Is the Beirut Bombing a Warning for the US or a Warning About Diversity?

Executive Summary

• Thomas Friedman is an establishment journalist, and he supports the status quo.
• Yet he mistakenly tells the truth about the problems with diversity in Lebanon.

Introduction

It is required that journalists and all others endorse diversity.

Diversity has gone from something that is a “strength” to something that must be “honored.” 

However, what the proponents of diversity cannot find is where diversity improves the outcomes of a society. Everyplace that has diversity has conflict as people are by nature, tribal. This can’t be admitted by diversity proponents, as it would mean questioning whether diversity is a good thing. However, sometimes they question diversity, without realizing they are doing it. This article by Thomas Friedman is a perfect example of this. These quotes are taken from Thomas Friedman’s article Beirut’s Blast Is a Warning for America in the New York Times (the ultimate diversity promoter), on Aug 9, 2020.

When I first heard the news of the terrible explosion in Beirut, and then the rampant speculation about who might have set it off, my mind drifted back some 40 years to a dinner party I attended at the residence of Malcolm Kerr, then president of the American University of Beirut.

During the course of the dinner, someone mentioned the unusual hailstorms that had pelted Beirut the previous two nights. Everyone offered their explanations for this extreme weather event, before Malcolm, tongue in cheek, asked his guests, “Do you think the Syrians did it?”

Malcolm — a charming man and brilliant scholar, who was tragically murdered a few months later by unidentified assassins — was being both humorous and profound. He was poking fun at the Lebanese tendency to explain everything as a conspiracy, and, in particular, a conspiracy perpetrated by Syria, which is why we all laughed.

But he was also saying something profound about Lebanese society — that, alas, also applies to today’s America — the fact that in Lebanon then, and even more so today, everything, even the weather, had become political.

Because of the sectarian nature of Lebanese society, where all the powers of governing, and the spoils of the state, had been constitutionally or informally divided in a very careful balance between different Christian and Muslim sects, everything was indeed political. Every job appointment, every investigation into malfeasance, every government decision to fund this and not that was seen as advantaging one group and disadvantaging another.

Yes, and this is happening in the US. Quotas are increasingly used for college admissions, calling into question if those people who attend under a quota for a particular race could have gotten in these universities without these quotas. In IT, Indians have been discriminating mightily against non-Indians and Indians who are not of the right Indian grouping as we covered the article How Indian IT Workers Discriminate Against Non-Indian Workers. As the US has been infused with immigrants from 3rd world nations, which never developed a concept of meritocracy, the US will increasingly have positions allocated based upon whether the person is the appropriate race or sex. For example, presently, there are calls that Joe Biden’s running mate must be a black woman.

That is why the first question so many Lebanese asked after the recent explosion was not what happened, but who did it and for what advantage?

The United States is becoming like Lebanon and other Middle East countries in two respects. First, our political differences are becoming so deep that our two parties now resemble religious sects in a zero-sum contest for power. They call theirs “Shiites and Sunnis and Maronites” or “Israelis and Palestinians.” We call ours “Democrats and Republicans,” but ours now behave just like rival tribes who believe they must rule or die.

Yes, but Thomas Friedman seems to entirely exclude the racial diversity that has exploded in the US over the past three decades. This is not just a matter of the same ethnic population in the US from the 1990s become more political. There are far more differences in race and culture in the US than ever before. Those who have welcomed and promoted these changes — people like Thomas Freidman and publications like the New York Times have told us that this diversity will not have any impact on reducing the social cohesion in society. That everyone is “American.” And those that do not agree with increased diversity (read non-white, diversity means non-white), are told they are ignorant hillbillies. Thomas Friedman is seriously deluded if he thinks the only division in the US is between Democrats and Republicans.

We now have an immigrant culture in the US that tells people who tell them to speak English to “go f*** themselves.” 

Most of these immigrants don’t think English should be the official language of the US. Yes, this is going to cause conflict with the domestic US citizens who have always taken this as an assumption.

