Arab judge who criticized PA is suspended

Yet more evidence that Abbas is a well-groomed Arafat:

The Palestinian Authority has decided to suspend a senior Muslim religious judge (kadi) who criticized the PA judicial system and complained about anarchy and lawlessness.

The decision, the first of its kind since the death of Yasser Arafat, contravenes promises made by his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, to democratize Palestinian society and encourage freedom of expression.

The kadi, Dr. Hassan Jouju, was suspended following an interview he gave to the Jerusalem-based biweekly Sawt al-Nissa (Voice of Women) on April 14. 'The Shari'a (Muslim religious law) judiciary suffers due to the lack of legislation that regulates work, so chaos has spread,' he said in the interview. 'We work by God's will.' The kadi's remarks reflected widespread criticism of the PA's secular and religious judiciary systems, which have long been held responsible for the absence of law and order.

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A moderate Palestinian voice gets denounced

This happened in February:

WASHINGTON — America's largest Jewish policymaking body will host an unlikely guest at its annual gathering this weekend in Washington: the head of America's most prominent pro-Palestinian advocacy group.

Ziad Asali, founder and president of the American Task Force on Palestine, will participate in a special discussion on March 1 at the annual policy plenum of the Jewish Council of Public Affairs, a policy coordinating body that brings together 13 national organizations and 123 local Jewish communities. It will be the first time in more than a decade that the JCPA gathering has included such a discussion on whether American Jews and Arabs can work together for Middle East peace.

Since he established the Task Force, more than two years ago, the 63-year-old retired physician has been calling for Arabs — both in the Middle East and in America — to reach out to American Jews and work together for peace. The American Jewish community's support of a two-state solution is "essential" for any viable peace accord between Israelis and Palestinians, he said in a recent interview with the Forward.

"If we do not reassure [American] Jews that what we are striving for is a Palestinian state that will live in peace, security and respect alongside an Israeli Jewish state, then we simply cannot proceed" toward realizing that goal, he said. That process, Asali said, should be based on building both personal and organizational rapport between the two communities, and on charting the political common ground.

Asali's moderate voice and solid contacts with the Bush administration and Congress have turned this mild-mannered Jerusalem-born physician into the most visible spokesman for the Palestinians in Washington in recent months. Together with Washington lawyer and Republican activist George Salem, who is on the board of the relatively new pro-Palestinian organization, Asali was chosen by the White House to represent America on the official three-person U.S. delegation to Yasser Arafat's funeral. He and Salem, along with two senators, Republican John Sununu of New Hampshire and Democrat Joe Biden of Delaware, were part of the official American delegation sent to the region last month to monitor the Palestinian Authority presidential elections. And earlier this month, he was invited to testify before a congressional committee on the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace, joining former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former U.S. Mideast envoy Dennis Ross.

At the hearing, he voiced some unorthodox views: One was that Palestinians "absolutely should fulfill all their obligations," as stipulated in the road map peace plan "without delay." Another was that the question of Israeli security is "not negotiable."

It was another statement, however, that got the Palestinian activist invited to speak at the JCPA's annual plenum.

At a press briefing following his trip to monitor the Palestinian elections, Asali said that Palestinians should come to terms with the fact that they would not be able to realize their "right of return" to their old homes in Israel.

Asali, who was six when his family fled Jerusalem in the spring of 1948, says he knows full well how unpopular this position is among Palestinians. His mother, he says, died with the key to their Jerusalem home under her pillow. "But we must now separate the right from the return," he said. The moral right of refugees to recover their properties, he said, should be addressed by a combination of compensation and an Israeli acknowledgement of the wrong that was done to hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. "But in terms of an actual return, well, there is really nothing to return to. It's Israel now."

Asali believes that speaking his mind enhances his credibility. "I am fed-up with making points or scoring points in political debates," he said. "I understand the young [pro-Palestinian] students who scream on university campuses. I know what they are talking about. And I also know that they don't know what they are talking about." Palestinians and their friends in America, he said, should quit focusing on grievances of the past and instead do their best "to avoid the disasters of the future."

