Take a good, long look.
Drink it in.
I could understand granting members of a particular ethnic group citizenship, sure. Plenty of states do that. I could also understand, in extreme scenarios, denying it to all members of an ethnic group. But that is quite, quite different from explicitly restricting citizenship to black people.*
Where is the outcry? South Africa was a pariah state even before the US abolished the Jim Crow laws, and Palestinian propaganda is so easy to understand and parrot around that the fact that Arabs in Israel don't have total and utter equality in every economic and social aspect of life is apparently now seen as apartheid as well.
You'd think that I'd have seen or heard something on this on TV or the Web throughout my entire life. But lo and behold, I stumbled upon it on Wikipedia completely by accident. Nobody that I know has heard about Liberia's citizenship laws, and hardly anybody really seems to care. Even a Google search only turns up a few cursory articles protesting it (one even appears to defend it, although it's some obscure African news source).
The obvious answer to this is simple: racism. The Arabs states can herd Palestinians into internment camps, deny them citizenship and basic living conditions, or expel them by the tens of thousands. But is it really important? Reading about this in the paper, it's just another tribal conflict in the unenlightened Muslim desert.
But Europeans, and especially Jews, are regarded as civilized. They are the enlightened liberal democrats bringing reason and equality to the Arab and African barbarians.
It seems fundamentally wrong to us that members of our race should deny rights to others.
What happened in South Africa was a pretty typical sort of conflict aside from the fact that it was perpetuated by white people. Look at the equivocation: both Jim Crow and South African Bantustans are homogenized under the term "apartheid" rather than being acknowledged by what they were: entirely different political relationships.
*Kindly note the difference between ethnicity and race before posting, thank you.
Drink it in.
I could understand granting members of a particular ethnic group citizenship, sure. Plenty of states do that. I could also understand, in extreme scenarios, denying it to all members of an ethnic group. But that is quite, quite different from explicitly restricting citizenship to black people.*
Where is the outcry? South Africa was a pariah state even before the US abolished the Jim Crow laws, and Palestinian propaganda is so easy to understand and parrot around that the fact that Arabs in Israel don't have total and utter equality in every economic and social aspect of life is apparently now seen as apartheid as well.
You'd think that I'd have seen or heard something on this on TV or the Web throughout my entire life. But lo and behold, I stumbled upon it on Wikipedia completely by accident. Nobody that I know has heard about Liberia's citizenship laws, and hardly anybody really seems to care. Even a Google search only turns up a few cursory articles protesting it (one even appears to defend it, although it's some obscure African news source).
The obvious answer to this is simple: racism. The Arabs states can herd Palestinians into internment camps, deny them citizenship and basic living conditions, or expel them by the tens of thousands. But is it really important? Reading about this in the paper, it's just another tribal conflict in the unenlightened Muslim desert.
But Europeans, and especially Jews, are regarded as civilized. They are the enlightened liberal democrats bringing reason and equality to the Arab and African barbarians.
It seems fundamentally wrong to us that members of our race should deny rights to others.What happened in South Africa was a pretty typical sort of conflict aside from the fact that it was perpetuated by white people. Look at the equivocation: both Jim Crow and South African Bantustans are homogenized under the term "apartheid" rather than being acknowledged by what they were: entirely different political relationships.
*Kindly note the difference between ethnicity and race before posting, thank you.
wut?
