How about this?
Posted on 10/11/2011 8:22:21 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
On a daily basis, I sit in awe at the amount of nonsense that pervades the world’s media. The latest is the preoccupation with the ethnicity of Steve Jobs’s biological father.
Steve Jobs was adopted at birth. And until his untimely death last week, as far as almost anyone in the world knew, he was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Jobs.
In fact, as far as Steve Jobs himself was concerned, his only parents were Paul and Clara Jobs. As the New York Times reported nearly 15 years ago (“Creating Jobs,” Jan. 12, 1997): “Jobs holds a firm belief that Paul and Clara Jobs were his true parents. A mention of his ‘adoptive parents’ is quickly cut off. ‘They were my parents,’ he says emphatically.”
But reading much of the world’s press in the past week, one would be excused if one came to think of another man as Steve Jobs’s father.
The amount of attention paid to his biological father, a Syrian-born American named Abdulfattah Jandali, dwarfed the amount of attention paid to Paul (or, for that matter, Clara) Jobs.
By all accounts, Mr. Jandali is a fine man, and nothing written here is meant in any way to counter that assessment.
But I have to ask, given that Mr. Jandali and Steve Jobs never once met, and that Steve Jobs thought only of Paul Jobs as his father, why all the attention to Mr. Jandali? And why no attention to Jobs’s biological mother?
For example, take this headline in the International Business Times: “Steve Jobs Dies: He Was the Most Famous Arab in the World.”
Or this headline in the New York Times: “Steve Jobs, Son of a Syrian, Is Embraced in the Arab World.”
I suspect that there are two unimpressive things going on here: political correctness and a widespread belief that blood is important and therefore adoptive parents aren’t a person’s “real” parents.
First, the political correctness.
The press feels bad for the Arab world in general and for Arab-Americans in particular. The former is almost never in the news for anything positive, and the latter are deemed victims of xenophobia and Islamophobia. So if one of the giants of our age can be declared an Arab and an Arab-American, many in the media are only too delighted to do so.
Although the biological father played no role whatsoever in the life of Steve Jobs, article after article has been written about Mr. Jandali. That this has been motivated by a desire to label Steve Jobs an Arab-American is further proven by the fact that we read nothing of his biological mother — which is particularly noteworthy given that those who are preoccupied with blood parents are almost always more preoccupied with the identity of the biological mother than with that of the biological father. But the poor woman is merely a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, a member of the only American group that is granted no special status by the politically correct.
So a man whose parents were WASPs, and one of whose biological parents was a WASP, is now declared an Arab. Type “Steve Jobs Arab” in Google and you get 86 million hits.
The other unfortunate trend is the belief — widely held in the media, academia, the social-work community, and among the well-educated generally — that adoptive parents are not one’s “real” parents. Even many adoptive parents have been persuaded by social workers and others to believe that their foreign-born son or daughter must be educated in the language and culture of the group into which he or she was born. Instead of regarding their Korean- or Chinese- or Honduran-born child as fully American, many American adoptive parents are convinced that they must teach their child the Korean, Chinese, or Spanish language and culture. And many of the particularly sophisticated are adamant that their child must one day go to the country in question to find his or her “birth family.”
Once each year on my radio show I devote an hour to making the case for how much less blood matters than love and values. And for anyone who disagrees, I offer this story.
One year a man called my show from his car to tell me that while he nearly always agrees with me, on this issue I was simply wrong. He explained that he is the only child of Jewish Holocaust survivors, and every one of his parents’ relatives had been murdered by the Nazis. He was literally the only blood relative they had. Now, he asked, can I see how blood can be very important — and that a blood child is different from an adopted one?
I responded by suggesting that this man ask his parents one question: “Would you rather have a blood child who converted from Judaism to another religion or an adopted child who was a committed Jew?”
That one question changed his mind.
None of this is meant in any way to be disrespectful toward Arabs or Arab-Americans. I would say the same thing if his biological father were Jewish or Albanian or Greek: Steve Jobs was an American, the son of Paul and Clara Jobs. Period.
— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist.
A thought crossed my mind the other day after finding out that Steve Jobs was adopted. How many pro-abortion types rely on their iPads, iPhones, iMacs etc., to get through their day? The local PPH maven wrote a letter to the editor expounding on how abortion was a great antidote to poverty. I would ask this woman how much more impoverished would the world be without Mr. Jobs contributions and I am not an Apple-phile. In fact I don’t even like Apple products, but have to give the man his due. He changed the world.
As an adopted son, I say Amen, Dennis. And again, Amen.
