Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Khazar libel

Showing posts with label Khazar libel. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 04, 2023

Memo to Abbas: Jews are Not Descended from Khazars; Here’s Proof (Judean Rose)

"Battle Scene," Folio from a Zafarnama (Book of Victories) of Sharaf al-Din 'Ali Yazdi

Jews aren’t really Jews, according to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, but Khazars, a nomadic Turkic people. These “Khazar Jews” Abbas claims, have no connection to the Land of Israel, just an invented history and a false narrative of religious rights to the Land of Israel. This, of course, is an inversion of the truth. In reality, it is the “Palestinians” who are an invented people with an invented history, and an invented religious right to Jewish territory. By now there is a large body of definitive proof that the Jews are not descended from the Khazars, but those who hate Israel are not interested in either proof or truth.

The purpose of the Khazar myth is to delegitimize all Jewish claims to Israeli territory while spreading the lie that the land in question belongs to others. It’s an if/then proposition. If Jews are Khazars, they have no legitimate claims to Jewish land, which makes them thieves. Except that the Jews are not Khazars. They are Jews. And for thousands of years, Jews have been overwhelmingly endogamous—they marry each other. Abbas says otherwise, because it serves his interests, the main interest being taking land away from the Jews.

Abbas stands truth on its head. The land, he asserts, doesn’t belong to those Khazar Jews, but to his constituents—if you can call them that, when there hasn’t been an election since Abbas assumed office in 2005. Muwaffaq Matar, Fatah Revolutionary Council member and regular columnist for official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, reported on remarks made by Abbas to “various Palestinian intellectuals,” in a 2021 meeting (emphasis added):

[At the meeting he held, PA] President [Mahmoud Abbas] debunked the Zionist fairy tale, which some call the Jewish Israeli narrative…

The president spoke about the 9th century pagan Tatar-Khazar kingdom, which was established in the Caspian Sea area. It underwent attacks and suffered from wars, and therefore its king sought advice to be saved from this situation. His friend, a Jewish man, advised him to convert. The kingdom followed in his footsteps, and it also converted. It remained like this until the 11th century when the kingdom finally collapsed, and [its residents] scattered in neighboring states. These are the Ashkenazis, who were not originally Jews but rather converted.

But this is a lie, as borne out by science. Jews are endogamous: they marry each other (or did until modern times). A study on Ashkenazi hereditary diseases published in 2022, speaks of historically endogamous marriage practices in Judaism in general, and how marrying within the tribe impacted Ashkenazi Jewry in particular:

Judaism is a shared religious and cultural identity, with endogamous marriage practices and distinctive diasporic histories of communities worldwide, particularly a Levantine origin and complex history of migrations over the last ∼2.5 millennia. Present-day Ashkenazim are descendants of medieval Jewish populations with histories primarily in northern and eastern Europe. As a result, they carry distinctive ancestries, and Jewish and non-Jewish medieval individuals living in the same regions would likely show characteristic patterns of genetic variation.

Hereditary disorders in Ashkenazi Jewish populations have been the focus of considerable medical research, with genetic screening now commonplace to mitigate risks. Their prevalence is generally attributed to strong genetic drift during Ashkenazi population bottlenecks, coupled with high endogamy, although other processes such as heterozygote advantage have been proposed.

Candidate population bottlenecks include the phase of dispersion following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the formation of Ashkenazi communities in northern Europe during the medieval period, antisemitic persecution arising from the Crusades, unfounded reprisals for the Black Death, and the movement from western and central Europe to eastern Europe that preceded rapid population growth from the 15th to 18th centuries.

Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (Royal Library of Belgium manuscript, 1376/77)

As we see, the Jews are no Khazars, they married within; but no matter, because Abbas has a useful idiot Jew to lend him credibility. More from the Muwaffaq Matar report:

As proof, the president brought the book ‘The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire [and its Heritage]’ by Jewish-Hungarian author and historian Arthur Koestler.

The Jews never were a people and they never will be. The Zionist organization will continue to invent its own history and transpose it into the books of human knowledge, and even into the holy books, in all languages. This is in order to achieve the goal of mobilizing and gathering enough human ammunition [i.e., immigrants] to carry out missions of occupation and settlement, which the colonialist world powers and empires imposed on it.

What of this so-called proof Abbas brings from “Jewish-Hungarian” author and historian Arthur Koestler? According to Yiddish scholar and expert on Ashkenazi surnames Alexander Beider, there is none. Beider describes the evolution of the unfounded Khazar theory in Ashkenazi Jews Are Not Khazars. Here’s The Proof (emphasis added):

Since the late 19th century, the so-called “Khazarian theory” has promoted the idea that a bulk of Ashkenazic Jews living in Eastern Europe descended from medieval Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic people who founded a powerful polyethnic state in the Caucasus and north to the Caspian, Azov and Black seas. The theory received a recent boost with the 1976 publication of “The Thirteenth Tribe,” a book by Arthur Koestler. Most recently, the Khazarian hypothesis has been promoted by authors like the Tel Aviv University professor of history Shlomo Sand and Tel Aviv University professor of linguistics Paul Wexler, as well the geneticist Eran Elhaik.

Despite this institutional backing, the theory is absolutely without evidence. As any historian will tell you, generations of Jews, like generations of any people, leave historical traces behind them. These traces come in multiple forms. For starters, people leave behind them historical documents and archaeological data. Predictably, archaeologic evidence about the widespread existence of Jews in Khazaria is almost nonexistent. While a series of independent sources does testify to the existence in the 10th century of Jews in the Kingdom of Khazaria, and while some of these sources also indicate that the ruling elite of Khazaria embraced Judaism, the Khazarian state was destroyed by Russians during the 960s. In other words, we can be confident that Judaism was not particularly widespread in that kingdom.

A later report by Matar on the meeting between Abbas and the so-called “Palestinian intellectuals” details the PA president’s sickening assertions of a connection between Nazism and Zionism. Hitler’s “Jewish question,” according to Abbas, arose from the failure of the “Khazar Jews” to properly integrate into European society:

We must focus on what the president said regarding the [Jewish] question or ‘the Jewish problem,’ because its cause is that the Jews of the Khazar kingdom did not integrate in the European societies.

A separate report on the same meeting, this time written by Muhammad Al-Masri, appeared in Ma’an, an independent Palestinian news agency, on Dec. 25, 2021:

[PA] President Mahmoud Abbas presented those present with a concise historical survey, such that dealt intensively with the injustice caused to the Palestinians when the world powers – and foremost among them the US and Britain – agreed to the theft of the homeland and land and to granting them as a gift to the Zionist movement, which is an inseparable part of the international colonialist movement.
President Mahmoud Abbas was clear when he said that inflaming the dreams of the Jews and realizing these dreams within a political entity was not the fruit of the efforts of the Jews themselves, but rather colonialist-theological plans and visions of colonialist world powers, as the modern-day Jews are mostly of Tatar origin. They are descendants of dynasties that established a kingdom in the 9th century called ‘the Khazar kingdom.’ In this statement, it appears that President Mahmoud Abbas sought to say that the colonialist world powers used the Jews in order to execute the great colonialist plan – dismantling the Ottoman Empire and afterwards dismantling the Arab nation.

