re: Dennis Prager on why poverty does NOT cause crime

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The most obvious example are the jews. You think they wouldn't have traded places with blacks in the 1940s?!? Why were they able to prosper?

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Israel received a massive reparations package from Germany in the early 50's that is credited with totally revitalizing the Israeli economy.

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Despite the protests, the agreement was signed in September 1952, and West Germany paid Israel a sum of 3 billion marks over the next fourteen years; 450 million marks were paid to the World Jewish Congress. The payments were made to the State of Israel as the heir to those victims who had no surviving family. The money was invested in the country's infrastructure, and played an important role in establishing the economy of the new state. The reparations would become a decisive part of Israel's income, comprising as high as 87.5% of the state income in 1956.[3][8] Israel at the time faced a deep economic crisis and was heavily dependent on donations by foreign Jews, and the reparations, along with these donations, would help turn Israel into an economically viable country.

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As late as 1988, even MORE reparations were approved.

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And then again just since 2012 EVEN MORE has been approved:

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And perhaps even more important than the money, was the act of Germany society and the German sovereign basically admitting to and owning up to what they had done. Prior to the passage of the act, the German people's narrative was very self-serving:

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In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.

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“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’?”

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Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.”

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