[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
DNA tests have been used in Israel to verify a person’s Jewishness. This brings a bigger question: what does it mean to be genetically Jewish? And can you prove religious identity scientifically?
When my parents sent their saliva away to a genetic testing company late last year and were informed via email a few weeks later that they are both “100% Ashkenazi Jewish”, it struck me as slightly odd. Most people I know who have done DNA tests received ancestry results that correspond to geographical areas — Chinese, British, West African. Jewish, by comparison, is typically parsed as a religious or cultural identity. I wondered how this was traceable in my parents’ DNA.
After arriving in Eastern Europe around a millennia ago, the company’s website explained, Jewish communities remained segregated, by force and by custom, mixing only occasionally with local populations. Isolation and intermarriage slowly narrowed the gene pool, which now gives modern Jews of European descent, like my family, a set of identifiable genetic variations that set them apart from other European populations at a microscopic level.
This genetic explanation of my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry came as no surprise. According to family lore, my forebears lived in small towns and villages in Eastern Europe for at least a few hundred years, where they kept their traditions and married within the community, up until the Holocaust, when they were either murdered or dispersed.
But still, there was something disconcerting about our Jewishness being “confirmed” by a biological test. After all, the reason my grandparents had to leave the towns and villages of their ancestors was because of ethno-nationalism emboldened by a racialized conception of Jewishness as something that exists “in the blood”.
The raw memory of this racism made any suggestion of Jewish ethnicity slightly taboo in my family. If I ever mentioned that someone “looked Jewish” my grandmother would respond, “Oh really? And what exactly does a Jew look like?”
Yet evidently, this wariness of ethnic categorization didn’t stop my parents from sending swab samples from the inside of their cheeks off to a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company. The idea of having an ancient identity “confirmed” by modern science was too alluring.
Not that they’re alone. As of the beginning of this year, more than 26 million people have taken at-home DNA tests. For most, like my parents, genetic identity is assimilated into an existing life story with relative ease, while for others, the test can unearth family secrets or capsize personal narratives around ethnic heritage.
But as these genetic databases grow, genetic identity is re-shaping not only how we understand ourselves, but how we can be identified by others. In the past year, law enforcement has become increasingly adept at using genetic data to solve cold cases; a recent study shows that even if you haven’t taken a test, chances are you can be identified by authorities via genealogical sleuthing.
What is perhaps more concerning, though, is how authorities around the world are also beginning to use DNA to not only identify individuals, but to categorize and discriminate against entire groups of people.
In February of this year, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the peak religious authority in the country, had been requesting DNA tests to confirm Jewishness before issuing some marriage licenses.
In Israel, matrimonial law is religious, not civil. Jews can marry Jews, but intermarriage with Muslims or Christians is legally unacknowledged. This means that when a Jewish couple want to tie the knot, they are required by law to prove their Jewishness to the Rabbinate according to Orthodox tradition, which defines Jewish ancestry as being passed down through the mother.
While for most Israeli Jews this simply involves handing over their mother’s birth or marriage certificate, for many recent immigrants to Israel, who often come from communities where being Jewish is defined differently or documentation is scarce, producing evidence that satisfies the Rabbinate’s standard of proof can be impossible.
In the past, confirming Jewishness in the absence of documentation has involved contacting rabbis from the countries where people herald or tracking genealogical records back to prove religious continuity along the matrilineal line. But as was reported in Haaretz, and later confirmed by David Lau, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, in the past year, the rabbis have been requesting that some people undergo a DNA test to verify their claim before being allowed to marry.
For many Israelis, news that the rabbinical judges were turning to DNA testing was shocking, but for Seth Farber, an American-born Orthodox rabbi, it came as no surprise. Farber, who has been living in Israel since the 1990s, is the director of Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center, an organization that helps Israeli Jews navigate state-administered matters of Jewish life, like marriage and conversion. In the past year, the organization has seen up to 50 cases where families have been asked to undergo DNA tests to certify their Jewishness.
Those being asked to take these tests, Farber told me, are mostly Russian speaking Israelis, members of an almost 1 million strong immigrant community who began moving to Israel from countries of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Due to the fact that Jewish life was forcefully suppressed during the Soviet era, many members of this community lack the necessary documentation to prove Jewishness through matrilineal descent. This means that although most self-identify as Jewish, hundreds of thousands are not considered so by the Rabbinate, and routinely have their Jewish status challenged when seeking religious services, including marriage.
[...]
Boris Shindler, a political activist and active member of the Russian speaking community, told me that he believes that the full extent of the practice remains unknown, because many of those who have been tested are unwilling to share their stories publicly out of a sense of shame. “I was approached by someone who was married in a Jewish ceremony maybe 15, 20 years ago, who recently received an official demand saying if you want to continue to be Jewish, we’d like you to do a DNA test,” Shindler said. “They said if she doesn’t do it then she has to sign papers saying she is not Jewish. But she is too humiliated to go to the press with this.”
What offends Shindler most is that the technique is being used to single out his community, which he sees as part of a broader stigmatization of Russian speaking immigrants in Israeli society as unassimilated outsiders and second-class citizens. “It is sad because in the Soviet Union we were persecuted for being Jewish and now in Israel we’re being discriminated against for not being Jewish enough,” he said.
Ibid: But according to Yosef Carmel, an Orthodox rabbi and co-head of Eretz Hemdah, a Jerusalem-based institute that trains rabbinical judges for the Rabbinate, this is a misunderstanding of how the DNA testing is being used. He explained that the Rabbinate are not using a generalized Jewish ancestry test, but one that screens for a specific variant on the mitochondrial DNA – DNA that is passed down through the mother – that can be found almost exclusively in Ashkenazi Jews.
A number of years ago Carmel consulted genetic experts who informed him that if someone bears this specific mitochondrial DNA marker, there is a 90 to 99% chance that this person is of Ashkenazi ancestry. This was enough to convince him to pass a religious ruling in 2017 that states that this specific DNA test can be used to confirm Jewishness if all other avenues have been exhausted, which now constitutes the theological justification for the genetic testing.
For David Goldstein, professor of medical research in genetics at Columbia University whose 2008 book, Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History, outlines a decade’s worth of research into Jewish population genetics, translating scientific insights about small genetic variants in the DNA to normative judgments about religious or ethnic identity is not only problematic, but misunderstands what the science actually signals.
“When we say that there is a signal of Jewish ancestry, it’s a highly specific statistical analysis done over a population,” he said. “To think that you can use these type of analyses to make any substantive claims about politics or religion or questions of identity, I think that it’s frankly ridiculous.”
But others would disagree. As DNA sequencing becomes more sophisticated, the ability to identify genetic differences between human populations has improved. Geneticists can now locate variations in the DNA so acutely as to differentiate populations living on opposite sides of a mountain range.
In recent years, a number of high-profile commentators have appropriated these scientific insights to push the idea that genetics can determine who we are socially, none more controversially than the former New York Times science writer, Nicholas Wade. In his 2014 book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, Wade argues that genetic differences in human populations manifest in predictable social differences between those groups.
His book was strongly denounced by almost all prominent researchers in the field as a shoddy incarnation of race science, but the idea that our DNA can determine who we are in some social sense has also crept into more mainstream perspectives.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times last year, the Harvard geneticist David Reich argued that although genetics does not substantiate any racist stereotypes, differences in genetic ancestry do correlate to many of today’s racial constructs. “I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism,” he wrote. “But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’.”
Reich’s op-ed was shared widely and drew condemnation from other geneticists and social science researchers.
In an open letter to Buzzfeed, a group of 67 experts also criticized Reich’s careless communication of his ideas. The signatories worried that imprecise language within such a fraught field of research would make the insights of population genetics more susceptible to being “misunderstood and misinterpreted”, lending scientific validity to racist ideology and ethno-nationalist politics.
And indeed, this already appears to be happening. In the United States, white nationalists have channeled the ideals of racial purity into an obsession with the reliability of direct-to-consumer DNA testing. In Greece, the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party regularly draw on studies on the origins of Greek DNA to “prove” 4,000 years of racial continuity and ethnic supremacy.
