GORDON DUFF: WHY ATTACKING HELEN THOMAS IS ANTISEMITISM

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“LUCY, YOU GOT SOME ‘SPLAININ TO DO..”

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Part of our continuing series, “Everything You Think You Know You Learned From A Liar,” we are going to talk a bit, a short talk as it is the holiday season, about Semites.  Semites are people from the Middle East,  not a race, but a language group.  There is no Semite or Semitic race and never has been.  There are Semites, however,  They are people who speak Semitic languages or, if we want to apply a more modern and inaccurate definition, folks from areas where those languages, Akkadian, Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Ge’ez, Hebrew, Maltese, Phoenician, Tigre and Tigrinya and several others were spoken.

Hebrew is one of these and Jews who come from areas where Hebrew was spoken, in continuity, as a language, can be Semites as are all Arabic speakers.  Since half the Hebrew speakers, anecdotally of course are Americans and Arabic speakers are spread across the world, it is fair to pull the borders in, let’s say from Ethiopia to Turkey to the border of Iran and into the Arabian Peninsula.

So, when you are talking about Antisemitism, you are talking about people who hate folks from that region, a racial mix of fully African to generally Middle Eastern.  Of course, when we use a linguistic group to describe a racial or religious division, we have automatically become liars.  When Israel welcomes Jews from Africa, they are welcoming pure Semites, maybe the purest Semites in all of Israel.

So, how does this apply to Helen Thomas?  Remember when she said that she wanted the Jews from Germany and Poland and Russia to go back home?  Helen Thomas is a ProSemite.  She may now be considered an extremist, a 90 year old rights activist dedicated to the Semite cause.  The problem is, her definition of “Semite” is inclusive and others is, can we be kind and say, “selective?”

PROSEMITE, HELEN THOMAS

Her issue, of course, is that she believes that Zionism, the belief by Jews that all “original Semitic regions,” constitute “Greater Israel” and are the exclusive domain of what they consider an exclusive racial group that also practices the religion of Judaism.  “Greater Israel” is, as Zionists describe it, all lands from the Nile in Egypt to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and south, including the Arabian Peninsula.  This, pretty much, covers the regions of the original language group, the Semites, noticeably leaving out Ethiopia and other regions of Africa.  As for why these areas are omitted, we have our suspicions based on more than a bit of controversy within Israel about “racial purity” and “African blood” but that’s another story for another day.

Thomas insists that “settlers” who are displacing Palestinians, pure “Semites” if there really is such a thing, which we know there isn’t, are mostly European.  Despite attempts by pseudo-science to claim there is a Jewish gene, one some claim is tied to the last surviving Neanderthals, who fled to the Caucasus Mountains, no real ties between Jews and Neanderthals has ever been established.  Neanderthals, with their larger brains and aggressive nature, well, we don’t need to go there.  This kind of thinking befits the people who used to predict criminal behavior by measuring heads and checking for bumps.  Phrenology?

THIS IS THE BEST PART

There isn’t a shred of real evidence that the Palestinians living in Judea when Israel became a state in 1947 hadn’t originally been Jews, many converted to Christianity and more later converted to Islam.  After the Jewish revolt of 132-5 CE, Hadrian tried to expel the Jews.  However, all he accomplished was changing the name of Judea to Syria-Palaestinia.  The Jews remained.  They are still there, living behind a 20 foot wall, land mines, barbed wire, living in Gaza, some, while others are in refugee camps in Lebanon or Jordan and some are still practicing Judaism.  Welcome to the wonderful world of Historical Revisionism, Israeli style.

To the majority of Semites, whatever religion they were to embrace eventually, they shared some common influences, Hellenic certainly, later Byzantine and during the 7th Century onward, that of Islam.  There was clearly a broad acceptance of Christianity among Jews.  In 636, when Islam Muslims arrived in Jerusalem, it was an entirely Christian city.  It wasn’t until the 11th century, Caliph Hakim VI (who believed himself to be a god), that the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher led to a series of Crusades, ever changing the political perceptions of the relationships in the region.

From that time to the beginning of the 20th century, almost every version of the history of the region you will read is total fabrication, no matter whose position it supports.  We know the Ottoman Empire brought Jews from Europe to help with administration.  Zionist sources claim these Jews from Germany, Poland, Russia and other areas of Eastern Europe had been driven there by the Romans during the early 2nd century.  There is no proof of this, quite the contrary.  There is, however, considerable proof that these Jews were of Khazar ancestry.

KHAZARS

There is considerable controversy about the Khazars simply because most Jews alive today, perhaps well beyond “most” are of Khazar ancestry.  Around 740 CE, a kingdom formed of tribal groups in Southern Russia, extending from Kazakhstan on the east to well into Eastern Europe on the west, the Ukraine, Belarus, Slovakia, Romania, Serbia, Moldova, even much of Hungary, chose to convert to Judaism.  The regions covered by the vast Khazarian Empire included peoples of the Steppes, Turks but also the Slavic and even Nordic groups.  For 200 years, this Jewish culture flourished but was eventually crushed, overrun and displaced.  However, that culture and the Khazar Jews didn’t disappear, they simply stopped existing as a nation.

The Khazar Empire lasted into the 10th century, had a total population in the many millions with a proud history.  While Charles Martel was stopping Islam from overrunning Europe in the West, it was the Khazars that kept Europe as Christian by blocking Muslim expansion into Europe from the east.

However, Zionist groups trying to ascribe “Semitic” ancestry to European Jews, despite their totally European appearance, have advanced wild theories to explain how, during the Roman era, Jews were resettled across, well, Khazaria and as far west as the Rhine River in Germany. These theories minimize and erase the Khazars for no other reason than to attempt to establish European Jews as “Semites” is a useful ploy in answering attacks on ethnic cleansing policies brought against Israel.  Khazars are inferior Jews, it is claimed, because they lack “Semitic blood.”  But, as we explained earlier, there are only Semitic languages, there is no such thing as “Semitic Blood.”

It is far easier and so much more profitable to credit Eastern Europe and Russia’s large Jewish population to bizarre theories of Roman era emigration than to the startling fact that those groups directly overlay the former Khazar Empire.  This attempt to erase Khazarian history in order to justify removal of Palestinians based on wild suppositions about the racial ancestry of European practitioners of the Jewish religion an absurd and unsupportable hypothesis.  That hundreds of academics, several Nobel Prize winners, have published “race based” papers supporting these suppositions is adequate reason to doubt all race based scholarship.  Race based scholarship is, in fact, racism.

Zionists support the theory that,  in and around 135 CE,  Jews were expelled from Judea and resettled throughout the Roman Empire,  thus accounting for the Jewish populations in Eastern Europe and Russia. Perhaps, might have wanted to have taken time to view a map of the Roman world of that era.  Check the Empire’s northern borders from that period against what we know to be Jewish population patterns in Europe;

When one takes into account that this border was only held for a short period of time and that the many of the frontier regions were sparely settled, largely by former Roman soldiers, one or two questions might come to mind.  There is no evidence of Jewish settlements in remote regions of the Empire nor is their evidence that Jews in significant numbers fled Israel to live among the Gothic tribes.

This map depicting Jewish populations in Europe as supplied by the ADL, (Anti-Defamation League) gives clear ideas as to size and distribution of Europe’s Jewish population prior to the Holocaust.  If the maps are superimposed, a pattern emerges placing Europe’s Jews either within the borders of Khazaria or close but distinctly outside the any areas of long term Roman control or established non-military settlements.

PALESTINE

At the beginning of the 20th century, almost the entire population of Palestine were Semites.  Of Palestine’s Semitic population of 700,000, approximately 70,000 or 10% were Jews.  The majority were Muslim and Christian Semites.

Again, we return to the Helen Thomas issue.  If Palestinian Semites, many, maybe even most of original Jewish “stock,”  are forcibly removed from their land because of misconceptions regarding their race and replaced by European Jews who claim Semitic ancestry, what are the issues?

• Can land be taken from one group of Semites and given to another group of Semites based on religion?  Is this not a violation of Article II of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which Israel is signatory?

Article 2.

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

• Is there, perhaps, some history of colonial exploitation, ethnic cleansing and mass murder based on interpretations of the wishes of invisible supreme beings?  Haven’t such practices been widely discredited?  With, literally tens of thousands such beings currently worshiped by the people of member states in the United Nations, everything from shark gods to statues with arms and legs coming from every direction, can we fairly establish a criteria for which being has the authority of life and death over the worshipers of another?  Doesn’t Article II apply here also?
• Whether Jews wanting to settle in Palestine are or are not of ethnicity directly related to one  of the Semitic language groups of the Middle East, how does this diminish the rights of any other person or group?  The idea of wanting to establish that European Jews settling in Palestine have superior legal status because of “Semitic” ancestry is, in itself, reasonable proof of intent to use this status, real or imagined, to violate the basic human rights of others.

‘BACK WHERE WE CAME FROM’

Helen Thomas may have stepped a bit far when telling people to “go back to where they came from.”  She grew up in Detroit but is from a Lebanese-American family.  In fact, not only are we all from some place else, when we go back far enough, none of us can guess where that might be.  Out of convenience, I guess, some groups claim all life goes back only some 6000 years.

The real issue isn’t European Jews who settled in Israel returning to Europe.  The issue is the removal of an existing population, Semites for sure, of Jewish ancestry in all likelihood, because members of an technologically and particularly militarily advanced society have the power to take what they wish and believe they can use race and historical fabrication, no matter how shoddy and haphazard, to cover their tracks.

I can’t imagine many people who are in a position to criticize Helen Thomas for a minor misstatement.  What is clear is that those who attack Helen Thomas do so as in order to cover crimes against humanity as outlined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Gordon Duff

Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.

Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.

Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.

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