As we cover in the article, The DNC is Now Only For Non-White People, the Democrats have become the party of non-whites and the Republicans the party of whites. If Democrats are elected, they will cater to their non-white base and promote more immigration from 3rd world nations (the only place the US draws immigrants from anymore), and if the Republicans are elected, they will restrict this immigration. There are now difficulties in having discussions around other issues because the two political parties have become so racially segmented. Yet again, the establishment media says this is all fine, and will not have any negative consequences. Everyone must keep supporting diversity or anti-white statements and policies.

But a society, and certainly a democracy, eventually dies when everything becomes politics. Governance gets strangled by it. Indeed, it was reportedly the failure of the corrupt Lebanese courts to act as guardians of the common good and order the removal of the explosives from the port — as the port authorities had requested years ago — that paved the way for the explosion.

Yes, that has been the observation of those opposing diversity, and this website. Diverse countries fall into tribal contention over control over a society. Mexicans want no deportation, Indians want to discriminate against whites and non-whites and want more H1-B visas and Green Cards to be granted, blacks want reparations and want to move out of black areas into predominantly white areas, Asians want to setup their institutions to benefit only Asians. The list of disagreements continued to grow. How this is only an issue of Democrats versus Republicans, one has to make a very concerted effort not to observe.

“For a healthy politics to flourish it needs reference points outside itself — reference points of truth and a conception of the common good,” explained the Hebrew University religious philosopher Moshe Halbertal. “When everything becomes political, that is the end of politics.”

To put it differently, when everything is politics, it means that everything is just about power. There is no center, there are only sides; there’s no truth, there are only versions; there are no facts, there’s only a contest of wills.

Yes, this is a hallmark of a diverse culture. Each group is simply jockeying for position. This is the outcome of all diverse societies. Thomas Friedman is decrying this in the US, without seeming to consider why the US has come to this point. I find myself in gyms across that country that are 60 to 75% non-white. I increasingly hear a variety of languages spoken where it used to be English. I see no commonality with much of the US population, and this reduces my interest in sacrificing anything for the US. Rather I see elites — selling out the majority of people, or the so-called middle class in the US. This is the gift of diversity, accepting a larger number of people from failed societies into the country — and telling them, they can do what they like.

Illiberal populists like Trump — or Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Vladimir Putin in Russia — deliberately try to undermine the guardians of facts and the common good. Their message to their people is: “Don’t believe the courts, the independent civil servants or the fake news generators — only trust me, my words and my decisions. It’s a jungle out there. My critics are killers (which is what Trump called his press corps on Friday), and only I can protect our tribe from theirs. It’s rule or die.”

Is this really only coming from Trump? Democrats lied about Russiagate for two years as we cover in the article How Accurate Was the Coverage of Russiagate? about the impeachment, about universal health insurance. Also, how “liberal” are Thomas Friedman’s credentials, he has been a non-stop booster for globalism, which has reduced US wages and accepted near slave conditions in China, supported the Gulf War. If Thomas Friedman is a “liberal,” we have a serious problem because the term than ceases to have any meaning.

“When you lose the realm of the sacred, that realm of the common good outside of politics, that is when societies collapse,” said Halbertal. That is what happened to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Iraq. And that is what is slowly happening to Israel and America.

Reversing this trend is the most important project of our generation.

Yes, each of these countries is torn by diversity strife. The US had far more unity when it was a less diverse country. It should not be a surprise that this is the outcome.

Conclusion

Thomas Friedman can’t admit what the issue is, because he would have to admit that diversity is a failure. Therefore, he has to come up with some amorphous or generalized reasons that conflict has increased. This history of diversity causing conflict only goes back thousands of years. It was only the reason for the Bosnian war. But why try to learn anything from history. Just keep repeating that diversity is a strength and demanding that people “honor diversity.”

References

*https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/opinion/trump-beirut-politics.html