Showing posts with label Khazar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Khazar. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 04, 2023

"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!

 

 

Tuesday, October 04, 2022




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!

 

 

Thursday, September 22, 2022

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!

 

 

Friday, August 26, 2022


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:


It seems likely that Ben & Jerry's will not be recognizing the indigenous rights of either the Abenaki nor of Jews in the near future.





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!

 

 

Tuesday, July 19, 2022

We've discussed Columbia University professor Joseph Massad before and noted his antisemitism and bigotry since this blog began in 2004.

In an article for Arabi21, Massad strongly indicates that he subscribes to the discredited Khazar theory. While it is not the main point of his article, he writes, "The Zionists of European Jews claimed that they are the descendants of the ancient Palestinian Hebrews and that their settlement project is nothing more than a 'return' to their ancient country, Israel....The pan-Jewish nationalism of European Zionism, which sought to re-establish the glories of the 'Jewish' kingdoms of the Palestinian Hebrews (who were appropriated by the Zionists as ancestors of Europeans who had converted to Judaism), was portrayed as 'progressive' and socialist."

This is similar to what he wrote in English for Electronic Intifada in 2017, saying that European Jews were converts to Judaism. 

The Wikipedia entry on the genetics of Ashkenazic Jews shows that nearly all studies find their origin is in the Middle East. So Massad, in the 2017 article, makes his argument that most European Jews as converts by calling it "an established historical fact."


The usual version of the theory that Jews are converts is the Khazar theory, which has also been repeatedly debunked from genetic, historical, linguistic and other perspectives. It is embraced by Palestinians because their entire claim of indigeneity is destroyed when another people were there first and most Palestinian Arab families proudly trace their ancestry to Arabia. (The Palestinian Christians, on the other hand, seem to be descended from Jews.) 

Since the truth is not on their side, they need to push the Khazar lie. And that lie is meant to say that Jews don't have any historic ties to the Jewish homeland.

Denying Jewish history is just as antisemitic as denying the Holocaust.




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Thursday, September 30, 2021

This video of Jews celebrating Simchat Torah in Hebron on Wednesday is causing a great deal of angst from bigoted Arabs who believe that Jews should be banned from Judaism's second holiest site.


Al Jazeera catalogued some of the reactions to this video.

This tweeter that they highlighted said, "The sons of Khazar are dancing around the Ibrahimi mosque burial site of Ibrahim(pbuh) patriach of the Arabs. These European Jews who have no connection to our father Ibrahim(pbuh) are testing the limits of the Arabs."

The Khazar myth is an antisemitic theory that says most Jews aren't really Jews.

The Palestinian Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs condemned the celebration, claiming that "extremist groups used the Jewish holidays to desecrate the mosque through massive incursions, wearing religious clothes, in an attempt to perform Talmudic prayer and lying on the ground, deliberately provoking the feelings of Muslims."

Because why would Jews want to celebrate a holiday without deliberately provoking the feelings of Muslims?

But perhaps the most telling comment came from Ramy Abdu, the founder and chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, who has given statements to the UN. We've shown the anti-Israel bias of the organization, but his comment leaves no doubt that the human rights of Jews are of no concern to him.

Abdu tweeted, "At dawn today, with the support of the occupation forces, herds of colonists storm the Ibrahimi Mosque in Khalil al-Rahman and perform Talmudic prayers!"

To this "human rights expert," Jews in groups are not human, but "herds" of animals. Performing Jewish prayers (which are virtually all "Talmudic") is a disgrace. Jews do not have any rights to their own holy places. 

Dozens of responses curse the Jews for having the audacity of dancing - which is how Simchat Torah is celebrated. 

A human rights leader is inciting violence against Jews. And no one says a word about it.

UPDATE: This news site says that the Jews converted the shrine into a "discotheque." 






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