Most concerning is how the conflation of genetics and racial identity is being mobilized politically. In Australia, the far-right One Nation party recently suggested that First Nations people be given DNA tests to “prove” how Indigenous they are before receiving government benefits. In February, the New York Times reported that authorities in China are using DNA testing to determine whether someone is of Uighur ancestry, as part of a broader campaign of surveillance and oppression against the Muslim minority
While DNA testing in Israel is still limited to proving Jewishness in relation to religious life, it comes at a time when the intersection of ethnic, political, and religious identity are becoming increasingly blurry. Just last year, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government passed the Nation State law, which codified that the right to national self-determination in the country is “unique to the Jewish people”.
“If we are to survive earth systems breakdown, then we must begin by transforming the Treasury and by removing the politicians that threaten the futures of today’s younger generations.” Ann Pettifor writes on the British Chancellor’s recent attack on ‘net zero’.
It took a child, Greta Thunberg, to alert much of the adult world to the catastrophic threat posed not just by climate breakdown, but earth systems breakdown. Sadly her voice did not reach one of the politicians responsible for defending the nation’s security: Philip Hammond. Watching the Chancellor attack the Prime Minister for wanting to invest a smidgeon of Britain’s annual income in the future survival of the nation, it’s hard to believe that it is now eighty three years since John Maynard Keynes invented the field of macroeconomics. We have had eighty three years in which to train Treasury economists to think in terms of the aggregate economy, and we still have a Chancellor that views the economy through the wrong end of a telescope – as if it were a household.
From Keynes’s macroeconomic perspective, the public sector finances are not analogous to household finances. Keynes turned Say’s Law on its head (CW XXIX, p. 81):
“For the proposition that supply creates its own demand, I shall substitute the proposition that expenditure creates its own income”
Given spare capacity, public expenditures not only are productive in their own right but also foster additional activity in the private sector, according to the multiplier. Increased employment means increased incomes, which, from the point of view of government, means higher tax revenues and lower welfare (and, later, debt interest) expenditures.
Now one can just imagine how intellectually challenging it would be for #spreadsheetPhil to accept that “expenditure creates its own income”. It does not do that for individuals, or even households, he will argue. Quite so. But the collective sum that is government expenditure, if invested in the creation of a skilled, well-paid ‘green carbon army’ would generate considerable income for government – and would help ensure the survival of life on earth.
As one comes to expect of Dannis, this is an intelligent discussion centering largely on the recent Youtube purges.
However, despite my appeals, Dennis still does not make a distinction between our would-be left and their left, an international, anti-White, YKW directed left, which are social “unionionizations” of sorts, in “coalition”, so the rule structuring stories go, against a would-be White unionization, a White left ethnonationalism.
It is an important mistake; there are significant reasons why YKW want us to identify “the left” as the enemy and by reaction, for White identity to be right wing and liberal.
Whereas in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s blacks and women were the PC victim groups most flamboyantly promoted by YKW, now promotional advocacy of the third major PC victim union in coalition, gays, is being stepped-up. And they are succeeding to get the right to over react to this red cape (or rainbow cape, as it were).
It is not that the campaign and marketing of gay pride is a good thing for Whites, and there is a good argument aired by Dennis - an 8 minute video by Vertigo Politics Now, called, “the last White man” discussing how gays are ideal model consumers for the corporate agenda….and of course we don’t want homosexuality encouraged, especially not for those whose inborn nature could go either way…
Nevertheless, we must be careful, particularly regarding clever arguments like this, that would get us wrapped-up in reaction, chasing after the red caping, er rainbow caping, of YKW anti-White coalition building. ...like feminism and black advocacy as unions in YKW directed hands, it is important rather, for Whites to not react into right wing anti-social unionization altogether, against the compassion for our reasonable and accountable marginals and non ideal forms that it would allow for, and consider instead social organization to be a strictly non-White thing, as YKW has weaponized it against Whites and would have us believe is THE “left.”
A danger, of course, in being heavy handed in reaction to what is maybe about 2% of the population, is that as Whites react to the YKW rainbow caping, in right wing idealism of gender differentiation and into militant anti-queerism; try to imagine the pressure on teenage White boys to do utterly stupid and self destructive things in order to prove that they are not gay…
..and try to get the social point that the YKW have misrepresented and misdirected in their gross distortions, that most people are not ultra masculine or ultra feminine - they occupy a normal range which should not be made to feel queer, call it normal pride, if you will.
In service of reconstructing White social systemic homeostasis, it is important not to react, become overly fixated in chase after the red capes, black power, feminist capes, rainbow capes as the YKW wave them against us in great exaggeration and distortion of the concept of working-hypothesis of social unionization (which would include ethnonationalism); right wing reactions that seek warrant beyond the social realm, above nature or below human nature, become inherently unstable for their lack of social accountability and correction - as the social unionization would otherwise sustain.
They didn’t have quite the excuse to go after Regina as they did Reginald, but if they did ...well, they just lack education, has nothing to do with distinctive black hyper assertiveness…
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 06 June 2019 08:04.
Ignore Lana’s idiotic use of the YKW supplied “enemy term”, i.e., “Leftists”, and replace it with the correct term, “Liberals” and it is otherwise a good critique of Lauren Southern’s ((())) “Borderless.”
Lana’s inclination to get suckered into a right wing position is probably a significant reason why Red Ice has been spared the recent Youtube purge so far.
(((Lauren Southern))) equipped with gas mask, helmet and protective eye goggles, ready for the “surprise attack” from anti-fa.
And as far as Lauren Southern (Simonsen) goes, Majorityrights has long seen her game as kosher.
Excellent discussion between Dennis and a German lady friend, Tanya, who acquits herself and the boomer predicament quite well, while discussing the disaster of post war liberalism on Germany (culminating in the cataclysm of Merkel) and its impact on Whites generally…
The United States ended the Second World War as a global superpower, but Europe, Asia and the Soviet Union were devastated. There have been many changes since then, such as the collapse of the European empires, the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of China, but the United States is still the dominant power. President Donald Trump rules an empire bequeathed by history.
Britain, on the other hand, lost her empire, her naval superiority and access to cheap raw materials. We were reduced to living on American loans and when we tried to flex our muscles by joining France and Israel in the invasion of Egypt in 1956, we were ordered to withdraw by a furious American government..
Countries are measured by their military capacity, standard of living, level of education, economic performance, and many other factors. By any standard Britain is a great nation with a seat on the United Nations Security Council, a modern army, navy and air force equipped with nuclear weapons, a thriving financial services industry, world-class health and education.
We are doing well but we could do so much better. It’s a national disgrace that people are sleeping in doorways. Philip Alston, the internationally respected UN expert on poverty, has issued a damning report on homelessness in the UK. The government has denied his report but rough-sleepers with sleeping bags and makeshift cardboard bedding can be seen in most city centres. We have started building more houses but, young people are finding it difficult to get mortgages because of tighter banking regulations. And all the while, the gap between rich an poor grows wider.
The Brexit fiasco has forced us to consider Britain’s place in the World, The Brexiteers are living in the past, but most people realise that we are a European power, like France and Germany. We are Europeans by history, geography, blood and culture.
The latest date for Brexit is 31st October, but the Euro election results show that the country is equally divided between Leavers and Remainers. The Brexit Party won the most seats but the combined votes of the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats were greater.
Theresa May has finally given up trying to appease the head bangers of the Tory Right. The lunatics have taken over the asylum and Boris Johnson is waiting in the wings. He is a Brexiteer but he would serve as prime minister of Britain in or out of the EU, he just jumped on the Brexit bandwagon to further his ambition.
John Bean
The article on my old friend John Bean in last month’s Nation Revisited prompted several enquiries about his health. I am pleased to report that he is in good shape both mentally and physically. The last time that he had his intelligence measured was in 1991 by Mensa. At that time he scored an impressive 138. His Mensa certificate is attached.
John Bean writes: “Thanks for that. I will appreciate a mention in June NR. This is not just my touch of vanity but rather to show that followers of the Radical Right amongst your readership are not just a collection of non-thinking prejudiced idiots.”
NR writes: According to the journal ‘Intelligence’, the smartest voters in the 2001 election were supporters of the Green Party and the least intelligent were BNP voters. You will not be surprised to find that this survey appeared in ‘The Guardian’.
Saving the NHS
We are torn between staying in the European Union or breaking away, but many of us fear that an ‘independent’ Britain would be swallowed up by the United States. We are linked to America by language and history and many of us have friends and family across the Atlantic, but we are different countries. Their health care system is based on insurance and leaves millions of people without cover, but we conform to the European Social Model which provides universal health care. We do not let people die because they are poor.
Our National Health Service employs over a million people and tums over £120 billion. The giant American medical corporations will gain access to the NHS if the far-Right Tories get their way. They have long advocated closer ties between the UK and America,
The shadowy Atlantic Bridge movement was founded by Liam Fox in 1999 to promote trade between Britain and America. Margaret Thatcher was appointed president and the membership included, Michael Gove, George Osborne, William Hague and Chris Grayling. The movement was shut down by the Charities Commission in 2011.
The real choice is between being an equal member of the European Union or an American dependency like Puerto Rico. We must not allow our NHS to be taken over by businessmen who are more interested in profit than people.
The Reverse of the Truth
Members of the Brexit Party and UKIP are wrong about Europe. They fear that membership of the EU will rob us of our identity, and they think that pro-Europeans are ‘traitors’. They even question the sincerity of Theresa May, a decent patriotic woman who loves her country.
The same accusations were aimed at Oswald Mosley and his supporters who opposed the war. Most of them had fought in the First World War, but that didn’t stop the warmongers from calling them traitors. Mosley wrote in ‘The Alternative’:
“What then, was the truth concerning the National Socialist or Fascist movements before the war? Our fault was exactly the opposite of that suggested against us. How often in politics is that the fact? How rarely are the people permitted to know anything except the reverse of truth. It was suggested that we might set the interests of other countries before our own: that was an absurd lie. In reality we were all too National - too narrowly concentrated upon securing the interests of our own nations. That was the true fault of all real National Socialist or Fascist Movements; whether in Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy.
So far from being willing to serve each other as “Fifth Columnists” in the event of a clash between States, our political ideology and propaganda were far too Nationalistic even to mould the minds of men in a new sense of European kinship and solidarity which might have avoided disaster by universal consent. So far from fighting for other countries in a war, we none of us argued with sufficient force in favour of that new sense of European Union which modern fact must now make an integral part of the new creed.”
An article by Martin Webster is circulating which argues that Oswald Mosley adopted European unity to ingratiate himself with the Establishment. In fact, he abandoned imperialism after the war because the Empire was no longer viable. Instead, he developed the idea of ‘Europe a Nation’, Mosley moved on but nationalists are still clinging to obsolete pre-war policies.
Oswald Mosley and his followers were not traitors and nor are the 48% that voted to remain in the EU. People are entitled to their opinions and they should not be threatened and insulted because of them. We seek to change men’s minds by reason and debate and we deplore the modern practice of shouting down the opposition.
Ken Clarke
Last month I proposed Ken Clarke to lead a Government of National Unity. He has been annoying the right wing of his party for many years, but I still think that he is the man for the job. He upset the powerful Zionist faction when he invited Oswald Mosley to address the Cambridge Tories in 1961.
The Daily Telegraph reported:
“While still a student at Cambridge, Clarke joined the Conservative Party and was chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association.
Controversially, he invited Sir Oswald Mosley, The former British fascist leader, to speak, leading some Jewish students, including a young Michael Howard, his future successor at the Home Office - to resign from the association in protest.”
Ken Clarke is currently under fire from the far-Right. They have tried to unseat him as an MP but he is too popular with his constituents. In an age when politicians change their minds to suit the prevailing mood, they are lucky to have a reliable figure to represent them. Compare him and his achievements as a Cabinet Minister with the miserable gang of second-raters that are scrambling to lead the Tory Party.
David Baruch Lau, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel
(((Lauren Southern))) equipped with gas mask, helmet and protective eye goggles, ready for the “surprise attack” from anti-fa.
The right is infamous for getting people swept-up and lured into mistakes.
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