In fact, every human being on the planet is “African-_____.”

As odd as this sounds coming from a Pacific Islander, I wonder if I happen to have any such blood. The Philippines was ruled by Spain for some time, after all, and my family has said that Spanish blood enters our bloodline at some point in the past.

Although given the Chinese side of the family, it’s far more likely to have some ancestor from the Forbidden City than from any throne in Europe. Still, it’d be an interesting thing to research, if I ever found the time.

That was superb.

A quote from one letter in particular caught my attention. In this letter a Jewish woman in the Dabrowa ghetto, Tola Goldblum, wrote the following to her sister who was in Canada:

“I can feel at this moment–the pain in your heart when you receive this letter. It was not our fault. We are innocent. OUR FUTURE IS LOST and it cannot be changed.”

Tola, her husband and son died in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

If we are not clear-sighted, resolute, ruthless and decisive, Islam will win its war against all Infidels, and if it does, we will be the ones whose “future is lost” and who will be writing letters like this and smuggling them out of the new ghettos and concentration camps or stuffing them in a hastily dug hole for someone in the far future to find.

Pete, are you more likely to die in a car accident in Iraq than a terrorist attack? Wasnt that your argument for why we needn’t worry about it here?

If we must be overtly concerned that “fighting terrorism only creates more terrorists” we might as well convert now.

Without a doubt my first thought was: holy crap, this guy sure goes out of his way to make Muslims look like savages. And at the same time interrupting a discussion about Jews. Dude, you’ve got major anti-Semitism problems.

….When a person is fond of emphasizing his connection to a particular ancestor or group of ancestors, he is engaging in a kind of narcissism. He wants to underscore that connection, because in some way it flatters him. If some of your ancestors were great artists, or brilliant scientists, or brave soldiers, you may be inclined to point proudly to them, because the association in some nebulous way makes you feel that you are creative, brilliant or brave. You are unlikely to talk much about those other ancestors of yours who were artistically incompetent, scientifically clueless, or yellow-bellied cowards.

In a politically correct society such as ours, the same principle holds for those who point endlessly to their enslaved ancestors. People who talk about how much their slave ancestors suffered don’t really give a rat’s rumpus about their ancestors, except insofar as emphasizing the historical connection can bolster the illusion that the slave’s modern day descendants are also in some nebulous way oppressed. What he gets out of this is firstly a confirmation of his delusions of moral superiority to those he labels his oppressors, and secondly he gains a certain power that we’ve talked about elsewhere, the power to manipulate people with guilt trips, and to wield this weapon as a way of squeezing concessions out of them.

This is the kind of narcissism and selective memory that permeates the thinking of the reparations activists. What is so frightening about the implications of their behavior is that, given what I have just laid out about human ancestry, every single one of us could conceivably sue someone else for reparations to atone for injustices that their ancestors inflicted on ours.

What kind of a world would be living in if everybody were running around incriminating someone else and filing litigation against him because of things that happened centuries ago? By the logic of the reparations people, I could sue my 2-year-old adopted Chinese daughter on the grounds that her 13th- century Mongol ancestors raped and pillaged my 13th-century Persian ones.

You just think about the absurdity of that the next time Randall Robinson or some other smooth-talking race-baiter insists he’s got a good moral case for bilking the government or private corporations out of billions. And remind the fool that even if some of his African ancestors were slaves, it’s a REALLY good bet that some other African ancestors of his were slave owners themselves. Just as no one should have to pay for the bad deeds of one’s distant forebears, no one can rightfully claim an entitlement to anything, based upon sufferings incurred so long ago that no one living today could have had any influence on it whatsoever.

Thank you for patiently allowing me

I think I tried to make this point once before, over a year ago, but let me address the issue again.

To argue that one is a victim entitled to some sort of recompense because some of one’s ancestors suffered oppression is to employ a selective memory of history to engage in a self-serving fraud. When we trace our ancestors back in time, with each generation we regress the number of our ancestors grows by a factor of two – 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc. By the time we have traced our ancestry back, say, 20 generations, the number of individuals from whom we are biologically descended is conceivably as high as 2 raised to the power of 20 (a figure that may be reduced somewhat by the fact that in many societies it is, or was, common for cousins to intermarry). 2 to the 20th power equals 1,048,576 people. Can any of us possibly account for who all of these people were, where they came from or how they lived their lives?

No matter what our respective heritages may be, if we were to look at our pasts honestly, we would find that we are descended from literally every imaginable type of human being. Some of our ancestors were kind and some were cruel; some were intelligent and some were stupid; some were erudite and some were ignorant; some were brave and some were cowardly; some of our ancestors oppressed innocent people and some of them were themselves oppressed people.

I’m a good example of that principle. I identify myself as Persian by heritage. Persians built huge empires by conquering many other different peoples – Ionians, Babylonians, Lydians, Egyptians, Afghans, Tadzhiks, Uzbeks, Azerbaijanis, Baluchis – and ruling them with an authoritarian iron fist. On the other hand, Persians have been conquered, brutalized or exploited at various points in history by Macedonians and Greeks, by Arabs, by Mongols and more recently by European colonial empires. Ordinary Persians, moreover have lived under the dictatorial hand of their own rulers, whether they were shahs or ayatollahs. Ultimately, when you consider my complicated past (a past which is no more complicated than anybody else’s), it makes no sense to call me either an “oppressed” person or an “oppressor”. I can truthfully deserve these labels based only upon how I myself treat others, or how I am treated by them.

When a person is fond of emphasizing his connection to a particular ancestor or group of ancestors, he is engaging in a kind of narcissism. He wants to underscore that connection, because in some way it flatters him. If some of your ancestors were great artists, or brilliant scientists, or brave soldiers, you may be inclined to point proudly to th