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.

I was astounded by the lack of common sense these guys displayed.  Despite their obvious intelligence, something was missing.  Or rather present.  They actually identified with their criminal culture and strove to maintain it.  There did not seem to be any yearning to move beyond the ghetto into legitimate wealth in America.  They raised their children amid the poverty and failed to help them get better opportunities. This is dangerous. It’s almost as if achieving anything in a legal manner made them less legitimately black.  Their identity was deeply ingrained with pathology.  There was no hope for the future.  They had no inkling that their children could one day be President of the United States.

It was perhaps the pictures on the screen that said it all.  The Jewish mobsters were dressed in conservative, expensive suits. They looked the model of mainstream success.  You wouldn’t have known they were gangsters unless you’d been told.  The black gangsters, on the other hand, were dressed in sleeveless t-shirts and festooned with gold chains and bracelets. They were carrying submachine guns with rounds of ammunition hanging around their necks.  If any law enforcement office had happened by, they would have been arrested on sight.  I realized in watching the contrast between Jewish and African-American gangsters was that the black gangsters had embraced gangster culture.  The Jews had turned to crime out of necessity, and did not glorify it.  It was merely a means to an end – a legitimate place in the society.

Jews share a deeply ingrained culture of achievement.  Whether they are religious or not, they are raised with values: work hard, be just, be studious, and make something of yourself.  This doesn’t mean that Jewish people are above some of the social ills that plague the rest of society.  But it means that as a culture they consciously aspire to a higher standard.

During a recent conversation with a close Jewish friend I asked him what he thought separated Jews from most other ethnic groups.   I was expecting him to talk about how a shared history of oppression had strengthened Jews and brought them closer together.  But his answer was both surprising and controversial.  “Unlike gentiles, especially Christians,” he said, “Jews do not believe in an after life as such. There is no God up there dictating your lot in life.  We don’t believe the meek shall inherit the earth. We truly believe in the power of an individual’s free will, guided of course by right principles.”

As someone who ascribes to a strong Christian faith, I do not share my friends’ beliefs.  I do believe in the afterlife, and that we will ultimately be judged for our actions by a higher power. But we do share the same principles when it comes to ethical behavior.  Jews believe in the Ten Commandments, and so do Christians.  These rules for behavior are not just a ticket to a blessed afterlife, but a prescription for success here on earth.  These basic moral principles have had a profound effect upon how Jews view life.

In America, Christianity has been used by various groups to justify the enslavement of others.   Blacks were told they were the Sons of Ham, and therefore cursed by God to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.  Jews, on the other hand, have firmly held that they were specifically chosen by God to rule the earth.  On the other hand, the slaves’ deep spiritual well enabled them to endure some of the harshest conditions known to modern man – intergenerational slavery in a foreign land. The so-called Negro spirituals and the importance of the black church bear witness to this.  Still, despite the passage of time and expansion of opportunity, blacks as a race still bear the spiritual wounds of their captivity.

Barak Obama alluded to as much in his autobiography, Dreams of My father.  As he surveyed the landscape of inner-city Chicago for a language of unity and strength to support the building of “families, communities [and] economies” he found the stories of hope and triumph on that ground tainted with hatred and feelings of inferiority.  He found it difficult if not impossible to “separate that strength from the hurt and distortions that lingered around [him].”  What Obama did not realize is the very policies of liberalism he espouses have massively contributed to such a culture.  Liberalism betrays blacks by keeping them in a place of victimhood.  After all, you can’t qualify for most social programs unless you profess to be disadvantaged.

It’s one thing to be bound together by a shared struggle. That lends people strength in times of crisis.  But when the crisis is over, reveling in shared oppression only tends to frustrate future progress.  Perhaps blacks should take a cue from the Jewish culture, and embrace a shared history of achievement and success.

I do not profess to have all of the answers to why there is such a disparity in achievement between ethnic groups in America.  But I know from my own experience that achievement starts with an aspiration to be more than you are now. And to do that, you have to let go of the past.

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.

In April 2008 a typical post appeared, claiming that “Jews owe Africa and Africans everything they have today because if Africa did not shelter them when they were homeless and starving, they would not be here today.” And in July 2008, a piece called “They fear peace” by Kate Smythe-Blake went up on Obama’s site. “The kike filth,” Smythe-Blake ranted, “are trying to steal this election from us. But this is our time. The kike live in fear of peace. They fear happiness. The thought of people living happily in peace without killing each other frightens the horde of kike that runs our government.  But when pieces of kike use their kike manipulation tactics to stop Barack, it is time to strike back. There is nothing a kike army can do when faced with progressive people who are determined to achieve peace.  We will achieve lasting peace.”

