Some black survivors of Hurricane Katrina have predictably been accusing the government of racism, most recently claiming the government “was in no rush to save their lives because they are Black” at a Congressional hearing last Tuesday. Some survivors have apparently been comparing what they went through to the “Holocaust” in WWII:

“We were abandoned. City officials did nothing to protect us,” Patricia Thompson, a New Orleans evacuee said.

“We saw buses, helicopters and FEMA trucks, but no one stopped to help us. We never felt so cut off in all our lives. “No one is going to tell me it wasn’t a race issue,” she told Congress.

Community activist Leah Hodges said, with tears in her eyes, that Black residents “died from neglect.”

At times during the hearing, the survivors even compared themselves to victims of genocide and the Holocaust.

Note Hodges claim that Black residents “died from neglect.”

Michelle Malkin provided a link to some interesting
post-Hurricane Katrina statistics.

Her point? Look at the number of deaths when broken down by race. Yes, blacks accounted for 48 percent of deaths, but who comes in second? Caucasions do, at 41 percent! That is hardly a significant difference in numbers, and shows that at least in terms of deaths, whites were almost as big a victim as blacks. For Hodges to sit there and tearfully talk about blacks dieing of “neglect” as if they were the only ones to die that way is demeaning to all survivors of Katrina, and to all the people who donated time and money to try to help survivors.

If you read the story I originally linked to above, you’ll notice some other complaints from blacks, i.e., “we were treated like criminals,” “we were trapped in temporary shelters,” “we had machine guns pointed at our heads,” “we had to lie next to dead bodies,” etc.

Some of these claims were already being disputed by people like Rep. Chris Shays, who basically said he had a hard time believing the “machine guns were pointed at our heads” story.

Interestingly enough, very little was said about all the looting, gang activity and general disorder that was going on in the aftermath of Katrina.