Many of the Jews who moved to Israel in the 19th and 20th Century had a kindly view of the Palestinians. They saw no reason why the two groups should not prosper together. They did not see the land of Israel as a zero sum matter wherein one group would win and one group would lose.
This reminds me of when the Pilgrims fled England and set up shop in Jamestown in 2007. The Pilgrims hated the cruel way the Spaniards treated the native and were determined to do better.
In the end, the kind intentions of Jews and Pilgrims meant very little because land is a scarce resource and conflict over it is inherent until one group triumphs and other groups are brought to heel.
The Cold War did not end until the United States won and the Soviet Union was destroyed. The Middle East conflict won’t end until Israel wins convincingly and its surrounding dictatorships see it in their self-interest to avoid war with Israel (such as Egypt, Jordan and Syria who have caused Israel little trouble for years).
Wherever you find people of more than one race trying to share the same territory, there is conflict.
American race relations in the Anglo-American sense began in 1607 with the founding of the Jamestown colony on the coast of Virginia. Jamestown is not only where American race relations begin, it is also a fascinating example of the inevitability of racial conflict.
The purpose of the colony was to find gold, but the intentions of the colonists towards the Indians were entirely benevolent. In fact, the English, aware of the Spanish reputation for brutality in the New World, consciously wanted to be different and better.
The English, moreover, had no preconceived notions of racial superiority, and saw the Indians—or “naturals” as they called them—as essentially no different from themselves. This was in direct contrast to their view of Moors or black Africans whom they did think of as aliens. Some of the Jamestown colonists believed that the “naturals” really were white people whose skin was dark because they painted themselves so often.
In any case, the 100 or so men who started the colony were very careful to find a place for their encampment that was unclaimed and uninhabited. They wished to cause no offense. The leader of the colony, Edward-Maria Wingfield, decreed that since the English came in peace, there would be no fortifications and no training in arms.
There was contact with the Indians, mostly peaceful but sometimes tense, and before the encampment was two weeks old, hundreds of Indians attacked the camp in an attempt to wipe out the colony. There were deaths on both sides, and the English would have been massacred if they had not panicked the Indians with cannon fire. It was only after this narrow escape that the English built the three-sided stockade so familiar to American school children.
I keep reading all these heartfelt cries for stopping the killing in the Middle East. So let’s indulge this wish for a minute and think about what would happen if all the actors in the Middle East decided to stop killing each other.
The Arab and Muslim states in the Middle East, who average IQs around 90 at best, would sit back and watch the Jewish state of Israel surpass them in almost every way at a faster rate with each passing year. The Arabs and Muslims would have to confront the inescapable fact that they are an inferior civilization (when measured in First World terms) and that their people are not as capable as Jews, whites and orientals. I can’t even conceive of a worldview they could develop wherein they could think of themselves as number one and every group must look at the world in terms where they are number one.
Let’s imagine that in the United States, all killing ceased and all violent crime ceased. Then low-achieving blacks and latinos and whites would have to face the facts that they stayed overwhelmingly in the lowest rungs of the socio-economic scale generation after generation and as the world became more complicated with each passing year, they would fall further and further behind. How would they prop themselves up psychologically if they could no longer blame the man for their troubles?
The only way to have peace in the United States and peace in the Middle East is if the criminally inclined are too scared to commit crimes. Right now, Egypt is a dictatorship and the country is running better than when it was a democracy ruled a militant Muslim. The United States had much less violent crime when it had entrenched racial discrimination and widespread lynching. People with low IQs naturally tend to crime and the main thing that stops them is fear.
The long-term answer is to force all girls, starting about age 12, to take norplant or some long-term birth control, and only allow them to have kids when they can have a license to do so (and that license depends on them showing they have the capability to give birth to and raise productive citizens aka they have IQs over 100). I agree with the Supreme Court justice who ruled that three generations of imbeciles are enough.
The Washington Post has a long article on the difficulties of policing a low-IQ community in Alaska:
With no police and few courts of their own, most Alaska Native villages instead are forced to rely on Alaska State Troopers. But there is only about one trooper per every million acres. Getting to rural communities can take days and is often delayed by the great distances to cover, the vagaries of the weather and — in the minds of many Alaska Natives — the low priority placed on protecting local tribes.
