The City Council’s resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and refusing to denounce Hamas’s barbaric Oct. 6 assault on Israel has aroused criticism around the world. Oakland—already an international embarrassment as a failed city—now is seen as supportive of Palestinian terrorism simply because the Palestinians are allegedly people of color and most Israelis are White. And, as we’ve sadly learned over the years, progressives in Oakland conceive of recent history as a justified uprising of people of color against White colonialists.
I myself refuse to take a position in this question of a cease-fire. I’m happy to leave that decision, and others associated with the war, to the diplomats and politicians who are directly concerned. I don’t think we all have to take positions on everything, all the time. It’s okay to admit you don’t know, or don’t have enough information.
But our City Council, of course, always has to take a position on anything and everything concerning race, because they’re obsessed with race. Racial grievance is what got most of them elected, because it’s fashionable these days to rage against racism, and young people in particular—who are so ignorant of history—feel it’s their duty and responsibility to “fight racism.” What they don’t understand is that they’re fighting a phantom. Since there’s no such thing as “racism” in America, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to end, nothing to correct. What there is in America is resentment against certain sociopathic behaviors, and if these behaviors tend to be displayed more frequently among some racial groups, then those groups will probably feel that resentment. But it would be a mistake of tragic proportions to misinterpret the resentment as based on skin color rather than on sociopathic behavior.
There’s a reason why human beings dislike sociopathic behavior: it threatens the stability of the group. Somehow, against all odds, humans managed to evolve into an orderly society that more or less works to everyone’s advantage. We still have wars and crime, unfortunately, but in general we live in a peaceful world in which people are free to survive the perils of infancy and grow up to be autonomous individuals, with the right to pursue happiness alongside their neighbors. But every once in a while someone decides to rebel against the group norms that keep us welded together in harmony, and it is these disrupters whom the greater society has always had to sanction. Every society we know of has punished transgressors that threatened its stability and tranquility. When a disrupter is punished, the greater group asks not what color he is, or what ethnicity, or what his religion is, or his height or weight or astrological sign. It is the disrupter’s behavior that is put in the dock. And it’s important to remind ourselves that we, as the greater group, have every right to sanction disrupters, especially when they’re violent, repeat criminals. Our society is held together by rather flimsy threads; we know, intuitively, when those threads are threatened, and we react instinctively. Therefore, what some people call “racism” is simply the greater group letting it be known that we cannot and will not allow sociopaths to unravel our society and culture. To do so would be the suicide of our species.
So, to the disrupters who chanted “From the river to the sea” at the City Council meeting, I say, when you’re able to condemn Hamas with the same rapacity with which you condemn Israel, we may be able to have a conversation. Until then, as far as I’m concerned, you’re the reason why the world is laughing at Oakland, or pitying it, or both.
Have a great weekend! Back on Monday.
Steve Heimoff