Equality of people is no more proven than inequality. It is socially acceptable to detrimentally generalize about mothers in law or dislike neighbors. It’s okay to discuss varying smartness of various breeds of dogs, or to assert that one person is smarter than another. Leftists decry applying that reasoning to nations for a single reason: leftists’ pet groups are always deficient. Leftists find it hard to claim representing, say, Americans, but position themselves as heralds of primitive peoples, such as Africans or Arabs.

Cats are less intellectually advanced than humans, but humans don’t kill cats for that reason. Human beings evolve; modern humans are definitely smarter than Neanderthals. The West and the Middle East evolved differently; Westerners statistically achieved better than Arabs throughout history. Could all the previous generations be wrong? Could we imagine that no Arab throughout the history was sufficiently educated to make a major invention?

Rational recognition of statistically different achievements of nations is not the same racism as lynching. Passive dislike doesn’t equal hatred, surely not actionable hatred. Thoughts are not deeds; Jesus was wrong equating lust with adultery. Leftists sophistically widen the meaning of racism to accuse the detractors of their pet nations of immorality. By the current standard of racism, books written before the 1960s are generally racist, and the leftists already censored the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Arabs exploit popular unwillingness to assert their intellectual inferiority.

Generalization about Arab intellect is presumed immoral, but leftists generalize the other way presuming Arabs good and smart. Generalization and arguing from absence of evidence are accepted scientific methods. We don’t care that Arabs could turn out decent intellectual results if forced to universities from seventh century onwards; absent of positive evidence of their achievements, it is logical to presume them stupid.

Groups, including nations, are different from each other. Their competition fosters social evolution and progress. In the process, some groups die out. Oil purchases artificially keep Arab hordes alive.

Alexander the Great conquered the world. Rome imposed pax Romana. Russia cut the window on Europe. British empire spawned continents. Napoleon liberated Europe. Europeans pioneered America. Jews restored their ancient state.
The verbs convey the sense of approval. The described campaigns are great and admired. But all of them were conducted against the wishes of local people, often at the cost of their lives. That’s the ethics of history in a nutshell: strangers’ lives can be sacrificed for the aim one considers high.

Suffering of Palestinians is as unimportant as the suffering of ancient Persians conquered by Alexander. History doesn’t remember dead masses, but great events only. Jews’ lenient treatment of the Palestinian aborigines will fall into historical oblivion; think of your school course of history, does it mention any ruler for his kindness? Israel’s only chance of entering the history is becoming the Great Israel. Regardless of her enemies’ lives.

A recent scandal over the Education Ministry approving a textbook for Israeli Arabs which mentions the War of Independence as a catastrophe, highlights the problem of fairness. The textbook, as the Education Minister claimed correctly, fairly presents both the Jewish and the Arab sides of the event. The leftist minister failed to understand a critical thing: we Jews don’t want fairness. Two friends contesting a beautiful girl both of them love dearly – do they think of fairness? Fairness is a concession. People concede to contenders in some matters, expecting reciprocity in other matters. But sometimes, no reciprocity is in sight. A man won’t step back from contesting his darling’s heart because other contenders lack reciprocal offers for him. Fairness is a statistical matter; unique things are above the concept of fairness.

The United States, the most free country on earth, practices eminent domain. The government evicts owners from their real estate property without sufficient compensation (if it were sufficient, they would sell rather than being evicted). Almost every state was formed by displacing the original inhabitants of the land, often by killing them off or forcibly assimilating them.

The Jews, too, need to carve a state for themselves. Not because it is fair: fairness is inapplicable to statehood. Not because the Jews deserve a state: no one does – ask the Basques. Not because Palestinian Arabs lack tribal characteristics: nation or not, they miss their grandparents’ villages and olive trees. The Jews need a state because they want to live in a state.

Masses of citizens slowly kill their states by disregarding civil responsibilities; most don’t even vote. States are formed not by majorities, but by a relatively few zealots who hold the land, independence, and living without strangers as the ultimate values not subject to concessions. Enough Jews desperately want a state of our own, and the Jews won such a state in six wars and scores of conflicts.

Jewish occupation of the land settled by Muslims is not fair to Muslims. Nor is it green. Fairness has as little to do with statehood as color. For all its political correctness, America retains the common sense to avoid indoctrinating its children with the Red Indian side of the story. People in peacetime, especially children, cannot easily grasp the wartime concepts of genocide, rape, and robbery. It would take years for children to understand – and most will never understand – the subtle philosophical basis of morality as intra-group phenomenon, inapplicable – and never applied – in foreign relations. People abandon morality to further their most cherished aims: Juliet broke her parents’ hearts by faking suicide that would bring her to Romeo. All means are good to further national goals, and statehood is the primary national goal.