And this statement was made this week in response:

The Global Palestine Right of Return Coalition (and its constituent organizations in historic Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Europe and North America, including Al-Awda), and in conjunction with the Right of Return Congress and the listed signatory popular organizations and committees representing various Palestinian refugee communities, join the Arab-American community in declaring that various statements and false representations by the president of the Washington-based "American Task Force on Palestine" (ATFP) Dr. Ziad Asali nullifying the Palestinian right to return and demeaning the Palestinian and Arab people are reprehensible and entirely outside the consensus of our people.
The Right of Return is an inalienable right affirmed by the international community annually since 1948. No single person, group or government have the authority or mandate to forfeit this individual and national right.
In reality, voices such as Asali's are part of a larger concerted effort to introduce a false veneer of moderation as a replacement for the legitimate inalienable rights of the Palestinian and Arab people, represented by their right to return, sovereignty and self-determination. Through organizations like ATFP, Asali has gone even beyond the Geneva Accords, the Nusseibeh-Ayalon Agreement and other such attempts that violate fundamental, inalienable and natural rights that are enshrined in international law. From under the garb of hollow US democratization, Asali has in effect been diligently advancing the neo-Conservative plan for the "New Middle East", where nations and people are reconstituted against their will.

One can imagine peace, and even a two-state solution, when dealing with people like Asali. But the evidence that he truly represents anyone is lacking, and the reliance of the Bush administration on Asali and his group may be yet another manifestation of wishful thinking that pervades Washington and Jerusalem nowadays. The reflexive and utter denunciations of any Arab leader who softens his positions towards Israel even a slight amount speaks volumes more than the existence of such people to begin with.

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American Indians Aren’t Like Palestinians

An interesting take on those who love to use the colonialism argument against Israel.

By David Yeagley
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 9, 2002

MANY PEOPLE SEE A SIMILARITY BETWEEN American Indians and today’s Palestinians. I’m Comanche Indian. I see no similarity whatsoever.

Comanches were once "Lords of the South Plains," (Wallace & Hoebel, 1952). Arabs living in Palestine have never dominated anything but goats. Comanches were independent, and certainly not supported by two billion other Indian ‘brothers,’ like the Palestinian Arabs claim they’re supported by the Arab world.

There’s no similarity in the land claim issue. Comanches, never numbering more than six or seven thousand, were simply strong enough to take over the American southwestern plains, first from other Indians, then from white people. Palestinians have accomplished nothing but suicide bombings.

Palestinian Arabs are not indigenous to Palestine. They are leftover Arabs, residual of another age. Knowing Arab history is vital to understanding the situation in the Middle East. (Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial (1984) is a ‘must read’ on this subject.)

Arabs are from Arabia. Beginning in AD 622, under Mohammad, Arab "prophet" of Medina, the Islamic religion became a war machine and aggressively expanded from the Arabian Peninsula to all directions until AD 750 when it controlled North Africa westward to Spain and southern France, northward to Palestine and Armenia, and eastward 400 miles past the Indus River.

It was spectacular achievement, one which clearly proved Islam to be not a religion of peace, but of dominance. Arabs intermarried, enslaved, and otherwise lorded over every culture they encountered. Arabs established the African and Asian slave routes, which are still used today for slave trade out of India and Nepal, as well as Africa and the Far East.

European Christians finally fended off Islamic dominance to the east and west. By the 15th century, Muslims were ousted from Spain and from most of the Balkans by the 17th century. Mongolians broke Islamic dominance in the Orient. The last phase of Islamic political dominance, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), ended in 1840 when Constantinople submitted to terms of Western powers in its dispute with Egypt. Turkey’s government declared itself secular by 1922.

During all this time Palestine was little more than a wilderness of nomads, loosely associated groups of provincial subdivisions with frequently changing administrations. The people were a "pan-Arab" mix of gypsy-like leftovers, whom the General Syrian Congress of 1919 declared to be "the southern part of Syria." It wasn’t considered "Palestine," a separate Arab nationality, until the 1967 Six-Day War of Israel’s boundary expansions.