When such things went up on Obama’s website (and often stayed there for long periods), the Jewish lay leadership in this country said nothing, did nothing, and supported this man. Now he is President of the United States, and there is even more ugly Jew hatred and incitement to kill Jews on Obama’s website. It harks back to the Jewish blood libels. Obama’s website has become a hub for Islamic antisemitism.

On October 5, a post went up on Obama’s website entitled  “Nazi Israel … Indeed.” It quoted a Princeton professor, Richard Falk, referring to Israel’s “war crimes”, “genocidal tendencies”, “holocaust implications”, and “holocaust-in-the-making.” It spoke about Israel’s “Nazi-like crimes and human rights violation.” It claimed: “Comparing the present-day Israel with Nazi Germany one discovers that the majority of the Israeli policies are the exact copies of the Nazi policies. Nazi Germany had invaded its European neighbors extending from England to Russia. Israel had also invaded all its neighboring countries; Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. It is also heavily involved in the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Its tentacles had also reached African countries as far as South Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Angola, and Sierra Leone.”

Continuing the lies and blood libels, the post claims: “Worse than the Nazis Israeli forces used to invade peaceful Palestinian towns, execute men, women and children in cold blood everywhere and anywhere they encounter them, dynamite their homes on top of their residents, and finally demolish the whole town making room for new Israeli colonies.” It charges that Israel pursued “a pre-meditated genocidal plan” against the Palestinian Arabs.

Suffice to say that this entry passed muster with Obama’s moderators and is clearly acceptable to Obama for America.

Why hasn’t Obama stopped the terrible hate speech he was hosting on his site? This has been going on for well over a year. And it continues. He knows the anti-semites post these blood libels on his website. So why does he retain the platform as President of the United States? It’s evil. Why does he encourage it with his silence? Is Obama an anti-semite? By his fruits we shall know him, and so we know him

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.

Come to think of it, one could justify almost any other Nobel Prize for Obama other than the Peace Prize.  As has been exhaustively noted by questioners around the globe, the prizes are awareded for acheivement, not for good intentions, not for speeches or sound bites or just not being the guy you replaced.  It could be rationalized if Obama had spent decades striving for peace and had kept coming up short, to give him the prize for persistency.  Kind of like the Irving Thalberg Award for sticking around long enough.  In other words, Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Prize.

How about the prize for medicine?  Come up with some new discovery of how this gene or this virus works and help some people live a better life?  Pfooey!  Completely restructure the way 300 million people get treatment, invade people’s lives to an unprecedented level, decide what care is government-sanctioned and what isn’t, and in the process undermine the best care in the world, and you can really lay claim to having an impact on medicine.  Even without a bill passed yet, there is something there to hang your hat on.

But without a doubt, the prize to which Obama can most reasonably lay claim is that for economics, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.  His nearly one-trillion dollar stimulus package has been a major achievement in the field.  It has been the most high-profile repudiation of Keynesian theory ever launched.  Of course, that wasn’t Obama’s intent, but so many scientific breakthroughs have come about while academics were trying to determine something else entirely.   The president conducted one of the highest-cost economics experiments in history, (with taxpayer money) to see if J. M. Keynes theory that massive government spending could essentially end economic recessions. 

The answer is, of course, no.  In an era where economic cycles, like all others are compressed, the consensus is that the stimulus has fallen far short of its desired impact.  Even if we grant that Congressional Democrats hijacked the initiative to pay off organized labor, environmentalists, and special-interest advocates of pet social projects, the package has not delivered.  Unemployment continues to creep upward, no matter how much dissembling the administration undertakes about “jobs saved,” and how many more would be out of work without the stimulus.

In a few short months, Professor Obama has achieved what many economists spend a life time trying.  He has provided concrete evidence to support an economic theory.  Fortunately for the future of the republic and the solvency of generations to come, the theory he has helped prove is that Keynes’ theory is garbage.  Government cannot borrow and spend its way to prosperity.   Obama’s experiment shows that government is an inefficient agent for redistribution of resources.  Its efforts are subject to political whims, its actions are slow and entail unforeseen costs and consequences that diminish, rather than increase positive economic activity. 

Now that is an achievement worthy of a Nobel Prize.  Come to think of it, a few more years of this and Obama will be a lock for the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.