Thank You, Thomas Sowell, For Shooting Down Bernie Farber's "Tikun Olam" Palaver Post Haste

In his latest hand-wringing piece about how we here in Canada, especially we Jews, are failing to fulfill our "Tikun Olam" duties ("Tikun Olam," in case you didn't know, is Hebrew for "the lefty social justice agenda"), former Official Jew Bernie Farber apprises us of this litany of woe:

We have driven First Nations from their traditional lands, kidnapped their children, forcibly placed them in residential schools where many were left wilfully to die of tuberculosis or they became the subjects of medical experimentation, some were abused and sexually assaulted; we poisoned their waters to a point where many living on reserves in north-western Ontario still suffer the consequences of mercury poisoning. 

I have personally been witness to aboriginal communities that face unsafe housing with extensive black mould, dilapidated structures, rampant prescription narcotic drug abuse/addiction, interpersonal abuse, lack of primary healthcare, unsafe drinking water and waste treatment, near complete unemployment, lack of an identifiable economy, and a fundamental lack of hope permeates many First Nations reserves.

Thomas Sowell has some thoughts about the Bernies among us. You can find them in Sowell's latest book Intellectuals and Racism, which I just finished reading. Not that Bernie is such an intellectual--he's really just a victimist, someone who plies the lucrative victimhood trade for fun and profit--but tell me that Sowell doesn't have him and his "Tikun Olam-y" ilk down cold here:

There is no question that some races or whole nations have been victimized by others, any more than there is any question that cancers can cause death.

But that is very different from saying that deaths can automatically be blamed on cancer. You might think that intellectuals could make that distinction. But many do not. 

Yet intellectuals see themselves as friends, allies and defenders of racial minorities, even as they paint them into a corner of cultural stagnation. This allows the intelligentsia to flatter themselves that they are on the side of the angels against the forces of evil that are conspiring to keep minorities down.

When they cannot come up with hard evidence in any particular case to support this theory today, that just proves to the intelligentsia how fiendishly clever and covert these pervasive efforts to hold down minorities are.

Why people with high levels of mental skills and rhetorical talents would tie themselves into knots with such reasoning is a mystery. Perhaps it is just that they cannot give up a social vision that is so flattering to themselves, despite how detrimental it may be to the people they claim to be helping.

Exactly.