The Khazarian Bankster Cult That Destroyed Libya

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The Neocons and AIPAC treat us all, including the Libyan people, as subjects or sub-humans. You can say that this is the premise upon which they build their entire ideology. The Neocons used America to dispose Gaddafi because they thought that he was basically challenging the Neocon hegemony in Libya.

Vladimir Putin with Gaddafi.

 

…by Jonas E. Alexis and Mariam Alfatah

Mariam Alfatah graduated from the London School of Economics. She is a Libyan and has witnessed how the Powers That Be and their marionettes obliterated her country. You may disagree with just about everything Alfatah is going to say, but try to understand some of the arguments and evidence that she is going to put forth and interact with them responsibly.

We agree that ideas should be proved or disproved by reason and logic, not by emotion or name calling. If what she is saying lacks logical consistency, explanatory power, explanatory scope, and historical context, then readers are welcome to provide serious evidence to the contrary. The interview is a little long largely because Alfatah had to explain a number of issues and present evidence to support her claims.

Jonas E. Alexis: You said that there was a “Holocaust” and “a genocide” in Libya in 2011. Virtually everyone knew that the invasion was a Neocon war.[1] In fact, long before the war got started, thirty-seven Neocons sent Obama a letter saying that Gaddafi must go.[2] Neocon talking-head Bill Kristol himself said on eve of the invasion:

“Our ‘invasions’ have in fact been liberations. We have shed blood and expended treasure in Kuwait in 1991, in the Balkans later in the 1990s, and in Afghanistan and Iraq—in our own national interest, of course, but also to protect Muslim peoples and help them free themselves. Libya will be America’s fifth war of Muslim liberation.”[3]

More importantly, virtually every serious scholar knows by now that the Neoconservative movement is a Jewish ideological enterprise which has never been good for America.[4]

Stephen Halper and Jonathan Clarke, themselves philo-Semitic scholars, declare that the Neoconservative movement is “in complete contrast…to the general cast of the American temperament as embodied by the Declaration of Independence.”[5]

Jewish legal scholar Stephen M. Feldman argues that the Neocons got their political and intellectual position “by leading an assault on the hegemonic pluralist democratic regime that had taken hold of the nations in the 1930s.”[6]

What Feldman is implicitly or reluctantly saying is that the Neocons essentially attacked the moral and political fabric of America and progressively turned the country into an empire that always looks for monsters to destroy in the Middle East and elsewhere.[7] This came into full bloom during the Reagan administration.[8]

These warmongers have told us ad nauseam that they were trying to establish “democracy” and “freedom” in places like Libya. Obviously Libya has been in chaos ever since these “geniuses” landed in the country. Describe for us why these warmongers were and still are worse than psychopaths. You can also talk about what really happened when they invaded Libya.

Mariam Alfatah: First of all, it must be stated that the Neocons and AIPAC treat us all, including the Libyan people, as subjects or sub-humans. You can say that this is the premise upon which they build their entire ideology, and I will prove that throughout this interview.

The Neocons used America to dispose Gaddafi because they thought that he was basically challenging the Neocon hegemony in Libya. This is an important point. One of the writers at VT, David Swanson, talked about this in one of his articles, which was published by the Guardian itself.[9]

Keep in mind that Libya, under Gaddafi, controlled its own oil. I agree with Swanson completely when he said that “The Libyan government controls more of its oil than any other nation on earth, and it is the type of oil that Europe finds easiest to refine. Libya also controls its own finances.”[10]

What was more interesting was that Gaddafi challenged African countries to follow his lead![11] He helped establish satellites in many African nations. Some of those nations used to get their satellites from the French, which cost them millions of dollars. Now they were getting them at a fairly reasonable price from Gaddafi. To the warmongers and psychopaths, that was a dangerous move.

There is more: Gaddafi challenged African nations to stop importing what one may call GMO food from the West. He also said that Italy should compensate the Libyan people for their colonization from 1911 until 1945. Finally, Gaddafi had a plan to transform Libya into a second Dubai, where tourists would flock there by the millions. In his view, this would have created a shining monument for all of Africa. So, if you peel back the ideological onion, you can easily see why Gaddafi was a target.

There was no way for Gaddafi to survive the Neocon onslaught without serious backup from other countries. The Neocon system in the West, particularly in America, certainly didn’t want to stop their aggressive expansion in Libya and indeed in Africa. Therefore they had to summon pathetic lies and use false pretexts to invade Libya in 2011. Since the fall of the Jamahiriya, Libya has not experienced any political, financial or even social stability. None at all. Practically overnight, Libya was transformed from one of the richest growing countries in the world when it comes to oil and other resources to a failed state.

After the invasion, the West put “Abdulhakim Belhaj” in charge, one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. If you don’t believe me, you can even go to Wikipedia and it will tell you a little bit about Belhaj. He joined the Taliban and was even associated with al-Qaeda. The Gaddafi government warned the West about Belhaj right after the 9/11 attack. That was back in 2002.

