Obama throws Israel under the Bus

[Christians4LessGvt]

Sorry, i don't do group guilt. 

It's not really guilt...it is just a statement of factual reality.

In 1880's PA if a black family had a kitchen and oven they had the
same advantage my ancestors had.

You've got to be kidding?
The "same advantage"?
Laughable at best!
Being denied human rights, property, healthcare,
education, housing, nutrition, voting, jobs for centuries
to generation after generation has no effect if two
people approach the same start line?

You really think that in 1880 a black approaching
landlords, suppliers, customers was treated
anywhere near the same as your white relatives?

Hell that can hardly even be said today in 2011.
The Voting Rights Act wasn't even until 1965!
Of course we have made huge progress.
But claiming blacks had the "same advantages"
as whites in 1880 is ludicrous.

[BT]

That is exactly how the bakery started, in their kitchen. And they sold to their neighbors. And yes a relative did introduce them to purveyors of the ingredients necessary to bake breads.

So unless the black family, in Pennsylvania, did not have a kitchen and neighbors and a relative to make introductions, yes they would have the same advantage as my great great grandfather and great great grandmother. I don't see why it is hard to understand that concept. Immigrants to this country are still doing it today.



 

[Xavier_Onassis]

In 1880's PA if a black family had a kitchen and oven they had the same advantage my ancestors had.
====================================================

That would be true if people were as likely to buy from this hypothetical Black family, and they had the same access to customers that your family did.

It also might involve the ability to buy flour and other ingredients on credit.

And of course, many, if not most Black families in 1880 were not in Pennsylvania, but on sharecropper farms in the South.

Quite often the police did not protect Black families from thieves as well as they did White families.

There are a number of factors you seem to not be considering here.

[Christians4LessGvt]

So unless the black family, in Pennsylvania, did not have a kitchen and neighbors
and a relative to make introductions, yes they would have the same advantage
as my great great grandfather and great great grandmother. I don't see why it is
hard to understand that concept. Immigrants to this country are still doing it today.

Comparing immigrants to the United States in 2011
with Blacks in the 1880's and the problems blacks
faced seems rather ridiculous. An immigrant
today can sit right at the front of any city bus
in America.....hell blacks still couldn't do that
in the 1950's much less the 1880's. Blacks
had separate drinking fountains in the 1950's.
Recent and even illegal immigrants in 2011 fill
our classrooms across America...black children
were not allowed in thousands of schools across
the United States in the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's,
and 1960's....and that had no consequences as far
as making a tougher road?....lol

Denying that so many more doors were closed to Blacks
than Whites in the 1880's is just crazy.
Could a black have made a go of it?...Well sure anything is
possible....but are we talking anywhere close to being in
the "same game"...with the "same advantages"?.....Hell no!

Blacks did not have access to the same markets & customers as your white family did.
Blacks did not survive from birth or as adults as long as your white family did.
Blacks were shunned loans/landlords/suppliers if they tried to expand a kitchen into a business.
Blacks had ZERO educational resources in their backgrounds to manage a growing business.
Blacks if they got sick had much less access to medical care than your white family.

Those are not the "same advantages".

BT lets play an analogy game for a moment beyond the micro
example of your family....

Do you think if a race is locked in a dungeon for a couple of centuries
denied education, denied medical care, denied jobs, denied loans,
denied free travel to better themselves, denied voting, denied
property ownership, denied fair judicial procedures, etc etc etc
then all of sudden they are set free they are on the same footing
with another race that has enjoyed throughout generation after
generation of education, voting, free travel, medical care?

Obviously it takes time to heal those wounds.
We are still today in that process.
Lots of progress has been made.
However many things we have done have actually hindered that progress.
But progress continues....the gap is narrowing.
However the project is still far from complete...
But recent generations are making up the gap fast....
Education, education, education, education is the KEY!
With each generation of education success the gap will keep closing.
But it takes time.....but 1880?.....Come on...get serious!

I don't think a black in 2011 has the "same advantages"
in a general sense. Part of the reason I have a successful business
are from things that most black families would not have had access or been
as connected with the business community.....could a black have made it
it the same business as me?....well sure.....but in my opinion in most cases
the road would have been more difficult because they don't have the "same
advantages" as I did....and most whites would have over most blacks as far
as family/friend connections to education, family/friend connections to loans,
family/friend connections to business, family/friend connections to collateral-capital,
family/friend connections to customers.....ect...

[Xavier_Onassis]

The Blacks who did well economically around the turn of the century were nearly all those who sold products to and did services for other Black people: preachers, undertakers, life insurance salesmen, people who sold hair straighteners and skin cremes. There were a few Pullman conductors and others who saved their money and bought real estate in Black communities as well.

