Canadian Arab News Much like the U.S. banking industry, Israel’s propaganda industry is facing collapse. The “currency” of zionist propaganda is irredeemably debased and The Lobby faces a dwindling market for its propaganda, especially among Jews and Jewish academics. Last September, a study by the American Jewish Committee found a growing generational chasm between older and younger U.S Jews. It found that only 48% under age 35 believe that Israel’s destruction would be a personal tragedy for them, compared to 77% of those 65 and older. In addition, only 54% under 35 are comfortable with the idea of a Jewish State, as opposed to 81% of those 65 and older. The study’s authors concluded the trend is part of a long-term irreversible slide because attachment to Israel does not grow with age. This latter point should be self-evident given that Israel no longer even feigns interest in peace; it now openly rationalizes collective punishment and Nazi-like extermination practices. Deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened to respond to Qassam rocket attacks with a holocaust[shoah] against Gaza. In the wake of a Palestinian attack on the racist Mercaz Harav rabbinical seminary, former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu called for retaliation: “The life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs.” New organizations like European Jews for a Just Peace and the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians are giving voice to rising Jewish opposition to zionist terrorism, and are symptomatic of The Lobby’s declining credibility and inability to make a coherent defence for Israel as a necessary haven for all Jews. Because Israel is indefensible, any accurate exposé of its behaviour is met by hysterical overreaction and character assassination, such as happened to me. In my last column, I showed how the Lobby attacked the Vancouver Library for allowing me to present my book The Host and The Parasite—How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America. As a result, City Librarian Paul Whitney pulled all advertising for my talk claiming a fear of vandalism, barely mentioned me in his introduction, and slagged me in the media. He said his comments were misreported but refused to demand clarification because he had received an additional 200 hostile e-mails demanding that the Library disassociate itself from me. Given the events leading up to the talk, the demand was clearly gratuitous. At the time I also mentioned that on Feb. 12 local scribbler Terry Glavin defamed me in the Vancouver Sun. On the advice of legal counsel, I will not respond at this time to specific defamations and lies because of a planned libel action against CanWest. However, two aspects of Glavin’s rant deserve mention, for they illustrate how fear of informed dissent is leading The Lobby to shoot itself in the foot at the same time it’s shooting off its mouth. Ostensibly, the event that provoked Glavin’s outburst was my book, but you’d never know it by what he wrote. Here’s an excerpt from his blog: “I didn't write about the contents of Felton's book, and I never claimed to… I’ve read excerpts of Felton’s book. I’m fully conversant with its thesis…, and I’m quite familiar with the Medieval legends that Felton persists in reporting as fact. This is ‘intellectual’? These are his ‘views’? I’ve spent far too much time reading through Felton’s voluminous ouevre [sic] to insult anyone’s intelligence by stooping to mount a condemnation, spirited or otherwise, of anything he writes.” Translation: “I am going to fulminate against Greg Felton and his book on principle even though I have not conducted any research to show that anything he said is inaccurate.”
First, Glavin is not “fully conversant” with my book’s thesis because he misrepresents it, but since he acted out of ignorance—by his own admission—I could hardly expect accuracy. But this offence is minor compared to Glavin’s spectacular act of self-immolation concerning the Khazars: “Europe’s Jews aren’t Jews at all, Felton wrote. Almost all of them are ‘Khazars,’ a long-extinct Turkic tribe from somewhere north of the Caspian Sea. The Khazar legend was a staple of 1930s-era European racism. Long after it had been wholly discredited by geneticists, linguists, archeologists and historians, the lie was revived by late 20th-century neo-Nazis… “For Israel’s more conspiracy-prone enemies, the Khazar legend completely delegitimizes the notion of Israel as a Jewish homeland. That’s how Felton employs it, and he gets extra mileage out of it as further evidence of the world’s real, hushed-up history, which the Jews don’t want you to know.” For those of you new to the subject, here’s a quick history: The Khazars, a Turko-Finnic people, migrated out of the Caucasus in the second century.Their kingdom, Khazaria, became one of the most powerful trading powers of the first millennium and at its height reached from Georgia to Ukraine. In AD 740, the khagan (king) of Khazaria decided that paganism wasn’t good enough for his people and decided to adopt one of the “heavenly” religions: Judaism, Christianity or Islam. After a process of elimination he chose Judaism, and from that point it became the official religion.
The history of Khazaria is well documented, as is the conversion to Judaism. The medieval documents are extant and scholarly works have been written about the Khazars, most notably Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), Kevin Alan Brook’s The Jews of Khazaria (1999), The Jewish Encyclopedia (see under “Chazars”) as well as www.khazaria.com, which has numerous links to history, documentation and modern descendants. Adding to the scholarship of the Khazar Jews are two Tel Aviv University professors. Linguist Paul Wechsler argues in his book The Ashkenazic ‘Jews’ A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity that Ashkenazic Jews are predominantly converted Slavs and Turks who merged with a tiny population of Palestinian Jews. He also says that Yiddish started out as a Slavic language and became progressively Germanized, since Yiddish and Medieval Jewish have no common origin. Historian Professor Shlomo Sand goes even further and argues that the idea of a Jewish national identity dating to Biblical times is nothing more than a national mythology manufactured in 19th-century Germany: “At the beginning of the 20th century there is a tremendous concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe—three million Jews in Poland alone. The Zionist historiography claims that their origins are in the earlier Jewish community in Germany, but they do not succeed in explaining how a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms could have founded the Yiddish people of Eastern Europe. The Jews of Eastern Europe are a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward.” Moreover, he traces the idea of a Jewish national identity to the same atavistic chauvinism that gave us German nationalism, which further shows that nazism and zionism have a common origin, Given the uncontestable fact of the Khazar empire, as well as the specious equation of Israel with Jewish history, let’s look again at Glavin’s, ahem, criticisms of my writing: “The Khazar legend was a staple of 1930s-era European racism. Long after it had been wholly discredited by geneticists, linguists, archeologists and historians, the lie was revived by late 20th-century neo-Nazis…” • Is Glavin calling the linguist Wechsler and the historian Sand neo-nazis and liars? The most remarkable aspect of Glavin’s rant is its desperate stupidity. My book has nothing to do with Khazars. Glavin had to dig out an irrelevant 10-year old column, distort it, and then use that distortion to try to discredit me and my book, which he could not bother reading. It's as if accuracy were irrelevant. These are indeed desperate, frightening times for The Lobby.
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