Comments below:
-----Original Message-----
From: John Bizwas [mailto:bizwas at lycos.com]
Sent: Sun 9/26/2004 8:59 PM
Cc:
Subject: [lbo-talk] RE: We Need More Jews!
Reply to Chip B.
1. Please don't quote my entire message in order to make such a short reply yourself. It isn't good listmanship on any list I've been on, and to a careless reader it makes me look like the culprit of text bloat.
Sorry.
= = =
John Bizwas:
2. I think there are a couple points worth addressing again outside of your debunkiing of guys who have already been debunked or taken to task in a scholarly way. One, as I said, another source of the misuse of these genetic studies are the Zionists themselves. Follow their reasoning over Ashkenazi Jews. All Jews demonstrably come from Palestine (cite and misuse and misinterpret this or that study that traces Y-lined genetic markers, or maternal mitochondrial DNA). Or, they say, all of Palestine was Israelites (who were forced to convert to Islam). This denies centuries of intermingling of peoples in Europe; it denies inward migrations into Palestine or cultural and linguistic diversity in ancient Palestine. Further, it denies the multiple sources of European (including Polish, Russian, Ukraine, Caucasus) Jewish cultures. And it's easy to see why they are doing this. They wish to justify by any means they can the current racist state of Israel in Palestine (no matter how self
-contradictory, such as mixing archaeology with incomplete history with misinterpreted genetics with religious myth with zionist nationalism with exclusivist concepts of 'democracy and human rights' with all-out anti-Arabism).
Chip Berlet:
It is clear that some White supremacist Christian U.S. nationalists embrace similar pseudo-scientific claims about the Khazars (and other Jewish populations) as some ultra-Zionists--although the latter tend to make the argument based on migrations through the Caucuses rather than mass conversion. This is probably a good argument for what is wrong with racial nationalism in the first place. I never thought you were in either category, and originally just was trying to point out that Veli-cranksky and Koestler were not reliable sources for any serious discussion on the Khazars. This was not aimed at you. You clearly have studied the issues, which is quite unusual. I subscribe to most of what you have posted as your views. The elite conversion was probably followed by both more extensive conversion in the population and migration and intermarriage over a long period. But if someone is a racial nationalist, this is too messy; and to preserve the absurd racial nationalist claims one has to make the claim that some "racial" continuity exists. This is the same mess that muddles the issue of the Aryan. One can follow the linguistic family from India to "Persia" to Ireland. But if you argue it is a racial migration, you can end up with Wagner and Hitler infusing Norse myth with pseudo-scientific racialism.