Rural Alaska has the worst crime statistics in the nation’s Native American communities — and the country. Alaska Native communities experience the highest rates of family violence, suicide and alcohol abuse in the United States: a domestic violence rate 10 times the national average; physical assault of women 12 times the national average; and a suicide rate almost four times the national average. Rape in Alaska occurs at the highest rate in the nation — three times the national average.
The article does not mention how these problems are endemic among those with low-IQs, not just in remote Alaska and not just among blacks and latinos, but among all those with low IQs. It takes a high IQ to see the future more clearly and to see the consequences of your behavior. Empathy requires abstract thought, to put yourself in the place of others and to feel the pain they feel.
IQ is not the only factor in murder and violent crime. Different groups have different rates of social pathology — blacks tend to have higher rates than whites who tend to have higher rates than orientals.
Philosopher Michael Levin writes:
However, different levels of intelligence are not likely to be the sole cause of racial differences in morality. Data reported in The Bell Curve (and noted in the February issue of AR) show that black and white populations differ in crime and illegitimacy rates even when IQ is held constant. Thus, in one large-scale study, blacks in general were 6.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, but when the comparison was restricted to blacks and whites with IQs of 100, blacks were still 2.5 times more likely to be incarcerated.
Temperament therefore appears to have an effect on behavior that is independent of intelligence. This is intuitively obvious, as aggression easily becomes heedlessness of the rights of others; we should therefore expect black and white standards of behavior to differ.
Examples of this difference abound. “Trash talk,” the stream of arrogant banter with which black basketball players seek to intimidate and humiliate opponents, is alien to white ideals of sportsmanship. Likewise, Montel Williams, the host of a television talk show, claimed to have discovered racial bias in a question on an IQ test that asked children what they would do if they threw a baseball through a neighbor’s window. The answer scored as correct was offering to pay for the window, but Mr. Williams, who is black, objected that in his old neighborhood a “Sorry, man” would have sufficed. No doubt, Mr. Williams was right that blacks do attach less urgency than whites to compensating damage.
Numerous fights among blacks result from “dissing”-males seeking dominance over each other by shows of disrespect — a practice that indicates disregard for the golden rule. Moreover, it is hard to imagine a more blatant violation of the golden rule than the constant demand for royalties by Martin Luther King’s estate whenever his speeches are published — especially when his own plagiarism is justified as “voice merging.”
What Morality Is
Evolutionary biology suggests an explanation for race differences in moral values. But first, to begin with a definition: An individual’s “morality” is the rules he wants everyone to follow, and that he wants everyone to want everyone to follow. Honesty is a moral value for him if he tries to be honest, tries to make his children honest, hopes others will be honest, and encourages others to reinforce honesty. A group’s morality is the moral rules its members share.
The clause about “wanting everyone to want everyone” is needed to distinguish moral questions, like honesty, from other “universal” concerns. If you are like most people, you think others ought to be honest. But you may also think everyone should exercise, without considering exercise a “moral” value. The difference between the two is not in their usefulness, since both are useful: jogging is healthful, and honesty facilitates such profitable activities as trade. But honesty, unlike exercise, is advantageous only if everyone else is honest. Jogging strengthens my heart whether or not you jog, whereas being honest helps me only insofar as it induces others to reciprocate, allowing me to rely on their words. This is also why it is smart to be honest even when tempted to lie — if you are found out, others will feel no obligation to be honest with you.
On the other hand, if everyone else is a liar, honesty only lets others take advantage of you. Therefore, since honesty, self-restraint, and other moral virtues are good ideas only when everyone thinks they are good ideas, you not only want everyone else to be honest, you want everyone to encourage others to be honest, and to ensure that honesty is widespread.
The advantages of honesty and other virtues have a biological dimension. Since moral individuals in a moral community do better than scoundrels, they live longer and have more children. Obeying and reinforcing moral rules is adaptive. If there is any genetic tendency to obey and reinforce moral rules, a tendency to obey and reinforce them and to be susceptible to reinforcement will be passed on to offspring.