Steve Jobs is one possible outcome, when you remove a child from an oppressive culture - where great pride is taken in playing the victim, and no effort is made for either education or individual thought; and place him in an American culture where he was forced to assume personal responsibility, are encouraged to study and learn; and are given to freedom to pursue your own dreams.
If Steve Jobs had remained with his biological father, (who’s only claim to fame is that he had irresponsible sex with some nameless woman) - he would be yet another angry Arab, blaming someone else for every problem he has ever had, or heard of.
That's it in a nutshell; arabs are from a filthy, destructive, lunatic culture that has, throughout history, destroyed everything in their 'warpath'. They steal other culture's ideas and claim them as their own. They lie about 'who' they are and 'what' they've contributed to (nothing). Look at Obama, insisting that arabs/muslims had a large role in our founding.
So does it surprise anyone that these cretins would try to snatch Jobs and claim his legacy for their own?
As an adopted son, Jobs’ success points out the value of the culture in which he was raised. There is no need to comment on the usual contributions of his sperm donor’s culture; this is a time to celebrate the parent who gave him Western values that allowed him to make the world a better place. The bottom line is that exceptional individual outcomes are to a large extent a reflection of culture, not just genetics.
Any Schmuck can shoot sperm, It takes a REAL MAN to be a Father!
Good for the man who allowed a child to be adopted into a family where he could be loved and nurtured.
Aside from that praise, the only thing that the father should be cheered or boo’d for is whether or not his brain power or cancer was genetic.
Steve Jobs understood that his “real” parents were the people who loved him and supported him. It is an insult to the real parents to even mention his adoptive family at all.
I hate the media.
Ephesians 1:
In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will — 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.
I sometimes wonder if the whole fascination with the notion of birth parents which is so common today is not on some level a rejection of the integral position adoption plays in Christianity.
If we do not take on the nature of our adoptive Father, our adoption is useless.
In the ancient world, adoption was final, you became the offspring of your parents, not a half and half almost non person (culturally speaking) like many would seem to have it today.
Likewise, people giving their children up for adoption seem to really want someone else to be responsible for raising their children, but have rights and privileges otherwise intact - this is not true adoption, no matter what the social services people seem to think.
Well said
"Marx replaced Hegel's "Spirit" by matter and economic interests. In the same way racialism substitutes for Hegel's "Spirit" something material, the quasi-biological conception of Blood or Race. Instead of "Spirit," Blood is the self-developing essence; instead of "Spirit," Blood is the sovereign of the world, and displays itself on the Stage of History; and instead of its "Spirit," the blood of a nation determines it essential destiny.
The transubstantiation of Hegelianism into racialism or of "Spirit" into blood does not greatly alter the main tendency of Hegelianism. It only gives it a tinge of biology and of modern evolutionism.
Karl Popper
Sorry, but I don't think I understood your last sentence -don't you have that backwards? Shouldn't you have said, "It is an insult to his adoptive parents to even mention the "real" parents at all", correct? Also, didn't you mean the adoptive parents loved and supported him? His "real" parents gave him birth, but his adoptive parents raised him.
I see the onus placed on adoption as a rationalization of abortion, and mentality that goes with it. “If i keep the child, then he grows up without a father, but since he is really mine alone, I will give him all the love he needs. No one else can give him the same love. Besides. If I know he is out there, I will worry that he is not being taken care of. Better that he die than suffer, and more important, that I not suffer.
Well, no. In the Bible, blood is life. Which is why the law forbade the drinking of the blood of animals, especially those sacrificed to other gods. For Catholics and many other Christians, the drinking of the cup is the drinking of the Blood of Christ, and the life that is in him.
Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, having had recent painful experience with Arabia, wanted to find a safer trade route to the East, when the Italian explorer Columbus came by with a proposal. So, Obama was technically correct that arab muslims did have a large role in our founding. However, as he typically does, he left out the whole truth of the reason why.
You are correct. I live a backwards life some times!
Thanks SeekAndFind.
The sperm donor had nothing to do with the decision re Steve’s adoption. In 1955 it was all up to the bio-mother.
In his commencement address to Stanford in 2005, Jobs himself said his bio-mother, who chose to give him up for adoption, insisted that the adopting parents be college graduates. The family who was originally supposed to get her baby were a lawyer and his wife. They wanted a girl, and declined. The agency then called the Jobs, who said yes.
When the bio-mother found out the Jobs were not college graduates she initially refused to sign the adoption papers. The Jobs promised that the baby would attend college, so she finally agreed. But the sperm donor had no say in it whatsoever.
And, ultimately, he was very fortunate to have been adopted by a middle-class family. Observing their hard work and the value of the $ they saved to provide the promised education set him on the course that led him to such success.
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