Back in 1982 a faction of Lebanese Arabs massacred Palestinian Arabs at two refugee camps in Beirut. The Israeli army, in the neighborhood at the time, was accused of turning a blind eye to the killings. Hearing of this, Menachem Begin famously muttered: “Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.”

Hence my title. NAM is an abbreviation for “Non-Asian Minority” commonly used among us wicked people who notice What Should Not Be Noticed.

A couple of weeks ago during a live radio forum to discuss the recent surge in violent crime in Chicago”€”homicides are up 38 percent on last year“€”a community activist asked this of Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy:

What does the community need to do with the Police Department to close the gap that I see…between the Police Department and the community…?

McCarthy’s answer:

Closing the gap, that’s a big issue. It’s a long time coming. Um, you know, we’ve done a lot of things wrong in policing in this country. I’m willing to admit that. But this goes back two, three hundred years to the time when Pilgrims came here and things started developing from that, the African American experience in this country.

Chicagoans kill Chicagoans, and he blames the Pilgrim fathers!

And we”€™re not talking about Chicagoans in general. I couldn’t find demographic stats on all 237 of this year’s Chicago homicides, but for a rough approximation I plotted the locations of last weekend’s shootings as reported here. I have marked them with big black dots on a map of the city. Eyeball that alongside a demographic map, and with one exception up there in the 46th Ward, they all occurred in heavily black or Hispanic neighborhoods.

The head of an ex-cons’ group working against the violence confirms my thumbnail analysis:

Eighty percent of the homicides in Chicago are black on black homicides.

Superintendent McCarthy wasn’t the only member of that radio forum intent on digging back into history. Radio host Warren Ballentine chimed in with some background material from a century ago:

A lot of people don’t understand the history of America. When we had Reconstruction, when blacks were allowed to first become politicians in this country, they created something that was called the vagrancy laws. The vagrancy laws were simply laws that, if you could not prove you were working, you were incarcerated and given a fine of up to $5,000 in 1910, which kept you in jail for five to six years, sometimes to the rest of your life.

I’ll take that on faith, though I think “created” is misleading. Every civilized society has had some form of laws against vagrancy. In England during Elizabeth I’s reign there were laws against “sturdy beggars.” But how is this relevant to homicides in 2012 Chicago? Let Mr.”€”I”€™m sorry, Brother“€”Ballentine teach us:

When you fast-forward to today, what they did during the vagrancy time, they locked them up and they rented them out to corporations as cheap labor. That’s exactly what’s going on today.