A ‘Palestinian Arab nationality’ was something Musa Alami began asserting after 1948, as a political reaction against Israel. As R. Sayigh wrote, "A strongly defined Palestinian identity did not emerge until 1968, two decades after the expulsion [of some Arabs living in parts of Palestine]," (Journal of Palestine Studies, 1977). In twenty years, Alami’s myth took effect.

But the land-by-residence claim gives Palestinian Arabs even less right. In 1950, United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) defined a Palestinian Arab as one who had lived in Palestine a minimum of two years before 1948. This is no ancient claim.

The ancient, indigenous inhabitants of Palestine are long perished from the earth. Canaanites, Phoencians, and then Philistines, all were dominated by the Israelites before 1060 BC. Most of these cultural identities dissolved completely by the neo-Babylonian age, or, the 6th century BC.

Arabs weren’t even in Palestine until the mid-7th century AD, over a thousand years later, after Palestine’s 1,300-year Jewish history. Arabs later living in Palestine never developed themselves or the land, but remained nomadic and quasi-primitive during their 1,200-year stay.

Then a stronger people modern Jews who’d been expelled from their homes in Europe and in Arab countries came in and conquered (without annihilating) the Palestinian Arabs.

As a Comanche Indian, I’m sensitive to this history. I believe the conqueror has a right to what he has conquered. No one owns the land. Only he who is strong enough to possess it will control it and the people living on it. That’s the law of war.

Teddy Roosevelt once said, "Let sentimentalists say what they will, the man who puts the soil to use must of right dispossess the man who does not, or the world will come to a standstill." (W. T. Hagan, Theodore Roosevelt and Six Friends of the Indians, 1997). The land developers, the agrarians, have become stronger than the hunters.

In the case of Comanches, we lost a magnificent hunting empire, and a lot of ego with it. In the case of "Palestinian" Arabs, what is lost? Why their sense of humiliation?

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Suha still getting millions!

Hey, the woman needs shoes!

French investigators are tracking $7 million transferred by PLO treasurer Nizar Abu Ghazaleh to the Paris bank account of ex-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's widow, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Palestinian officials said the PLO controlled a bank account in Tunisia from which millions of dollars in unexplained payments were made to Suha Arafat - payments they suspect were connected to contracts issued by the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat before he died last year, the report said.

The officials are trying to find out whether the money transferred to Suha Arafat came through Al Bahr and Al Sakhra, two companies which routinely handled purchase orders placed by the PA and which apparently were seeking, according to one official, to 'create a war chest in case the PLO fell back on hard times', it added.

As head of PLO finances, Ghazaleh played a key role in the transfers to Suha Arafat, according to Palestinian officials and French judicial officials probing PLO funds, the report said. Ghazaleh, who died last week, was also chairman of Al Bahr, and Suha Arafat played a key but unofficial role at the firm, helping to broker purchases, according to the daily.

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Israel helps rescue Syrian, Egyptian sailors on sinking North Korean boat

Just try to imagine Syrians trying to save Israelis.

Drama at the open sea: Israeli, American and French naval forces assisted Wednesday in the rescue of Egyptian and Syrian sailors whose ship sank in international waters off the coast of Nahariya.

Shortly before 2:00 p.m. (7:00 a.m. EST), the cargo ship Adora, traveling from Ashdod to Turkey, received a dispatch that another ship, which was apparently transporting cement, was in trouble.

The dispatch said the ship, which was carrying at least seven Egyptian and Syrian crew members and flew a North Korean flag, was sinking in international waters as it was making its way from EL Arish Port in Egypt en route to Syria.

Israeli, American, and French battleships and naval helicopters arrived at the scene, some 56 kilometers (about 35 miles) off the Nahariya coastline; the ship eventually sank, but three crew members have been saved so far.



American divers will apparently attempt to trace the four missing sailors on the ocean’s floor.



