INDEPENDENTLY RESEARCHED AND VERIFIED

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

BREAKING NEWS: President Obama Declares War in Iraq to Be Over



Obama ends Iraq combat effort: Time to turn page
By BEN FELLER, AP White House Correspondent

2 mins ago

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is telling the nation in a prime-time Oval Office address that the U.S. is officially ending its combat role in Iraq, a final turning point in one of the country's longest wars.

He said Tuesday night, in his words, "I am mindful that the Iraq war has been a contentious issue at home" and that "it is time to turn the page."

Obama said he called former President George W. Bush, who began the war with the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Obama, an anti-war activist, said that he and Bush had disagreed about the war but there was no doubt about Bush's support for U.S. troops, his love of country or commitment to America's security.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Opposed to the war from the start, President Barack Obama on Tuesday formally ended the U.S. combat role in Iraq as promised, declaring: "It is time to turn the page." He said the nation's most urgent priority must be fixing its own economy.

In advance excerpts of his prime-time speech to the nation, Obama said the United States "has paid a huge price" to give Iraqis the chance to shape their future. That toll has included more than 4,400 dead, tens of thousands of troops wounded and hundreds of billions of dollars spent since March 2003.

"Ending this war is not only in Iraq's interest — it is in our own," Obama said.

Yet for all the finality, the war is not over, and the American sacrifice will continue.

Obama is keeping up to 50,000 troops in Iraq for support and counterterrorism training, and the last forces are not due to leave until the end of 2011 at the latest. Still, he sought to mark Aug. 31, 2010, as a milestone in one of the defining chapters in recent American history.

In a telling sign of the domestic troubles weighing on the U.S., Obama reserved part of his war address to campaign for his efforts to revitalize the economy.

On a night focused on his role as commander in chief, he said his "central responsibility as president" was to get people back to work.

The ending of the combat mission on this date had been known for 18 months. Given the stakes, the toll in American lives and dollars and the long consuming debate, Obama sought to explain it to the country.

"Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country," Obama said. He made sure to remind the nation that he had promised to meet this goal and shrink U.S. involvement by now, "and that is what we have done."

Obama's rise to the presidency was built in part on his fierce opposition to the war, an American-led endeavor that lost public support as it rolled on and American casualties rose. Obama has long held that the war inflamed anti-American sentiments abroad and stole resources from the fight in Afghanistan.

In a defense of his foreign policy, Obama said capping the combat mission in Iraq would send a message to the world that the U.S. "intends to sustain and strengthen our leadership."

Obama sought to close a divisive chapter without declaring victory.

His opposition to the war presented him with a tricky moment — standing firm in his position without disparaging the sacrifice and courage of those who fought.

On Tuesday he was intent on assuring the nation and the stretched military that all the work and bloodshed in Iraq was not in vain, declaring that because of it "America is more secure."

Though the U.S. commitment in Iraq is winding down, Obama is sending more troops to Afghanistan, the home base of the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida terrorists, where Americans have been fighting for nearly nine years.

"It is going to be a tough slog," Obama said of Afghanistan in remarks earlier Tuesday to soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said success in Afghanistan was possible but "is not inevitable."

Tuesday night, the president's speech was never intended to be celebratory.

"It's not going to be a victory lap," Obama said at Fort Bliss, a post that has lost 51 soldiers in the Iraq war. "It's not going to be self-congratulatory. There's still a lot of work that we've got to do to make sure that Iraq is an effective partner with us."

In fact, Iraq is in political turmoil, its leaders unable to form a new government long after March elections that left no clear winner. In Baghdad on Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden pressed Iraqi leaders anew to break the impasse. The uncertainty has left an opening for insurgents to pound Iraqi security forces, hardly the conditions the U.S. envisioned for this transition deadline, which Obama announced 18 months ago.

Since the war began, more than 4,400 U.S. troops have been killed and almost 32,000 have been wounded. The war is one of the longest in the nation's history, even as the one in Afghanistan continues.

Obama's big day was defined by what it was — a turning point, a promise kept — and by what it was not.

It is not the end of the war. More U.S. troops are likely to die.

All U.S. troops are not expected to leave Iraq until the end of 2011, a final agreement that was secured before Obama took office.

Obama has accelerated the end of the U.S. role in Iraq by pulling home nearly 100,000 troops.

The American public has largely moved on. The prevailing worry now is joblessness at home.

Almost forgotten are the intense passions and protests that defined the Iraq debate through much of the past decade. Or that lawmakers of both parties authorized President George W. Bush to go to war.

What emerged was not just a war but a Bush doctrine of pre-emptive force against perceived threats, one that reshaped how the world viewed the United States. In Iraq, the intelligence that made the case for war was faulty; no weapons of mass destruction were ever found.

Saddam Hussein was toppled, and Iraqis now live in greater freedom, but those were not the rationales for war. The aim was, as Bush put it in his own Oval Office address in 2003, "to defend the world from grave danger."

The national focus has turned to Afghanistan and to the staggering economy in the U.S. In particular, weeks ahead of a vital congressional election in the U.S., Obama wants Americans to see a linkage between getting out of Iraq and investing more money at home.

A major thrust of Obama's speech was to honor the service of U.S. troops and civilian workers in Iraq. Another was to assure Iraqis that the United States is not abandoning them.

And yet another mission was to remind the country, in Obama's view, about where the true threats to national security lie, including in Afghanistan.

Just 38 percent of people support the war in Afghanistan, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll, and only 19 percent think things will get better in the next year. On Iraq, unsurprisingly, Obama finds more support in pulling troops home: 68 percent approve of his ending the formal combat mission.

The cost has been financial, too. Congress has allotted more than $1 trillion for both wars.

The Iraq war linked Obama and Bush before the Democrat won the White House, and has ever since.

Fittingly, Obama called Bush on Tuesday to talk about this moment in the war. It is more than seven years after the former president declared that major combat operations were over.

The White House said the call was private and would not say more.

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Monday, August 30, 2010

THE KHAZAR THEORY DEFENDED



Scholarly opinions in favor of the Khazar theory (FROM JEWISH SOURCES)

The idea that Khazars contributed to a certain extent to the gene pool of Eastern European Jewry has been, and still is, championed by a large number of legitimate folklorists and historians, as well as by popular authors. Below is a collection of their viewpoints.

"Is it not probable that among the four millions of Russian Jews, thousands can be traced to the old nomads of the steppes? The study of the Jewish types of Poland and Little-Russia inclines us to believe so. A Finno-Turkish blend seems to be common among them."

- Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, in Israel Among the Nations: A Study of the Jews and Antisemitism (London: William Heinemann, 1904), page 118.

"The strangest fact is that the name of the Ashkenazim, the bulk whom I see as the descendents of the Khazars, points towards the old grounds of the Khazars around the Caucasus... According to the explanation by the Talmud, Ashkenaz thus means a country near the Black Sea between Ararat and the Caucasus, within the original region of the Khazar empire. The name with which the Sefardim indicate their co-religionists from Poland already gives the explanation for the real descent, from the countries in the Caucasus."

- Hugo Freiherr von Kutschera, in Die Chasaren: Historische Studie (Vienna: A. Holzhausen, 1910).

"[Isaac Bär] Levinsohn was the first to express the opinion that the Russian Jews hailed, not from Germany, as is commonly supposed, but from the banks of the Volga. This hypothesis, corroborated by tradition, Harkavy established as a fact. Originally the vernacular of the Jews of Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev was Russian and Polish, or, rather, the two being closely allied, Palaeo-Slavonic. The havoc wrought by the Crusades in the Jewish communities of Western Europe caused a constant stream of German-Jewish immigrants to pour, since 1090, into the comparatively free countries of the Slavonians. RussoPoland became the America of the Old World. The Jewish settlers from abroad soon outnumbered the native Jews, and they spread a new language and new customs wherever they established themselves. Whether the Jews of Russia were originally pagans from the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas, converted to Judaism under the Khazars during the eighth century, or Palestinian exiles subjugated by their Slavonian conquerors and assimilated with them, it is indisputable that they inhabited what we know to-day as Russia long before the Varangian prince Rurik came, at the invitation of Scythian and Sarmatian savages, to lay the foundation of the Muscovite empire. In Feodosia there is a synagogue at least a thousand years old. The Greek inscription on a marble slab, dating back to 80-81 B. C. E., preserved in the Imperial Hermitage in St. Petersburg, makes it certain that they flourished in the Crimea before the destruction of the Temple."

- Jacob S. Raisin, in The Haskalah Movement in Russia (The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1913), pages 18-19.

"...[The Khazars] spread far and wide to the west and northwest, their modern descendants probably forming the preponderant element among the east European Jews."

- Roland B. Dixon, in The Racial History of Man (New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923)

"We are told of a large tribe of Tartars called the Khazars, who in the eighth century were converted to Judaism and established a Jewish kingdom in southern Russia. Although that kingdom was destroyed by the Russians in the tenth century, no doubt many of the descendants of the Khazars were still living in the region. And no doubt they readily greeted their brethren as they came flocking in from Germany."

- Lewis Browne, in Stranger Than Fiction: A Short History of the Jews from Earliest Times to the Present Day (Macmillan, 1925), pages 237-238.

"The fashion of dismissing the tale about the Khozars as also incredible and therefore untrue is no longer in vogue. Inasmuch as the famous poet philosopher Judah Halevi (1085-1140) founded his Cuzari on the Khozars, the tale was thought to be merely the poetical offspring of his imagination. But history has now accepted the account as undoubtedly true and attributes some of the characteristics of the Russian Jew as due to their descent from Tartars, converted to Judaism, rather than from Jews even of the lost Ten Tribes."

- Elkan Nathan Adler, in Jewish Travellers (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1930), page xiii.

"At about the same time that the Mohammedans had conquered Spain, the king of a people, called Khazars, had become dissatisfied with worshipping idols, and had become a Jew. A great many of his lords, generals, and soldiers had done likewise. Rabbis were then invited to come and teach Jewish laws and customs to the Jewish Khazars. During the two hundred years of the existence of this Jewish kingdom, most of the Khazars had learned the Jewish religion and were living in accordance with its laws. Hasdai rejoiced greatly to learn of the kingdom of the Khazars. Unfortunately, the Russians destroyed it a few years later. You are probably wondering: ''What happened to the Jewish Khazars?'' Some of them mingled with the other Jews of Russia, and the others gradually forgot their Judaism and became Christians."

- Mordechai I. Soloff, in How the Jewish People Grew Up (Cincinnati, OH: The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1936), pages 219, 221.

"Dr. [Itzhak] Schipper believes that diffusion of Jewish Khazarian elements into the Polish kingdom appeared only after the Khazarian kingdom fell. A lot of documents and different town-names attest to the early Jewish immigration to Poland.... At the same time there was another Jewish immigration and colonization from the west, from Germany. Lots of antagonism existed between the eastern and western Jewish immigrants because there were different types of city-buildings.... Polish land was covered mostly with forests, especially in the North and West with wetlands and quagmire, so there was little population. The Khazar people, usually peasants, used primitive tools and were people with less culture. There was antagonism with the more advanced German Jews."

- Emmanuel Ringelblum, in Z'ydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej, edited by Aryeh Hafftka, Itzhak Schipper, and Aleksander Tartakower (Warsaw, 1936), page 38.

"In the early Middle Ages a powerful state, inhabited by the Khazars, existed on the coast of the Black Sea; and early in the eighth century Buland, ruler of the Khazars, formally adopted the Jewish religion. Subsequently this country, like so many other areas of Eastern Europe, was absorbed by the growing power of the Kingdom of Kiev. To the present day the Mongoloid features noticeable among the Polish Jews would indicate that, after the downfall of this Eastern European Jewish state, some, probably the ruling classes, migrated to Poland. Some anthropologists, however, attribute such features to the Mongol invasions."

- Raymond Leslie Buell, in Poland: Key to Europe (New York, NY: A.A. Knopf, 1939), pages 288-289.

"The capital city and lands of the Chazars were finally captured about the middle of the tenth century by the Duke of Kiev; the survivors of this strange kingdom were then scattered through the Crimea, where they were soon lost to history. Yet even today throughout Southern Russia we find Jews whose tall figures, sandy hair and high cheek bones suggest that they may have descended from the almost forgotten Chazars."

- Elma Ehrlich Levinger and Rabbi Lee J. Levinger, in The Story of the Jew for Young People (New York, NY: Behrman's Jewish Book House, 1940), page 107.

"The Khazar nation was scattered. Some of the people fled to northern Russia. They may have become the ancestors of certain Jewish groups who are living at the present time."

- Dorothy F. Zeligs, in A History of Jewish Life in Modern Times for Young People (New York, NY: Bloch Publishing Company, 1950), page 203.

"The circumstances surrounding the beginnings of Jewish settlement in Poland remain nebulous, though it is more than a surmise that the first Jews must have come from the Crimea. After the fall of the Jewish kingdom of Khazaria, they continued to arrive, fleeing from the Russian boyars of Kiev who after several centuries of vassalage to the Jewish kings had finally risen in revolt and conquered them. In time, these Khazar Jews blended with the other Jewish elements in Poland and ultimately lost their ethnic group identity."

- Nathan Ausubel, in Pictorial History of the Jewish People (New York, NY: Crown, 1953), page 133.

"In 1016 the descendants of the Jewish royal family fled to their coreligionists in Spain. Many of the Jewish Khazars, however, continued to live in the Crimea.... But the majority of the early Khazar proselytes were scattered over the neighboring countries, introducing Jewish ideals among their Christian neighbors. Some estimate that from sixty to seventy per cent of the Jews of Southern Russia are not of Semitic descent."

- Jacob S. Raisin, in Gentile Reactions to Jewish Ideals (New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1953), page 691.

"The first Jews to settle in Lithuania in the 11th century came from the land of the Khazars, on the lower Volga River, from Crimea on the Black Sea and from Bohemia. Originally, the Jews came to the land of the Khazars from the Byzantine kingdom, where they had been oppressed. The Khazars had welcomed the Jews and later had been converted to Judaism. When the Khazars were overrun by the Mongols and Russians, the Jews settled in Lithuania, whose rulers, at that time, were extremely tolerant."

- Sidney L. Markowitz, in What You Should Know About Jewish Religion, History, Ethics and Culture (New York, NY: Citadel Press, 1955).

"The immigration (originally transmigration) of Jews to Poland started in the middle of the IX century. It took place at the same time from Western Europe and from the East (that is from the state of the Chazars, whose state religion was Judaism. Chazars was situated in the vicinity of Kiev and extended to the Dniestr; it ceased to exist in 969)."

- Michal M. Borwicz, in A Thousand Years of Jewish Life in Poland (Paris, 1955).

"It is known that the khagan of the Khazars and many of his subjects had yielded to the Jewish propaganda coming mainly from the numerous Jewish colonies in the Crimea. They accepted the Jewish creed -- the first case of a large part of one nation becoming Jewish at such a late period. The Khazars were otherwise a very tolerant nation. They are probably to some extent the ancestors of the eastern Jews. Driven by the Cumans and the Mongols from their homeland, many of the Jewish Khazars were settled in Poland by the Polish kings. There they mixed with western Jews."

- Francis Dvornik, in The Slavs: Their Early History and Civilization (Boston, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1956), pages 196-197.

"But before and after the Mongol upheaval, the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centers of eastern Europe."

- Salo Wittmayer Baron, in A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1957), volume 3, page 206.

"Descendants of the Khazars, men noteworthy for their learning and piety, were known long after in Toledo.... And, to the present day, the Mongoloid features common amongst the Jews of eastern Europe are, in all probability, a heritage from these 'proselytes of righteousness' of ten centuries ago."

- Cecil Roth, in A Short History of the Jewish People (London: Horovitz [East and West Library], 1959), page 288.

"In the same period there began an influx of Chazar Jews from the East. At first this was essentially a trade immigration, but towards the end of the 10th century, after the fall of the Chazar state, it assumed larger proportions. The immigrants of this period turned mainly to agriculture and handicrafts. These colonies or settlements occurred in the southern and eastern parts of the future Polish state."

- Kazimierz and Maria Piechotka, in Wooden Synagogues (Warsaw: Arkady, 1959; originally appeared in a Polish-language edition), English edition, page 9.

"Poland received many Jews seeking to escape from the oppressions of the Crusades and the Black Death, as well as survivors of the Jewish kingdom of Khazaria."

- Meyer Levin and Toby K. Kurzband, in The Story of the Jewish Way of Life (New York, NY: Behrman House, 1959), page 48.

"The Khazars were a warlike people, and succeeded in extending their rule and influence. They were subjected to occasional attacks by the Byzantines and later by the Russians. By the end of the 10th century they succumbed to the Russians, and after maintaining themselves for a short period in the Crimea, some gradually embraced the Christian or Moslem faith, ceasing to exist as a separate people, though many joined with their Jewish brethren."

- David Bridger and Samuel Wolk (editors), in article "Khazars" (pp. 265-266) in The New Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, NY: Behrman House, 1962), page 266.

"Far away, on the steppes of Southern Russia, a whole nation had been converted to Judaism several hundred years ago. Could it be true? Hasdai sends a letter to the king of this foreign people, the Chazars, and receives an answer: the story is true... They were to exist to the thirteenth century, when they were defeated, their remnants joining the Jewish or Christian communities."

- Leo Trepp, in Eternal Faith, Eternal People: A Journey into Judaism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962), page 143.

"Polish scholars agree that these oldest [Polish Jewish] settlements were founded by Jewish emigres from the Khazar state and Russia, while the Jews from Southern and Western Europe began to arrive and settle only later... and that a certain portion at least of the Jewish population (in earlier times, the main bulk) originated from the east, from the Khazar country, and later from Kievian Russia."

- Adam Vetulani, in his article "The Jews of Mediaeval Poland," in Jewish Journal of Sociology, volume 4 (December, 1962), page 274.

"In Khazaria, perched precariously on the trackless steppe extending between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, Jewish merchants and refugees from the persecutions of the Byzantine Empire managed to convert the king, many of his nobles, and a considerable portion of the nomadic, Khazarian population.... With the disappearance of the Khazarian kingdom under the blows of the Russians, the Jews and Jewish Khazars settled in the Crimea, in Hungary, and in Lithuania."

- Jacob Berhard Agus, in The Meaning of Jewish History (New York, NY: Abelard-Schuman, 1963), page 237.

"It is clear, however, that the influence of the Jews, who had become the most active agents of the commerce of the Caliphate, was substantial in the Khazar kingdom, and it is probable that the commonly observed mongoloid type among East European Jews, particularly in the Ukraine, Poland and Roumania, derives from the conversions and intermarriages which were no doubt frequent in the swarming trading camps of the Khaqans."

- W. E. D. Allen, in The Ukraine (New York, NY: Russell and Russell, 1963), pages 8-9.
"Meanwhile the bulk of the victims of expulsion, massacre, and persecution were to be found in the territory between the Black Sea and the Baltic, most of which was part of the kingdom of Poland. There European Jews had met another strand of the Jewish people, Jews who had entered the same area from the south and east. Jewish colonies on the Black Sea and in the Crimea dated back to very early times, and kingdom of the Khazars had left many Jewish relics in lands which are now Ukrainian."

- James Parkes, in A History of the Jewish People (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1963), pages 105-106.

"Driven out of their country by the Cumans in the 12th century, part of the last Jewish Khazars settled in Poland."

- Françoise Godding-Ganshof, in article "Khazars" (pp. 214-215) in Chamber's Encyclopedia, vol. 8 (Oxford, England: Pergamon Press, 1966), page 215.

"It is likely too that some Khazar progeny reached the various Slavic lands where they helped to build the great Jewish centers of Eastern Europe."

- Abba Solomon Eban, in My People: The Story of the Jews (New York, NY: Behrman House, 1968), page 150.

"It would of course be foolish to deny that Jews of different origin also contributed to the existing Jewish world-community. The numerical ratio of the Khazar to the Semitic and other contributions is impossible to establish. But the cumulative evidence makes one inclined to agree with the concensus of Polish historians that 'in earlier times the main bulk originated from the Khazar country'; and that, accordingly, the Khazar contribution to the genetic make-up of the Jews must be substantial, and in all likelihood dominant."

- Arthur Koestler, in The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (London: Hutchinson, 1976 and New York, NY: Random House, 1976), page 180.

"...it may be stated at present that well-documented findings concerning the culture of the Jewries of western Europe in the Middle Ages, as well as evidence leading directly to the recognition of the movement eastward of important segments of those Jewries during late medieval times, leave no room for the hypothesis that the Jews of postmedieval Europe were descended primarily from the Khazars. That, however, those among the Khazars who adopted Judaism as their religion came to form a part of the Ukrainian component of eastern European Jews, and eventually to be assimilated by it, can hardly be doubted on the basis of our present state of knowledge."

- Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, in Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), page xv. In later separate writings by Golb (Jewish Proselytism, 1988) and Pritsak ("The Pre-Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe in Relation to the Khazars, the Rus' and the Lithuanians." In Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, 1990), however, the view that virtually no Jews are descended from the Khazars is expressed.

"There is little reason to doubt that Jews had lived in Poland from the earliest times, and that Judaism, as preserved by the descendants of the ancient Chazar kingdom in the southeast, had actually antedated Christianity."

- Norman Davies, in God's Playground: A History of Poland, (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982), volume 1, page 79.

"The Khazar Jewish kingdom was a fascinating episode in Russian Jewish History.... The Jews dispersed into Russia, Armenia, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean coast. It is likely that many of the Jews of these regions are descended from Khazar refugees."

- Richard Haase, in Jewish Regional Cooking (Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1985), page 56.

"Poland was Christianized in 966, at a time when Jews already lived there. The first ones came from the Khazar state of Russia and Kievan Rus. Late in the eleventh century, Jews fleeing from persecution in southern and western Europe arrived. Not, however, until the fifteenth century did large numbers of Jews begin to live in Poland."

- Meyer Weinberg, in Because They Were Jews: A History of Anti-Semitism (Greenwood Press, 1986), page 153.

"East European Jews, especially the Ukrainian, Moldovian (Bessarabian), Azerbaijanian, Georgian, and Armenian Jews are actually a fusion of Byzantine-Greek Jews, Babylonian Jews from the Abbasid Caliphate, Yiddish-speaking German-Polish Jews, sixteenth Century Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and Khazars. This is the bloodline of these Russian Jews... However, the most strongly Khazar of the Jews are undoubtedly the Hungarian Jews, descendants of the last Khazars who fled into Hungary about 1200-1300, where they were received by their former vassals, the Magyar kings. The Hungarian Jews are definitely a fusion of Semitic German Jews and the Turkic Khazars with some Sephardic immigrants who came to Hungary by way of Italy in the 1500's escaping the Spanish Inquisition."

- Monroe Rosenthal and Isaac Mozeson, in Wars of the Jews: A Military History from Biblical to Modern Times (New York, NY: Hippocrene Books, 1990), page 224.

"As the conquering Lithuanians moved south through Byelorussia, Volkynia, and the Ukraine, they came upon towns with either established Jewish communities or a Jewish presence. These communities were established by a mixture of Jews who came via Khazaria, Khazarian Jews and Jews who came directly from older communities. What was the proportion of each or their numbers is not known."

- Stuart and Nancy Schoenburg, in Lithuanian Jewish Communities (New York, NY: Garland, 1991 and Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), page 10.

"Jews are the largest and most important of these nationalities... According to some historians, many of them are descended from the Khazars, a people who ruled much of the Volga-Dnieper basin the seventh to ninth centuries and converted to Judaism en masse in the eighth century. Others are descended from a large colony of Jews who settled in Ukraine when it was ruled by a religiously tolerant Poland."

- William G. Andrews, in The Land and People of the Soviet Union (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1991), page 183.

"It is very likely that Judaized Khazar elements, especially those that had acculturated to the cities, contributed to the subsequently Slavic-speaking Jewish communities of Kievan Rus'. These were ultimately absorbed by Yiddish-speaking Jews entering the Ukraine and Belorussia from Poland and Central Europe. In the same way, one may conjecture that Khazar Muslims contributed to the Turkic-speaking and Turko-Muslim communities of the Volga basin and North Caucasus."

- Peter Benjamin Golden, in An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), pages 243-244.

"How and why Jews first reached Lithuania is a matter of informed hypothesis. Historian Abraham Elijahu Harkavi maintains that they came from Babylonia and elsewhere in the Near East in the ninth and tenth centuries C.E., after the decline of the Jewish communities there. Harkavi also believes that Jews reached Lithuania from the shortlived but flourishing Jewish state of the Khazars, who were among the founders of Kiev in 865. The Khazars lost their kingdom in 969 to the Russian princes, who introduced the Russian Orthodox Church... Thus inspired, the Russians expelled the Jews..., who moved en masse to the then-Lithuanian towns of Gardinas (Grodno), Minsk, Pinsk..."

- Masha Greenbaum, in The Jews of Lithuania: A History of a Remarkable Community 1316-1945 (Jerusalem: Gefen, 1995), page 2.

"It is in the fusion of autochthonous Jews with semi-Jewish Khazars and Kabars in the tenth century that we must seek the earliest demographic basis of the Jewish population of medieval Hungary."

- Raphael Patai, in The Jews of Hungary (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996), page 29.

"...one should remember that the Khazars were described by several contemporary authors as having a pale complexion, blue eyes, and reddish hair. Red, as distinguished from blond, hair is found in a certain percentage of East European Jews, and this, as well as the more generalized light coloring, could be a heritage of the medieval Khazar infusion."

- Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai, in The Myth of the Jewish Race (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), page 72.

"Jews from central Europe first settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the second half of the 14th century. Early examples are the communities of Brest-Litovsk and Grodno, established by Jews from Poland with charters from Duke Vitold, similar to those granted by Bolislav the Pious to Jews of Great Poland. Among the Jews of the southwestern districts of the Lithuanian Duchy, annexed to the Kingdom of Poland toward the end of the 14th century, were descendants of Jews from oriental countries, including a few of Khazar stock. They differed from the Ashkenazis in both language and cultural traditions."

- Shmuel Arthur Cygielman, in Jewish Autonomy in Poland and Lithuania until 1648 (5408) (Jerusalem, 1997).

"Eventually, the Khazaria kingdom fell. Evidently, some of its Jewish population went to Eastern Europe and the rest disappeared."

- Lawrence Jeffrey Epstein, in Questions and Answers on Conversion to Judaism (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1998), page 176.

"Jewish-Khazarian settlement in Kiev can be traced to the 10th century; the Russian-speaking community was later absorbed by Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Central Europe."

- in the entry "Ukraine" in The Shengold Jewish Encyclopedia, edited by Klenicki, Schiff, and Schreiber (Schreiber Publishing, 1998), page 267.

"The descendants of the Khazars reached eastern and central Europe. There is substantial evidence that some of them settled in Slavic lands, where they took part in establishing the major Jewish centers of eastern Europe.... It is also widely believed that many Khazar Jews fled to Poland to avoid forced baptism. Moreover, some of the groups that migrated from eastern to central Europe have been called Khazars and may have originated in the former Khazar empire. Some apparently fled into northern Hungary, where, to this day, there are villages that bear such names as Kozar and Kozardie."

- Robert and Elinor Slater, in Great Moments in Jewish History (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David, 1999), page 87.

"Unfortunately, in 1016 C.E., the Russians, with the help of Byzantium, crushed the Khazar kingdom and brought it to a close. What happened to all the Khazar Jews, both the descendants of the converts and the settlers, is shrouded in mystery. They were certainly dispersed in many of the neighboring lands. It is conceivable, according to some scholars, that some of them are the forebears of the Polish and Russian Jews of previous generations. Who knows? If your ancestors came from these lands, you may have the blood of kings in you - not David and Solomon, but kings who voluntarily chose to join the fate of a people whose religion they acknowledged as true."

- Rabbi Benjamin Blech, in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jewish History and Culture (Alpha Books, 1999), pages 161-162.

"Before they arrived in present-day Hungary, the Magyars had lived in Central Asia relatively near the famous Khazars, who had converted to Judaism in the eighth century. When the Magyars left the area, many Khazar Jews joined them on their trek westward. In southern Hungary, archaeologists discovered a Khazar ring engraved with Hebrew letters. These Khazars joined the pre-existing Jews of Hungary and formed communities in the main cities, including Buda."

- Eli Valley, in The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1999), page 377.

"Thus, the Ashkenazic ethnogenesis, having been formed by migrations from the East (Khazaria), West (e.g., Germany, Austria, Bohemia), and South (e.g., Greece, Mesopotamia, Khorasan), is more complex than previously envisioned." (EDITOR'S NOTE: THE "MESOPOTAMIA" REFERENCE IS A LOADED CONCLUSION, HOWEVER THE QUOTE IS QUITE PROFITABLE AND INSIGHTFUL. IT IS MY OBSERVATION AND CONCLUSION THAT THE ASHKENAZIM ARE AN INTRIGUING FUSION OF EDOMITE AND KHAZAR STOCK, LEANING MORE TOWARDS THE KHAZAR EXTRACTION.)

- Kevin Alan Brook, in The Jews of Khazaria (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1999), page xv.

"During the Middle Ages, a large group of Jews came from Germany and eastern lands to Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.... Another group emanated from the lands of the Khazars, relates the Encyclopedia Judaica."

- Ben G. Frank, in A Travel Guide to Jewish Russia and Ukraine (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1999), page 63.

"In the tenth and eleventh centuries, as the Khazar state disintegrated, and into the thirteenth century, as the Cuman and Mongol hordes pushed large numbers of refugees westward, Khazar and Khazar-influenced groups professing Judaism - including the probably highly committed Levites - migrated into Eastern Europe, where they mixed with other Jewish groups moving east from Germany and north from Italy."

- David Keys, in Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 2000), pages 100-101.

"During their period of decline many Khazars were killed in battle, sold into slavery, or forced to convert to Islam or Christianity. A sizable number probably intermarried with the Crimean Jews. Others fled to the West (meaning Poland and southern Russia) where they intermarried with Ashkenazi Jews."

- Ken Blady, in Jewish Communities in Exotic Places (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2000), page 118.

"An important Jewish center was established in Kiev, the Khazarian border stronghold. After the conquest of Khazaria by Rus, the Khazarian Jews moved northward. Simultaneously, Eastern Europe was reached by Jews from the West."

- Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe: From the Congress of Vienna to the Fall of Communism, ed. by Richard Frucht (Garland, 2000), page 402.

"It is even possible that Jewish survivors of the Khazar kingdom near the Caspian Sea made their way to Poland after that kingdom's destruction during the thirteenth century Mongol invasions."

- Lloyd P. Gartner, in History of the Jews in Modern Times (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), page 19.
"...the 18th-century Yiddish-speaking Jews who lived in German- and Slavic-speaking areas and considered themselves Ashkenazic, actually were descended from three independent sources. The first, very important source, was the Rhineland in western Germany; the second one was the area of the modern Czech Republic, an area that medieval Jewish rabbinic literature called 'West Canaan.' The third and marginal center called 'East Canaan' corresponded to modern Ukraine in which one part of the Jews were of Khazarian origin."

- Alexander Beider, in his article "The Influence of Migrants from Czech Lands on Jewish Communities in Central and Eastern Europe," in Avotaynu, volume 16, number 2 (Summer 2000), page 20.

"When, in 1016, a joint Russian and Byzantine army defeated the already much weakened Khazar army, these 'Khazar' Jews were forced to flee once more... These Jews were no longer simply the descendants of Jewish refugees from Greece and Persia. Intermarriage with original Khazars who had been converted to Judaism had introduced central Asian features, high cheek-bones and Oriental eyes... With the destruction of Khazaria some of the Jews found their way back to Greece and the Mediterranean, exiles once more. But many must have taken back with their Russian conquerors to the lands of southern Russia - to Kiev and Kharkov... The Khazar Jews who settled in Russia were not particularly liked or welcomed. Such historical records as survive show for example that a hundred years after their arrival anti-Jewish riots broke out in Kiev itself and many were killed.... Meanwhile, in the very same years that the defeated Jewish Khazars - and there was a second Khazar Diaspora following the Mongol invasion of the area in the thirteenth century - were finding new homes in southern Russia, another group of Jews, numerically much larger, were being driven out of their homes, along the river Rhine."

- Martin Gilbert, in Letters to Auntie Fori: 5000 Years of Jewish History (New York, NY: Schocken, 2002), pages 147-148.

"It's even possible that my ancestry might not move in the direction of ancient Israel at all.... After 965, the Khazars were through as an organized power, but Judaism may have remained, and it may well be that many East European Jews are descended from Khazars and the people they ruled. I may be one of them. Who knows? And who cares?.... Where did all this [my family's European physical traits] come from? Surely not from any Mediterranean or Turkish people. It had to be of Slavic origin and Scandinavian beyond that - plus a bit of Mongol to account for my B-type blood."

- Isaac Asimov, in It's Been A Good Life (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), chapter 1.

"During the period of decline, many Khazars converted to Islam or Christianity, but some, who remained Jews, migrated westward, and are historically documented in several East European countries and cities, including Kiev. According to one sweeping theory, the original and dominant stratum of East European Jewry is of Khazar origin."

- Rivka Gonen, in The Quest for the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel: To the Ends of the Earth (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2002), page 73.

"Wrotizla's (= Wroclaw/Breslau) Jewish community clearly predated the earliest records of existance. Jewish merchants had been active in Central and Eastern Europe from Khazar times. ... And it has been contended that a Jewish community functioned in Poland from the tenth century onwards, stimulated by a Jewish presence to the east in the former Khazaria."

- Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, in Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), page 91.

"Apparently, part of the Khazar Jews remained in their areas of settlement because there is evidence of a messianic movement among the Jewish Khazars of the Crimea. Others returned to the Caucasus and there augmented the Jews who had earlier immigrated from Persia. They formed the core of the 'Mountain Jews' who even today live in communities rich in tradition. Khazar Jews also settled in Kiev and other cities in Rus', as well as in Poland."

- Heiko Haumann, in A History of East European Jews (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002), pages 6-7.

"Although it was particularly in the East, in the hospitable regions of Poland and Lithuania, that the German Jews sought refuge as their condition grew worse, we cannot conclude that the Polish Jews were solely of Western origin. On the contrary, it is quite probable that during the first millennium of our era the first Jews to penetrate into the territories between the Oder and the Dnieper came from the southeast, from the Jewish kingdom of the Khazars, or even from the south, from Byzantium. We are not sure about the relative proportions of the two groups; what is important is that the superior culture of the German Jews permitted them rapidly to impose their language and customs as well as their extraordinarily sensitive historical consciousness."

- Leon Poliakov, in The History of Anti-Semitism: From the Time of Christ to the Court Jews, trans. Richard Howard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), page 246.

"One of the oldest documents to come from Kiev, which makes reference to the city in the 9th century, was written in Hebrew. Some believe that Kiev's Jewish population was a remnant of the Khazar Khaganate (Khazaria) -- a Judaic-Turkic kingdom in the northern Caucasus that died out around the 11th century. Others suppose the Ashkenazi Jews reached Europe by passing through Crimea, and into the trading capital of early-12th-century Kiev."

- Andrew Evans, in Kiev: The Bradt City Guide (Bucks, England: Bradt Travel Guides, 2004), page 256.

"I personally believe, as did Arthur Koestler, that if part of the Khazars integrated with the Russian kingdom at its formation, the majority of them fled to Central Europe, where they met the flow of Jewish immigrants from France and Germany that came as a result of the Crusades. And from their meeting the Ashkenazi Jews were born. The surnames Kagan and Kaganovitch, and the names of villages in Poland like Kaganka, attest in this area to the presence of Jewish Khazars."

- Marek Halter, in L'Empire khazar, eds. Jacques Piatigorsky and Jacques Sapir (Paris: Autrement, 2005), page 12.

"...let us note only that Jews already appeared in Central Europe and Eastern Europe before the fall of the Khazar state, which makes the assumption of Koestler [that East European Jews are mostly Khazars] less probable. One can, however, admit the idea that one part of the Khazar population practicing Judaism would have been absorbed by the Ashkenazim."

- Alexei Terechtchenko, in L'Empire khazar, eds. Jacques Piatigorsky and Jacques Sapir (Paris: Autrement, 2005), page 78.

"The problem with this long-held notion that the Jews and their Yiddish pushed ever eastward is one of numbers. Three million Jews eventually settled in Eastern Europe; only a fraction of that kind of population could have possibly migrated east from Germany. More likely, goes a rising tide of opinion, Yiddish spread in the opposite direction, westward from Russia. The population explosion in Eastern European Jews can probably be accounted for by the voluntary mass conversion to Judaism in 740 C.E. by the Turkic Khazars, who had settled on the steppes of southern Russia."

- Neal Karlen, in The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-mosh of Languages Saved the Jews (New York: William Morrow, 2008), page 62.

There are also similar sentiments in many other works by other authors. For instance, J.S. Hertz, a Yiddish-language historian, in Di Yidn in Ukrayne: fun di eltste tsaytn biz nokh tah vetat (New York: Unzer tsayt farlag, 1949), argued that most Ukrainian Jews and many other Eastern European Jews are Khazarian. Abraham N. Poliak, a Hebrew-language historian from Israel, wrote a book Kazariyah (first published in the 1940s) in which he argues that Eastern European Jews are predominantly Khazarian. Arthur Koestler borrowed heavily from Poliak's works when writing The Thirteenth Tribe during 1973 and 1974. Early proponents of the Khazar theory included the Polish scholars Tadeusz Czacki (1765-1813) and Max (Maksymilian) Gumplowicz (1864-1897), the Ukrainian Jewish scholar Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788-1860), and the Russian Jewish doctor/anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg (1867-?) [in his 1895 book Die südrussischen Juden. Eine anthrometrische Studie]. Itzhak Schipper (1884-1943), a Polish Jewish historian who wrote in Polish and Yiddish, argued that the Polish Jews are largely Khazarian. Schipper wrote: "The activities of certain groups among the Jews who immigrated to Poland in ancient times and engaged in agriculture is evidenced by the Jewish villages that we find in Poland and Russia during the early Middle Ages. The names of these villages prove the origin of the people who lived in them. They are: Zidow, Zhidowo, Sidowo, or Kozara, Kozari, and Kozhazhow. There can be little doubt that the earliest of them were those villages whose names derive from that of the Khazars. It is possible that these Jewish Khazar settlements came into being during the 10th century, when a wave of Khazar immigrants arrived in Poland and Russia seeking refuge after the collapse of their state." Schipper also thought that Khazarian Jews founded the Polish city of Ciechanowiec, partly because he thought that the nearby village of Kosarze and a street that he interpreted to be "Khazar Street" were traces of Khazars. The quote I gave from Piechotka and Piechotka is influenced by Schipper's opinion of what happened to the Khazars. Samuel V. Kurinsky, an American archaeologist with extensive knowledge of Jewish history, alleged that Jews from Khazaria settled in Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland in his 1991 book The Glassmakers. Denis Sobolov also supports the Khazar theory. The Jewish historian Julius Brutzkus also did.

Then there are the works of Abraham Elija Harkavy, a Russian-language historian of the late 19th century who was familiar with some of the basic Hebrew sources for Khazarian history. I have already quoted from Greenbaum, who summarizes his views. Harkavy's theory that Khazarian and Middle-Eastern Jews came into Poland is supportable by a number of factors, and may yet gain added credence if Yaffa Eliach is correct in saying (in her 1998 book There Once Was A World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok) that the first five Jewish families to settle in the town of Eishyshok in Lithuania came from Babylonia. Since Eliach (whose family spoke Yiddish just like other Lithuanian Jews) herself claims descent from these Oriental Jews, that is perhaps another clue that Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews are the descendants of multiple migrations from diverse locations and not simply late-medieval arrivals from Germany. And there are many other historians and archaeologists who have argued that Russian and Polish Jews derive in part from Oriental and Khazarian Jews.


Notable modern Jews and Jewish communities who claim Khazar ancestry


Dan Rottenberg, author of "Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy" (1st edition, 1977), has ancestors from the Austrian and Russian empires. Some of his wife's ancestors were allegedly Khazars. Karen De Witt, in The Washington Post, wrote the following on page B3, in the Saturday, August 20, 1977 issue, in her article "Family Lore and the Search for Jewish 'Roots'": "Rottenberg, who has traced his and his wife's family back to the early 1800s and found one line that goes back to the Khazar kingdom in the Crimea, which dates to the 8th century, notes that there is only a finite number of Jews in the world." And Rottenberg wrote in his book "Finding Our Fathers" on page 45: "In any case, some East European Jews, and perhaps a great many, are descended from the Khazars. Figuring out whether you are or aren't of Khazar ancestry may be impossible, but some families seem to have clues. For example, a branch of my wife's family named Tamarin, from Russia, maintains that the family came into Judaism via the Khazar conversion and that the family took its name from Tamara, queen of Georgia in the thirteenth century."

The family of Ehud Ya'ari, a top Israeli journalist who produced the 1997 documentary Mamlekhet ha-Kuzarim, also claims some Khazarian roots. Michael Ajzenstadt, in The Jerusalem Post, wrote the following on page 5 in the March 17, 1997 issue, in his article "An Incredible Journey to the Lost Empire of the Khazars": "[Ehud Ya'ari is quoted as saying:] "As a child I heard that our family has some Khazarian blood and for 30 years now I have been trying to find information about this exciting subject.... [I am] a soldier in the last battle of the Khazar kingdom, a battle for the right to be remembered.... And finally I would like to secure funds to continue excavations in several places, which looked quite promising. My sexiest dream is to find the actual tomb of one of the Khazar kings. I believe that if we achieve that it will be as important-at least as the discovery of Troy or of the treasures of the Pharaohs in the Pyramids."

Some Jews from the shtetl Kurilovich, in Moldova, claim "Tartar" ancestry: "In 1923, my father, who was born in the Jewish colonies of Baron Hirsch, visited the small-town of Kurilovich, near Kishinev, between Moldavia and Bessarabia, from where their parents had come to Argentina. Old relatives of the town assured him that the family lived there for 500 years, and added this phrase that fed my fantasies for a long time: 'We are Jewish Tartars'. The 5 centuries would correspond exactly to the time at which the descendants of the Khazars dispersed from Crimea. And the usage of 'Tartars' instead of 'Khazars'? Perhaps a slip of the tongue and of the memory, that the historians will not delay in correcting." - Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, "El fantasma de los jázaros", La Nación (Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 19, 1999).

A relative of a Transylvanian Jew who has been in touch with me once told him "We are not Semites - we are white Turks from far to the East, and our homes were destroyed by the Russians." These are the Jews of the town Sfîntu Gheorghe in what is now Romania. Though their community had intermingled with some Hungarians and Romanians, they remained a cohesive community with knowledge of its Turkic origins for centuries. In the 1990s a genealogical expedition hired by my Transylvanian Jewish acquaintance found confirmation of the tradition that these Jews are Turkic. That does not prove that they were Khazars. They could have been Tatars or Kipchaks (Cumans) or Oghuzes. But most likely they were Khazars, as the Khazars converted to standard Judaism in larger numbers than any other Turkic group.

There are also isolated cases of Jews from certain towns in Ukraine and Lithuania who claim Khazar ancestry. Stories like these help to contradict the opinion of Leon Wieseltier in "You Don't Have to Be Khazarian: The Thirteenth Tribe, by Arthur Koestler" (New York Review of Books, October 28, 1976) on page 34 that there are no memories of a Khazar heritage among any modern Jews.

Extracted from: "Are Russian Jews Descended from the Khazars?: A Reassessment Based upon the Latest Historical, Archaeological, Linguistic, and Genetic Evidence" by Kevin Alan Brook. This page is Copyright © 2000-2010 by Kevin Brook, all rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction of this page is prohibited. Source:http://www.khazaria.com/khazar-diaspora.html

Editor's Disclaimer: Kevin Alan Brook holds to the view that Eastern European Jews descend both from Khazarian Jews AND from Israelite Jews. I dismiss this, however, based on the quotes he presents. Clearly, he does this for political and strategic reasons. Mr. Brook knows the "philo-semitic" literary world in which he writes.