According to Ehud Yaari, this too is a lot of hooey (emphasis added):

It should be noted that Abbas has his facts about the Khazar empire wrong: the Khazars were not Tatars—rather they were a Turkic people—and [the conversion of the royal dynasty and aristocracy as reported by medieval sources] took place, according to most historians, sometime between 740 and 865 CE. His Prime Minister, Muhammad Shtayeh, also had his dates wrong when declaring on June 26, 2021: “Present day Jews are Khazar Jews, who converted to Judaism in the 6th century.” Regardless of the historical inaccuracies about the Khazar dynasty itself, both statements are instead the product of a more recent and dangerous historical trend, reviving the case offered by the late Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, against the justification of a Jewish homeland. These assertions follow in the vein of numerous Arab writers who have produced a number of volumes over the past five decades identifying the Ashkenazi communities as refugees from the destruction of the Khazar Qaganate by Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev c.965 CE.

Promoting this narrative has not just been the effort of Palestinian and Syrian politicians; many Egyptian, Saudi, and Lebanese intellectuals have also been drawn to a narrative that deprives contemporary Jews of pre-medieval Jewish lineage and history connecting them back to the land. Books dealing with the subject are still on sale all over the region and these theories are widely available across the internet.

This approach is deeply rooted in a widely popular theme of Soviet anti-Semitism, prevalent in many of the institutions where a number of Arab intellectuals studied. In a state where history became subservient to the reigning ideology, Soviet historians depicted the conversion of the Khazars as a humiliation of the Russians, poisoning their values and beliefs and sowing corruption in society. In a famous article published in Pravda (1951) under the pseudonym “Ivanov”—posited to be Stalin himself—an argument was put forth that it would be “shameful” to accept that a Jewish empire governed the vast area between the Caspian and the Black Seas before the appearance of the early Russian princes. This became the official interpretation of the Khazars, mixing dangerously with contemporary accusations of a “Jewish nationalistic plot.” Abbas would have acquainted himself with these concepts while writing his Holocaust-denying Ph.D in Moscow twenty years later.

Abbas was indeed well acquainted with these concepts. In May 2018, Abbas gave a speech to the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the PA, in which he claimed that the nonsensical Khazar theory is backed by Jewish sources:

The sons of Jacob were 12. Where did you bring 13 from? They invented it. Where? In the Khazar Kingdom. When? In the 9th century. It was an irreligious kingdom. Afterwards it became a Jewish kingdom. The emperor converted to Judaism and therefore [the kingdom] converted to Judaism. Afterwards it broke apart, and all its residents migrated to Europe, and these are the Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites, and they have no connection to Semitism or Abraham, Jacob, or others. It was a Tatar-Turkic state...

...Now we are talking about the Jewish homeland. They are talking about longing for Zion and that's why they are going [there] and so forth. I say - not me, rather history says that these words are baseless.

But in fact, science says the baseless idea is the one in which Jews have a Khazar origin story. A 2014 Wayne State University study, No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews, concludes:

Employing a variety of standard techniques for the analysis of population-genetic structure, we found that Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations and, among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East. No particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews to populations from the Caucasus is evident, particularly populations that most closely represent the Khazar region. Thus, analysis of Ashkenazi Jews together with a large sample from the region of the Khazar Khaganate corroborates the earlier results that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe, that they possess considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations, and that there is no indication of a significant genetic contribution either from within or from north of the Caucasus region.

And still, as late as August 24, 2023, Abbas was still spouting his wildly embroidered Khazar lies. MEMRI shared these excerpts:

The truth that we should clarify to the world is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with Semitism. . .The story began in 900 CE, in the Khazar Kingdom on the Caspian Sea. It was a Tatar kingdom that converted to Judaism. . . [In the 11th century], this empire collapsed, and all its population left to the north and to the west. They left for Russia and Western and Eastern Europe. They spread there, and they are the forefathers of Ashkenazi Jews. So when we hear them talk about Semitism and antisemitism – the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites.
Everybody knows that during World War I, Hitler was a sergeant. He said he fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money. In his view, they were engaged in sabotage, and this is why he hated them. We just want to make this point clear. This was not about Semitism and antisemitism.

As for the eastern Jews, they are Semites, because all of them originated in the Arabian Peninsula and they traveled to Al-Andalus, and then came back. We are familiar with this history.

Actually, they are familiar not with history but with lies. Since 2006, the world has known that two fifths of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from four women. Judy Siegel-Itzkovich reported on the discovery by a team of Israeli geneticists:

The team, which studied mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) passed on solely by mothers to their children, found evidence of shared maternal ancestry of Ashkenazi and non–Ashkenazi Jews, a finding showing a shared ancestral pool that is consistent with previous studies that were based on the Y chromosome. This evidence pointed to a similar pattern of shared paternal ancestry of Jewish populations around the world originating in the Middle East. They concluded that the four founding types of mtDNA—likely to be of Middle Eastern origin—underwent a major overall expansion in Europe over the last thousand years.

The “four founding mothers,” [Professor Skorecki] added, “are from lineages that originate long before the launching of the Jewish people some 3400 years ago. They probably came from a large Middle Eastern gene pool.

“As consistent with the Bible, in which the founding Jews were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and his sons, and the matriarchs were ‘imported’ from non–Jewish peoples and then converted, the haplotypes of contemporary Jewish men are much less varied.”

Is there any truth to the idea that the Khazars converted to Judaism? According to Prof. Shaul Stampfer, no. The research simply does not support this idea:

Did the Khazars convert to Judaism? The view that some or all Khazars, a central Asian people, became Jews during the ninth or tenth century is widely accepted. But following an exhaustive analysis of the evidence, Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher Prof. Shaul Stampfer has concluded that such a conversion, “while a splendid story,” never took place. . .
From roughly the seventh to tenth centuries, the Khazars ruled an empire spanning the steppes between the Caspian and Black Seas. Not much is known about Khazar culture and society: they did not leave a literary heritage and the archaeological finds have been meager. The Khazar Empire was overrun by Svyatoslav of Kiev around the year 969, and little was heard from the Khazars after. Yet a widely held belief that the Khazars or their leaders at some point converted to Judaism persists.
Reports about the Jewishness of the Khazars first appeared in Muslim works in the late ninth century and in two Hebrew accounts in the tenth century. The story reached a wider audience when the Jewish thinker and poet Yehudah Halevi used it as a frame for his book The Kuzari. Little attention was given to the issue in subsequent centuries, but a key collection of Hebrew sources on the Khazars appeared in 1932 followed by a little-known six-volume history of the Khazars written by the Ukrainian scholar Ahatanhel Krymskyi. Henri Gregoire published skeptical critiques of the sources, but in 1954 Douglas Morton Dunlop brought the topic into the mainstream of accepted historical scholarship with The History of the Jewish Khazars. Arthur Koestler’s best-selling The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) brought the tale to the attention of wider Western audiences, arguing that East European Ashkenazi Jewry was largely of Khazar origin. Many studies have followed, and the story has also garnered considerable non-academic attention; for example, Shlomo Sand’s 2009 bestseller, The Invention of the Jewish People, advanced the thesis that the Khazars became Jews and much of East European Jewry was descended from the Khazars. But despite all the interest, there was no systematic critique of the evidence for the conversion claim other than a stimulating but very brief and limited paper by Moshe Gil of Tel Aviv University.

Professor Shaul Stampfer

Stampfer notes that scholars who have contributed to the subject based their arguments on a limited corpus of textual and numismatic evidence. Physical evidence is lacking: archaeologists excavating in Khazar lands have found almost no artifacts or grave stones displaying distinctly Jewish symbols. He also reviews various key pieces of evidence that have been cited in relation to the conversion story, including historical and geographical accounts, as well as documentary evidence. Among the key artifacts are an apparent exchange of letters between the Spanish Jewish leader Hasdai ibn Shaprut and Joseph, king of the Khazars; an apparent historical account of the Khazars, often called the Cambridge Document or the Schechter Document; various descriptions by historians writing in Arabic; and many others.
Taken together, Stampfer says, these sources offer a cacophony of distortions, contradictions, vested interests, and anomalies in some areas, and nothing but silence in others. A careful examination of the sources shows that some are falsely attributed to their alleged authors, and others are of questionable reliability and not convincing. Many of the most reliable contemporary texts, such as the detailed report of Sallam the Interpreter, who was sent by Caliph al-Wathiq in 842 to search for the mythical Alexander’s wall; and a letter of the patriarch of Constantinople, Nicholas, written around 914 that mentions the Khazars, say nothing about their conversion.
Citing the lack of any reliable source for the conversion story, and the lack of credible explanations for sources that suggest otherwise or are inexplicably silent, Stampfer concludes that the simplest and most convincing answer is that the Khazar conversion is a legend with no factual basis. There never was a conversion of a Khazar king or of the Khazar elite, he says.
Years of research went into this paper, and Stampfer ruefully noted that "Most of my research until now has been to discover and clarify what happened in the past. I had no idea how difficult and challenging it would be to prove that something did not happen."
In terms of its historical implications, Stampfer says the lack of a credible basis for the conversion story means that many pages of Jewish, Russian and Khazar history have to be rewritten. If there never was a conversion, issues such as Jewish influence on early Russia and ethnic contact must be reconsidered.
Stampfer describes the persistence of the Khazar conversion legend as a fascinating application of Thomas Kuhn’s thesis on scientific revolution to historical research. Kuhn points out the reluctance of researchers to abandon familiar paradigms even in the face of anomalies, instead coming up with explanations that, though contrived, do not require abandoning familiar thought structures. It is only when “too many” anomalies accumulate that it is possible to develop a totally different paradigm—such as a claim that the Khazar conversion never took place.
Stampfer concludes, "We must admit that sober studies by historians do not always make for great reading, and that the story of a Khazar king who became a pious and believing Jew was a splendid story.” However, in his opinion, "There are many reasons why it is useful and necessary to distinguish between fact and fiction – and this is one more such case."

Mahmoud Abbas lies like a rug and he repeats the same lies over and over again as if they were fact. His constituents and Jew-haters at large already know the drill. Abbas says it, and the Jew-hating echo chamber will happily repeat the false narrative until it takes on a life of its own. Mark Twain said that “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

Lies spread like wildfire; they have power. We see it with Mahmoud Abbas and the Khazar origin story. The more Abbas repeats his lies about Jewish lineage, the less anyone cares to hear the truth. The truth simply no longer matters; it has been rendered irrelevant.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

UN Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs quotes antisemitic Hamas-linked newspaper

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur for the territories, tweeted:

The Quds News Network is a Hamas-affiliated news site. In this case it translated the words of Ben Gvir incorrectly - he threatened terrorists, not Palestinians. Haaretz quoted him as saying, “Our government killed the most terrorists, over 120 in the past six months, but a lot of work remains – and we have to lend a helping hand to soldiers and the police to support and strengthen them.”

But an Arab or Hamas media outlet lying about what an Israeli said is hardly news. Far more interesting is that this is where a UN representative gets her news from.

Quds News is an unabashedly pro-terror site, like most Palestinian media. But it is also explicitly antisemitic.

One article denies that Jews are a people, quoting the Khazar myth and others.

This Quds News article about the Holocaust says that Jews believe "the suffering of the Jews cannot be compared to the suffering of the rest of the peoples, since the Jews are the people chosen by the Lord El, while the rest of humanity becomes in an inferior stage of this choice, - being gentiles - and therefore the suffering of the Jews - the supreme race of all - is not similar to the suffering of inferior Gentiles." In this quote, Quds News is echoing the justifications of the Nazis for genocide.

It then says that Palestinians are the primary victims of the Holocaust, not Jews.

This is all classic antisemitism. It is hate that the news site is quite proud of and not at all ashamed of. So it is no surprise that Francesca Albanese considers an antisemitic, Hamas news site to be a reliable source for her to quote.

(h/t Israellycool for Hamas link)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Houthi websites don't even pretend not to be Jew-haters

Arab media didn't have a problem with antisemitism before MEMRI and Palestinian Media Watch started translating their articles into English. One of the earliest translations from MEMRI came from the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al Hayat al Jadida, in 1998, during the Oslo process(!):

Corruption is a Jewish trait worldwide. So much so that one can seldom find corruption that was not masterminded by Jews or that Jews are not responsible for. They are well known for their intense love of money and its accumulation. The way in which they get hold of that money does not interest them in the least. On the contrary - they would use the most basic despicable ways, to realize their aim, so long as those who might be affected were non-Jews. A Jew would cross any line if it were in his interest.

...Since such is their behavior, they have exerted all their efforts into developing evil schemes. They believed that the secret to their survival lay in controlling the economies of the countries that had let them in and sheltered them from being refugees. [They further believed] that the secret lay in conspiracy and abatement of feuds [between non-Jews], so that the non-Jews would be engaged in internal conflict – paving the way for [a Jewish attack]. They concoct scandals that would haunt leaders, letting the Jews take a firm grip and tilting leaders in favor of their interests.

A survey conducted by [Jewish] scholars, on the legacy and customs of non-Jewish nations, taught them that the latter were afraid of money and sex. These are exactly the two instruments Zionists use. First, they have propagated Freemasonry and Rotary clubs all over the world, in order to hunt for influential people, or such whom they can take advantage of. Zionists trap these [influential people] due to their circumstances, shortsightedness or greed. [Shortcomings] have pushed them to the lap [of Jews], so they can [still] reach the aims they had envisioned.

While one may find similarly antisemitic articles in Algerian or Iraqi or Islamic fundamentalist media, since the translations started getting media attention the more mainstream sites in Egypt and the PA have been trying to avoid explicit antisemitism and call it all "anti-Zionism."

Little has changed, except in Abraham Accords countries. But the explicit antisemitism is a bit more embarrassing so it is not as publicized in the media of most Arab states.

But not in Yemen.

It isn't surprising to see that Yemeni news sites associated with the Houthis remain explicitly antisemitic. After all, the Houthi motto includes "Curse the Jews."

So they can feel free to say all the things that most Jordanians, Palestinians and Egyptians think - out loud.

This is from the Houthi Laa Media site called "The Cancer of the Jews" published yesterday:

Today we call the name “Jew” in general on every person who converted to the Jewish religion, while the reality is that many of these are not Semitic in terms of ethnic origin, as a large number of them are descendants of the Herodians or the Edomites of Turkish-Mongolian blood.

The Jews of Khazaria were famous for their malice, extreme stinginess, decadent methods in financial matters, and their vile morals, so they spread economic and social corruption in Europe. .
In 1306 AD, France expelled the Jews, followed by Saxony in 1348 AD, Hungary in 1360 AD, Belgium in 1370 AD, Slovakia in 1380 AD, Austria in 1430 AD, the Netherlands in 1444 AD, Spain in 1492 AD, Lithuania in 1495 AD, Portugal in 1498 AD, and Italy in 1540 AD, and Bavaria in general 1551 AD.

Therefore, most historians say that Europe was not able to start the era of renaissance and prosperity until after it was able to expel the Jews from its lands and liberate itself from the clutches of Jewish economic control.

Will we, the Arabs, succeed in expelling this malignant cancer from our region, so that we can enjoy the renaissance and prosperity as Europe did in the past?!

Or is the axis of resistance the only one fighting this cancer in order to expel it from the region, while the rest of the Arabs do not care about the evil of this malignant disease?

It is a direct call for genocide.

If the larger Arab world was as repulsed by antisemitism as they claim, they would attack the Houthis as being bigots, and defend the remaining Jews in Muslim lands. But they never do, not when Yemenis say these things and not when other Arabs manage to publish similar articles.

Shaming is a terrific weapon, and one that the West needs to use more. Even if antisemitic Arabs are forced to hide their hate, that still is an accomplishment - hiding it makes it harder to spread to newer generations. MEMRI and PMW has managed to shame large swaths of the Arab world to eschew explicit antisemitism, knowing that they will look bad when exposed to the West.

The Houthis cannot be shamed by Westerners - but if their fellow Muslim Arabs would call out their hate, they would be put on the defensive. And if we are going to successfully fight Arab antisemitism, then we need the Arabs who claim to distinguish between Jews and Zionists to prove it by openly defending Jews from attacks like these.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Saudi news still publishing pure Jew-hatred

Despite the clear liberalization of Saudi Arabia over the past few years, antisemitism is still a major part of the mindset.

An op-ed in the popular Okaz newspaper site doesn't leave much doubt:

The title of the piece by Jasser Abdullah Al-Harbish says it all: "Neither good people nor cousins.. Rather, the Ashkenazi Khazars are racists."

The well-known fact in the history of nations and religions, and obscured by the influence of financial and media power, is that Western Jews are not Semites, but rather white European Ashkenazi Khazars who suckled ethnic racism from the European peoples among whom they were divided and lived as religious minorities....

The respected human rights advocate Gideon Levy (which is rare in his society) concludes that the entity of the State of Israel is fascist and racist and will not reach the two-state solution nor recognize the least rights of the Arab and Druze Palestinians.

...[Saudi intellectuals are] well aware of what was being taught to the Israelis in occupied Palestine from Talmudic jurisprudence about good people and non-believers. The Torah for the Jews is a devotional text in the first place, and the Talmud for them is the legislative and political jurisprudence that defines their relations with other creatures of God. The Jewish Talmudic jurisprudence says what it means that every land you step on, son of Israel, belongs to you.

It bothered me that some of the attendees in our discussion sought to improve the Israeli racial reality while they know and realize its origins by claiming that the Jews are Semitic cousins like the Arabs and that coexistence and cooperation with them will inevitably come and a matter of time, as a necessity to protect the Arab region from the encroachment of the Persians and their national ambitions disguised as a special sectarian Islamism.

The argument that the myth of first cousins and Abrahamic origins is just a Khazar-Ashkenazi masquerade ploy from the European Middle Ages has not helped. These invaders in Palestine are neither Hebrews nor Israelis, nor do they share common paternal or maternal lineages with the Arabs, with the exception of minorities from the eastern Sephardic Jews of Yemen and Moroccan Jews who fled with the Arabs from the Spanish Inquisition.

The author was very upset that his intellectual friends felt that Israel could be a Saudi ally. But his argument isn't based on the supposed evils of Zionism, but on the idea that Jews are not Jews, that they are only liars and racists, who teach the racist Talmud.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Joseph Massad, lying again, claims that Zionism never claimed to be about Jewish rights

Columbia professor Joseph Massad is very upset that Jews are claiming the right to self-determination. If Jews indeed have the right to self-determination, then opposing that really is a form of antisemitism, and antisemites like Massad cannot admit to that.

His normal method is to claim that Jews aren't a people, and that most Jews do not originate in the Middle East. If they aren't a people, then they have no right to self-determination.

But Massad knows that everyone knows that is a lie besides dyed in the wool antisemites who call Jews "Khazars."

So he has come up with a new argument: that the self-determination argument was never a Zionist tenet, rather it was a Palestinian Arab one.

Since the inception of their war against the Palestinian people, Zionist ideologues did not argue for Jewish self-determination but rather sought to delegitimise the indigenous Palestinians’ right to it. In the tradition of all colonial powers which denied that the colonised were a nation, the Zionists began by denying the nationness of the Palestinians.

Actually, the Zionists didn't even address the "nationness" of the Palestinian Arabs, who themselves didn't assert such a status (except for a tiny number of intellectuals) until decades after Zionism was established.

At the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I, the Zionist Organisation (ZO) did not invoke any "Jewish" right to self-determination, even though self-determination was all the rage at the conference, with colonised peoples from around the world affirming this right to liberate themselves from the colonial yoke.
The ZO instead argued that Palestine "is the historic home of the Jews…and through the ages they have never ceased to cherish the longing and the hope of a return".

Massad takes this statement out of context. The ZO's proposals were not meant to be a definition of Zionism, rather recommendations to the allies with an eye to what was politically possible. Even so, they did use the language of rights in their suggested conference statement: "The High Contracting Parties recognize the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine and the right of Jews to reconstitute in Palestine their National Home. "

Massad then makes an astoundingly incorrect assertion:

It is most important to note in this regard that, unlike the more recent and increased use by Zionists of the notion of Jewish self-determination, neither Herzl’s writings, the 1897 first Zionist Congress, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, nor the 1922 Palestine Mandate employed the language of "rights", let alone the right of self-determination.

Herzl's definition was "Zionism has for its object the creation of a home, secured by public rights, for those Jews who either cannot or will not be assimilated in the country of their adoption."

The phrase "public rights" was coined by Italian jurist Pellegrino Rossi in the 1830s. It meant universal rights for people - what it now called human rights. Herzl's definition of Zionism was based on the idea that Jews have the same rights as any other people, which would by implication include self-determination, a phrase that didn't gain popularity until the 1910s.

Massad cherry picks specific documents and statements and says that because they don't invoke "rights' or "self-determination,"then Zionists as a whole didn't use that language until recently. That is laughable.

A book on Zionism and the Jewish question by famed juror Louis Brandeis in 1915 says, "Jews collectively should enjoy the same right and opportunity to live and develop as do other groups of people."

Similarly, Jessie Ethel Sampter published "A Course in Zionism "in 1915, and wrote, "The Jew is always foremost in every modem movement towards justice. In the 18th century he fought for individual human rights, as his rights. In the 20th century he fights for the rights of the small nations to life and autonomy, also as his right. It is the democracy of nations, internationalism. "

Massad is even wrong in his assertion that self-determination is a new claim by Zionists. "A Jewish State in Palestine" by David Werner Amram (1918) says that the Zionist movement was partially a result of the "consciousness of the right of self-expression and self-determination of the Jewish people." The phrase did not have to be said explicitly by the early Zionists; it was well understood as one of many national rights that Jews should have as a people.

Similarly, the preface to a book written by the Zionist Organization in London in 1918 says, "Only by their resettlement in their ancestral land of Palestine...will the Jews be able to exercise the right of self-determination."

Early Zionists always asserted their national rights as the Jewish nation as well as the right of self-determination. It is not a new phenomenon. Massad's pretense that this is a new definition of Zionism is yet another failed attempt to delegitimize Zionism - and to push his brand of modern antisemitism.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

11/18 Links Pt2: Theodor Herzl was gone, but his message survived; BBC broadcasts folksongs that glorify attacks on Jews; FBI Director: Jewish Community Under Threat ‘From All Sides’

From Ian:

Gil Troy: Theodor Herzl was gone, but his message survived

Editor’s note: Excerpted from the new three-volume set “Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings” edited by Gil Troy, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People, now available at www.theljp.org. This is the 11th in a series.

In 1897, Theodor Herzl essentially described himself when he wrote about a man who once “deep in his soul felt the need to be a Jew,” and who, reeling from Jew-hatred, watched “his soul become one bleeding wound.” Finally, this man “began to love Judaism with great fervor.”

In this short story, “The Menorah,” Herzl saluted his step-by-step Judaization and Zionization. Celebrating Hanukkah, he delighted in the “growing brilliance” candle by candle, gradually generating more and more light.

The “occasion became a parable for the enkindling of a whole nation.” Flipping from the reluctant, traumatized Jew he had been to the proud, engaged Jew he was surprised to see in the mirror, Herzl admitted: “When he had resolved to return to the ancient fold and openly acknowledge his return, he had only intended to do what he considered honorable and sensible. But he had never dreamed that on his way back home he would also find gratification for his longing for beauty. Yet what befell him was nothing less.”

Herzl concluded: “The darkness must retreat.”

Seven years later, Herzl spelled out Zionism’s dynamic power, its spillover effects. “For inherent in Zionism, as I understand it, is not only the striving for a legally secured homeland for our unfortunate people, but also the striving for moral and intellectual perfection,” he wrote.

This vision made Herzl a model liberal nationalist. He believed that “an individual can help himself neither politically nor economically as effectively as a community can help itself.”

Mark Regev: Did Israel's famed diplomat Abba Eban lack clout back home?

The 20th anniversary of the passing of Israel’s legendary foreign minister Abba Eban on November 17 is an opportunity to ask whether the acclaimed diplomat, with his stellar global reputation, was as effective in defining Israeli policy as he was in advocating it abroad.

An outstanding student at England’s Cambridge University, Eban graduated in 1938 with an exemplary triple first, positioning him to pursue a lifetime career as a respected academic.

But the South Africa-born Eban could not sit out the impending world crisis that would so heavily impact the Jewish people. Drawn to Zionism, he worked at the London headquarters of the World Zionist Movement under the leadership of Chaim Weizmann (who later became Israel’s first president).

With the outbreak of World War II, Eban joined the British military to fight the Nazis, serving as an intelligence officer in Mandatory Palestine. Discharged at the end of the war, Eban joined the staff of the Jewish Agency’s political department and was sent to New York where he became the Jewish Agency’s liaison with the UN’s Special Committee on Palestine, helping steer it toward recommending Jewish statehood. Subsequently, Eban was part of the lobbying effort that produced the necessary two-thirds majority General Assembly vote for partition on November 29, 1947.

After successfully orchestrating Israel’s acceptance to the UN in May 1949, Eban became the Jewish state’s permanent representative to the organization. In parallel, he also served as Israel’s ambassador to the US, concurrently working in both Washington and New York throughout the 1950s.

Eban was a celebrity. His remarkable intellectual and oratorial prowess made him one of the foremost English speechmakers of the period, on a par with Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy. Henry Kissinger wrote: “I have never encountered anyone who matched his command of the English language. Sentences poured forth in mellifluous constructions complicated enough to test the listener’s intelligence and simultaneously leave him transfixed by the speaker’s virtuosity.”

Howard Jacobson: Ulysses Shmulysses

Homeric he is not; but a hero for our time he is. Ulysses is first and foremost a comedy of exile. Joyce wrote it while living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. That Dublin went on calling to him throughout the years he lived elsewhere is clear from the novel’s intense recreation of the city’s bursting vitality. But novelists thrive on being away, and Joyce needed to be anywhere but Dublin, free from Irish politics, the church, and his own memories of personal and professional failure. Leopold Bloom is not given that choice; Joyce does not buy him a ticket from Dublin to Tiberias. But he is already, in his Jewishness, exile enough for Joyce. Behind the epic figure of Odysseus, in this novel, looms the shadow of the mythical Wandering Jew who, for having jeered at Jesus on the way to the cross, is doomed to roam the earth until the end of human time. Call him a figment of early Christian antisemitism. And while antisemitism isn’t a major theme in Ulysses, it shows itself with some unexpected savagery from time to time as in the figure of the headmaster Mr. Deasy who gets a kick out of declaring “Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews … and do you know why? She never let them in. That’s why.” “That’s not life for men and women,” Bloom responds, “insult and hatred.” Those who are not let in, must find somewhere else to go.

This has been in large part the Jewish story for 2,000 years. And the homeless Jew is the metaphorical undercurrent of Ulysses. Joyce is said to have worked up the the character of Leopold Bloom from the Jews he met in the course of his own wanderings in Trieste and Zurich. He must have studied them attentively, for Bloom is no mere token Jew. In his queer lapses from Judaism, mistaking words and confusing events, he is every inch the part-time, no longer practicing Jew, making the best of the diaspora, more Jewish to others than to himself.

And in him, unexpectedly but triumphantly, Joyce sees a version of his own rejections and rebuffs. Without going into what we know or think we know of Joyce’s own sexual predilections, it is accepted that there are similarities between Bloom’s submissiveness and his creator’s, and that Joyce chose Bloom’s Jewishness as the perfect vehicle to express the passive, much put-upon and all-suffering openness to life that he needed to drive—or, rather, be driven by—this novel. At home in being far from home, content to be cuckolded and remaining in love with the wife who cuckolds him, pessimistic and yet happy enough, dialectical, pedantic—in one lunatic scene he morphs into “The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft who tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved tradition of medical science … produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centre”—Bloom makes being a stranger in a strange land an enticing condition.

One of the best jokes made about Bloom is that he was once a traveler for blotting paper. His absorbency might not make him the most forceful husband for Molly, but it is the key to the novel’s plenty. With Bloom around to soak in every misadventure without complaint, there’s no limit to what Joyce might plausibly invent. Ulysses first appeared in 1922. Worse things than exile were still to happen to Jews. And for many novelists in the ensuing years, the Jew would become the perfect protagonist, the very model of humanity in extremis—homeless, tragic, patient, funny. But James Joyce got there first.

La Revue Blanche

The Dreyfus affair was not the only social battle in which the Revue engaged. In 1897, across two issues, it published a remarkable “Enquete sur la Commune,” a series of brief, firsthand accounts of the great uprising of 1871 whose specter still haunted France. A century and a half later it remains one of the best accounts of that event.

The repressive legislation passed in response to the anarchist bombing wave of the early 1890s, laws which effectively banned anarchist propaganda and activity of any kind, was harshly criticized in the pages of La Revue blanche. The strongest criticism was an article signed “Un Juriste.” The author described the legislation as, “Everyone admits that these laws never should have been our laws, the laws of a republican nation, of a civilized nation, of an honest nation. They stink of tyranny, barbarism, and falsehood.” The pseudonymous author was the future three-time prime minister of France, Léon Blum.

An 1898 volume of anti-militarist articles released by the review’s book publishing arm, provocatively titled L’Armée contre la Nation (the army against the nation) would lead the minister of war to press a charge of defamation against the publishers, a charge the Natansons were able to successfully defend themselves against by claiming the book contained nothing but articles that had already been published elsewhere and not been found criminal.

By the turn of the century French intellectuals began withdrawing from the political field. Charles Péguy later described the letdown felt during and after the Dreyfus affair by lamenting that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” At the same time, the editorial staff and stable of writers at the review had turned over several times. One of its later editors, Urbain Gohier, was a barely disguised antisemite who would become an important figure on the anti-Jewish fringe. Yet the quality of the contributors was still high. If Mallarmé’s poetry no longer appeared in its pages, the young Guillaume Apollinaire did. Alfred Jarry became a regular contributor, the Revue publishing his masterpiece, Ubu Roi, as well as Octave Mirbeau’s classic Diary of a Chambermaid, serially and in book form by its Editions de la Revue blanche. That enterprise also published what is considered to be France’s first bestseller, a translation of—of all things—the Pole Henryk Sinkiewicz biblical epic Quo Vadis.

By the first years of the 20th century only one Natanson brother, Thadée, remained on the magazine. Embroiled in a lengthy divorce, he seemed to have grown tired of the magazine. It was losing money, but then, according to Thadée’s wife, later famous as Misia Sert, that had always been the case. In 1903 La Revue blanche published the last of its 237 issues. Its closing was in no way an indication of failure. It had set out to be the voice of a new France, of a more open country, both politically and culturally, and was, in the end, both its begetter and its voice.

Palestinian antisemitism has no underlying philosophy - it is just pure hate of Jews

There have been many different excuses given for hatred of Jews over the millenia.

Pharaoh: "Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground."

Haman: "[Their] laws are different from those of any other people and [they] do not obey the king’s laws."

Voltaire: “The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.”

Luther: "Wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and veheming his eyes on them."

Marx: "What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money."

Wagner: "[The Jews is] incapable ... of artistic expression, neither through his outer appearance, nor through his language and least of all through his singing."

Wilhelm Marr: "Jewry has ...corrupted all society with its views. It has driven out any kind of idealism, possesses the controlling position in commerce, infiltrates increasingly into state offices, rules the theater, constitutes a sociopolitical phalanx, and finally has left you little more than the hard manual labor that it always despised. "

For most of these, the hate of Jews came before their theories and justifications for their hate, but they tried to create a consistent philosophy that would allow them to justify the hate and not feel like monsters.

Palestinian antisemitism has no such interest in consistency. It isn't a philosophy. It freely steals from any and all other flavors of antisemitism, even those that contradict each other. As long as someone has something to say against Jews, the Palestinians will parrot it.

Palestinians have embraced traditional Muslim antisemitism where Jews are considered liars and betrayers of prophets since Biblical times. Yet they also embrace the antisemitic Khazar theory that says that most Jews aren't real Jews to begin with.

Palestinians have denied the Holocaust, but when it is convenient they compare Israel to Nazis - and then pivot again and claim that they are the real victims of the Holocaust.

Palestinians attack Jews as a people, as a nation, as a culture, and as a religion. But they also claim that the Jewish people do not exist, and it is only a religion.

Palestinian articles will describe the absolute Jewish control over the world, but they also write how Jews are as weak as a spider web and frightened Jews will run away from Israel as soon as they encounter any resistance.

