I am a student of history. I love reading book about history, particularly those things that take something we think we know but that our history classes have sanitized or outright lied about and tell you what really happened.
Don't Know Much about History is just such a book. I was reading it yesterday and I was reading about the Indian wars, the 19th Century Genocide of the Native Americans by the Americans who originated in Europe. It was a horrible thing and, while there's not a lot we can do about it at this point, we can do what we need to do, which is learn from history.
One of the things that hit me about this was that often one tribe would be promised "friendship" or other benefits for joining the Euro-Americans against another tribe. Those promises weren't worth the paper they were written on because as soon as the Euro-Americans "finished off" the first tribe, they would turn around and do the same thing to the other tribe (one big perpetrator of this sort of action was 7th President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, not my favorite president, but I digress). The Native American tribes, therefore, would contribute to their own destruction (just as the Africans did by turning over members of other tribes to be brought over to the new world by the slave ships -- the slavers didn't care what tribe their slaves came from).
I was thinking about this today when I was doing something so mindlessly boring that I needed to give my mind something to do. And I had an epiphany.
If we are going to learn from history, which we rarely do, we need to learn that The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. In other words, if you don't like Jews or Israel, don't think that the Palestinians and/or ISIS (or other terrorist group) is your friend!!!!!!
That's right. No matter how much you hate us, we Jews are your best chance of saving yourself from the Hydra-headed Terrorist Monster.
The Hydra-headed Terrorist Monster is already trying to inveigle the American people to accept them as allies, by making the downtrodden minorities, the people who, whether true or not, think they are being singled out for persecution and prosecution, trying to make them think that under their Sharia law (one of the most, if not the most, oppressive, suppressive, bigoted, Anti-Black, Anti-Women, Anti-Gay, Anti-Christian and Anti-Jewish "justice" system in the world) will be the salvation of the inner city black.
But it will never work. You can't expect civil rights from terrorists. Just like the Native American population should have unified against the Euro-Americans back in the 19th Century, African Americans need to join together with Latinos, Jews, Indians (Native Americans and those from India), East Asians, Women, Gays and all other people who in the US have to or have had to fight to get their rights in this initially Landed-White-Anglo-Saxon-Germanic-Protestant-Male country. We have come a long way (and, if you check it out, so have you) since the 1820s, the 1890s, the 1900s, even the 1950s and 1960s. Bad things happen when people want too much too soon. Susan B Anthony never did legally vote (she died in 1906), neither did Nat Turner. But now there are African Americans, Women, East Asians, Latinos in congress, there was even an African American President. There are no longer signs in stores that say "No dogs or Jews" and people of any ethnicity and gender can sit where they want in restaurants and on buses. Schools are desegregated.
This isn't a perfect world, but it can get better only if we work hard to make it better. IMHO, this means caring more about a 14 year old Moore Oklahoma girl or a 5 year old Milwaukee girl both of whom were killed in drive by shootings than we do about a dangerous criminal who is on videotape stealing from a shop and shoving the shopkeeper and who forensic evidence has shown was running at the police officer who shot him. This also means caring more about Tibetans, whose country is truly occupied by invading China; Indonesian Christians who are being persecuted (to the point where their lives are in danger) in Muslim Indonesia; "Palestinian" people who are being kept in squalor and poverty, taught only hatred and how to kill themselves and others; Syrians being slaughtered day in and day out by ISIS; or any of a number of other groups of people (Khurds, Basques, etc.) than you do about Hamas terrorists killed by Israel defending Israel. Just as the people supporting Ferguson marchers are only enraged and "up in arms" by the death of an African American because it was caused by the gun of a white police office and not by the gun of a black drive-by gang-banger, the world is only enraged if Israel kills people (in self-defense) and not bothered in the least when Hamas kills Palestinians or uses their children as human shields.
We need to know what side our bread is buttered on. We need to know who is the better ally in our fights to make the world a better place. If we don't, we just might end up in some distopic "Hunger Games on Steroids" Totalitarian Dictatorship of the Haters. In such a world, civil rights have no meaning and life is cheap. We are each only given one life. Make sure you know who you are spending it on.
