Free Will Is Only For White People

By Martin Indyk

There’s a very simple reason my team has been trying to blame Israel primarily for the recent breakdown of negotiations with the Palestinians: we can’t expect guilt to attach to Arabs, who are nonwhite and therefore not responsible for their decisions. Only white people have free will.

Since Arabs, as nonwhites, lack free will, the only ethical method of achieving change is to demand concessions from Israel. A society or individual with genuine volition and sense of right and wrong could be held accountable for translating political grievances into the bombings of cafes and buses, but that is not how we, or our European allies, view the Palestinians. They have no choice but to resort to brutality, since that is their nature.

The principle that only those of European ancestry have culpability lies behind a good number of foreign policy decisions. It can’t really be Iran’s fault that they want nuclear weapons, since, as non-Europeans, they ipso facto lack the capacity to realize that the consequent destabilization of the region would be a bad thing. So the best we can do is let them develop what they want, since it would be unethical to restrict them when we’re the ones who invented that technology in the first place. It’s only fair.

As for China, where was our environmental consciousness when we were belching hundreds of millions of tons of pollution into the atmosphere with no regard for consequences? It’s downright hypocritical of the West to oppose the same kind of unfettered industrialization when non-western nations pursue it; and since only whites can be blamed, there’s essentially nothing that can be done to prevent the environmental catastrophe that, let’s face it, is the white man’s fault. He started it.

While it’s true that many Israelis are themselves nonwhite – whether Israeli Arabs or non-Ashkenazi Jews – it’s not really them we’re talking about here, since their non-culpability renders them merely a puppet of the white establishment. It’s that elite to which we address our ethical demand for concessions.

One might be able to criticize this approach, but remember, it comes from a nonwhite president. You can’t blame him.