The Problem With Comparing African American Slavery And The Jewish Holocaust is a past time of Zionists. Here’s just one:
There is an alarming quote from an article by James Kirchick, (published Feb. 09, 2015 3:05PM EST) of The Daily Beast, writing about three men who had been found guilty for arson charges after they were accused of firebombing a synagogue in Germany. The court said they only intended to bring attention to the Gaza conflict. Mr Kirchick claims the German judge let them off too easily so he starts his essay:
Imagine the following scenario:
“A group of skinheads torch a black church somewhere in the Deep South. Upon being apprehended by the police, they cite the injustices that Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe has visited upon the white farmers of his country as justification for their arson. Mugabe is black, he rules on behalf of “the black race,” and therefore black people everywhere must be made to feel responsible for his crimes.”
“Anyone making such a ridiculous argument would rightly be labeled a racist. But change the victims from black people to Jews, and the perpetrators from pale neo-Nazis to dark-skinned Muslims, and a great many people will claim that what is obviously a crime motivated by blatant bigotry is in fact a politically-inspired protest.”
I had to read James Kirchick’s piece several times in order to understand why he made the false equivalence. Is he pitching for an Israeli solidarity amongst us? Is he attempting to purchase our support for Israel even as this same state continues to commit crimes against humanity on Palestinians?
Or what?
But let us track back a few steps to understand the motivation of Kirchick. The ‘imagined scenario’ proposed in Mr Kirchick’s essay to justify Israeli actions against Palestinians in Gaza ought to be put in its rightful context. To compare white inhumanity to African Americans during Slavery to a court ruling in Germany that lets off certain protestors from punishment strikes of crying wolf, and in addition, of being an outright racist.
Who are pale neo-Nazis? You mean white people – Europeans? Who are dark skinned Muslims? You mean Arabs or do you again want to invoke the famous American racist media narrative – America’s most wanted, most chased – dark-skinned? You mean Arabs or do you mean Black people? Is Kirchick aware that there a millions of Black people who speak Arabic, and that these are also full-blooded Arabs? Muslims? There are millions of Black people who are muslims – is Kirchick often drunk?
Else, how? Within two paragraphs alone African Americans, Black people, Arabs, Muslims, Africans are so demonized already that you forget that the article was supposed to be about Jews, Synagogues and Germans – nothing to do with African Americans, or Black people, let alone Africans!
Mr Kirchikc needs some reminding. Perhaps he has forgotten. If indeed there was ever the ‘imagined situation’ in the Deep South, yes it will be racist. That is clear.
How? The correct analogy to the court ruling in Germany would look like this: Imagine that Africans are angry with the recent white cop murders of African Americans in the US and the ongoing mass incarceration of Black people in the US. White homes and churches in Africa are then burned down in protest to the murders.
That is rather the fitting analogy – if and only if Mr Kirchick wants to make a sensible one – of the Gaza conflict and protests around the world about Israel’s political reluctance to recognize the equal humanity of the Palestinian State.
However, that African equivalence is not happening. Why not? Perhaps, is it because Africans have been the more civilized for more than 10,000 years and are still awaiting civilization to befall Europe? Or is it because Africans are naturally law abiding?
If a court of law in Germany rules that an act in a German town, Wuppertal, was an act of protest about what Israel is doing in Gaza then it is an act of protest. Is it not? I am very surprised that James Kirchick has conveniently forgotten all about his Western Values – the rule of law!
Recall when Eric Garner was choked to death by white cops in Staten Island and the white officer walked Scott free because a majority white jury let him off? That was the rule of law. Was it not? Recall when Trayvon Martin was murdered in front of his own home, and the murderer, who the media now insist is not white, walked free, and even richer – was that not the rule of law? Recall when Michael Brown was murdered in the streets of his own neighborhood and the white cop who killed him walked away free and richer than he ever thought? Was that not the rule of law? According to Western Values?
African in the diaspora, taken there in chains and beaten, killed, raped, molested and worked for well over four centuries, and their experiences in America has no equivalence whatsoever, anywhere. It cannot be compared with the Jewish experience in America. Can it?
What is worse is the comparison of the over 400 years of slavery – death and oppression – to the Lilly-luxury experiences of Europeans in Zimbabwe, which is disingenuous if not at all an attempt to disfigure history entirely.