I don't think a baker would have done all that well. There was competition by then from commercial bakers, whose bread was cheaper.

[Plane]

Caterers, Butchers, Confectioners, Ice Cream (Louisville, KY)
Author W. H. Gibson, Sr. lists the following as prominent African Americans in Louisville, KY -- [Caterers] George Brown, Daniel Clemmons, Frank Gray, and Thornton Thompson; [Butcher] Bartlett Taylor; and [Confectioner] Henry Cozzens, who was also a barber and had an ice cream saloon "known from New Orleans to Pittsburg [sic]." The Page Ice Cream Factory, located on West Chestnut Street, was the largest manufacturer and dealer of ice cream in the city of Louisville. The National Negro Press Association visited the factory in 1928, and members were served slices of the much requested brick ice cream known as "Neapolitan."


http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/NKAA/subject.php?sub_id=24


A count of Negro bakers employed in Kentucky can be found in the U.S. Census records. Kentucky has never been a state with a large number of bakers of any race. The first comprehensive counting of bakers in the U.S. was reported in the 1850 record of American manufacturers. Men were the dominant wage earners. According to the census, by 1920 there were 720 Negro bakers in the United States: 530 males and 193 females, and of the total, 72 males were employed in Kentucky. The manufacturing of bread in the U.S. was valued at over a billion dollars, and the distribution of bakeries was about the same as the population distribution in urban areas. Between 1921-1929, bakery operations in the U.S. were expanding as grocery stores, restaurant chains, and retail bakeries began operating as multi-units. In 1930, there were 60 Negro male bakers in Kentucky and eight in Louisville. Over the next few decades the industry was affected by many factors, including rationing during the wars. The sale of pre-packaged

[Christians4LessGvt]

there is no doubt that a few blacks could succeed....
baking...farming.....any environment....
there are always survivors
the question is was the "playing field" in the vast majority of cases anywhere near the same?
were the "advantages the same"?
of course not.....

[BSB]

There's also the factor, and perhaps the most important factor, with African Americans of having been institutionalized. Slavery doesn't just take away your physical freedom, it takes away your mental freedom. You no longer see yourself as an individual who can overcome events, and solve problems. As a slave you get out of the habit of thinking you can control any part of your destiny. Your life is in the hands of someone else almost completely. You can't just turn the switch of individualism back on again. That takes time, generations in fact. An African American, 130 years ago, could have had every advantage of starting a business handed to them, but seeing yourself as capable of actually doing it is a whole other thing. That, more than anything else, has been the treck blacks in this country have been on. And if that journey isn't difficult enough in its own right, much of America has been set up to keep telling blacks that they aren't capable. That's what bigotry is designed to do.

BSB

[BT]

Just got back in town.

So CU how many more generations do we need of an affirmative action war on poverty to help ease that white guilt you seem to be carrying around?

[Xavier_Onassis]

Affirmative action should continue until racism no longer affects the job market.

Guilt is not really relevant to this: it is just a byproduct.

I note that although some universities give special treatment to "Asians", they do not extend it to Jews, or even Israelis. If you look at a map, you see that Israel is clearly in Asia.

I imagine this is because it is not possible to prove that Jews or even Israelis, are underpaid or underemployed when compared with other Americans. I think the reverse is true.

[sirs]

Affirmative action should continue until racism no longer affects the job market.

But of course....discrimination is a good thing, when certain folks say so.  Boy oh boy, if MLK could see how his message has been mutated

[Xavier_Onassis]

Yeah, it is awful how they discriminate against you whiteboys.

[sirs]

Wow...Racism sure doesn't look good on you, Xo     

[sirs]

Peace Process, RIP

When President Obama said last month that "Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with Palestinians who do not recognize its right to exist," he was referring to Hamas. In its charter, Hamas calls Palestine an "Islamic endowment" and specifically rules out a peaceful solution to the conflict with Israel. Hamas describes itself as "one of the links in the Chain of Jihad." It uses terrorism to achieve its goals -- which include the advance of Muslim power and the expansion of Muslim territory , and its spokesmen openly mourned the death of Osama bin Laden, calling him an "Arab holy warrior" who deserves to spend eternity with the "true believers and the martyrs."

Nevertheless, Obama also made clear that he believes the "peace process" can and must move forward. If the Israelis cannot be expected to negotiate with Hamas, surely they can negotiate with Fatah, the other main Palestinian faction. Though now in the process of forming a coalition with Hamas, Fatah does recognize Israel's right to exist.

Or does it?

Azzam al-Ahmed is a member of the Fatah Central Committee. He is closely associated with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. And last week he was pretty clear in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. "Fatah has never recognized Israel's right to exist and will never do so," he said.

So, by Obama's own reasoning, there are now no Palestinian leaders with whom the Israelis can "be expected to negotiate." And that, in turn, implies that what we call the "peace process," which began with talks in Madrid 20 years ago, is now as dead as Monty Python's parrot. That's big news -- though few news outlets are treating it as such.

What they are reporting instead is that Israeli troops have been firing on Palestinian refugees along Israel's border with Syria.

The reality: Mobs from Syria, probably not including anyone who actually left his home during a war waged against Israel more than 60 years ago -- have been violating Israel's borders, in some cases throwing firebombs. Israeli troops, following numerous warnings to the mobs to turn around, have used force to push them back. If there is a good alternative available, it doesn't occur to me.

It should, by now, be apparent that both Hamas and Fatah are pursuing the dream not of a Palestinian state that would take its place next to Israel but of a Palestinian state that would replace Israel. Abbas wants not a two-state solution, but a two-stage execution. His approach is essentially the same approach as that of his predecessor, Yasir Arafat, who spoke, in Arabic, not in English, of a "phased strategy," implying that Palestinians should take any land Israel will surrender and use it as a springboard for the "complete liberation of Palestine."    (sirs nodding his head in how it validates exactly the point that Israel hold on to every parcel of land it has aquired in defense of their existance)

In the first stage, Abbas will issue a declaration of Palestinian statehood coupled with a demand that Israel retreat to what are misleadingly called the 1967 borders. In fact, these are the lines at which five Arab armies were stopped in 1949 as they were trying to drive Palestinian Jews into the sea. They had already rejected the first offer of a two-state solution.

One result of that war: about 600,000 Palestinian Arabs fled Israel, creating a refugee crisis that, quite purposefully, has never been solved. Palestinian Arabs who remained in Israel, however, became Israeli citizens and now constitute 20 percent of Israel's population, enjoying rights that ethnic and religious minorities are denied throughout what we have come to call the Muslim world.

The 1949 armistice lines remained in place until 1967 when another war was waged by the same armies from the same Arab nations for the same purpose. If at first you don?t succeed?

In the second stage, Abbas will seek approval for his state at the U.N. He will get it from an automatic majority in the General Assembly: more than 20 Arab members and more than 50 self-described Islamic states. Many Third World and European nations will join the chorus as well, perhaps backing Palestinian claims against Israel with weapons of economic warfare such as boycotts, divestment and sanctions.

What will happen after that is anyone's guess. With Hamas in its government, the newly declared Palestinian state will be, by definition, yet one more terrorist state in the Middle East. Since terrorist states generally attract few tourists and little foreign investment, Palestine will rely on the "international community" to pay its bills. Its leaders could offer to negotiate with Israel but they are refusing to do that now so why would they do that then? Nor is Israel likely to sit down with Hamas -- any more than we'd sit down with al-Qaeda.

The most likely outcome: another war, sooner or later.

Is there any way off this dead-end road? Palestinian leaders, both those from Hamas and Fatah, say they now plan to hold elections in 2012. Obama and European leaders have the clout to ensure that Palestinian voters are given a clear choice. Do they want peace with Israel and, if so, are they willing to make concessions and accept sacrifices to achieve it? Or would they prefer to continue the conflict, to fight as long as it takes to defeat and destroy Israel, no matter the cost?

The data, including both polls and a Foundation for Defense of Democracies? study of Palestinian sentiment as expressed through social media, suggest that most Palestinians are likely to choose war over peace: Better to wage an exterminationist jihad than tolerate an infidel nation, the only one left in the broader Middle East from Morocco to Pakistan -- as a neighbor. But a free and fair campaign, one that includes a real debate about the choices facing Palestinians might focus minds. It might even change minds.

The last time there was a Palestinian election, in 2006, it was neither free nor fair. No candidate could make an argument in favor of peaceful coexistence with Jews and live to tell the tale. The Bush administration deserves some of the blame for that. The Obama administration has a chance to do better. I'm not betting my paycheck that it will, but you never know.


Commentary

[Xavier_Onassis]

The last time there was a Palestinian election, in 2006, it was neither free nor fair. No candidate could make an argument in favor of peaceful coexistence with Jews and live to tell the tale. The Bush administration deserves some of the blame for that. The Obama administration has a chance to do better. I?m not betting my paycheck that it will, but you never know.
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It was more free and fair than elections in any Arab nations that have had elections. There were lots of candidates, and no major allegations of voter fraud.
The current administration could do a lot better, but they really need to put the screws on Netanyahu. Read the stupid sumbitch the riot act.