Schizo

During the 1980s, I remember the massive protests by black US college students against the South African Apartheid regime. It struck me as absurd that they were protesting government-sanctioned race segregation yet practiced self-imposed racial segregation: these black students were also demanding "Black Dorms", "Blacks-only" fraternities and sororities, etc.

It also struck me that no one noticed this very odd (and I'd add) schizophrenic ideology--not quite true actually, Shelby Steele did. Now comes another such cognitive disconnect in the upcoming Survivor TV show season debacle. Apparently, some unter-genius at CBS decided it would be so much fun to create "tribes" (irony alert!) along racial lines (Hispanic, White, Black, Asian) and have them compete against each other. I think it's amazing that such an idea actually got off the ground and out of that conference room because as we all know, Race doesn't actually exist in America (snort!).

Given that, here comes (h/t: Michelle Malkin) a report by the New York Post that:

Yesterday, members of the council's Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus (BLAC) met with the press to complain about - of all things - classifying individuals by race and/or ethnic origins.

Things that make you go hmmm. ... These things will continue to happen unless and until we are truly, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr, a colorblind society.

A Jew awakens

I always catch NPR's Talk of the Nation at lunchtime, mostly listening to silly bloat-heads talking about silly bloated topics. Today was different. I heard someone named Thane Rosenbaum, a Jew and professor of law at Fordham Law School talk about Isreal in terms I'm not used to hearing from Jewish intelligentsia. Listening further, I got the fact he'd written an op-ed. My cup of tea! I found it and here is a sampler:

And I am not alone. Many Jews are in my position -- the children and grandchildren of labor leaders, socialists, pacifists, humanitarians, antiwar protestors -- instinctively leaning left, rejecting war, unwilling to demonize, and insisting that violence only breeds more violence. Most of all we share the profound belief that killing, humiliation and the infliction of unnecessary pain are not Jewish attributes.

However, the world as we know it today -- post-Holocaust,post-9/11, post-sanity -- is not cooperating.

Refreshing.

Treachery

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero