600,000 found their only option to seek refuge in the newly created State of Israel – the only land that welcomed them home.

Jews are Israel’s indigenous people. But who will weigh such spurious questions of descent? Unfortunately, this is the only argument existing on the opposite side: since the population exchange of the mid-20th century was all but commonplace, Arabs lost their claim to Israel the moment they massacred the Jews who lived in Arab countries and stripped the remaining Jewish people of their nationalities.

For every refugee – adult or child – in Syria, Lebanon, or elsewhere in the Arab world who compels our sympathy, there is a Jewish refugee who fled from the Arab country of his birth. For every Arab who moved to neighboring lands, a Jew was forced to flee from a community where he and his ancestors may have lived for two thousand years. The Jews escaped to their original homeland, where their roots are even older; the Arabs also arrived where they were in the majority, where they shared the same language and culture with fellow Arabs, and often only a few dozen miles from their places of origin.

Why are the Palestinian refugees treated differently than all the other refugees in the world?

Most of Fluffy's claims about Jewish Arabs are simply false. About 12,000 Jews left Iraq in 1949. Something like 110,000 left after 1950. In general Nuri-sSaid did not want them to leave because they were too critical to the economy and the vast majority of Iraq Jews had no interest in Zionism or emigrating to Stolen Palestine (the State of Israel).

It took a combination of incitement, bribery, and false flag operations to induce Iraqi Jews to emigrate to Israel.

Racist ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists had had no interest in Jewish Arabs until after the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the native Palestinian population, for the Zionist leadership realized that stolen Palestine could not be held without an infusion of human cannon fodder and an ersatz native collaborator class, which Jewish Arabs were to constitute. (The Druze community simply was not large enough for Zionist purposes.)

Anyway, Joel Kovel recently asked me why I believed the non-Palestinian origin of ethnic Ashkenazim to be crystal clear, and I put together the short essay below, which can be found on my web site at link to eaazi.blogspot.com
(Joel Kovel's story is also interesting to the topic of Philip's article because StandWithUs is trying to deny Pluto Press distribution through UMich Press for publishing Kovel's book Overcoming Zionism.)

Personally, I believe that ethnic Ashkenazim should be proud of the role proto-ethnic Ashkenazim and ethnic Ashkenazim played in the construction of the Medieval world and then in the creation of the economy and distribution system of Commonwealth Poland.

Instead ethnic Ashkenazim are so ashamed of the achievements of their ancestors that they for all intents and purposes have stolen the history and country of the native Palestinian population, who are descended from the Greco-Roman Judean, Galilian, Idumean, Nabatian, Samarian, and Greek-speaking Palestinian population.

http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/origins-of-modern-jewry.html

The Origins of Modern Jewry
Against the Rationalization of Zionist Crimes
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Zionists and their white racist Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist supporters justify mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the native Palestinian population by asserting that ethnic Ashkenazim are descended from ancient Greco-Roman Palestinian Judeans or Galileans.

This belief has no connection to the facts as many Jewish studies scholars will admit in private. At an MIT lecture I asked Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen about the ancestral connection of modern ethnic Ashkenazim to ancient Palestine, and he told me there has been a lot of conversion since Greco-Roman times (whatever conversion meant in Greco-Roman times). In 2002 Marc Ferro published Les Tabous de l'histoire, which discusses in detail the conversion to which Professor Cohen referred.

Conversion is not the only process that deterritorialized Judaism. The Hasmoneans and Herodians seem to have pursued a policy of bringing as many worshippers of the high God El as possible within the fold of the Jerusalem Temple in order to improve the Judean kingdom's finances. El was Kronos to the Greeks and Saturnus to the Romans. In Hellenistic Tyre El Kon-Artz (El Creator of the Earth) was worshipped as El Kronos.

At the time of Jesus the vast majority of El-worshippers, who were adherents of 2nd Temple Judaism, probably had no ancestral connection whatsoever to Greco-Roman Judea, Persian Yehud or ancient Judah.

In very careful analysis of the sources, Seth Schwartz concludes in Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World) that by the end of the 2nd century 2nd Temple Judaism was completely shattered. He argues that the Constantinian Church reconstructed late Roman Judaism. In a way Shaye Cohen agrees because in The Beginnings of Jewishness he dates the origin of Jewishness as we understand it today to the 4th century.

In Schwartz's analysis Cohen's dating is probably too early because Talmudic/Geonic Judaism is not clearly the dominant current in late Roman Judaism, and Judean Christianity, which treats Jesus as messiah but not as God or son of God, still has many adherents throughout Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia Felix (Hijaz). Such Judean Christians viewed themselves as practicing some form of Judaism, and no Jewish group had a well-defined position on matrilineality or on conversion practices within the Judaism of this time period.

As the Christian late Roman Empire gradually retrenched or broke down, the Khazar Kingdom rose in Southern Russia and flourished from the seventh through tenth centuries. The wealth of the Khazar kingdom seems to have been based in trading Slavs and members of other Southern Russian ethnic groups as slaves first with the Byzantine Empire and then with the early Islamic Empires as well.

Trading in slaves in that time period cannot be equated with human trafficking today. Ancient servitude like later Islamic or Ottoman slavery could provide social mobility, confer political authority and give social status to members of an alien immigrant population. Ehud Toledano discusses such aspects of Ottoman Slavery in Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. Khazar, Byzantine and early Islamic slavery was probably closer to the later Ottoman system.

Dealing with the Christian and Islamic Empires put pagan Khazars in a tricky position. Some seem to have converted to Christianity and Islam, but such conversion may have created problems for the slave trade because as Christians or Muslims, the Khazars would have had an obligation to convert Slav subjects to either Christianity or Islam and incorporate them into the community. Slaving in such a situation is quite problematic. That time period's Judaisms, which were far less committed to proselytization than Christianity or Islam, for the most part made strong distinctions between members of the community and gentiles as well as between Hebrew slaves and Canaanite (gentile) slaves. Starting in the 8th century (or maybe earlier) the Khazars began to convert to Judaism, and by the 10th century the Khazar Kingdom officially practiced Judaism. For the entire Middle Ages, Rabbinic Jewish literature consistently refers to Eastern Europe as Kanaan — I presume — because Eastern Europe was a source of Slavs who were treated legally as `avadim kanaanim (Canaanite slaves).

In contrast with Ibero-Berber Jewish naming practices, which often include Talmudic Aramaic names consistent with the occasional immigration of Jews from Babylonia to Spain, Khazar Jewish names show the typical convert pattern of choosing names out of scripture as described in the work of Columbia Professor William Bulliet. Archeological investigation finds mixed Turkic pagan and Judaic graveyards with the earliest such mixed graveyards in Southern Russia and the later such graveyards in the Balkans and Hungary. Archeologists have also found coins with Turkic and Hebrew inscriptions in Hebrew-Aramaic letters. There is no textual or epigraphical evidence of knowledge of Arabic or of Aramaic among Southern Russian and Eastern European Jews of the 10th century or earlier as one would expect if they or near ancestors were immigrants from Palestine or Mesopotamia.

The Khazars corresponded with the Geonim, who seem to have been willing to adjust the sacred law to fit the slave trade in exchange for economic support. Such accommodation is probably the origin of Medieval Rabbinic Judaism as Khazar slavers needed a codified legal system, and Khazar contributions made it possible for Geonic Judaism to dominate and finally absorb other forms of Judaism at the same time that many members of non-Khazar Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean region, Germany and France became agents of the slave trade either directly or through finance, tax farming, medicine or estate management, which were professions supported almost entirely by the slave trade in the early Medieval Period. The Jewish slavers that accompanied William the Conqueror to England seem to have been of Ibero-Berber origin and not of Khazar background.

Matrilineal non-proselytizing Medieval Rabbinic Judaism proved exceptionally friendly to the Slavic slave trade. Medieval centers of Rabbinic Jewish learning thrived along with the Slavic slave trade while Medieval Karaites were probably the last holdouts against the Geonic accommodation. Karaite centers declined and tended to be in rather isolated parts of the world.

Amitav Gosh translated a lot of Geniza documents written by or about a Jewish slaver in India. The book is called In an Antique Land, and Gosh is somewhat diffident about describing his subject's source of income.

This Khazar hypothesis complements the Pirenne Thesis (Mahomet et Charlegmagne) as well as some of the proposals of Crone, Cooke, and Nevo about the development of early Islam (Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Crossroads to Islam by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren). The spread of various forms of Judaism to Southern Russia probably explains why St. Kliment of Ohrid gave many Cyrillic letters forms similar to those in the Hebrew Aramaic alphabet. Members of a non-Rabbinic Jewish group probably created the Slavonic book of Esther while Bogomili Christianity and Catharism were probably brought westward by Slavic slaves that practiced evolved forms of Judean Christianity, no longer recognized as Judaism by Rabbinic Jewish Khazars.

As the Slavic slave trade expanded the Jewish traders probably needed to free semi-proselyte Slavic slaves to assist in the business. A similar process took place in West Africa as the Black African slave trade expanded. In Germano-Slavic territories where Sorbian and Polabian were spoken, the Slavo-Khazar traders, who initially probably used Sorbian and Polabian, had incentive to relexify their Slavic dialect to German in order to trade with dominant German-speaking populations and to separate themselves from pagan and Christian Sorbians and Polabians. During the 9th-13th centuries this process created an older form of Yiddish, which became the West Yiddish dialects of German territories. During this time period, as the Slavo-Khazar Jewish population became larger and more important within the Jewish community, Arabic died out as a language of religious discourse among non-Khazar Rabbinical Jews.

As the Khazar traders reconstructed trade routes or created entirely new trade routes, Khazar and non-Khazar Jews developed distribution networks for goods unrelated to Slavery. In Spain the Jewish non-Slavery-related trade did not seem to have been highly valued because Spain expelled its Jewish population within 50 years of the shutdown of Slavic slave trade in Mediterranean Christian countries as a consequence of the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople.

The development of sophisticated heterogeneous distribution networks by Jews in Poland made Commonwealth Poland a wealthy world power while Jewish estate management, finance and tax farming remained important and often thrived in Poland even after the complete shutdown of the overland Slavic slave trade by the end of the Wars of the Reformation.

As Jews from the German territories migrated Eastward because of the Crusades and the Wars of the Reformation, the Slavic Kiev-Polessian dialects of the Slavo-Turkic Eastern European and Southern Russian Jewish populations (with the exception of certain isolated Judeoslavic-speaking communities in Slovakia and the Sub-Carpathian region) were relexified to West Yiddish to create East Yiddish dialects. Paul Wexler explains the vocabulary of Yiddish in Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish without proposing any historical reasons for the process. The work of Alexander Beider and other specialists in onomastic studies also demonstrate a westward migration of Eastern Slavic-speaking Jews. Some of the linguistic development of East Yiddish may have taken place in German territories.

By the 17th century practically all consciousness of the Khazar kingdom was lost among Jews, and Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews constitute a distinct Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group. During the German economic depression of the century following the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), there was considerable mixing of impoverished German Christians and German Jews, and many Jews probably passed into the Christian community while some Christians were probably absorbed in the Jewish community. During the same time period, as Poland collapsed after the Chmielnicki Rebellion (1648), Polish Prussia came under German rule, and German Jews began to develop some familiarity with the Polish estate system. Thus even after the crystallization of Ashkenazi ethnicity, the boundary between German Jews and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim has never been particularly solid.

This article seems to conflict with genetic anthropological studies of Hammer, Oppenheim and similar people but these studies are severely flawed as Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh and I point out in link to tinyurl.com
. A recent article by Talia Bloch in the Forward ("One Big, Happy Family," Aug. 22, 2007, link to forward.com
) indicates that even some of the most extreme Zionist genetics researchers are beginning to concede that ethnic Ashkenazim are a separate ethnic group distinct from other Jewish groups except insofar as members of ethnic Ashkenazi communities or related Eastern European and Southern Russian populations have been exported to non-Ashkenazi communities in the past.

The rationalization of Zionist crimes against Palestinians on the basis of some sort of modern Jewish ancestral connection to ancient Palestinian populations has always been unethical, but even those that believe genes confer superior rights to one group over another must concede that ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists in Palestine are murderous genocidal thieves and interlopers.

Take a look at the comments in this entry for the State Department's new blog via link to blogs.state.gov:<

http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entires/foley_saudi_arabia/

The democratic traditions of the United States by now are probably like some old, rheumatic, overweight, hound dog with cataracts sleeping by the stove, but no matter how decrepit those traditions are, certain totalitarian practices can get their juices running the way the hound's ears pick up and his tail wags at the sound of a shotgun being assembled or when his leash is rattled against the door.

Reading the efforts of the Lobby to silence M&W, and the reactions they are producing, I wonder if "that dog can still hunt"?

Oh, wait a minute. It's not just Jews who engage in such behavior. Only in this little echo chamber is that true.

Now, I know you'll all claim this is just some sort of Hasbra, as Judy Miller is Jewish and Scooter sent her coded poetry to go into operation crafty jew, but just because some of you are prone to conspiratorial delusions doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't examine the data.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_sndgs01.html

Nothing gets a journalist’s attention like a subpoena. While authoritarian regimes silence critics by murdering or jailing them, journalists (and other critics) in the United States face gentler, but still effective, intimidation: libel lawsuits. Over the last few years, Islamists have tried silencing reporters, scholars, and citizens by suing them for defamation, often successfully. But recent legal cases in California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota suggest that the tactic may finally be backfiring, at least in the United States, if not in Britain, where libel laws overwhelmingly favor plaintiffs. The American lawsuits’ outcomes—poorly covered by the media—represent victories for the free expression and public participation that the First Amendment guarantees.

The latest victory came in August, when an Islamic charity, KinderUSA, and its board chairman, Laila Al-Marayati, dropped the libel suit they had filed in April in California state court against former Treasury Department official Matthew Levitt, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (which now employs him), and Yale University Press. In 2006, Yale published Levitt’s book on Hamas, which Washington says supports terrorism. Levitt never mentioned Al-Marayati in his book, but he did assert that KinderUSA, founded to raise money for Palestinian children, had ties to terrorist groups.

Al-Marayati and KinderUSA charged that Levitt had made “false and damaging” charges that caused “irreparable harm to its reputation,” and they sought at least $500,000 in damages, a public retraction, and a halt to the book’s distribution. But Levitt and his codefendants stood by his claims. In June, they filed a motion against the charity and its chairman, seeking to quash the libel suit and demanding that the plaintiffs pay all legal fees. They cited a California law that bans “SLAPP”—or “strategic litigation against public participation”—suits, which aim not at winning in court, but at intimidating into silence a group or a publication raising issues of public concern. “California enacted anti-SLAPP legislation to get rid of inappropriate lawsuits like this one,” they wrote in a 15-page brief.

Less than six weeks later, Al-Marayati and KinderUSA dropped the suit. Todd Gallinger, who represented the plaintiffs, insisted that the charity had sued not to intimidate or silence Levitt, but rather to force him to correct charges that it still considers libelous. “They were trying to suppress the charity’s legitimate activities,” he said. But KinderUSA underestimated the costs involved, he acknowledged, and the defendants’ anti-SLAPP motion was a factor in its decision to drop the suit.

Related reading matter (some pretty biased, but still useful)

http://clog.dailycal.org/720/no-pictures-taken-none-allowed-at-the-hatem-bazian-lecture

http://antiracistblog.blogspot.com/

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?storyID=2598

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20030115/concordia030115?s_name=&no_ads=

link to yerkir.am
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She sure has come down in the world. :)

(BTW, F, if your goal is to demonstrate the vast power of the "Arab lobby," you probably shouldn't use examples where they were ineffective.)

While our parents generation benefitted from unprecedented comradarie and an obligation towards relative income equality, we live in the new "gilded age" of American aristocracy.

We are borrowing from our kids (my kids, if not yours) to pay for wars, corruption and waste.

The federal government is by far the largest that its ever been, and government services are at best mediocre.

How do you change that? By agitation?

For what? Better wages? (It just raises the baseline cost of housing.)

DEUTSCH: No, no, no, but I mean –

COULTER: We have the fast-track program.

DEUTSCH: Why don't I put you with the head of Iran? I mean, come on. You can't believe that.

COULTER: The head of Iran is not a Christian.

DEUTSCH: No, but in fact, "Let's wipe Israel" –

COULTER: I don't know if you've been paying attention.

DEUTSCH: "Let's wipe Israel off the earth." I mean, what, no Jews?

COULTER: No, we think — we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say.

You mean the person I explicitly refer to in the 3rd paragraph of my comment?