[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[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.
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”.
John Bolton spearheading P.N.A.C. and going to show that even (((1/8th))) can be toxic.
Journalist Explains John Bolton’s Push For ‘Aggressive Use’ Of American Power
NPR, 2 May 2019: New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins says President Trump’s current national security adviser is a hawk who sees America as “a colossus operating anywhere it wants.”
TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. President Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton is known as a tough-talking hawk. A new article about him in The New Yorker is titled “John Bolton On The Warpath.” My guest is the author, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dexter Filkins, who’s a staff writer for the magazine. He’s joined us many times on the show, dating back to when he covered the war in Iraq.
Bolton is President Trump’s third national security adviser, after Generals Michael Flynn and H.R. McMaster. Trump was familiar with Bolton’s views because Bolton had made hundreds of appearances on Fox News as a guest, and then as a paid commentator. On Fox, he’d advocated for military strikes on Iranian training camps and for forced regime change in North Korea. Earlier in Bolton’s career, he served in the George W. Bush administration as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs and as U.N. ambassador. He advocated for the invasion of Iraq and told Filkins he still thinks the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein was correct.
Dexter Filkins, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So as you point out in the piece, the Trump administration has no permanent secretary of defense, no secretary of homeland security, no ambassador to the U.N. What does it mean in terms of the power John Bolton has now in his role as national security adviser?
DEXTER FILKINS: Well, the national security adviser, just by virtue of the geography of that job - it’s in the West Wing. It’s right down the hall from the Oval Office. It’s an incredibly powerful position. You know, Bolton sees the president every morning. He sees him or he talks to him in the evening. It’s just, the proximity of that job to the presidency gives the occupant of that job just an enormous amount of power. So just on its face, you know, you’re in the pole position there. But I think in this administration because, you know, it’s a revolving door in the rest of the government pretty much all the time - Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, he’s gone. There hasn’t been - no replacement has been named so there’s an acting secretary of defense. There’s no ambassador to the United Nations. There’s no secretary for homeland security.
So it’s just kind of a big vacuum. I think it’s fair to say that makes his job even bigger and gives him even more influence than you would ordinarily have. So I think in that administration, when you’re talking about foreign policy, you’re basically talking about John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, and that’s it.
GROSS: And are they on the same page on most things, Pompeo and Bolton?
FILKINS: I think so. I had a funny conversation about Pompeo and Bolton together with an unnamed Western diplomat who knows them both. And they said, look, you know, Pompeo is really only interested in what Trump is interested in. So you can’t really sit down and talk about the world with him. Bolton, on the other hand, you can talk about anything. You can talk about aid programs in Africa, and he’s well-briefed. He knows about it. But Pompeo has a much more political outlook.
GROSS: So you’re saying Pompeo is there to amplify Trump’s views. Bolton has very strong views of his own.
FILKINS: Yes, he does.
GROSS: So the title of your piece is “John Bolton On The Warpath.” I know he’s a hawk. Does the piece imply that he’s going to lead us into war?
FILKINS: No, but I think it fairly raises a lot of questions. And I think the basis of the piece is this, which I was kind of surprised to find - this divergence of world views between Bolton, on the one hand, who’s been a hawk his whole life. He’s for aggressive use of American power. He’s advocated bombing North Korea. He’s advocated bombing Iran. And then on the other hand, to the extent that President Trump has a world view, it is he wants to stay home. It’s America first. He’s pretty close to being an isolationist. He doesn’t want to - you know, he doesn’t want to partake in this kind of entire international architecture that was set up after the Second World War, whether it’s the World Trade Organization, or NATO or EU. He doesn’t want to pay for any of that stuff, and he doesn’t want to get involved.
So Trump, I think it’s fair to say, doesn’t really want to launch new military operations. They do not see eye to eye on things. I tried to kind of, you know, figure out what it is they talk about when they get together (laughter) for that reason.
GROSS: If Trump and Bolton have such opposing world views when it comes to the possibility of military intervention or war, why would Trump choose him? Why did he choose him?
FILKINS: Well, I think there’s - that’s a really good question. I think there’s two reasons for that. One is that, you know, I think he’s, Bolton, is kind of emotionally appealing to Trump. You know, Bolton was a very highly paid analyst on Fox News. He was on there few times a week. One of the revelations is - for me was I got to look at Mr. Bolton’s financial disclosure, which you’re required to submit for a job like that. And yeah, there was lots of stuff in there. So I think he was being paid $600,000 a year - this is just part of his income, but - $600,000 a year to be on Fox. And so every night, he’s banging away, talking tough. And I think that appeals emotionally to Trump. He’s like, he’s a tough guy. Plus he just sees him all the time. ‘Cause they didn’t really know each other very well.
I think the other reason is there were - H.R. McMaster had been the national security adviser before John Bolton. And there was a kind of a pretty large group of Trump allies who had decided that McMaster had to go. They didn’t like him. They thought he wasn’t supportive enough of Israel and of, you know, the current leadership there. And so they pushed him out. I mean, I think it’s fair to say they lobbied very hard to get him out, and they worked pretty hard to get Bolton in. So I think it was a confluence of those two things.
GROSS: What did Bolton advocate for as a highly paid commentator on Fox News?
FILKINS: (Laughter). Well, he, as I mentioned, he - and I went through a lot of stuff that he said on the air. And, you know, I think he’s finding - I should say, before I answer that question - I think he’s finding, you know, it’s a little different when you’re in power, as opposed to being out of power. But on Fox, talking tough - strike North Korea, if necessary, before they acquire an ICBM capability. Strike Iran in various, you know, various ways and in various contexts. That’s, like, at a minimum. And support Israel in its kind of what I think is a covert or actually pretty hot war that’s going on with Iran and Syria.
So really aggressive use of American power. But I think even more than that, not just - you know, not just dropping bombs. I think that Bolton’s worldview is he’s extremely skeptical of international agreements, whether they’re treaties or, again, the whole kind of architecture that was built by the United States over the past 70 years. You know, whether it’s NATO, or the EU, or the U.N. or the World Trade Organization, all those things which, you know, that’s the world we live in. And he is - and these are, you know, treaties and commitments, and bilateral agreements, multilateral agreements. He’s deeply skeptical of all those things. And he says, essentially, in - he has said this on Fox News, but he’s been very articulate about it in his writing, which is, every time you sign a treaty or a multilateral agreement, you give up a little bit of your sovereignty. And so I think he sees - his view of America is as a kind of colossus operating unilaterally wherever it wants. And, you know, if you pick up friends along the way, great. But they’re not going to be your friends for long. ‘Cause there’s no such things as friends in the international system. There’s only interests. And only interests endure. And so don’t get sentimental about it. Just carry on. And I think that it’s a very unsentimental view of the world that he OK. But Trump fell in love with…
Jen Scharf is an egomaniac promoting an attempted diversion of White interests that she calls “The Church of Entropy.”
She balks at our natural and active WN concern for a consistent genetic legacy of our kind, and proffers that White men will be made “happy” by passively accepting her hokus pokus wizardry about being reincarnated into ...well, whatever, a Mulatto, a rabbit, who knows what she has in mind. She claims to be a reincarnated Indian (that’s what whack job that she is) come to enlighten White people.
Here are my exchanges with her as I exposed her as an agent of misdirection. As a result, she does not want anything to do with me - not “in any way, shape or form” - to which, of course, I say LOL! it is quite fine with me.
Rapper films girlfriend crying-out for parents hours before overdose death, 400 meters from hospital
Daily Mail, “Rapper boyfriend of Holby City star’s daughter ‘filmed her dying and called her a drama queen after he gave her psychedelic drug at Bestival - but didn’t call 999 in case he was arrested”, 5 Feb 2019.
Much has been said about Christendom, many nationalists of many different stripes have spoken about it, but the fact is that there is no ‘White Christian Civilisation’. It’s just someone else’s spiritual framework and someone’s else’s jurisdiction. I think it’s time to shed some light on that fact”..... Kumiko
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 10 April 2019 05:00.
László Bogár reminds us that we are not alone.
Full House Judiciary Committee Hearing on ‘Hate Crimes’ and the Rise of ‘White Nationalism’
‘White Nationalism’ is placed in scare quotes as the enemies of White people take the liberty to render pejorative, defaming and indicting mis-definitions of White Nationalism, notably, as being synonymous with ‘supremacism’, despite the fact that White Nationalists just about always reject supremacism and define White Nationalism as we do here, as a designation for the Nationalist sovereignty of European nations and peoples; therefore, governed separatism, a means for peaceful co-existence, the multicultural diversity of human and pervasive ecology, not supremacism, imperialism, exploitation or violence.
“Many White Extremist Killers Were Inspired by Earlier Attacks” chart via New York Times
Here’s what you need to know
The attack in Christchurch, New Zealand did not happen in a vacuum. It was part of an overall increase in white nationalist violence that’s been legitimized through public officials’ extreme rhetoric in government, and effectively allowed to wreak havoc in society. In partnership with organizations such as Bend the Arc, we have been raising the red flag on the need to reject white nationalism for years. We’ve called on Congress to conduct a hearing on white nationalism. We’ve called on tech companies to do a better job of enforcing their hate speech policies online. We’ve also constantly called on the Trump administration and other elected officials to cease their extreme rhetoric as it continues to marginalize communities. Congress will be holding a hearing on Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism and we’ll be there, bringing you updates from the front lines.
Here are the details
It’s been over three weeks since a man opened fire in two mosques and killed 50 innocent Muslim worshippers. Since then, there’s been an increase in related hate violence, both here at home and abroad. In California, there was an attempted arson attack where graffiti referenced the New Zealand attack. In Britain, there has been a 600% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes of almost 600%. The vast majority of those were incidents linked to the Christchurch attacks.
The increase in white nationalism has been legitimized in our government by President Trump. His long-standing affinity for white nationalist rhetoric, leaders and movements is well documented. Administration officials and members of Congress, often feign opposition of the President’s rhetoric. Yet, they continue to see through a policy agenda which is inspired by this ideology. We’ve seen white nationalists organize on social media platforms. In 2017, The Guardian released a report detailing how Facebook’s community standards allow harmful content and white supremacist ideology a space to live and escalate.
Along with national civil rights groups, we pushed tech companies to change their community guidelines. We’ve been pushing them to enforce their hate speech policies more effectively. Facebook has announced that they will ban posts, photos and other content that references white nationalism and white separatism. Still, it should not take a massacre to force a simple conversation over how to deal with these issues.
When attacks similar to Christchurch, Pittsburgh or Oak Creek occur, our message has been clear. Any response to these incidences, and to the forces which led to them, must come as part of a reaffirmation that America aspires to be pluralistic and unified. To achieve, we have to ensure any legislative or political response does not deepen already existing divides.
Here’s what we’re doing
As the first step in moving a path forward, together we have called on Congress to conduct a hearing on white nationalism. We need to have an understanding of white nationalism and its impact on communities. We need Congress to call white nationalism what it is: a threat to our domestic and national security.
We thank Chairman Nadler of the House Judiciary Committee, for his bold leadership hosting today’s hearing. Follow us on social media and join the conversation as we cover this important hearing.
Red Ice’s commentary: House Judiciary committee Hearing on Criminalizing Nationalism for White People.
David Baruch Lau, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel
John Bolton spearheading P.N.A.C. and going to show that even (((1/8th))) can be toxic.
László Bogár reminds us that we are not alone.