How bizarre is it to reject fairness? But where did you see fairness recently? Some people are born rich while others live dirt poor. Some are geniuses while most possess mediocre minds. Some are prom queens while others are ugly sheep. Was life fair to the Red Indians? To the Chechens? The Basques? Jews? Arabs?

The world runs a giant affirmative action program for Palestinian Arabs at the Jews’ expense.

Greece and Rome were openly homosexual societies but lacked gay marriage. A permissive environment for deviational enjoyment does not have to twist the values of commonsense.

Liberalism as an all-permissive culture flourished in America because immigrants lost their core values and traditions in the melting pot of American assimilation, and developed no new system of values besides the objective of getting rich. An experiment in cultural meltdown failed in the US, as it did in Russia and Israel; actually, the experiment succeeded while the societies failed culturally.

The Netherlands are permissive not because the locals lack values but because they are abnormally kind to others. Hard communal work building dams, an absence of mortal foreign enemies or expansionist ambitions, a mild monarchy and non-aggressive clergy, prosperity, and relatively mild domestic economic competition together created a rare well-wishing national mentality; we’ve yet to see the results of its accommodation of deviants. Nations that lack statutory enemies are extremely rare.

A "national mentality" does exist in many places, and values do vary across nations. The Norwegians but not the Danes, the French but not the Italians, are anti-Semitic. Few if any people value freedom above security or order, and still fewer interpret freedom as an all-permissiveness which is not, in fact, a value but rather the absence thereof.

Immigrant societies like the US, Israel, and to a lesser extent the originally culturally homogenous Canada lack values, and thus tend towards valueless liberalism. They will either eventually build a cultural core suitable for a nation, or dissolve. The US survived and prospered for so long because it was formed in an incubator of oceanic isolation, it retained some Puritan values, and it consistently suppressed multiculturalism, which calls for the lowest common denominator among various values. Today, the US cities look like intergalactic airports, swarming with aliens. Small faraway towns and to a degree the South retained the original American ideology: tolerant, but not permissive beyond the bounds of common sense.

All-permissiveness historically correlates with decadence, which kicks in before societies enter free fall. Affluent and afraid of violence toward themselves, people shrink from violence to others. In search of still more enjoyment, they abandon moral restrictions and in their arrogance disregard seemingly irrational values. Societies which lack commonsense values, whether decadent like Rome or rationalist like the communist Russia, always fail.

Israelis imitate the Americans and study humanities relatively little. More attention is paid to the cash crops of applied sciences. Americans build complicated enterprises but fail to understand complex international relations. Israelis are sliding in the same direction.

Israeli-born Jews, imbued with post-1967 macho mentality, shrug at the Holocaust victims: why did they allow killing themselves as sheep? why didn’t they fight? The Jews brought up in the spirit of tolerance and rapprochement with Germany seek fault with their brethren; ostensibly, they behaved as sub-humans. In truth, the generation of Holocaust behaved all too human. Consider brave, zealous Russians who have no ghetto mentality; they silently submitted to the Stalinist slaughter. During WWII, Russians prisoners died by hundreds of thousands from starvation but did not rise up against their German guards. No nation has stronger claim for normality than Americans, but the story of American prisoners’ degradation in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 fully conforms to the events. Americans accepted their government to slaughter their children by sending them to senseless wars in Vietnam and Iraq. French, British soldiers accepted assured deaths in Verdun rather than rejecting the government’s right to have them killed.

Jews of Holocaust are guilty of profaning God’s name by submitting to their murderers. There are, however, extenuating circumstances: a history of anti-Semitism, recent persecutions and often pogroms made Jews prepared for death; Germans and their Latvian, Ukrainian accomplices crushed the Jews’ self-respect before murdering us; in many cases, the lethal prospects were concealed and Jews imagined salvation until it was too late. Israeli Jews lack any of those excuses.

The Muslim statements, intentions, and ideology are clear: in the long term, they won’t accept a Jewish state in the Middle East. The targets for North Korean, Pakistani, and Iranian nuclear bombs are clear: Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Ashdod. The disloyalty – or rather nationalism – of Israeli Arabs is clear: in a crisis, enough of them will come up to kill Jews. That Israeli government commits treason on every turn, from giving Muslims the Temple Mount to sending humanitarian aid to Gazan Arabs is beyond doubt. The sour fruits of the peace process with determined enemy are no secret: more than 7,000 Jewish casualties. The map of the Roadmap plan is there on the Internet to see: creating a Palestinian state leaves Israel a 9-mile wide country most of whose territory is Negev desert. Arrogant Israeli Jews disparage the Holocaust victims for sheepishly accepting their deaths; Israelis, for their part, accept the lethal prospects as donkeys. Sheep accept their fate; donkeys ignore it.