Lieutenant Colonel Yossi Meshita, who commanded the Israeli rescue efforts, said “As soon as we got the mission we knew what we had to do.'



'We are not interested in who the sailors are or what their nationalities are,' he said. 'From our standpoint it is about saving lives, and that is what we were trying to do for many hours at sea.”"

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I'm sure that they are very oppressed

Don't you love when people justify suicide bombings by saying that the Palestinians are "forced" to do it because they are so "desparate"?

I wonder what mental hurdles these idiots have to go through to explain stories like this.

I also wonder if these potential martyrs would change their minds if Israel gave the Palestinians the entire West Bank and Gaza?

Yeah, right.

TEHRAN, Iran Apr 20, 2005 — More than 400 young men and women have volunteered to carry out suicide bombing attacks against Americans in Iraq and targets in Israel, a militant group said Wednesday.

The recruiting effort was detailed during a ceremony organized by the Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement, a shadowy group that has been seeking attackers for nearly a year.

The Iranian government has distanced itself from the organization. But the event was attended by Mahdi Rahimian, the head of the Martyr's Foundation and the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee, both quasi-government organizations run by hard-liners loyal to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

'Some 440 volunteers, most of them women, signed up today,' said group spokesman Mohammad Ali Samadi.

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Teach Kids Peace

Watch this flash video. It takes about 90 seconds.

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Abbas lies again about collecting weapons

Once again, Abbas keeps up his reputation as Arafat in a suit.

Israel Radio Arab Affair Correspondent Avi Yissakharov reported this
afternoon that PA head Mahmoud Abbas claimed in a meeting with Israeli
reporters that the PA has collected all the weapons held by 'wanted'
Palestinians in Jericho and Tulkarem and that they will all soon be joining
the PA security forces.

Yissakharov noted that when he checked with Palestinian sources that they
all denied that this was the case and the Palestinians told him that while
the PA has made announcements regarding the collection of weapons that in
fact the weapons have yet to be collected.

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Egyptians start to see benefits in business co-operation with Israel

In its latest issue, 'Newsweek' quotes Egyptian Minister of Foreign Trade and Industry Rashid Mohamed Rashid as saying that the qualified industrial zone (QIZ) agreement with Israel is a 'huge thing' that has helped change the mind-set in Egypt toward Israel, after 25 years.

Under the QIZ agreement, products made in Egypt with Egyptian labor and comprising a specified proportion of Israeli inputs are exempt from US quotas and customs duties. Israel and Jordan also have a QIZ agreement, and the US hopes to initiate a similar agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Rashid told 'Newsweek' that, as with any reform in Egypt, the importance of the QIZ agreement lay in helping change the mind-set in Egypt.

Also, see this from Egyptian businessmen:

An Israeli company, Delta Galil Textile Industries, has been engaged in profitable business in Egypt since 1995. The company began with 145 employees and now employs nearly 4,600 workers in the Nasr City Free Zone. Labor conditions are excellent and certified at EU standards in all areas, including overtime. Touring the factory, we could not help but notice that the workers exhibited a sense of dignity and joy about their work.
Last year, Egypt and Israel signed a landmark economic accord, the Qualified Industrial Zone (QIZ) Agreement, that enables goods containing one-third Israeli inputs to be imported into the U.S. tariff-free. Yet in the current atmosphere, Israeli entrepreneurs face great hurdles in finding suitable Egyptian business partners. For the QIZ to bring sound results for Egypt and Israel, the political echelon must lead by example. As a symbolic gesture, President Mubarak should visit Israel, along with a delegation of leading businessmen, to temper the anxieties of the Egyptian business community and warm the cold peace.

