I’ve always wondered what makes Jews so successful.  Always a minority in each country they’ve inhabited (with the recent exception of Israel), Jews are disproportionately represented among the most wealthy, powerful and accomplished citizens in the world today.   They’ve done this despite a millennia’s long history of persecution and oppression.  Why have they achieved so much, while other groups facing similar conditions have failed to raise themselves out of poverty?

Many American blacks point to the election of Barak Obama to the highest political office in the land as a triumph of the civil rights movement.  And in many respect it is.  The eradication of de jure discrimination has opened unprecedented opportunities for middle class blacks to achieve their highest aspirations.  On the other hand, the majority of blacks in America have succumbed to the worst social pathologies: high poverty, unemployment, crime, broken families, and incarceration rates that greatly exceed other races – even controlling for education and income.  When these statistics are pointed out, black intellectuals and activists usually blame the persistent effects of racism for the plight of the masses.

But is this really true?  Both Asians and Jews – who have achieved disproportionate success in this country – also share a history of racial discrimination.  Many of them came to this country with nothing, and have managed to dig themselves out of poverty.  The difference really comes down to values.

One episode that brought this home was when I was lounging on my couch late one night and flipping through the cable channels. It’s remarkable that with so many channels these days – there’s never really anything worth watching.  But I happened to turn to a program documenting Jewish mobsters in America.  Some of these guys were ruthless killers and degenerate thieves.  But the thing that stood out about them is that they never raised their children to grow up to be mobsters.  Some of their families had absolutely idea what they did for a living, and assumed that they were just legitimate businessmen.  Others helped out the more legitimate members of their family by paying for their education and investing in real estate and other legal businesses.

Right after the show on Jewish mobsters ended, another program began.  It was about a black family from Arkansas that took over the drug trade in Detroit.  Like the Jewish mobsters, the black criminals displayed a similar level of violence and cunning.  Like the Jews, they started out dirt poor; they also preyed upon their own kind.  However, there was one striking difference.  The black mobsters stayed in the ghetto where they peddled drugs.  They never invested in the education of their other family members.  In fact, when it became obvious to them that the law was closing in, they didn’t leave.  They stayed and ultimately got arrested, even though they had amassed millions and could have gone anywhere in the world.

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During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s website, Organizing for America – over which Obama has editorial control — played host to a series of vile anti-American, Jew-hating posts and pieces. It was overwhelming. There were numerous, heinous calls for Jewish genocide and incitement to hatred. And it is happening again, right now, on the official website of the man who is supposedly the leader of the free world.

The site was and is closely policed. The site moderators remove material that they consider to be “disrespectful to our other users” and to “detract from a welcoming community where all people can engage in positive discourse.” What they find disrespectful can be interesting: once during the campaign a conservative blogger, Bill Levinson, posted a blog on Obama’s website consisting entirely of a series of quotations from Obama’s own book, Dreams of my Father. Obama’s team did not approve of their standard-bearer’s words, and so Levinson’s blog and account were deleted from the Obama site in just under 36 hours. That’s right, Barack Obama’s website banned Obama’s own words. But the most disgusting anti-semitic ravings remained on the site, along with blogs advocating anarchy and the overthrow of the United States Congress.

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The Norwegian Nobel Committee wanted to let everyone know that they really like Barack Obama. They approve of his political views and they want him to remake the world according to his vision.  Okay, we get it.  The Norwegians, one of the most homogeneous societies in the world, whose sole significant imprint on the world stage is the annual awarding of this increasingly worthless prize, arrogantly assume the role of moral arbiters of United States politics.  Thanks.  Appreciate it. 

It is blatantly absurd to award the Nobel Peace Prize to a nine-month president with absolutely no foreign policy achievement of note.  Especially when there are so many other fields where the Academy could justify lavishing glory, (and money–one wonders what POTUS will do with the cash?) on their secular savior. 

 President Obama has written two highly acclaimed (by the left) books.  Dreams from My Father is his accounting of his unique life story and his journey to understand his roots and his father’s abandonment of him and his mother.  It was called, “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician,” by fawning sychophant Joe Klein.

 His second book, The Audacity of Hope (the first campaign flier published by Crown) was his soaring vision of a nation and world guided by the kind of social justice that only a community organizer can envision.  No less a literary critic than Gary Hart called Obama a, “figure who possesses perseverance and writing skills that have flashes of grandeur.”  The book occupied the New York Times Bestseller List for thirty weeks and won a Grammy to boot.

Almost any writer would kill to have sold as many volumes and have his or her books become so influential.  Surely the Nobel Prize for literature would have been much more justifiable.

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