It was for a reason that Plato has only awarded voting rights in his utopian state to military aristocracy. The rights belong to those ready to fight for them. Fictional democracy allows brainwashed donkeys to elect a government that kills them on the altar of peace process. The Holocaust generation of Jews, at least, did not elect its executioners.

European politicians support the Arabs against Israel for pragmatic reasons: the Arabs supply oil, they buy European goods, and they provide investment opportunities. European anti-Semites naturally side with the Arabs against the Jews. But there is also a large class of pro-Arab liberals – not only professional leftists, but simply compassionate well-wishers. That group invested much less efforts in helping the Jews escape the Nazis or Soviets. These liberals defend not just anyone, but exotic people. The liberals in Russia and France defended the Jews against anti-Semites until the 1930s, and defended the Vietnamese from the Americans with no less zeal than Palestinian Arabs from Jews. They condemned Britain for oppressing the Indians and France over Algiers although the decidedly rational Britain and France provided fewer opportunities for criticism than Israel or the US, who veil wars in high-flown moralizing.

Liberals demanded Western intervention in Somalia and Rwanda, but opposed it in Iraq. Leftists criticize any government policy regardless of its merits. Iraqi Kurds, though exotic, are reportedly strong, not victims who need leftists to defend them. Iraq was ruled by a dictator. Leftists seek to impose their ivory tower designs by force, and love dictators. No dictator is too bloody for them: they cheered Stalin, Mao, and Saddam.

Why exotic people? Because they are like pets: cute, curious, and unthreatening, thus they arouse compassion. Exotic people don’t challenge the liberal leadership or their theories and are grateful for the help. Liberals need glory and don’t concern themselves with inconspicuous oppression: few demonstrated regarding Rwanda or Darfur, and then only to push Western governments for charity or intervention. Leftists love to defend exotic people against liberal Western governments. The moral ground is high, governments’ false pretenses are easily expounded, and the struggle against the perceived evil is well publicized and not dangerous. The Israeli-Arab conflict falls perfectly into that trap.

When I insist on moral equivalence of Arab terrorism and Jewish warfare, the usual retort is deliberate killing of Jewish children by Arabs. Jews, supposedly, avoid targeting Arab children – though accept a so large number of Arab civilian casualties during military operations that the distinction is irrelevant. Jews killed many more Arab children than Palestinian terrorists – Jewish children. Arabs, too, generally target military- or voting-age population. The notorious disco bombings were directed against IDF recruits. Some Arab terrorists, by far a minority, deliberately killed Jewish children, not as a matter of collateral damage as other Arab terrorists and Jews during bombing campaigns. But nations from Ukrainians to the most civilized Germans – perfectly average Germans – did the same, yet the Jews ingratiate themselves with those murderers – while snobbishly rejecting the Arabs only because the Jews could so far afford to reject and detest the Arabs.

Arabs act normally – with the normal brutality of oppressed against their oppressors, of owners against thieves, of colonial populations against colonizers, of people certain of their values against those who infringe on the dearest values. Palestinians fight like any decent nation should: a brutal, total war where every member of the enemy force is an enemy. Palestinians fight like any decent army does: with the aim of inflicting the most pain on the enemy – on their Jewish enemy; what Jew ever cared of the American fire-bombings of Tokyo? of Palestinian children herded into the Gaza concentration camps to live in the conditions unworthy even of animals?

Labeling enemies is counterproductive. Morally wrong enemies could be corrected, taught, set up on the right path. Our Arab enemies are not wrong, much worse: they are irreconcilable. They want the same land we do, and fight for it with the same methods we employ. Syria is a terrorist state because it supports Hamas? Israel supported the very same Hamas against Arafat. Syrians are terrorists because they aid Hezbollah? Israel has aided much more barbarous South Lebanon Army. A few Palestinians shot Jewish babies and children point blank? Venerable Ben Gurion reduced prison sentences for Jewish perpetrators of Kfar Qasem murder to no more than 3.5 years: Israeli courts, General Staff, and President understood that Arab children 8 years up where murdered to force the Arabs to flee a strategically important region. Like it or not, ends justify the means.

Atheist Jews forget our prime example of dealing with sworn enemies: “Smite Amalek… slay both man and woman, infant and suckling…” Arabs act normally. It’s time for Jews to follow their example.

Ending mass murder in other countries by a short invasion is extremely cost-efficient, but the idealists and the military-industrial complex often extend the imperial involvement for the self-serving reasons of, respectively, changing the invaded societies in America’s image and earning profits. America’s image is a function of America’s economic opportunities; most other peoples are less developed and industrious. America uniquely collected the entrepreneurial cream of many other societies; people who long for unhindered economic opportunities naturally prefer political freedom. Other nations prefer the personal or economic safety of dictatorships; common Iraqis were safer under Saddam’s rule than under the current democratic strife. Few Iraqis appreciate the freedom of driving from Fallujah to Baghdad at a speed of no less than 120 miles per hour trying to avoid ambushes. It is simplistic for America to imagine that a few years of occupation can change the historical development of societies. Iraq didn’t become a liberal democracy in its thousands years of statehood, and won’t become liberal after a few years of American troops staying in the Green Zone.