Let’s remember what really happened in the 15 million strong Zimbabwe. From 1888 until about 2000, Zimbabwe’s 1 percent white population, controlled more than 90 percent of Zimbabwe’s farm land in the name of ‘we provide 30 percent of Zimbabweans work and account for 40 percent of Zimbabwe’s exports’.
When Europeans exploit everyone through violence for their own prosperity, it seems to them that their economic theories are facts. When in fact they are not; whites exploited African lands and human resources, and they still do, at every turn in Zimbabwe for more than a century.
So, if you believe that patronizing nonsense about Kirchick’s Zimbabwe, I have to jog your memory with this other fact – the ethnic composition of Zimbabwe breaks down as follows – 82 percent Shona, 14 percent Ndebele, 2 percent other African ethnic groups, 1 percent white, 1 percent coloured and Indian, and then all the land, literally belonged to the whites? How’s that for painting the picture of whites in Zimbabwe as dire?
Better, Kirchick needs a kindergarten lesson: Whites have always been the meager minority in Zimbabwe while African Americans have accounted for more than a sizable 12 percent of the American population for a long time. And what do they have to show for it? Land? Freedom? A chance to ‘provide 30 percent of whites, jobs, and a chance to account for 40 percent of American exports?’
No! African Americans were never allowed to own land, never allowed to rent land, and never allowed to vote even after slavery was abolished. Yet it seems perfectly fine for Mr Kirchick to accept how a 1 percent white community of any population would own more than 90 percent of the land, vote and control the political atmosphere of a nation like Zimbabwe, and still be painted out in his mind as under duress? Kirchicks anger, it is obvious, is that President Robert Mugabe restored the dignity of Zimbabwe by restoring some justice?
How rich! On the other hand in America, the African American minority experience has been the exact opposite of what whites in Africa have enjoyed for more than four centuries and counting.
Which is which Mr Kirchick? Your thinking and logic are obvious – they are odious.
President Robert Mugabe, who was the Chairman of the African Union, and like any sane human being he saw the savagery of injustice in Zimbabwe perpetrated by Europeans, and he was ready to confront it, unlike all US Presidents who ignored and even supported African American oppression. Mugabe may be many things, but his no coward. Mugabe sure has more human courage and balls than any American President, ever! That is who you call a dictator?
Furthermore, since 1965, after Zimbabwe’s independence, President Mugabe single handedly sought for justice for the African families whose farm lands were illegally seized by white colonial imperialists. How on earth do you compare President Mugabe’s fight for justice in Zimbabwe to Nazi, Zionist, KKK, white supremacist slavery in America?
Perhaps, the comparison Mr Kirchick wishes to attempt in his essay is the false equivalence of the Trans-Atlantic-Slave Trade and the holocaust. There is a problem with comparing African American Slavery and the Jewish holocaust.
For the sake of political correctness I would rather not talk about the holocaust. I know little of it, except for the public knowledge that it spanned the 5 or 6 years of the period of the Second European Tribal War, which the Europeans love to affectionately call, as bloodthirsty people do, “the second word war.” Nonsense – referring to the idea of the world war!
Mr Kirchick and his entourage of bloodthirsty morons who operate freely in the United States without suffering any consequences for their violent ideas would do well to spare us the nonsense of talking and writing about subjects like the Trans-Atlantic Human Trafficking, African American Slavery, Racism, Segregation, African Independence Movements and the Jim Crow Era! Spare us the Pharisaism!
More, Mr Kirchick should further spare us the childish lesson in African history and the conflation of African experiences in America and Africa, unless of course like Brian Douglas Williams before him – his compatriot – he finds a similar interest and joy in telling rampant lies!
A German story that concerns Jews, Israel, Gaza and Palestinians, has only one moral or political comparison or equivalence in America or in Africa. It has everything to do with European barbarism, up to and including the Palestinian Holocaust right at the hands of those who claim they suffered a holocaust in the last European Tribal War. I have laid it out for the morons to comprehend. A child can see through the baring teeth of the crocodile scholarship of the Kir-chicks!
False equivalence indeed. But of course he would do anything to make an emotional argument which is no argument at all. He hopes one of these groups garners sympathy so the reader can extend that sympathy to his group of choice.
That’s right. Kirchick hopes his audience shares a brain so that his writing can make half sense.