They say they are not antisemitic and that they respect Judaism as a sacred religion, but just today, not for the first time, the official Palestinian news agency referred to everyday Jewish prayer as "racist Talmudic rituals."

The far-Left PFLP and the Islamist Hamas and Islamic Jihad have no public disputes over their contradictory philosophies. Their worldviews have almost nothing in common. But what they have in common is considered far more important than the philosophies that separate them: they both hate Jews. The far-Right Islamists will happily borrow the far-Left language of "racism" and "apartheid" even though they are far more guilty of those crimes; the far-Left will enthusiastically sign on to "defending Jerusalem from being Judaized" even when they are ostensibly atheist. They have allied and cooperated in terror attacks against Jews.

Palestinians claim a Jewish state is racist while they say they want an Islamic-based, pure Arab state of their own. They say that Jews practice apartheid towards Arabs but they want hundreds of thousands of Arabs to move to Israel to live in that environment.

The only consistency in Palestinian philosophy is their hate for Jews.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Roger Waters proves he's an antisemite, again

Rolling Stone has an interview with Roger Waters by an investigative journalist who actually knows his stuff - and he makes Waters look like an idiot.

The interviewer, James Ball, concludes:

Waters’ live show repeatedly flashes up one particular message that clearly compels him: “Control the narrative, rule the world.”

I leave the interview thinking it’s almost the opposite: Waters is an example of how we can construct our own narrative and twist the world to fit in, with no amount of mainstream media, propaganda, or even real-world facts and evidence able to let any light in. It leads us to a nihilistic place, where we are only able to feel compassion for victims that fit our personal narrative, minimising or even actively denying the suffering of others.

We've already shown how Roger Waters is a real antsemite - not just an "anti-Zionist" - because he applied neo-Nazi, fake Talmud translation conspiracy theories about Jews to Sheldon Adelson.

The text of the interview shows that Waters also adheres to the antisemitic Khazar myth.

Ball: Yes, but isn't settler quite offensive when there are Jewish people who have lived there for two millennia?

Waters: No, it's not. Those people are not from there.They are not the descendants of indigenous people who've ever lived there. They're all from northern Europe or America or somewhere else.

As with his Adelson ideas, this is muddled in his brain from the original, but the sources for both the Adelson quote and this one are quite clear - Roger Waters reads antisemitic literature and assimilates it into his worldview. He even goes beyond it, saying that even Sephardic Jews are not from the Middle East.

Yes, saying that all Jews are lying about their own origins to steal land from others is antisemitism. By any definition.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Arab site: Khazars started Zionism!

Palestinian site AlKhanadeq has been digging up some bizarre history.

Some contemporary writers attribute “Zionism” to Mount Zion in Jerusalem, and that it was born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. However, the truth indicates that it was a product of the twelfth century AD, as it appeared among the “Khazar Jews,” a people of Turkish origin. Their influence extended between the Black Sea in the west, the Caspian Sea in the east, which bore their name, the Caspian Sea, and from the Caucasus in the south to the Volga in the north. In the year 740 AD, the Khazar king, his court and his military embraced the Jewish religion, and Judaism became - the official state religion - among the Khazars, and it was a unique matter of its kind among the pagans. Thus, the "Jews of the Khazars" considered themselves "God's chosen people" who had the "right of return" to the "Promised Land" of Palestine.

Historian Arthur Koestler says in his book "The Khazar Empire and Its Legacy, the Thirteenth Tribe" that "there is another small matter related to the subject of the Khazars, which is a semi-mythical matter close to historical folklore, and still lives to this day. In Khazaria there was a messianic movement, and it was a primitive attempt aimed at reclaiming Palestine by force of arms. They say, “It is the time when God will gather His people, the people of Israel, from all the countries to Jerusalem, the holy city,” and they mention that “Solomon son of Doji is Elijah” (one of the prophets of the Torah), and that his son is the awaited Savior.

It is clear that these invitations were addressed to the Jewish groups in the Middle East, and their influence appears to have been weak. Because the next step was not taken until about twenty years later, when the young "Menachem" called himself "Daoud al-Ruy" and made his title "The Waiting Savior". Although this movement was born in Khazaria, it soon moved to Kurdistan, where the so-called "David" gathered a large armed force, including local Jews with the help of the Khazars, and they succeeded in taking a position for them in the fortified forest of Ahadi to the north-east of Mosul, and perhaps He hoped to lead his army from there to Edessa (Edessa) to reach by force through Syria to the Holy Land.

The author is claiming that David Alroy, a fairly famous false messiah, was the first person to want to lead Jews back to Israel - and he was a Khazar, not really Jewish. Therefore, Zionism itself has nothing to do with Judaism and is only a fake movement created by fake Jews!

I've seen some claim that Alroy was a Khazar, but I have seen no evidence of that - he lived centuries after the Khazar kingdom fell and he lived in Persia, not former Khazaria. So this entire theory seems bogus to begin with.

Moreover, the history of Jewish false messiahs who tried to lead Jews back to Israel predates Alroy by centuries. If that is evidence of the root of Zionism as the movement to return Jews to Israel, then Zionism goes back to the days of Bar Kochba!

The author also claims that the Star of David was first used by Alroy as well.

There is a great desire by some Palestinians to say that everything about Judaism and Zionism is fake. The theory comes first, and the "evidence" comes later.

Which is pretty much what antisemitism is.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

No, the headline is not hyperbole.

Amad reports that the Council of Arab Information Ministers held its 52nd meeting on Thursday, and the top of the agenda is "continuing Arab media support for the Palestinian cause, at the center of which is occupied Jerusalem....emphasizing all decisions related to the Palestinian cause, and working to keep the issue of Jerusalem, Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Islamic and Christian holy sites alive in the minds and hearts of Arabs and Muslims through media awareness programs."

Abu Rudeineh, representing the PA, said that "the current battle taking place on the Palestinian land is the vision and Arabism of Jerusalem, noting that there is a movement on the international arena to confirm that East Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Palestine, and that there are Palestinian Islamic and Christian people and sanctities, which calls for collective Arab action to support the Palestinian vision and expose the Israeli lies targeting the city and its people."

There was a somewhat interesting autotranslation, where he added that a mini-committee will meet to set up mechanisms for urgent action on the international scene "to reveal the Israeli facts and establish the Palestinian narrative."

Indeed, Israel has facts and Palestinians only have a narrative. And the "information ministers" - really, propaganda ministers who can tell news media what to cover - are ready to push those lies.

They also want to make May 11 a "global day of solidarity with the Palestinian media, which coincides with the anniversary of the assassination of the media martyr, Sherine Abu Akleh, as an expression of absolute solidarity with all Palestinian journalists and media professionals."

