolved into little more than a toxic narrative of American criminality and moral wickedness projected upon the nation to weaken it and gain power.  It promotes a sinister vision of our founding, history, and critical institutions and deploys a hostile rhetoric that deepens existing fault lines and cynically divides us into warring tribes and classes.  From its former intellectual heights, it has condensed into a single, all purpose, and duplicitous theory: the premise of American malfeasance and culpability, of entrenched, institutionalized bigotry that targets certain groups whom liberals are called upon to defend. 

Race and victimhood define liberalism today, an ideology of grievance that stirs the flames of racial hatred to access power, wealth, and votes.  Other “oppressed” groups too have climbed the ladder of victimhood: Latinos, gays, women, transgenders, Muslims, and, internationally, the Palestinians (who are also Muslim).  When you create a victim class, confer benefits and privileges, lo, the number of victim groups doth grow.  Indeed, any “group” that is outside the white, Christian, heterosexual, male dominated “patriarchy,” dripping with racism and hate as it is, will qualify, for they will increase the growing coalition of the aggrieved, thereby expanding the left’s base as they busily balkanize the nation into competing clans, each seeking favors from government benefactors. 

Individuals in the liberal imagination no longer exist; they are members of oppressed “minorities,” victims unable to fend for themselves, not responsible for their actions and in eternal need of assistance.  The aid comes not from the victims themselves or their families or communities but from powerful liberals in and out of government: bureaucrats, “civil rights” groups, community organizers, unions, government agencies, “diversity” counselors, administrators, the media, and the Democrat Party – the racial grievance industry, a towering and impregnable fortress of race baiting and resentment, delivering daily the disabling narrative of inexorable racism and bigotry in America. 

On the global scene, the moral equivalents consist of international institutions like the United Nations and the European Union, the international media, the diplomatic class, and the legions of leftist Non-Governmental-Organizations (NGOs) that pursue the same agenda for the perpetually wronged and aggrieved Palestinians.

“Victims” gradually deform into predictable behaviors; they become dependent, self-pitying, and resentful and reject personal responsibility.  They enjoy a double standard as befits a member of an oppressed group.  Any behavior or action by victims, no matter how heinous or extreme (in particular, by the Palestinians), is excused for it is the oppressor class that holds ultimate power and responsibility for the victims’ condition and failure.  With expectations and demands arranged as such, it is no wonder we see the social pathologies that abound in the black community and in the Middle East.

Blacks in America have been fed a steady diet of resentment and victimhood for decades.  They have consumed trillions of dollars in aid, subsidies, and welfare.  They have been the recipients of set asides, quotas, and affirmative action policies that give blacks preferential treatment and institutionalizes discrimination against whites and Asians.  Blacks, it is said, cannot compete on a level playing field, are thusly rendered “inferior” in status to other groups, and so require special assistance, as crippling a message for aspiring black youth as can be.  Many blacks have accepted liberal cultural mores and abandoned what had been the bulwarks of black communities, the married family and the church.  Black children are raised largely in fatherless homes, fathers now made obsolete in the age of the welfare state.  Lacking proper discipline and role models is particularly harmful to young black males who are then more vulnerable to the depredations and influences of the inner city.

The culture of the black underclass seems not to embrace education or mastering the habits of work, striving, or self-discipline.  Initiative and self-improvement have become dirty words, acting “white” as it may be referred to, and many of the government programs and policies intended to help blacks have hurt them by creating dependency, eliminating the impetus for self development and damaging the black family.  Self-appointed “black leaders” and other members of the racial grievance crowd can be counted on to exploit and exacerbate tensions for personal gain and to further the race narrative, the myth that institutionalized racism accounts for the social maladies that afflicts the black community, not the debilitating attitudes that blacks hold towards marriage, education, and work.

The Palestinians, for their part, have been the recipients of more foreign aid per capita than the Europeans during the Marshall Plan era after the devastation of the Second World War, although the Palestinians never underwent anything remotely like the destruction of World War II, nor suffered the privation, misery, dislocation, and death that tens of millions of “real” refugees experienced from that war and the many wars and upheavals since.  The so-called Palestinian "refugees" have a status unlike any other refugee today or in the 20^th century of which there have been some 100 million.  As Mona Charen has written, an entire department of the UN, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), is dedicated solely to the Palestinians with nearly 30,000 employees, most of them Palestinian, a massive jobs program for the Palestinians funded in part by American taxpayers.  The 50 million other refugees in the world including from Syria and Iraq, facing far more calamitous conditions than the Palestinians have only the UN High Commission of Refugees with its 7 thousand employees to assist them.  Some 50 million refugees have been resettled by the UNHCR including from India, Pakistan, Cyprus, Hungary, the Congo, Uganda, Angola, Bosnia and countless others.  Only the Palestinians, despite the billions of dollars and the attention of the world remain “unsettled.” 

Palestinian refugees also enjoy a unique classification, as descendants of those Palestinians who left Israel between 1946-1948 (leading up to and during Israel’s War of Independence when five Arab nations attacked Israel at its birth) are also counted as “refugees.”  No other refugees in the world have such a definition.  Only the actual refugees who have fled a given nation can claim refugee status not their children. Because of this singular classification, the five or six hundred thousand refugees created by the war against Israel have magically mushroomed into five million, the better to perpetuate and stir up yet more hatred and self-pity.   

The Palestinian Authority receives billions of dollars in aid each year including $500 million from the US, as well as from the UN, the EU, European nations, Japan, and Arab states, much of which goes into the pockets of Palestinian leaders and to support terror.  Despite this, the Palestinians remain unable to build a market economy that can support its people, maintaining instead an international welfare state with a mafia economy.  Despite its well-known bloodthirsty and fanatical tendencies, its dysfunctionality and kleptocratic traditions, the Palestinians remain the darlings of the international class and the media. 

When the Palestinians provoke a war with Israel by acts of terror or by firing missiles into civilian areas, they are not held accountable.  In their own state run media, in their mosques, schools, summer camps, and radio broadcasts they use the most vile, anti-Semitic language yet are not condemned.  They maintain an elaborate terrorist infrastructure, openly embracing a cult of death and child sacrifice and calling daily for the annihilation of the Jews but pay no price.  They have squandered billions of dollars in aid.  They have been offered peace and their own state on multiple occasions, which they have rejected.  They have made innumerable decisions that have brought death and ruin upon themselves and others.  Yet they persist in their ways.  Because for the Palestinians, the sympathies and financial generosity of the world never ends.  As the ultimate global “victims” they never have to make amends and so their obvious communal afflictions, the preposterous stupidity of their actions and demands, only deepen. 

It is liberalism on a global scale. 

In Ferguson, rioting and looting went on for weeks because of the death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old thug who attacked a cop, and the proper decision by the grand jury to not indict the officer, Darren Wilson.  Thousands of young blacks are killed every year. But only this one mattered because it promoted a liberal narrative of irredeemable racial oppression. 

Hamas poured down rockets after kidnapping and murdering three Israeli teenagers, finally provoking an Israeli response.  Yet were held blameless.  

Blacks and Palestinians enjoy victim status and both groups continue to suffer as a result.  Victimhood, dependency and welfarism infantilizes them, weakens them socially and morally, and leads to collapse and failure.  It is time to stop excusing black and Palestinian dysfunction.   Then perhaps reality can reassert itself and both groups may self-correct for their own sakes.