America wouldn’t have been happy if Australia had attacked it in 1902 or Russia in 1917 to force women’s suffrage, which America adopted relatively late, in 1920. Japan abolished slavery in 1588 and Britain, in practice, in 1772, but didn’t force the slaves’ rights upon America, which only banned slavery in 1865. Nor did the United States fight Saudi Arabia, which abolished slavery only in 1962. Many rights taken as self-evident now were not so widespread until surprisingly recently. The women of France, Italy, and Switzerland didn’t vote in national elections until after WWII. Black voters were severely restricted in America before 1965. America lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 only in 1971, while the voting age in Iran is a very liberal 15 years.

The Torah implies a generally democratic rule when stating an exception, “You shall not follow the multitude to evil,” but elders rather than any one individual governed the towns. The status of elder is a matter of experience: Bush clearly does not qualify for election, while someone like Kissinger probably does. Non-democratic Mubarak is better for Egypt than the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood.

Developed, stable, economically consensual societies usually opt for some kind of a democracy. People there want safety and have no urgent needs that push them to infringe upon others. People in homogenous societies have no institutional enemies and respect others’ opinions. Happy societies are alike democratic while discontented societies choose various modes of statehood which, depending on the local situation, provide the best chance for safety. In Afghanistan of 2004, democratic elections offered protection from the warlords, and the population flocked to vote for the American quisling president.

America opposed the Soviet attempts at centralized economic planning, but adopted an even more vile approach of planning and consciously changing societies. Complex adaptive systems cannot be planned. America would do best just to defuse immediate humanitarian crises and let countries develop on their own.

On one side of the scale, the Nazis practiced euthanasia of severely handicapped and mentally challenged people whose lives were deemed “not worth living.” On the opposite side, the UN adopted idealistic conventions on the rights of people with disabilities.

The conventions ban employment discrimination against the disabled. That amounts to a hefty tax on employers who have to hire the disabled only theoretically suitable for jobs. Many handicapped people are otherwise healthy and decent, but many are not. Governments should not require private employers to run charities.

Affirmative action for the disabled creates a new class above the rest. Companies can rarely formulate the reasons for firing employees with mathematical precision; “underperformance” is a vague term open to claims of abuse.

Mentally disabled people pose a bigger problem. The convention requires equal housing opportunities for them, but many sane people detest having such neighbors. Pushing the duty of housing the mentally ill people on the public is wrong. Governments charge taxes and should provide hospices to visibly insane people.

Historically, life expectancy among disabled people is low. With various benefits and medical treatment, usually at public account, the percentage of disabled in the total population is rising. While the UN figure of 650 million disabled worldwide is grossly inflated, their number is huge and grows particularly as the population ages.

The only option to control the costs of servicing the disabled is to relegate them to private charities rather than private enterprises.

The differences between the US occupations of Japan and Iraq are suggestive. The US fought Japan in an exhausting war and had every reason to hate its government. Democratic America detested Japanese monarchy. The Western Christians were xenophobic about odd customs of the Japanese. Yet the US was wise to change none of that.

America strengthened the very Japanese institutions that underpinned the war and eliminated only the Japanese army, the direct threat. Then the US used those institutions to change the Japanese outlook from within. The mid-term result was hugely successful: Japanese ambitions were channeled into the economy and the economy, directed outward. Long-term changes in mentality are unlikely, and Japanese imperialism will resurface, reinforced by economic success. Hardly any policy, however, could produce more than mid-term results.

Contrast the American policy in Iraq. The US destroyed institutions like the strong government and police which cemented multi-ethnic, religiously diverse Iraq. Reforming a failed state is impossible; only strong states survive reforms. America made the situation still worse by directly enforcing the law and pushing for unwelcome political changes, like democracy and Westernization. No people accept a new ideology force-fed by hostile outsiders. They fight or, at best, are contemptuously passive. Once the occupation force withdraws, locals will repair to the old values in their most extreme form. People will firmly connect the resistance fighters with the idealized old values, and raise them to power.

America could follow the Japan example in nuclear Egypt, Iran, and North Korea. Each still has a strong security apparatus and a reasonably contented population. America may conquer their capitals install acceptable rulers without damaging the security framework, and have the new rulers brainwash their citizens with a local variety of Western ideology, from schools to mass media. Ataturk was almost alone when he started secularizing Turkey. Totalitarian governments plus Western ideology could solve the problem of nuclear rogue states.