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Hamas: Current calm a trick, pre-'67 borders not enough

Another excellent find by MEMRI:

A convention held by the Egyptian newspaper "Al-Ahram," which was attended by writers and experts on Palestinian affairs following the Palestinian Cairo agreement on calming down the situation [ Tahdiah ], also hosted the head of the Hamas political bureau, Khaled Mash'al. Speaking at the convention, Mash'al stated that the Tahdiah was a trick and that the resistance will continue as long as the occupation exists. Mash'al also expressed concern about the PA and Fatah taking over settlement lands after the withdrawal and stated that in the eyes of Hamas, there is no objection to the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders as an interim solution. The following are excerpts from Mash'al's speech: [1]

We Agreed to the Tahdiah to Prevent an Internal Palestinian Implosion

"We have made an achievement in the Palestinian arena... We wanted to avoid the internal Palestinian implosion that Sharon wanted. He [Sharon] wished for dissent [among us] so that he [could] pressure Abu Mazen to confront the resistance... [With our consent] we avoided it. Our second goal was to send a message to the international community that the problem does not lie with the Palestinian people or the Palestinian resistance, [but rather] with the occupation... Our third goal was to give a chance and headspace to set the Palestinian house in order... Fourth, we strived to achieve, through the temporary initiative of Tahdiah, a chance to fulfill the Palestinian peoples' direct interests, such as releasing prisoners...

"... Every term has a special meaning, and our choice [of the term] Tahdiah is not incidental. A Hudna [cease fire] is an agreement whose terms are acceptable to both sides, but in the current situation there are no such terms. The Palestinian side is the weak one... we treat this Tahdiah as a Palestinian initiative conditional to the other side fulfilling the terms...

"… Hamas controls its military wing... and despite that fact that it is one of the largest factions of the resistance, it is highly capable of keeping its men disciplined. Tahdiah means Tahdiah [and when you talk of] escalation, there is escalation. There is a commitment and it is honored... In the eyes of Hamas, Tahdiah is a trick within the resistance plans, [but] in the eyes of the [Palestinian] Authority, Tahdiah is a step on the way out of the resistance plan... but we still give it a chance... we can be patient and suffer, but not from the perspective of those who want to be free of the Intifada..."

I Told Abu Mazen: "Beware, Less They Poison You as They Did Arafat"

"... As we draw near the end of the summer and the end of 2005, the following atmosphere will be created: The [diplomatic] settlement will be 'refrozen,' and one cannot deny the possibility that Sharon will blame Abu Mazen for being the obstacle for peace, just as Abu Ammar [Arafat] was considered one. Abu Mazen heard this from me, laughed, and said that 'this is a predictable and unsurprising scenario.' I replied: Beware, less they poison you as they did Arafat...

"... I cannot be satisfied with the 1967 borders alone and see them as a permanent solution... A Palestinian might say: 'Who gave you the right to forego the rights of Palestinians?' So Abu Mazen himself says, in his talks: 'I cannot forego the right of return.' It will be his political suicide, for there are 5-6 million whose problem must be solved. However, Hamas has no objection to accept the 1967 borders as an interim solution.

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Those expansionist Israelis

I just saw an incoherent response, written by one Doris Rausch, to this great article.

This is precious little real information in this short rant (no footnotes nor any real facts of any kind) but its main "proof" is in this priceless paragraph:

But if you want the truth, all you have to do is take a look at a current map; you can see for yourself the "facts on the ground" as to who is trying to push whom into the sea.

OK, Doris, let's do as you suggest.

Some mental midgets suggest that the two blue bands in Israel's flag symbolize Israel's expansionist plans - to the Nile and Euphrates rivers. One wonders why the Middle East's only nuclear power, which could have blown up her enemies to smithereens since the 60's and taken control of not only all that territory but also all that oil, hasn't seen fit to act on its obvious territorial greed.

But never mind that. Let's look at the maps, as Doris suggests.

On my map, in the mid-70's, Israel controlled all territory from the Suez Canal to the Jordan River to the Golan Heights. Since then, Israel has:

• Given every single square centimeter of the Sinai to Egypt, including dragging Jews out of their homes in Yamit (for peace.)
• Withdrawn from all Lebanese territory behind UN-drawn borders (for peace.)
• Given autonomy to the PA for territory where 97% of Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza during Oslo (for peace.)
• Offered all of Gaza and almost all of the West Bank to the PA (for peace.)
• Offered almost the entire Golan Heights to Syria (for peace.)
• Planned to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza and uproot Jewish settlers there (for peace.)

I certainly detect a pattern in Israeli moves, and none of it has the least bit to do with expansionism.

I am happy to take your advice about reading the map, Doris, but I am afraid that you have limited skills in understanding basic cartography.

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Who's your Daddy? Genealogy/genetics testing becomes mainstream

Interesting article about modern uses for genetics testing and genealogy.

Growing up in the Rio Grande Valley, Harlingen architect Danny Villarreal had heard the stories from his grandparents. His ancestors, it was whispered, had come to Mexico from Spain under something of a cloud. Apparently, they were not purebred Castilian Spaniards, but members of a persecuted minority -- namely, Jews who had converted to Catholicism on pain of death at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition.

Villarreal was intrigued. As he grew older, he took up genealogy as a hobby. "It's turned into a pretty big thing," he says. Villarreal discovered a paper trail to back up the stories of his family's elders. In Saltillo, Mexico, he found a 380-year-old document that concerned one ancestor of his -- Diego de Villarreal -- who had gotten a little too full of himself for the local padre's liking. "One of the documents out of Saltillo was the parish priest complaining to the Inquisition about this guy Diego de Villarreal, who had some silver mines and was a captain in the military," Villarreal says. "The complaint was that he would come into town wearing silk clothing and jewelry, and he was allowed to bear arms. People who were 'New Christians' " -- recently converted Jews -- "were not allowed to do those things. It was all political, he had a lot of power, he had his own little army. I guess the Church didn't like that."

In the end, nothing came of the priest's tattling letter. The Inquisition's enforcers weren't about to leave their comfortable offices in Mexico City and sully their long black robes in the Nuevo Leon dust, not to mention risk their scalps at the hands of the Apaches and Comanches then raiding along the route, and the local authorities swept the affair under the rug. For good reasons: "The thing was that the people who were ruling northern Mexico during that time were all descendants of Jews, so this priest didn't have the political power to be able to get him out," Villarreal says.

At least that's the theory. And as far as the case of Diego de Villarreal goes, it would seem that in the 17th century, northern Mexico -- which included Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California -- was run and in no small part populated by crypto-Jews. But was there anything to back up this idea other than legends and moldering documents in Mexican archives? Couldn't it be that the priest had been motivated to denounce de Villarreal as an uppity New Christian by simple jealousy? Or maybe de Villarreal had insulted the priest. Who knows?

The long and the short of it is this: Sometimes documents tell lies, but DNA never does, at least if you conduct your tests in a competently run lab. Danny Villarreal discovered a Houston company, Family Tree DNA, that conducts DNA tests for genealogical purposes. He ordered a kit, swabbed some genetic material from the inside of his cheek and mailed it back to Houston. FTDNA sent the test off to a genetics lab at the University of Arizona, and a few weeks later Villarreal got his results back. Although the company didn't find that he was related to anyone then in its database, it did have a few surprises for him.

First, there was his haplogroup -- the genetic marker that goes back on his Y chromosome for tens of thousands of years. All humanity is divided into 18 of these, and Mexicans of European descent would likely be in either haplogroup R-1A or R-1B, the most common groups in Western Europe, or if they were primarily of Native American descent, Q or Q-3. Villarreal's was E-3B, which is a Semitic haplogroup that evolved in East Africa and then spread around the Mediterranean and is most common today in the Middle East and in North and East Africa. Then there were his closest genetic matches. All three of them were to Jews in places like Hungary, Belarus and Poland. It appeared that the parish priest back in Saltillo had not been lying after all.

On discovering his Jewish ancestry, Villarreal says, his reaction was mixed. "I was kinda surprised. I didn't know how to react," he says. "I'm a good ol' Catholic boy -- I went to Catholic schools and everything. It's not gonna change my religion or anything like that, but it was kind of interesting."

It turns out that Villarreal is far from alone. There are plenty of genetic Jews among the Hispanics of South Texas, the American Southwest and northern Mexico. Companies like FTDNA are turning them up all the time -- not to mention establishing kinships where none were known to exist, solving history's mysteries and answering questions people have about themselves that until now had no answers.

[...]
FTDNA also can answer the ultimate genealogical poser: If you're a male, and thus the owner of a Y chromosome, it literally can tell you where your ancestors were in prehistoric times. (Women who want to test can find out their haplogroup by testing their mitochondrial DNA; if they want to test their male ancestry, they have to persuade a male relative to take the test.) "I can tell that your deep ancestry comes from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, whether his father's father's father was African, or a Semite," says Greenspan. "In other words, I can tell if someone is descended from the Neolithic farmers who came to Europe 9,500 years ago, or I can tell someone that in all probability they are a -- how can I put this -- an ethnic Jew."

Which brings up another potential dark side. During the holocaust, Hitler relied on traditional genealogy to dispatch millions to the death camps. One Jewish grandparent was all it took. A modern-day Hitler would have much more sophisticated tools at his disposal. Greenspan -- who is Jewish himself -- doesn't dispute it. "The fact of the matter is, anything that has power can cut both ways," he says. "And this is powerful. If there was some tyrannical maniac who came along and said, 'I'm gonna kill everyone who has Viking ancestry,' then I think the technology in general would be dangerous. I don't know how you could put the genie back in the bottle on this."

Villarreal had some uncomfortable moments after revealing his distant Jewish ancestry on his Web site. "I get a lot of hate mail from people all the time," he says. "I never realized there was so much hatred of Jews -- I mean I got some pretty bad e-mails. So bad that I have to take 'em off my Web site and block the senders. Stuff like, 'If I had Jewish blood running in my veins, I wouldn't admit it to anybody,' stuff like that. Some of it comes from people who I know are Hispanic and who also know about the history of the Sephardic Jews and stuff like that."

[...]
Like many genealogists, Greenspan hit some dead ends. In the mid-'90s, he discovered another Greenspan living in Argentina who grew up ten miles from his grandfather in Ukraine and whose family was in the same business as his. He had a hunch that they were related, but there were no documents to back it up. He wanted to do a DNA test, but no company did DNA testing for genealogical purposes back then. "I searched everywhere, and I was talking to a genetics professor at the University of Arizona, and he said somebody should start a company doing something like this, because he got phone calls from genealogists all the time," he says. "And sure enough, it took me a while, but eventually I convinced him at the University of Arizona to do the testing, and the rest is history. We really are the first company in the world to offer this service."

The Arizona genetics professor is Michael Hammer, who made waves in the '90s by discovering the Cohanim gene in Jews. By tradition, Cohanim are Judaism's priestly caste, said to be descended from Moses's brother Aaron. Hammer conducted a study and proved that a statistically significant percentage of Jewish men who claimed to be Cohanim did in fact share a genetic signature. Today, Hammer's lab does FTDNA's tests on a for-profit basis, and Greenspan's Houston office runs the operations.

And the business is doing well. The first anthrogenealogy conference, held in Houston late last year, was a success. Greenspan was treated as a rock star by the mostly aging genealogists who attended. The future of this young hybrid science was a hot topic. Greenspan believes his company will do nothing less than help to revolutionize the whole concept of the family tree. "Think of it this way: Think of the anthropological side as the branches and the limbs of a tree. Think of the genealogical side as the leaves. Right now we're probably missing the twigs -- in other words, I can tell a man by looking at his leaves what branch of the tree and maybe even what limb of the tree, but I can't tell him what twig he is on. Yet at the same time I can look at the leaves and make a comparison of them and get an idea of who is related. I think in the next few years many of those branches are gonna get fleshed out in such a way that we'll be able to do the whole branch-limb-twig-leaf deal.

"In the next ten years, every single surname is going to have a DNA surname project," he says. "That is literally inevitable."

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