[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.
Trump is making a bad choice in saber rattling against China and the rest of Asia. It is to say the least that his conciliatory stance with regard to Israel is of little help to us beyond perhaps serving to strategically placate them, but neither is siding with The Russian Federation over China the right priority.
China is never going to side with the The Russian Federation. Neither is Japan. We need cooperation with these and other Asian countries, and we do not need the headaches of The Russian Federation.
We need China, Japan and the rest of Asia to assist against Islamic and Middle Eastern imposition, Jews and Africans; we need Asian assistance in regard to our borders and along The Silk Road.
Russia’s tenuous claim, tenuous economic industrial and demographic support for its vast eastward expanse is a burden that we don’t need to share in. We’d all be better off with a Russian state scaled to the size of an ethno-state. The eastern part of the present Russian Federation will be taken over by Asian peoples eventually anyway. We need Asian cooperation to secure our own ethno-states, and its best to deal with these realities.
Israel and The Russian Federation or China, Japan and the rest of Asia in alliance with ethno-nationalism, White and otherwise? Trump is taking the wrong side.
WASHINGTON: In another sign of escalating trade tensions between China and the United States, Beijing told the World Trade Organization on Friday that Washington was failing to implement a WTO ruling against punitive U.S. tariffs on a range of Chinese goods.
China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) said it had requested consultations with the United States over the issue, and anti-subsidy duties on products including solar panels, wind towers and steel pipe used in the oil industry.
China’s complaint to the WTO was filed just days after Washington lodged a similar complaint against China, accusing it of unfairly continuing punitive duties on U.S. exports of broiler chicken products in violation of WTO rules.
“By disregarding the WTO rules and rulings, the United States has severely impaired the integrity of WTO rules and the interests of Chinese industries,” MOFCOM said in a statement distributed by the Chinese embassy in Washington.
The case was first brought before the WTO by China in 2012 against U.S. duties on 15 diverse product categories that also include thermal paper, steel sinks and tow-behind lawn grooming equipment.
In December 2014, the WTO’s Appellate Body ruled in favor of Chinese claims that the products subject to duties had not benefited from subsidies from “public bodies” favoring particular manufacturers.
The deadline for implementation of the rulings and recommendations of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body, set through binding arbitration, expired on April 1, according to WTO records.
A U.S. Trade Representative spokesman said the United States had been “working diligently to comply with the recommendations” and to fully conform with its WTO obligations.
He added that the U.S. response to China’s request for consultations would come “in due course.”
Trade tensions between the two largest economies have been rising in the past year as China’s economic slowdown floods world markets with manufactured goods. U.S. producers of steel and aluminum have filed a number of anti-dumping and anti-subsidy complaints against imports from China.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Commerce Department is scheduled to announce its final determination in an anti-dumping investigations of imports of cold-rolled flat steel products from both China and Japan. That case was brought by major U.S. producers U.S. Steel Corp , AK Steel Corp Arcelor Mittal USA, Nucor Corp and Steel Dyanmics Inc
Today’s “Victory Day” parade in Moscow is an exercise in hypocrisy—because it ignores the fact that the Soviet Union was allied to the Nazis for nearly two years of World War II—and invaded five neighboring states itself before the war with Germany broke out.
The Russian “celebrations” ignore the fact that the Soviet Union helped Nazi Germany with the invasion of Poland in 1939, invaded Finland in November 1939, and invaded Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in June 1940.
The Soviet invasion of Poland started without a formal declaration of war on September 17, 1939. The invasion took place in line with a treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, signed by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop on August 23, 1939.
The agreement—known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, contained a public and a secret clause.
The public clause was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—but the secret clause, never made public until 1946, contained an agreement to divide the territories of Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland into German and Soviet “spheres of influence,” anticipating potential “territorial and political rearrangements” of these countries.
Stalin and Ribbentrop after the signing of the Soviet–Nazi German pact. August 23, 1939.
The last page of the Additional Secret Protocol, bearing Ribbentrop’s and Molotov’s signature, dealing with the division of Poland and other Eastern European nations between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
It was on this basis that the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939—sixteen days after the Nazi invasion—and ended up occupying the eastern part of the Polish state.
The Western Allies—so quick to declare war on Nazi Germany for invading Poland—simply ignored the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland. Soviet and German soldiers in Lublin, Poland, 1939.
German and Soviet soldiers meet in jointly occupied Brest. German and Soviet officers shaking hands following the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union.
Soviet parade in Lviv, 1939. At the joint victory parade held by the Wehrmacht and Red Army in Brest, September 22, 1939, at the end of the invasion of Poland.At the center Major General Heinz Guderian and Soviet Brigadier Semyon Krivoshein.
Video below: Wehrmacht and Red army parade, Brest, Poland, September 22, 1939:
The only memorable public comment on the double invasion of Poland was a cartoon by David Low which appeared in a British newspaper, showing Hitler and Stalin greeting each other over the corpse of Poland
The German copy of the secret clause was discovered after the war, and first published in the United States by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on May 22, 1946, and in Britain by the Manchester Guardian.
It was also part of an official US State Department publication, Nazi–Soviet Relations 1939–1941, published in January 1948.
Despite this, it remained the official policy of the Soviet Union to deny the existence of the secret clause. It was only acknowledged as a fact in 1989, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and was finally published in its Russian format in 1992.
Putin even went on to question the existence of the secret clause, saying that “people still argue about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.”
The invasion of Poland was only the first Soviet military aggression of World War II.
In September and October 1939, the Soviet Union compelled the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to agree to “mutual assistance pacts” which allowed for the establishment of Soviet military bases in those countries.
On June 15, 1940, while the Western Allies were distracted by the German offensive against France, the Soviet Union militarily occupied Lithuania.
The next day, Latvia and Estonia also received Soviet ultimatums, which were quickly followed by military occupation.
Lithuania was formally incorporated into the Soviet Union on August 3, Latvia on August 5, and Estonia on August 6. The deposed presidents of Estonia (Konstantin Päts) and Latvia (Karlis Ulmanis) were imprisoned and deported to the USSR and died later in Soviet gulags.
While all this was going on, the Soviet Union also invaded the neutral nation of Finland on November 30, 1939.
This time, there was at least some half-hearted international reaction: the League of Nations passed a resolution condemning the invasion as illegal, and the Soviet Union was expelled from the League on December 14, 1939.
Red Army soldiers display a captured Finnish state flag, 1940.
Initially, the invasion went poorly, and the Finnish army held the Soviet offensive at the border. However, a renewed attack forced the Finns to capitulate in March 1940.
In terms of that treaty, Finland ceded 11 percent of its surface area—and 30 percent of its economy—to the Soviet Union.
Soviet Tupolev SB bombers above Helsinki November 30, 1939.
It was during the Soviet invasion of Finland that the term “Molotov cocktail” was coined. The improvised gasoline “bomb,” usually just a glass bottle, was given its name as an insulting reference to Soviet foreign minister Molotov, who was responsible for the setting of “spheres of interest” in Eastern Europe under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
Molotov had earlier declared on Soviet state radio that Soviet air force’s bombing missions over Finland were actually “airborne humanitarian food deliveries for their starving neighbors.”
As a result, the Finns dubbed the Soviet bombs as “Molotov bread baskets”—and when the hand-held bottle firebomb was developed to attack Soviet tanks, the Finns called it the “Molotov cocktail” as “a drink to go with the food.”
The Nazi-Soviet pact lasted until June 22, 1941, when Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union. That invasion, as is well known, ended in catastrophe for Germany.
Nonetheless, the fact that the Soviet Union was an official ally—and an aggressive invader of five neutral neighbors during the first stage of the Second World War, makes the Russian “Victory Day” parades hollow and hypocritical.
If Russia—or the West, for that matter—were sincere in celebrating the end of the tragic conflict known as the Second World War, they would give equal prominence to the Soviet Union’s role in fermenting that conflict.
But, because the controlled media and the establishment have made an art out of double standards and hypocrisy, the focus remains solely on Germany—and ignores the crimes of communism.
Trump is looking less like the one who is freeing the White Republican base from its Neo Con backing than he is a somewhat lower grade interface - a bit more gritty and streetwise, perhaps, perfect to stay ahead of reactionary trends in the WN curve; having shared interest with the YKW to protect domestic real estate assets - he has neither extricated himself nor the implicit White Republican base from YKW entanglements.
In an oddly ironic twist, today Donald Trump announced that he has picked as chairman of his newly launched fundraising operation none other than a former employee of the bank he has repeatedly criticized in the past, and which he used as a foil to criticize Ted Cruz: Goldman Sachs.
Trump announced that heading up his own personal fundraising operation as national finance chairman will be Steven Mnuchin, a long-time business associate, chairman and CEO of the hedge fund Dune Capital. More importantly, however, he spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs where he was most recently a Partner, having built a fortune of $46 million before launching his own hedge fund.
While employed at Goldman, he purchased the remains of IndyMac Bank (now known as OneWest Bank), the Pasadena, California-based mortgage lender that collapsed in 2008. “Notoriously press-shy, the executive endured 2011 protests on the lawn of his Bel Air mansion by foreclosed homeowners angered at his lender’s handling of soured mortgages.”
As Zero Hedge readers are familiar, Trump often critized his main competitor Ted Cruz for his links to the bank because of loans used to finance Cruz’s Senate campaign, and because Heidi Cruz was a one-time employee of Goldman. “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton,” Trump said in one debate.
He had no qualms, however, in hiring one of the most prominent Goldman alums to raise money for him.
In addition to Goldman, Mnuchin also worked at Soros Fund Management, whose founder, George Soros, has funded many left-leaning causes. Where it gets even more bizarre is that Mnuchin has donated frequently to Democrats, including to Clinton and Barack Obama.
As a hedge fund manager, Mnuchin is part of a group of businesspeople Trump has excoriated. In August, Trump said hedge fund managers were “getting away with murder” as he touted his proposal to end the so-called carried interest loophole, which gives private equity and hedge fund managers preferential tax treatment.
“The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country,” Trump said at the time on CBS’ Face the Nation. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky,” he said. “They are energetic. They are very smart. But a lot of them—they are paper-pushers. They make a fortune. They pay no tax. It’s ridiculous.”
They apparently are also very good at raising money.
Some more on Mnuchin’s background: starting his career in the early 1980s as a trainee at Salomon Brothers before moving to Goldman Sachs in 1985, Mnuchin was front and center for the advent of instruments like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. He has called securitization “an extremely positive development in terms of being able to finance different parts of the economy and different businesses efficiently.” The pitfalls of the financing method came later, he’s said.
Mnuchin’s father, Robert Mnuchin, was a partner at Goldman Sachs in the 1960s. The second-youngest of five siblings, Steven attended the prestigious Riverdale Country School and then Yale University, where his roommate was Edward Lampert, who would go on to become a hedge-fund manager and owner of Sears.
More recently, in October 2014 Mnuchin became co-chairman of the board of the Hollywood studio Relativity Media due to Dune’s fascination with movies. Dune has provided financing for batches of winning movies, like the “X-Men” franchise and “Avatar,” Hollywood’s all-time box-office champion.
Relativity Media filed for bankruptcy last summer, just a few months after Mnuchin’s arrival. According to Variety, Dune was intimately involved in the studio’s failure.
The money-man and fellow investors in a Dune Capital fund are said to have lost as much as $80 million — equity that is almost certain to be lost for good, said two sources familiar with the situation. And disgruntled Relativity investors privately are questioning how a bank Mnuchin once headed – OneWest Bank of Pasadena – was allowed by Relativity to drain $50 million from the studio just weeks prior to the July 30 insolvency filing.
Mnuchin had left Relativity just days before the company reached an agreement with OneWest to extend the loan deadline and allow the bank to claim that money.
To be sure, Hillary Clinton, who in turn has been attacked for her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, also has a high-ranking Goldman official in her ranks, former CFTC commissioner Gary Gensler, who is the former secretary of state’s chief financial officer and whom she is grooming for a potential Treasury Secretary. But for Trump, a self-professed “anti-establishment” candidate, who has repeatedly stated he will fund his own way and is not “for sale to special interest groups”, his sudden proximity to Wall Street comes as a big surprise and will leave many of his supporters demanding an explanation.
Moldova, an Eastern European country and former Soviet republic, has terrain encompassing forests, rocky hills and vineyards. It shares linguistic and cultural roots with its neighbor, Romania. Its wine regions include Nistreana, known for its reds, and Codru, home to some of the world’s largest cellars. The capital, Chișinău, has Soviet-style architecture and the National Museum of History, exhibiting ethnographic and art collections.
Capital: Chișinău
Gross domestic product: 7.97 billion USD (2013) World Bank
President: Nicolae Timofti
Population: 3.559 million (2013) World Bank
Official language: Romanian
In a sickening gesture of its malevolence toward native Europe, The EU body has threatened to fine those Eastern European countries not going along with the genocide program but which instead maintain their responsibility to foster and protect their native populations with migration control. In particular, the EU is targeting with genetic infection not only those countries characterized by healthy native demographic maintenance but is at the same time targeting with a devastating economic lose-lose proposition those countries, such as Poland, with the nerve to be doing fairly well economically and those countries such as Moldova, clinging to economic life. Perversely thus, the EU is punishing good demographic behavior, those who are economically well behaved and those that can least afford it - - threatening them with heavy fines if they do not participate in EU migration programs that would be both disastrous to them economically and tantamount to biological weaponry deployed against their native genome.
The EU Commission plans to impose fines on countries that refuse to take refugees under revised EU asylum laws to be put forward on Wednesday (4 May).
The commission will propose a sanction of €250,000 per refugee, according to the Financial Times.
The commission’s proposal will maintain the guiding principle of the current system that the country where migrants first step into the EU must deal with asylum applications.
But it proposes that when a country at the EU’s external border is overwhelmed, asylum seekers should be distributed across the continent.
The commission has been trying to encourage reluctant countries, particularly in central and eastern Europe, to take part in the redistribution system.
Slovakia and Hungary have already brought a court case to challenge an earlier EU decision to redistribute migrants based on a mandatory quota.
But commission officials say the outcome of the court’s decision will not affect their plans to overhaul the asylum system, known as the Dublin regulation.
EU countries last year agreed to redistribute 160,000 asylum seekers across Europe in two years, but have so far actually redistributed only a small portion.
Central European politicians have been vocal about an earlier version of the proposal for mandatory redistribution that was released last month.
At the time, Czech European affairs minister Tomas Prouza tweeted: “Permanent quotas once again? How long will the EU commission keep riding this dead horse instead of working on things that really help?”
Diplomats from eastern EU states have told this website that they are not “heartless people” and they are willing to help refugees in other ways, but they believe a redistribution system will simply lead to more immigrants arrive in the EU.
Turkey falling short
Along with the revised Dublin regulation, the commission is expected to recommend visa-free travel for people from Turkey and Kosovo on Wednesday, even if Ankara is not able to fulfil all the 72 benchmarks that the EU set as conditions.
Sources suggest Turkey is falling short on a handful of the demands – for example issuing biometric passports, and granting visa-free travel to Turkey for EU countries including Cyprus, which Turkey does not recognise.
Other outstanding issues include data protection, fighting corruption, effective cooperation with Europol and state-level law enforcement agencies, and a revision of anti-terror laws so that they cannot be used against journalists or opposition figures.
However, the commission will suggest visa-free travel with the condition that these criteria are met by the end of June, when Turkey is expecting visa requirements to be lifted.
Does the presumptive Republican nominee see African Americans and Hispanics as part of the American “we”?
Lucas Jackson / Reuters
Celebrating his big win in Indiana—and his elevation to presumptive nominee of the Republican Party—Tuesday night, Donald Trump spoke at Trump Tower in New York City, where he delivered a promise to heal the deep fractures in his party.
“We want to bring unity to the Republican Party,” he said. “We have to bring unity. It’s so much easier if we have it.”
Do Black Votes Matter to Donald Trump?
That will be a tall order. But as a general-election candidate, Trump will need to win over more than just Republicans. In his inimitable way, he pledged to bring together the rest of the nation as well.
“We’re going to bring back our jobs, and we’re going to save our jobs, and people are going to have great jobs again, and this country, which is very, very divided in so many different ways, is going to become one beautiful loving country, and we’re going to love each other, we’re going to cherish each other and take care of each other, and we’re going to have great economic development and we’re not going to let other countries take it away from us, because that’s what’s been happening for far too many years and we’re not going to do it anymore,” he said. (That’s a single sentence, if you’re keeping track at home.)
Trump faces significant obstacles to achieving that unity, particular with blocs that are not white men. Seven in 10 women view him unfavorably. It’s even worse with minorities. A recent Gallup poll found that 77 of Hispanics view Trump unfavorably. A Washington Post poll pegged that number at eight in 10, seven of them “very unfavorable.” An NBC News/Survey Monkey poll found an astonishing 86 percent of African Americans had a negative view of Trump.
One reason for those atrocious ratings is the way Trump speaks to and about minorities, which was on display during his victory speech Tuesday.
“We’re going to have great relationships with the Hispanics,” he said. “The Hispanics have been so incredible to me. They want jobs. Everybody wants jobs. The African Americans want jobs. If you look at what’s going on, they want jobs.”
Part of Trump’s rhetorical power is his supercharged used of “we,” a method that persuades people across the country that they are part of a larger movement, and somehow share with Trump his aura of wealthy and luxury. (It’s the same technique he’s used to sell real estate for years.) In the midst of his spiel about all the ways “we” would make America great again, Trump tossed in this passage about minorities.
His phrasing is telling. First, it suggests that for Trump, blacks and Hispanics aren’t part of “we”—“they” constitute separate groups. Perhaps that’s an accidental, unthinking division, but subconscious racial division is no less dangerous. Second, it shows him assuming that minority concerns can be reduced to economics. That view is perhaps unsurprising for a man who has spent his career trying to accumulate wealth, but it is a two-dimensional view of black and Hispanic Americans.
The fact that his policies simply don’t line up with what most African Americans want in a president is one reason his numbers with black voters are so bad. Another factor is a presidential campaign driven in large parts by divisive appeals to racism and bigotry against Hispanics, Muslims, and other groups. Trump also has a long history of racially charged incidents, from alleged tenant discrimination to his strident reaction to the Central Park Five.
The entertainer has long spoken about minority groups with the outdated formulation involving a definite article: “I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks,” he said in 2011, using language that undermined his claim. He’s said similar things about “the Hispanics.”
Changing the way Trump speaks about African Americans and Hispanics won’t solve his problems with those groups, but if he wishes to unify the country, beginning to speak about them as though they are part of the American populace would be a good place to start.
Way to go right-wingers. As usual, the real Republican men are too rational to see race…these men are color blind, love everybody.
This loving domestic unity is going to be good for European EGI, going to be good for the economy - Asia is going to buy its products.
An article about Malia Obama’s choice of college garnered racially charged reader comments on Fox News.
FILE- In this April 8, 2016, file photo, President Barack Obama and his daughter Malia walk from Marine One toward Air Force One at Los Angeles International Airport. Malia is taking a year off after graduating from high school before attending Harvard University as part of an expanding program for students known as a “gap year.” (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)(Credit: AP)
After posting a news story about Malia Obama’s decision to take a gap year before beginning Harvard, Fox News was forced to remove the comment section from the article, after an avalanche of racism by readers, according to reverbpress.
Although the comments are now hidden, Addicting Info managed to take several screenshots of the hatefulness posted some on the news site. Typos and grammatical errors have been included as per the original:
I wonder if she applied as a muDslime..or a foreign student..or just a N—–
According to the screenshot, this comment garnered the most likes from other users, managing to combine three different groups of people into one racist sentence.
A new study which locates the origin of Yiddish and in fact, the Ashkenazim, in Eastern Turkey is interesting not only for the implications it has for Jewish origins and behavior, but because it has correspondence with the origin of the parent haplogroup of Jews.
However, the hypothesis that Jews have origins other than the Middle East presents problems and opportunities when looking at ways to deal with conflicts with them. When and how did Jews take on attributes that cause us problems? What to do about it based on the facts?
Fausette’s “niche theory” of the development of Jewish virulence traces the origin of their infamous rootless and parasitic behavior to the Babylonian captivity - thereafter, they returned to Palestine/Israel and occupied managerial niches over the sedentary populations; thus evolving a parasitic relation to native peoples.
If we take a look back further along their genetic line, to the origin of J1 in Eastern Turkey, however, their characteristic rootless and mercantile nature might predate and indicate that that Jewish evolution may have imposed itself on the Middle East having already mutated the characteristic form prior to the Babylonian captivity.
Another well known hypothesis of non-Middle East origin of characteristic Jewish peoplehood is The Khazar hypothesis made popular by Arthur Koestler. While Khazaria was much later than the Babylonian captivity and a bit to the east of eastern Turkey, the temperament that the Caucus mutations have given rise-to do have family resemblance to Jewish behavior. Inasmuch as the theory holds true, it could throw some predictive light on them.
Being of pragmatic disposition, I tend to be averse to the hypothesis that Jews are of Khazarian origin. The practical reasons to reject the hypothesis that I have in mind are firstly, to go along with the preponderance of genetic evidence which currently organizes them as Middle Eastern peoples. That goes to the second reason to be averse to theories of alternative, e.g., Khazar origins: the purpose to locate Jews both genetically and geographically in order to hold them to account, curb the shenanigans of their sundry diaspora - what Bowery has referred to as their horizontal transmission - which is the idea based on the niche hypothesis that their exiles and border crossings only select for their non-sedentary, parasitic characteristics. The solution that he proposes is that they be compelled to stay in one place and develop “vertical transmission”, a non-parasitic, viz., symbiotic relation with a particular land. Nevertheless, we certainly do not want to propose that their rightful place is among European lands and to allow them to continue their exploits among us; nor would it necessarily do us any particular good to see them return to the lands of ancient Khazaria or somewhere else in the near east, even if that is where they are from.
Even so, while it may not be convenient for those of us who’d like to see them all forced to go to Israel, stay there and perhaps develop some vertical transmission, we might need to have a deeper understanding of their motives and their place (or non-place, as it were) in order to come to a better concept of how to deal with them as they are, and as the facts are, whether in Israel or in diaspora.
I suppose that those who find the Khazar hypothesis appealing might be motivated from the opposite direction - that we might be able to put an end to the trouble that they are causing in the Middle East by denying their warrant to be there; and eventually perhaps diffuse their virulence by its assimilation or dying-off.
Whatever we might want, however, facts won’t necessarily bear it out. Nevertheless, there are important matters of historical punctuation, viz., when and where Jews begin as a people; and there is our capacity to determine how the facts count surrounding any such assertions: Jewish claims are assailable indeed; their claims are within our negotiative control and subject to our agentive preference. Operational verifiability will only assist us to warrantably assert our preferences.
First, let’s take a quick look at the kind of argument that is being made against the Khazar hypothesis:
And indeed, Kevin MacDonald et al. argue persuasively for the genetic and geographical location of the origin of Jews in the Middle East. KM and Duke argue that there’re only one or two (unreliable, they say), genetic studies that endorse the Khazar hypothesis, while scores, they say, verify ME origins.
Patrick Slattery argues that there are two massively difficult conversions that would have to have been made to underpin the Khazar hypothesis: first, a mass of people held to become the Ashkenazi would have had to convert to Judaism. Next and an even greater challenge, is to explain why people who are held to have originated in Khazaria spoke Yiddish - a largely Germanic language
Now, GW has raised very valid points about characteristic temperament and other kinds of special relation that Jews have to the area.
He has responded:
Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 03 Apr 2015 16:18 | #
1. The Mosaic faith developed specifically as a survival mechanism in captivity, and developed through the Babylonian and Roman periods as such. For any people which has lost its guarantor of group survival - its land - and faces a permanent exile, with a future holding no more than an inevitable process of persecution and genetic dissolution, a mass conversion to Judaism is a perfectly logical choice.
Groups are capable, under stress, of taking immense decisions, including to suicide en masse. We should not regard mass conversion to a foreign faith as simply impossible.
2. Yiddish is an artificially-constructed language rooted in the languages of the host, particularly in the east, but containing influences from Hebrew and Aramaic which may simply originate in the oral faith tradition.
Again, while it isn’t quite Khazaria, it isn’t far from it either, and looking at this new GPS hypothesis, Eastern Turkey and surrounds show relevance to Ashkenazi origins and behavior after and perhaps before the Babylonian captivity. Interesting also is the fact that this study contradicts Slattery’s understanding of Yiddish as a mostly German derived language. The study below asserts that German words were merely added to an underlying language, the fundamental grammatical structure of which came from the East.
If we are willing to go to more ancient times, well prior to Khazaria, the fountain head of J1 does indicate an origin in Eastern Turkey (neither far nor very different climes from Khazaria) - viz., “the greatest genetic diversity of J1 haplotypes was found in eastern Anatolia, near Lake Van in central Kurdistan.”
The only problem with arguing non-ME origins for Jews is that it seems more helpful to middle-easterners than to Europeans. On the contrary, it could spread them around more and amongst us (e.g., from Turkey up into Eastern Ukraine!) - that is the last thing we might want when we need to quarantine them.
Want or not, however, it might even have some explanatory value for their influence on the margins of the Near East: In the Ukrainian - Russian war, for example; and their predictable role on both sides. Both Ukraine and ancient Khazaria would be appealing targets as a strategic and valuable real estate for them with some historical affinity as well as by being a place to put the products of Jewish men’s whore-mongering - prostitution is legal in Israel but the bastard products are not legally entitled by Israel to citizenship - they are not born of a Jewish mother. Where better to put them? Many of their mothers are Ukrainian or Russian, from these areas.
However, if we can pinpoint some of their characteristics virulence to mutations having occurred along the Silk Road in Eastern Turkey, that might help us to identify other anti-bodies to their virulence.
The origin of the Yiddish language (spoken at least since the 9th century A.D.), and consequently Yiddish speakers, has been debated for the past several centuries, mainly between linguists. While the Rhineland hypothesis suggests a German origin, the Irano-Turko-Slavic hypothesis, proposed by Paul Wexler, suggests a more complex origin starting with Slavic lands in Khazaria, followed by Ukraine, and finally Germany where the language was relexified, i.e., adopted a German vocabulary, but retained its Slavic grammar, which is why Yiddish was oftentimes called “Bad German.”
GPS predictions for the DNA of Ashkenazic Jews (orange triangles) overlap villages whose name may be derived from the word “Ashkenaz” that reside along the Silk Roads and other trade routes. GPS predictions for the DNA of Iranian (yellow triangles) and Mountain (pink triangles) Jews are also shown.
To evaluate these two hypotheses we applied the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool to the genomes of over 360 sole Yiddish and non-Yiddish speaking Ashkenazic Jews. This is the largest study of Ashkenazic Jews and the first one to study Yiddish speakers. Surprisingly, GPS honed in an obscure region in northeast Turkey. There we found four primeval villages (one was abandoned in the mid-7th century A.D.) whose name may be derived from the word “Ashkenaz,” suggesting that this was the central location of ancient Ashkenaz.
The search for ancient Ashkenaz has been one of the longest quests in human history lasting at least 1000 years (perhaps second only to Noah’s Ark that has been searched at least since the 3rd century A.D.). This is the only place in the world with these placenames and they cluster within a hub of atrade routes, as can be expected from a nation of traders where linguistic, genomic, historic, and geographic evidence converge.
Evidently, the ancient Ashkenazic Jews were merchants who, together with Iranian Jews, plied land and maritime trade routes and invented Yiddish as a secret language with 251 words for “buy” and “sell” to maintain their monopoly. They were known to trade in everything from fur to slaves. These findings are consistent with historical records depicting Jews as merchants. Indeed, by the 8th century the words “Jew” and “merchant” were practically synonymous. Around that time, Ashkenazic Jews began relocating to the Khazar Empire to expand their mercantile operations. Consequently, some of the Turkic Khazar rulers and the numerous Eastern Slavs in the Khazar Empire converted to Judaism to participate in the lucrative Silk Road trade between Germany and China.
After the fall of Khazaria (10-13th ce) Ashkenazic Jews split into two groups. Some remained in the Caucasus and others migrated into Eastern Europe and Germany that has been incorrectly proposed to be the original land of Ashkenaz. The two groups still call themselves Ashkenazic Jews, however the name became more strongly associated with the latter group. After their separation Yiddish became the primary language among European Jews and underwent relexification by adopting a new vocabulary that consists of a minority of German and Hebrew and a majority of newly coined Germanoid and Hebroid elements that replaced most of the original E. Slavic and Sorbian vocabularies, while keeping the original grammars intact.
Further evidence to the origin of AJs can be found in the many customs and their names concerning the Jewish religion, which were probably introduced by Slavic converts to Judaism, like the breaking of a glass at a wedding ceremony and placing stones over tombstones.
Our study demonstrate the potential of the GPS technology combined with citizen Science to shed light on the forgotten chapters of our history.
Eran Elhaik
University of Sheffield, Department of Animal and Plant Sciences
Sheffield, UK
Steve Mnuchin, derived fortune at Goldman Sachs
Moldova