The Gaddafi government even presented strong evidence which suggested that Belhaj was a terrorist and was advancing his ideology and covert activity at an alarming rate. Once again, even Zionist media like the BBC would agree with what I’m saying here. The BBC fairly reported in 2011 that Belhaj was in “Jalalabad, Afghanistan, from where he ran and financed training camps for Arab mujahideen fighters.”[12] We all know that the mujahideen are terrorists, even though the United States funded and trained them.[13] This is from Wikipedia—and it gets really interesting:

“Tracked by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), after a tip-off from MI6 gained from London-based informants, Belhadj was arrested with his pregnant wife in 2004 at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysia. Transferred on the same plane to Bangkok, he was then placed in the custody of the CIA, where he was retained at a secret prison at the airport. Returned to Libya on the rendition aircraft N313P, he was held at the Abu Salim prison for seven years.”

Now this is the guy that the Neocons put in power in Libya! This is the kind of democracy and freedom that they are imposing on us Libyans. What were the results of the Libya invasion? Well, over 100,000 civilians lost their lives, including women and children.

It gets worse. At least 2 million Libyans had to move out of the country; some went to Tunis, Egypt, Algiers, and the UAE. The living conditions from 2011 till 2014 in Tripoli was tolerable but Benghazi and the eastern part of Libya became a living hell. Kidnapping, raping, and shooting were like playing video games in those regions.

The invaders even used Sarin gas in Ban Walid, but no Zionist Media covered that vital story. Sirt, a city in Libya, was invaded by ISIS, which we all know got their financial backing from the US, Qatar, Turkey, and even Israel. Al-Qaeda also took over Benghazi.

I could go on and on, but the main point here is that since the invasion in 2011, Libya has never been the same. The UN began to implement draconian ideas which the Libyan people rejected. Let me finish answering your question by saying that Gaddafi wanted to live. It is said that he told the invaders that he was willing to go into exile in the desert if they would not bomb Libya and turn the country into rubble. The response was: “We want you dead, not in exile, as we know you will fund a coup d’état. No, we will bomb Libya and rebuild it.”

In March of 2011, Qaddafi’s son, Saif, came out on national TV and very angrily said that he would find every single traitor (he called them “rats”) and killed them all. I think CNN broadcast his announcement with, of course, the usual editing to make it sound like he was ready to cause a massacre.

The assassination of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens was an inside job, an order from the American administration, carried out by ragged rebels who were trained by American agents. By the way, there were 36 CIA agents who were saved by Qaddafi’s army; even though we had lost the war we still saved the asses of the Americans; what an irony.

The next US Ambassador, Safira Deborah, did everything in her power to finance and assist the so-called “Libyan Dawn,” which was but a faction of a terrorist group known as LIFG. They were also financed by Qatar and Turkey. Deborah praised Belhaj till she had to run for her own life in July of 2014.

Deborah fled first to Tunis then later to Malta. While in Malta she did a lot of bad mistakes which probably caused her to be fired. After Deborah, the new ambassador kept quiet and didn’t show his face much. It was no coincidence that Libyan officials began to sign contracts with Israel.

_______________________________________________

Abdulhakim Belhaj

Jonas E. Alexis: Vladimir Putin has specifically condemned the United States and NATO for invading Libya. He has obviously observed that the United States has a history of using categorical lies and fabrications to invade sovereign nations in the Middle East. Do you know if Putin ever corresponded with Gaddafi?

Mariam Alfatah: In 2011 Putin was only a prime minister and Medvedev was the president of Russia.  Gaddafi seemed to have spoken with Putin during a UN conference. As I understand it (from people who were in the room) Putin told Qaddafi that Russia would say NO to the “no fly zone.” I have no reason not to believe my sources.

Medvedev also seemed to have agreed with Putin. But it seemed that the elitists put an ideological spell on Medvedev and blackmailed him; so he basically ignored what was really taking place in Libya. Libyan officials knew that Medvedev wanted to be liked by the Americans. The result was total catastrophe.

Both Russia and China lost billions of dollars by not politically or militarily mobilizing against the Powers That Be; they knew from the get go that the Neocon “no fly zone” was a farce. Russia helped Libya as much as they could without breaking international rules. So, Gaddafi was in contact with Putin but how often I do not know.

Jonas E. Alexis: In your view, do you believe that the vast majority of Libyans supported Gaddafi’s leadership? For example, Assad won the Syrian election by a landslide.[14] Was that the case with Gaddafi?

Mariam Alfatah: Yes. At the time of the bombing Libya’s population was over 6.5 million, and Qaddafi had the support of 6.3 million. Even the Washington Postreluctantly admitted that “Many Libyans appear to back Gaddafi.” Take it from their own pen—and this was when the invaders were creating chaos virtually everywhere:

“But six days into the allied bombardment of Libyan military targets, it is clear that Gaddafi can count on the fierce loyalties of at least a significant segment of the population in the vast stretches that lie beyond the enclave of rebel-held territory in the east…

“Even Gaddafi’s opponents, who dare murmur their dissent only out of earshot of regime loyalists, concede that the man who has governed Libya for nearly 42 years does command genuine support.”[15]

But the Washington Post knocked itself out by saying, “That a man who boasts he lives in a tent and whom Ronald Reagan once dubbed ‘the mad dog of the Middle East’ still commands devotion four decades into his rule is one of the enduring mysteries of this idiosyncratic country.”[16]

That is really worse than stupid. How can they say this is an example of “enduring mysteries” when the vast majority of Libyans knew that Gaddafi, despite his faults, really helped the country? This is not an example of “enduring mysteries;” this is a classic example which conclusively shows that the Neocon ideology has always been in opposition to the vast majority of the people on this planet. So, people like you, Jonas, are right in calling this ideology satanic.

There was a rally in July of 2011 in Tripoli. I was there. There were also over 3 million people in Green Square! There is a video on my blog that you can access and see for yourself.

If the West had allowed Libyans to vote freely, Qaddafi would have won by a landslide like Assad. You see, if we didn’t want Gaddafi we would have removed him from power a long time ago. He would have been assassinated. You have to understand that we follow our tribe leaders.

I am sure if any of the tribe leaders didn’t want him, they would have taken him out. What’s also important about these issues is that the UN and Western allies refused to talk to those leaders! If I can use a rough analogy, it would be like the United States going to war with another country without contacting Congress.

Qaddafi had succeeded in uniting nearly all the tribes. This was almost an impossible task because you just couldn’t get those people to sit down at the same table. They sometimes fought against each other. But Gaddafi was able to unite them.

Note: It took us 3 years to get the majority of the tribe leaders in one room and to agree that we cannot leave Libya to foreigners or to installed puppets. Now do you see what the Neocons did to my country?

Jonas E. Alexis: Business Insider has been a Zionist outlet, but I think they were somewhat fair to publish your letter. I was quite surprised when they declared: “But even as Qaddafi commits atrocities, the rebels are engaged in some of the same violence. And Washington has been forced to look the other way.”[17]

In your letter, you told Business Insider that “Personally, I do not care about Qaddafi but what you are doing is wrong. You are not telling the truth. You are lying to your readers.”[18] Can you expand on that for us?

Mariam Alfatah: My political views are democratic; Qaddafi was a military leader. That is what I meant. People may think that I am an apologist for Gaddafi. That would be categorically false. Gaddafi “nationalized” my father’s business and for 10 years my father was basically out of job.

But I was also furious with NATO and the West precisely because they wanted to decide our fate. They told us ad nauseam that the Libyan invasion was a true revolution. Total nonsense. If it was a revolution, why did the terrorists and blood-thirsty animals have to get help from NATO?

We knew that there were 200,000 people who were in exile and were against Qaddafi. Most of them were religious fanatics and scumbags who stole from the Libyan people. I may not like Gaddafi but I cannot lie about what he did. He did a lot of good things. Under Gaddafi, education was free and it was obligatory that people get a decent education. In 1969, prior to the revolution, we had an 80% illiteracy rate. Under Gaddafi, that percentage dropped dramatically. Let’s not forget that though Qaddafi was brought in by the CIA, he would kick them out a few years later.

Qaddafi was no threat to Europe or America. On the contrary, he was the one keeping the refugees and “migrants” out of Europe.[19] Beginning in 1970, Libyan women started gaining their freedom.  Unlike some other Arab countries, we could travel on our own, we could buy lands, etc.

Gaddafi even made a law which said that women or teenagers are not to be forced to marry anyone. Women who were forced to marry could go to the police; the police would examine the situation and, if a particular woman is found to be telling the truth, then the marriage would be rendered invalid.

Yes, we had our ups and downs, but we didn’t deserve this current chaos. We had our own kind of democracy but it was not the democracy that the war machine wanted. Ironically, we Libyans had more freedom than any American now has. The only thing we couldn’t do publicly was to criticize the Qaddafi family. But Libyans had free health care, free education, no water bills, etc.

For example, in Europe I bought a car that cost me 16,000 euros; in Libya I would have bought the same car for 8,000 euros. So, we were perfectly comfortable with not being able to criticize Qaddafi publicly precisely because we had the things we needed. Why would anyone unfairly criticize a government that puts a roof over your head? Isn’t that why the average Russian now loves Vladimir Putin? Do you think they would love to see him dead? I don’t think so!

Free speech is overrated in the West; here in Europe and in the US people talk about free speech all the time, but we all know the role that the CIA, FBI, and the NSA can play when you don’t join the party line. Look what happened to Edward Snowden and other genuine whistleblowers.

Some US spies were even saying that they would love to see Snowden’s head on a silver platter. One NSA analyst said in 2014: “In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself. A lot of people share this sentiment.”[20] So much for “freedom of speech” in the West!

_________________________________________

Jonas E. Alexis: As already suggested, disagreement on rational ground is fair. But everyone ought to agree that Libya, like Iraq, is now run by a number of terrorist scumbags. You may say that Gaddafi was bad, and obviously he had his shortcomings, but the country was generally much better under his command. As retired US Army General Paul Vallely put it last year:

“Libya is just another one of those countries with too much interference from outside sources. In my opinion Gaddafi should have remained in power, because he was some kind of a stabilizing force. The problem today is we have these diplomats that don’t understand world affairs – they’re really not good at it. That is in many different countries. That was one of the biggest problems in Benghazi, as our State Department is getting involved in things they should not have been involved in.”[21]

You can now read the Zionist outlets and virtually every single one of them will reluctantly agree that Libya is in chaos.[22] Even CNN, of all places, said last year that

“Five short years ago, Libya was one of the wealthiest and most stable nations in Africa. The country had been led by Colonel Muammar Gadhafi for more than 40 years, since he seized power in a 1969 coup, and its six million citizens enjoyed the benefits of the country’s vast oil wealth.”[23]

But listen to how CNN actually twisted the actual facts: “After years of uncertainty and upheaval allowed ISIS militants to gain a foothold in the country, the U.S. has begun carrying out airstrikes to try and oust them.”[24] What CNN was implicitly saying was that ISIS militants were exclusively responsible for the chaos! The Neocons and warmongers could then wash their hands off.

Nonsense.

---

[1] See for example David Swanson, “Libya: another neocon war,” Guardian, April 21, 2011; Michael Lind, “The neocons are trying to talk us into war — again,” Salon, March 9, 2011.

[2] Jim Newell, “Neocons Write Nice Letter Asking Obama for War in Libya,” Gawker, March 15, 2011.

[3] Quoted in Howard Kurtz, “Libyan War and the Media’s Reaction,” Daily Beast, March 21, 2017.

[4] See Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Murray Friedman,The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Francis Fukuyama, “After Neoconservatism,” NY Times, February 18, 2006.

[5] Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 12.

[6] Stephen M. Feldman, Neoconservative Politics and the Supreme Court: Law, Power, and Democracy (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013), 1.

[7] Patrick Buchanan has rightly criticized this version of America. Patrick J. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire (WA: Regnery Publishing, 1999).

[8] See Patrick J. Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004).

[9] David Swanson, “Libya: another neocon war,” Guardian, April 21, 2011.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ronald Bruce St. John argues that Gaddafi made arrangements with at least 10 African states and was asking for political and economic partnership. Many African leaders applauded him for his commitment to help the oppressed people in Africa. Ronald Bruce St. John, Libya: From Colony to Revolution (Oxford: One World, 2012), 229.

[12] See “Profile: Libyan rebel commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj,” BBC, September 5, 2011.

[13] See “Frankenstein the CIA created,” Guardian, January 17, 1999.

[14] Nabih Bulos, “Syria’s Assad wins third term as president in landslide victory,” LA Times, June 4, 2014; “Bashar al-Assad wins re-election in Syria as uprising against him rages on,” Guardian, June 4, 2014; “Bashar Assad wins Syria presidential election with 88.7% of vote,” Russia Today, June 4, 2014.

[15] Liz Sly, “Many Libyans appear to back Gaddafi,” Washington Post, March 24, 2011.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Gus Lubin, “LIBYAN REBEL WAR CRIMES: The Videos America Doesn’t Want You To See,” Business Insider, April 18, 2011.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Bruce St. John, Libya: From Colony to Revolution, 274.

[20] Paul Szoldra and Michael B Kelley, “Some US Spies Are Saying They Would Love To Kill Edward Snowden,” Business Insider, January 17, 2014.

[21] “‘Post-Gaddafi Libya in chaos as Plan B was missing,’” Russia Today, October 20, 2016.

[22] “Four Years After Revolution, Libya Slides Into Chaos,” National Public Radio, January 13, 2015; “Chaos in Libya,” Hoover Institution, August 20, 2014; Rajan Menon, “Libya in Chaos,” National Interest, June 27, 2012; “Libya chaos: Islamic State battles militias in Sirte,” BBC, August 11, 2015; Richard Spencer, “How Libya descended into faction-fighting and chaos,” Telegraph, November 8, 2014; Richard Spencer, “World turning blind eye to chaos in Libya, Amnesty charges,” Telegraph, October 30, 2014.

[23] Bryony Jones and Anastasia Beltyukova, “Libya’s chaos, explained in five graphics,” CNN, August 4, 2016.

[24] Ibid

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Top Zionist scientist says Ashkenazi Jews came from Khazaria, not Palestine

Another Israeli myth exposed

An Israeli geneticist challenges the “Zionist” hypothesis that all Jews belong to one race and are intimately related, thus giving them a common ancestor in the Holy Land and a Biblical claim to Palestine. 

Scientists usually don’t call each other “liars” and “frauds.”

But that’s how Johns Hopkins University post-doctoral researcher Eran Elhaik describes a group of widely respected geneticists, including Harry Ostrer, professor of pathology and genetics at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine and author of the 2012 book “Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People.”

For years now, the findings of Ostrer and several other scientists have stood virtually unchallenged on the genetics of Jews and the story they tell of the common Middle East origins shared by many Jewish populations worldwide. Jews — and Ashkenazim in particular — are indeed one people, Ostrer’s research finds.

It’s a theory that more or less affirms the understanding that many Jews themselves hold of who they are in the world: a people who, though scattered, share an ethnic-racial bond rooted in their common ancestral descent from the indigenous Jews of ancient Judea or Palestine, as the Romans called it after they conquered the Jewish homeland.

But now, Elhaik, an Israeli molecular geneticist, has published research that he says debunks this claim. And that has set off a predictable clash.

“He’s just wrong,” said Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, a leading researcher in Jewish genetics, referring to Elhaik.

The sometimes strong emotions generated by this scientific dispute stem from a politically loaded question that scientists and others have pondered for decades: Where in the world did Ashkenazi Jews come from?

The debate touches upon such sensitive issues as whether the Jewish people is a race or a religion, and whether Jews or Palestinians are descended from the original inhabitants of what is now the State of Israel.

Ostrer’s theory is sometimes marshaled to lend the authority of science to the Zionist narrative, which views the migration of modern-day Jews to what is now Israel, and their rule over that land, as a simple act of repossession by the descendants of the land’s original residents. Ostrer declined to be interviewed for this story. But in his writings, Ostrer points out the dangers of such reductionism; some of the same genetic markers common among Jews, he finds, can be found in Palestinians, as well.

By using sophisticated molecular tools, Feldman, Ostrer and most other scientists in the field have found that Jews are genetically homogeneous. No matter where they live, these scientists say, Jews are genetically more similar to each other than to their non-Jewish neighbors, and they have a shared Middle Eastern ancestry.

The geneticists’ research backs up what is known as the Rhineland Hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, Ashkenazi Jews descended from Jews who fled Palestine after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century and settled in Southern Europe. In the late Middle Ages they moved into eastern Europe from Germany, or the Rhineland.

“Nonsense,” said Elhaik, a 33-year-old Israeli Jew from Beersheba who earned a doctorate in molecular evolution from the University of Houston. The son of an Italian man and Iranian woman who met in Israel, Elhaik, a dark-haired, compact man, sat down recently for an interview in his bare, narrow cubicle of an office at Hopkins, where he’s worked for four years.

In “The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses,” published in December in the online journal Genome Biology and Evolution, Elhaik says he has proved that Ashkenazi Jews’ roots lie in the Caucasus — a region at the border of Europe and Asia that lies between the Black and Caspian seas — not in the Middle East. They are descendants, he argues, of the Khazars, a Turkic people who lived in one of the largest medieval states in Eurasia and then migrated to Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Ashkenazi genes, Elhaik added, are far more heterogeneous than Ostrer and other proponents of the Rhineland Hypothesis believe. Elhaik did find a Middle Eastern genetic marker in DNA from Jews, but, he says, it could be from Iran, not ancient Judea.

Elhaik writes that the Khazars converted to Judaism in the eighth century, although many historians believe that only royalty and some members of the aristocracy converted. But widespread conversion by the Khazars is the only way to explain the ballooning of the European Jewish population to 8 million at the beginning of the 20th century from its tiny base in the Middle Ages, Elhaik says.

Elhaik bases his conclusion on an analysis of genetic data published by a team of researchers led by Doron Behar, a population geneticist and senior physician at Israel’s Rambam Medical Center, in Haifa. Using the same data, Behar’s team published in 2010 a paper concluding that most contemporary Jews around the world and some non-Jewish populations from the Levant, or Eastern Mediterranean, are closely related.

Elhaik used some of the same statistical tests as Behar and others, but he chose different comparisons. Elhaik compared “genetic signatures” found in Jewish populations with those of modern-day Armenians and Georgians, which he uses as a stand-in for the long-extinct Khazarians because they live in the same area as the medieval state.

“It’s an unrealistic premise,” said University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer, one of Behar’s co-authors, of Elhaik’s paper. Hammer notes that Armenians have Middle Eastern roots, which, he says, is why they appeared to be genetically related to Ashkenazi Jews in Elhaik’s study.

Hammer, who also co-wrote the first paper that showed modern-day Kohanim are descended from a single male ancestor, calls Elhaik and other Khazarian Hypothesis proponents “outlier folks… who have a minority view that’s not supported scientifically. I think the arguments they make are pretty weak and stretching what we know.”

Feldman, director of Stanford’s Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, echoes Hammer. “If you take all of the careful genetic population analysis that has been done over the last 15 years… there’s no doubt about the common Middle Eastern origin,” he said. He added that Elhaik’s paper “is sort of a one-off.”

Elhaik’s statistical analysis would not pass muster with most contemporary scholars, Feldman said: “He appears to be applying the statistics in a way that gives him different results from what everybody else has obtained from essentially similar data.”

Elhaik, who doesn’t believe that Moses, Aaron or the 12 Tribes of Israel ever existed, shrugs off such criticism.

“That’s a circular argument,” he said of the notion that Jews’ and Armenians’ genetic similarities stem from common ancestors in the Middle East and not from Khazaria, the area where the Armenians live. If you believe that, he says, then other non-Jewish populations, such as Georgian, that are genetically similar to Armenians should be considered genetically related to Jews, too, “and so on and so forth.”

Dan Graur, Elhaik’s doctoral supervisor at U.H. and a member of the editorial board of the journal that published his paper, calls his former student “very ambitious, very independent. That’s what I like.” Graur, a Romanian-born Jew who served on the faculty of Tel Aviv University for 22 years before moving 10 years ago to the Houston school, said Elhaik “writes more provocatively than may be needed, but it’s his style.” Graur calls Elhaik’s conclusion that Ashkenazi Jews originated to the east of Germany “a very honest estimate.”

In a news article that accompanied Elhaik’s journal paper, Shlomo Sand, history professor at Tel Aviv University and author of the controversial 2009 book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” said the study vindicated his long-held ideas.

”It’s so obvious for me,” Sand told the journal. “Some people, historians and even scientists, turn a blind eye to the truth. Once, to say Jews were a race was anti-Semitic, now to say they’re not a race is anti-Semitic. It’s crazy how history plays with us.”

The paper has received little coverage in mainstream American media, but it has attracted the attention of anti-Zionists and “anti-Semitic white supremacists,” Elhaik said.

Interestingly, while anti-Zionist bloggers have applauded Elhaik’s work, saying it proves that contemporary Jews have no legitimate claim to Israel, some white supremacists have attacked it.

David Duke, for example, is disturbed by the assertion that Jews are not a race. “The disruptive and conflict-ridden behavior which has marked out Jewish Supremacist activities through the millennia strongly suggests that Jews have remained more or less genetically uniform and have… developed a group evolutionary survival strategy based on a common biological unity — something which strongly militates against the Khazar theory,” wrote the former Ku Klux Klansman and former Louisiana state assemblyman on his blog in February.

“I’m not communicating with them,” Elhaik said of the white supremacists.

He says it also bothers him, a veteran of seven years in the Israeli army, that anti-Zionists have capitalized on his research “and they’re not going to be proven wrong anytime soon.”

But proponents of the Rhineland Hypothesis also have a political agenda, he said, claiming they “were motivated to justify the Zionist narrative.”

To illustrate his point, Elhaik swivels his chair around to face his computer and calls up a 2010 email exchange with Ostrer.

“It was a great pleasure reading your group’s recent paper, ‘Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,’ that illuminate[s] the history of our people,” Elhaik wrote to Ostrer. “Is it possible to see the data used for the study?”

Ostrer replied that the data are not publicly available. “It is possible to collaborate with the team by writing a brief proposal that outlines what you plan to do,” he wrote. “Criteria for reviewing include novelty and strength of the proposal, non-overlap with current or planned activities, and non-defamatory nature toward the Jewish people.”

That last requirement, Elhaik argues, reveals the bias of Ostrer and his collaborators.

Allowing scientists access to data only if their research will not defame Jews is “peculiar,” said Catherine DeAngelis, who edited the Journal of the American Medical Association for a decade. “What he does is set himself up for criticism: Wait a minute. What’s this guy trying to hide?”

Despite what his critics claim, Elhaik says, he was not out to prove that contemporary Jews have no connection to the Jewish people of the Bible. His primary research focus is the genetics of mental illness, which, he explains, led him to question the assumption that Ashkenazi Jews are a useful population to study because they’re so homogeneous.

Elhaik says he first read about the Khazarian Hypothesis a decade ago in a 1976 book by the late Hungarian-British author Arthur Koestler, “The Thirteenth Tribe,” written before scientists had the tools to compare genomes.

Koestler, who was Jewish by birth, said his aim in writing the book was to eliminate the racist underpinnings of anti-Semitism in Europe. “Should this theory be confirmed, the term ‘anti-Semitism’ would become void of meaning,” the book jacket reads. Although Koestler’s book was generally well reviewed, some skeptics questioned the author’s grasp of the history of Khazaria.

Graur is not surprised that Elhaik has stood up against the “clique” of scientists who believe that Jews are genetically homogeneous. “He enjoys being combative,” Graur said. “That’s what science is.”

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Ashkenazi Jews Calling for Death to Arabs: Who are the REAL Anti-Semites

Photo posted recently on an Israeli Facebook page. The words read, “The nation of Israel demands vengeance! Death to the whole Arab nation!”

By Richard Edmondson

The Anti-Defamation League recently released a “landmark” study entitled “ADL Global 100: An Index of Anti-Semitism,” purporting to show percentages of people who hold anti-Semitic attitudes in more than 100 countries around the world.

The survey, available here, subdivides the world into 7 geographic regions, offering data collected from countries within each, the results of which endeavor to show such things as numbers of people who harbor “anti-Semitic stereotypes.”

For instance, in the region referred to as “Middle East-North Africa,” the study gathers data from 17 different countries and two territories (Gaza and the West Bank). It is in this part of the world that researchers reportedly found the highest rates of anti-Semitism. The MENA countries included in the survey are shown in the graphic below. You’ll note, however, that conspicuously absent from the list–is Israel.

In an article about the study, published May 13 in the Huffington Post, ADL Director Abe Foxman writes the following:

Our basic findings were sobering: More than one-quarter of the people surveyed (26 percent) harbor anti-Semitic attitudes. The stereotypes receiving the most support worldwide were those that generate dangerous political anti-Semitism, those questioning the loyalty of Jews and those asserting excessive Jewish power and influence. And, despite decades of efforts to promote Holocaust awareness, only 33 percent of those surveyed are aware of the Holocaust and believe that it is accurately described by historians.

Foxman goes on to describe the ADL Global 100 as a “landmark” study, referring to it as “the broadest public opinion survey of attitudes toward Jews around the world ever conducted.”

“Broadest”–except that it doesn’t include anti-Semitic attitudes held by Jews in Israeltoward their Arab neighbors.

Posted on “The People of Israel Demand Vengeance” Facebook page. The sign reads: “Hating Arabs is not racism; it’s morality!”

One thing I have noticed about Israelis is that they seem to enjoy flaunting their racism, both on the streets and on social media websites. In the wake of the national angst over the kidnapped teens, a page entitled “The People of Israel Demand Vengeance” was put up on Facebook. I wrote about it in an article posted July 4 entitled Israeli Facebook Depravity Climbs to New Highs, and which included the two photos you see above along with several others. The Facebook site in question was removed after two days, but in that time it garnered 36,000 likes, according to Ma’an News, and a sizable collection of material from it, some thirty or so photos, has been archived here.  I encourage you to go and peruse the collection. Much of it was posted by Israeli soldiers, and clearly murder of Palestinians is very much on their minds.

A couple of other Israeli Facebook pages have also been quite open in their advocacy of violence. One of these calls for the murder of a Palestinian every hour while the other   features an article posted by an Israeli Knesset member calling for the genocide of Palestinians. Both of these are still up, and you can also go here and watch a video of a crowd of Israelis marching through Jerusalem shouting “Death to Arabs.”

Arabs, of course, are Semites. Ashkenazi Jews, on the other hand, are not Semites, despite claims to the contrary; Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars of southern Russia, or what is present-day Ukraine. The Khazars were not a Semitic people. They were a combination of Bulgars, Magyars, Slavs and others.

While certainly not every single Israeli is a racist, and some, such as Miko Peled and Ilan Pappe, have genuinely sought peace and reconciliation with Palestinians, the widespread calls for “death to Arabs” emanating from large segments of the Israeli population, along with thousands of “likes” garnered by Facebook pages such as those mentioned above, point to a rather inescapable conclusion: that Israel is one of the most, if not the most, overtly anti-Semitic nations on the face of the earth. Yet for some reason, the ADL failed to mention this or even, as I say, to include Israel on its “Global 100″ list of anti-Semitic countries.

We must wonder why, as per the conclusions of the study, the people of the Middle East-North Africa region might have the highest rates of anti-Semitism worldwide. Here is what Foxman says about that particular study finding in his Huffington Post article: “The high numbers of those who harbor anti-Semitic attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa are a challenge to the region — and the international community — going forward.”

In other words, the “challenge,” as Foxman sees it, is posed by problematic attitudes held by all the other peoples in the region–not by Israelis. It is a decidedly one-sided view of the situation and calls into question the validity of the entire study.

Could it possibly be–is it conceivable–that for the people of Lebanon, Syria and other countries that have been hit by Israeli missiles, Jewish behavior might have something to do with their negative attitudes toward Jews? Ah, but the notion that “people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave” is one of the “anti-Semitic stereotypes” the study grumbles about, the unspoken implications of such a position being that anti-Semitism is top to bottom thoroughly and wholly irrational and Jewish behavior can never be seen as other than exemplary.

Undertaken in order to “research attitudes and opinions toward Jews in more than 100 countries around the world,” the Global 100 study is the result of 53,100 interviews conducted between July 2013 and February 2014, and Foxman seems to regard it as the ADL’s magnum opus. He calls it “one of the most important efforts we have undertaken in our history as an organization.” Yet one wonders if maybe it wasn’t embarked upon with certain predetermined conclusions in mind.

Another question that begs to be asked is this: how many other ethnic groups in the world  have ever commissioned such  how-many-people-hate-us?-studies of this sort upon themselves? I suspect the answer is few to none.

___________________

Are you an anti-Semite?

Well here it is–the list of “anti-Semitic stereotypes” (11 of them in all) used as criteria by conductors of the study to determine whether individual respondents held “anti-Semitic attitudes.” So how do you stack up? If you answer “probably true” to six or more of the following, then YOU are an anti-Semite, in the view of the ADL.

Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100 listed “stereotypes”

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

The New Jewish Prophet

By Gilad Atzmon on June 25, 2014

Source

Marc H. Ellis on Gilad Atzmon — gilad.co.uk — June 25

Introduction by Gilad Atzmon:

I learned this week that Professor Marc H. Ellis – regarded by many as the contemporary leading Jewish theologian, came to the conclusion that yours truly, is the new Jewish prophet.

Here are some quotes I found in the final chapter of “Future of the Prophetic,” Ellis’ new epic treatise.

The Prophet

“Like the ancient prophets Atzmon exposes Jews. At the same time, Atzmon believes that the Bible, from which the prophets spring, is bogus….Atzmon provides no hiding place for Jews anywhere.” (Future of the Prophetic, Marc H. Ellis pg’ 332)

“Atzmon is extreme but, in his extremity, he is much like the biblical prophets.” (pg’332)

“Atzmon performs the prophetic for our time. Like the biblical prophets he does not acknowledge, Atzmon believes we are at the end of Jewish history, a history, like the prophets, he no longer believe exists or, if it does, is not worthy of being carried forward. Irony of ironies, he witnesses to the continuity of both” (pg’ 334)

“Like Moses, though with a twist, Atzmon is constrained from entering the land….Atzmon refuses to return until the Promised Land is liberated from the modern-day Israelites. In short, Atzmon’s homeland is occupied by Jews” (pg’ 336)

“ Instead of King of the Jews. Perhaps Atzmon should be recognized as the prophet of old, At least in his self description and his outreach, this is the way he appears” (pg’ 332)

“Although largely silent on the prophets, Atzmon’s prophetic voice wants nothing to do with his biblical patrimony. It seems to him contrivance that leads to what Israel has become-and perhaps, more or less, always was. (pg’ 329)

On Jewish Diaspora, Tribal Symptoms and Detractors:

“In an accusatory manner, Atzmon cites Diaspora Jews for constructing their identity through the Holocaust and the State of Israel. Since most Diaspora Jews were born after the Holocaust and do not live in Israel, Atzmon views them as voyeurs. (pg’ 329)

“From the Jewish establishment Board of Deputies to the marginal Jewish Trotskyites –‘the Jews for this and that’- Atzmon sees it all as a giant scam.” (331)

“Atzmon views the accusation of being an anti-Semite as a last ditch attempt by Jewish groups of different viewpoints to insulate themselves against the deconstruction of Jewish identity. However, while protecting against the deconstruction of Jewish identity another projection comes to the fore.” (pg’ 331)

For Atzmon Jewish identity lacks foundation. Therefore, ganging up on him becomes an agreed-upon foundation to deal with a group anxiety that there is a little basis of Jewish identity at all. Why else would such diverse group come together to denounce a fellow Jew* with such vehemence? Perhaps, as well, Jewish group-think regarding Atzmon represent an anxiety that Atzmon himself voices and embodies: that the only foundation of Jewishness is injustice. “ (331)

“He (Atzmon) baits his opponents and leaves them without a place to turn. Nor does he leave himself room to turn. Unlike the biblical prophets, Atzmon’s call to repentance leads nowhere – unless exile is always somewhere else” (pg’ 334)

Addressing the question why Atzmon doesn’t simply drift away and leaves the Jews alone Ellis writes:

“In fact, Atzmon takes pleasure in the ire of Jews he antagonizes with his writing. He delights in calling attention to the restrictive Jewishness of Jews across the board. “(Pg, 330)

On the Jewish appeasement of Palestinians a la Ali Abunimah & Co, Ellis writes:

“Atzmon’s self-identification has led Jewish and Palestinian groups to publically disassociate from him. The lead has been taken by Palestinians themselves who struggle to separate Jews and Zionism. For these Palestinians, Atzmon muddies the waters since their dispute with Israel as a Jewish State is not with Jews themselves. By disassociating themselves from Atzmon, Palestinians want to set the record straight about their own views on Israel, Zionism and Jews” (pg’ 330)

Final words by Gilad Atzmon: I have never regarded myself as a prophet, let alone a Hebrew prophet. I am just a person who thinks loudly, often enough, too loudly.

I can see where Ellis is coming from and why he sees a prophet in me. Yet, I need to emphasise, that for many years I haven’t spoken ‘to Jews.’ Instead I talk about Jews I as I see them, or more precisely, about Jewishness, Jewish culture and ID politics.

Ellis, no doubt a unique spiritual and critical Jew, is correct to see in me something that is foreign to his vision of Diaspora Jews. I was raised in Israel, I was brought up to see myself as the body and the soul of the revival of the biblical Israelite. In alignment with my peers, we believed ourselves to be the remote sons and daughters of King David. This view was further strengthened by the Israel in which I was raised; a Spartan society driven by Prussian military culture. We were taught to believe in ‘truthfulness’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘justice.’ We were patriotic because we blindly adhered to the Zionist ‘homecoming’ ethos.

Bizarrely, it was the Israeli rather than the Jew in me who protested once I realised that my existence on the land involved the dispossession of an entire nation. It was the Israeli rather than the Jew in me, who was outraged to find out that my ancestors were probably Khazarians and North African Berbers rather than biblical Israelites. I was even more furious as an Israeli, when I found out that my relatives weren’t reduced to soap by the Nazis. It was again the Israeli in me who asked what kind of people fabricate sickening stories accusing others of turning their family into soap. It was the Israeli in me that made me question why the historicity of the Holocaust is a sealed zone protected by draconian Holocaust denial laws.

I also believe that it was the Israeli rather than the Jew in Shlomo Sand, Gideon Levy, Israel Shamir and Israel Shahak that made us into outspoken critics of Israel, the Jewish people, Judaism and Jewish ID.

Unlike the Diaspora Jewish left, a controlled opposition front dedicated to the concealment of the Jewishness of the Jewish State, Israel has managed to produce the most profound critics of Jewish related matters.

It follows that it is actually the ‘Negation of the Galut (Diaspora)’ embedded in Israeli patriotic ideology that fixed the Israeli intellect in a bitter battle against the ‘Jew.’ It is that unique resilient attitude which Ellis interprets as Hebraic prophetic spirit .

The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity politics and Jewish Power in particular – available on Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk

* It is crucial to reiterate that I am not a Jew for many years nor do I define myself as one.

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!