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The Abenaki And Jews Have More In Common Than Just Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Ben & Jerry's was in the news again this week, as a federal judge rejected their attempt to prevent their parent company, Unilever, from allowing their ice cream from being sold in Judea and Samaria -- or as Ben & Jerry's prefers to call it: "Occupied Palestinian Territory."

Just a little over a year ago, they formally joined the BDS movement when the company announced they would no longer sell their ice cream in the West Bank.

Just last month, Ben & Jerry's found themselves accused of being hypocrites for claiming it was inconsistent with their values for their ice cream to be sold "on occupied land" while they themselves based their headquarters on tribal Indian land -- according to a letter signed by over a thousand Israeli students and academics affiliated with Students for Justice in America, with the support of Shurat HaDin.

The New York Post covered the story: Israeli students accuse Ben & Jerry's of occupying tribal land:

Israeli students claim that ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s is “illegally” occupying land in Vermont that once belonged to a Abenaki native American tribe and should practice what it preaches and immediately evacuate the properties.

...“We have concluded that your company’s occupation of the Abenaki lands is illegal and we believe it is wholly inconsistent with the stated values that Ben & Jerry’s purports to maintain. Ironically, in July of the last year you announced that you would discontinue the sale of your products in Israel because you object to the Jewish State allegedly occupying Palestinian territories,” the letter to B&J’s chairperson, Anuradha Mittal said.

This double standard had already been noticed just a few days after Ben & Jerry's original announcement last year, by lawyer Stephen Flatow:

Ever hear of the Abenaki Tribe?

Neither did I, until the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company this week started accusing Jews of illegally occupying other people’s territory, and I got curious about whose territory Ben & Jerry’s is occupying.

After all, if you’re going to go around calling other people “occupiers,” well, you better not be an “occupier” yourself, right? I mean, wouldn’t that be just the height of hypocrisy?

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield launched their business empire in 1978 by setting up an ice cream parlor in Burlington, Vermont. Today, the headquarters of their multi-billion-dollar enterprise is located in South Burlington.

It’s a safe bet that neither Ben nor Jerry ever asked permission from the territory’s original inhabitants. Like most white, imperialist, colonialist settlers, they just moved in and did what they wanted, the natives be damned.

The natives, in this case, were the Abenakis, a proud, peaceful group of indigenous tribes who had been living in that part of the country since forever... [emphasis added]

Yet not everyone had ignored the issue of the Abenaki's rightful place on the land. Legal Insurrection notes that just 3 miles from the Ben & Jerry's headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, the University of Vermont features a land acknowledgment on their site that -- unlike Ben & Jerry's -- formally recognizes the history of the Abenaki and their historical connection to the land:

The UVM HESA Program acknowledges that the University of Vermont rests upon the traditional territory of the original inhabitants of this land – the Abenaki people – and the State of Vermont now occupies the lands of the Mahican and Pennacook tribes. We acknowledge that Indigenous Peoples were forced to leave Vermont during the 1600’s, and eastern tribes were displaced by colonial expansion.

The university goes on to note records indicating that in addition to efforts to force them off their land, during the early 20th century, the Abenaki were also subjected to forced pregnancy terminations and more than 3,400 of them were sterilized. They faced attempts to physically reduce their numbers, the kind of physical threats that Jews too have faced in their history.

As Jeff Benay testified in 2010, during testimony for recognition of the Abenaki by the state of Vermont:

As noted by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, “The Vermont Eugenics Survey of 1925 and the sterilization law of 1931, which were intended to anglicize the state’s population, identified the Abenaki as undesirable – along with Catholics, such as French Canadians, Irish, and Italians; Jews, the poor; the mentally ill; and criminals.”

Interestingly, Benay notes that while the tribe was recognized by the state governor in 1976, it was rescinded the following year by the next governor.

The reason?

The new governor said that he could not give recognition to a “sovereign nation within a sovereign state” -- a problem that Jews are very familiar with over the centuries, having been told that they could not be fully accepted because they constituted "a people within a people."

Another parallel between the Abenaki and Jews is the attempt to rob each of their history. One of the hurdles placed in the way of the Abenaki was meeting the Federal definition of "tribe" before they could be recognized as indigenous. According to the Federal government, they had to prove that they were an autonomous and existing entity since colonial times -- a test that the Abenaki could not pass to the government's satisfaction.

As Abenaki activist Fred Wiseman put it:

They said the Abenakis were genetic, political, and cultural fakes.

How often have we seen antisemitic attacks accusing Jews of something similar -- of being descended from Khazars or of having no historical and cultural connection to the land Israel?

Apparently, during the American Revolution, the Abenaki retreated north into Quebec, to the extent that 2 centuries later they “were indistinguishable from the general population in Vermont.” In other words, their skin color was white. Not only could they not be visibly identifiable as Indians, they also hid their Indian identity from the Census Bureau.

Again, a point of comparison:

It’s happened before. In 15th Century Spain, Jews converted to avoid getting burned at the stake, lived outwardly Christian lives, but secretly observed Jewish rituals at home.

Wiseman sums up the situation that the Abenaki face:

Whatever happens, the Abenaki will once again be defined by others. Indians don’t have the right to self-identify. We have to be recognized by white people.

This again is a situation that Jews are very familiar with, where others get to define what can be considered antisemitism, antisemites lecture us about what Zionism is and international agencies assume the authority to give our cultural heritage away to others.

Ultimately, what ties the Abenaki and Jews together is that they are both indigenous peoples, born in their respective lands with historical and cultural ties to it.

And both have struggled to return to their land and have their connection to it recognized.

In this, the Jews have been extraordinarily successful after thousands of years. And that is a problem for some.

According to the UNHCR Resettlement Handbook:

Indigenous groups are descendants of the peoples who inhabited land or territory prior to colonization or the establishment of state borders. They often have strong attachment to their ancestral lands and natural resources, an attribute that can distinguish them from other minority groups. They may also have distinct social, economic and political systems, languages, cultures and beliefs. Their right to self-determination has frequently been impeded by subsequent migration of other ethnic groups into the territory where they reside.

Indigeneity is defined, in part, in the context of colonization. That may be helpful to the Abenaki, but in the case of the re-establishment of Israel, enemies of the Jewish State accuse Jews of being the colonists. Yet the distinct social, political, language, culture and belief systems of the Palestinian Arabs originate in Arabia -- and are not indigenous to Judea.

But because the definition of indigeneity is made in the context of being a victim of colonialism, the history of the Arab invasion and conquest of the land is forgotten and they are held up as the native population in the face of the return of Jews to their home.

The world is just not ready for indigenous populations that successfully re-establish their home.

Ben & Jerry's can glibly explain to an interviewer the rightness of their refusing to sell their ice cream in Judea and Samaria, but when challenged as to why they sell their ice cream to areas in the US where there are problems with human rights issues -- the 2 men are totally dumbfounded: