Last week, black survivors of Hurricane Katrina compared themselves to Holocaust victims. Via AP:

“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.

Sorry to interrupt the Bush-bashing, tinfoil-wrapped demagoguery, but the actual vital statistics of Katrina casualties, broken down by race, tell a different story.

Hat tip to Newsmax, which notes:

…preliminary figures compiled by the morgue in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, which is the primary facility handling the bodies of Katrina deceased, show that a majority of the dead in New Orleans and surrounding parishes were actually not black.

Of the 883 bodies processed so far by medical examiners at St. Gabriel, 562 have been identified by race. Slightly less than half that number - 48 percent - are African-American.

Forty-one percent are white, 8 percent unknown and 2 percent Hispanic.

The remarkable numbers, which undermine claims that Katrina rescue efforts were somehow infused by racism, have been completely ignored by the national media, with only the Lousiana-based news web site, The Bayou Buzz, devoting any coverage at all to the story.

The surprisingly low death rate for black Katrina victims comes despite the fact that New Orleans itself was more than two-thirds black [67 percent] when the storm hit. White residents made up less than a third [28 percent] of the city’s population, according to U.S. Census bureau numbers.

All of these deaths were tragic, no matter the skin color of the victims. It would be nice to hear black leaders say so.

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Meanwhile, the New Orleans Times Picayune reports that Farrakhan-ish rumors of levee dynamite persist.

Katrina myths die hard.

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More coverage:

Will Franklin looks at another underreported disparity–the number of elderly victims…

If we want to be outraged, focus that outrage on the negligent nursing homes and those who left their grandmothers and grandfathers to fend for themselves.

Gateway Pundit has much more.

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Heather Mac Donald: The racism charge won’t wash
Shameless Sheila Jackson Lee
Who are “my people?”
Bill Whittle: Tribes
“Refugee” is not racist
Kanye West: Bush-bashing for $$$

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