Friday, August 27, 2010

EGYPT WAS BLACK!


Queen Tiye (1415-1340 BCE)

Born in Nubia, Queen Tiye was the Great Royal Wife of Amenhotep III, mother of Amenhotep IV (later known as Akenhaton), and mother-in-law of Nefertiti. Highly prestigious during the reign of both her husband and son, she exerted her influence as queen consort and queen mother of Egypt over a fifty-year period. In addition, she shaped Egyptian fashion and altered the prevailing view regarding royal women.

Married at an early age, her husband fiercely admired her and displayed his love lavishly by building temples and massive statues where she sits by him as an equal, a feat unparalleled in that time; dedicated a number of shrines to her; and even created a monumental artificial lake for her. She was glorified by her husband as "... The most praised, the lady of grace, sweet in her love, who fills the palace with her beauty, the Regent of the North and South, the Great Wife of the King, the lady of both lands..."

Wielding her power and taking charge at this juncture in the nation's history, she used her political influence and astute decisions to maintain Egypt's authority. She averted key national crises by becoming Secretary of State when her husband's physical and mental powers deteriorated with age; and redirected political decisions to her attention when her son Akenhaton neglected his political duties while preoccupied with his religious innovation (named the Heretic King, Akenhaton was the first ruler in recorded history to believe in monotheism).

The mummy known as "Elder Woman" is often thought to be Queen Tiye. This is supported by the fact that a hair sample from the mummy matched a lock of hair found in Tutankhamen's (her reputed son/grandson) tomb. However, these findings are disputed primarily on the grounds that the mummy was much "younger" than Queen Tiye would have been when she died.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Books

Akhenaten: King of Egypt, Cyril Aldred, Thames and Hudson, 1988.

Akhenaten: The Heretic King, Donald B. Redford, Princeton University Press, 1984.

Black Women in Antiquity, Ivan Van Sertima (ed.). Transaction Books, 1990.

Egypt Revisited, Ivan Van Sertima (ed.), Transaction Books, 1989.

A General History of Africa, Vol. II: Ancient Civilizations of Africa, UNESCO, 1992.

Nile Valley Civilizations, Ivan Van Sertima (ed.), Transaction Books, 1989.

World's Greatest Men of Color, Vol. I, J.A. Rogers, Collier Books, 1972.

Source: http://blackhistorypages.net/pages/tiye.php

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Israelites in America: The Forgotten Captivity (EXCLUSIVE)


By Neyo Webster

All Bible scholars and students are knowledgeable of the Israelite captivity in Egypt under the 18th Pharaonic Dynasty, circa 1550 BC, the Assyrian captivity in 722 BC (cf. 2 Kings 17) with the subsequent dispersion of the ten northern tribes, the Babylonian captivity and subsequent exile in 586 BC, resulting in the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the First Temple. We are even familiar with the Greek conquest of Persia as Alexander rapidly moved on to destroy the Phoenician city of Tyre with military penetrations through Palestine, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan, thus conquering Egypt in 332 BC. We are also aware of the Palestinian conquest orchestrated by the Romans in 64 BC with a subsequent cruel domination. And finally, we are cognizant of the final Roman subjugation of Palestine with the conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple resulting in over a million Israelites fleeing into Africa, as recorded by Josephus. (See The Great Roman-Jewish War: AD 66-70)

HOWEVER, there is an Israelite captivity that is not readily mentioned nor openly acknowledged by scholars and that is the American captivity. Dr. Allen H. Godbey of Duke University correctly suggests that as strangers amongst Africans, Israelites would have been vulnerable to enslavement during wars and conflicts and were among the slaves imported to the Americas in ships. (See The Lost Tribes a Myth, Durham, NC, 1930, p. 246)

This academic inquiry made by Godbey is corroborated by Biblical prophecy. The LORD told Abraham in Canaan, "Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years." (Gen. 15:13) And centuries later, after the brutal Egyptian captivity, Moses relayed to the children of Israel, "And the LORD shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again: and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you."

Hebrew captives arrived wholesale at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. It is now 2010. It has been 381 years since that time. The children of Israel are now on the latter end of their captivity, which could possibly terminate in 2019. But I say that with reserved skepticism. The times and the seasons are set down by the authority of the Father. (Acts 1:7)

Addendum: Numbers in Hebrew take on a symbolic nature and 400 could represent completion or a vast extension of time. However, Daniel consulted the books of Jeremiah to decipher the condition of his people and understand prophetic events that were set or a later time. (Dan. 9:2)

The following is a map that documents the dispersions of the Hebrew Israelites into the Americas:


Map Source: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/palette/59/hebrew.html

Copyright © 2010 Zionism Unveiled Productions. All Rights Reserved.
http://zionismunveiled.blogspot.com/

Saturday, August 21, 2010

The Many Faces of Barack Obama


President Barack Hussein Obama is a complex individual with strange and peculiar contradictions. He is a rock star, a performer of sorts. The reader is left not knowing what to believe. Examine the following quotes with a critical mind and the impications will astound you:

"I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war."
-Barack Obama

"I don't take a dime of their [lobbyist] money, and when I am president, they won't find a job in my White House."
-Barack Obama

"I opposed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. It should be repealed and I will vote for its repeal on the Senate floor. I will also oppose any proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gays and lesbians from marrying."
-Barack Obama

"I think when you spread the wealth around it's good for everybody."
-Barack Obama

"I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class."
-Barack Obama

"In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world."
-Barack Obama

"In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?"
-Barack Obama

"Issues are never simple. One thing I'm proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues."
-Barack Obama

"The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam."
-Barack Obama

"We have an obligation and a responsibility to be investing in our students and our schools. We must make sure that people who have the grades, the desire and the will, but not the money, can still get the best education possible."
-Barack Obama

"We have now just enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their healthcare."
-Barack Obama

"We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States."
-Barack Obama

"What Washington needs is adult supervision."
-Barack Obama

"No one is pro-abortion."
-Barack Obama

"One of the great strengths of the United States is... we have a very large Christian population - we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."
-Barack Obama

"Let me be absolutely clear. Israel is a strong friend of Israel's. It will be a strong friend of Israel's under a McCain...administration. It will be a strong friend of Israel's under an Obama administration. So that policy is not going to change."
-Barack Obama
Amman, Jordan, July 22, 2008.
Note: This is no typo here but a direct quote.

"Ok, look, you know, when I was a kid, I inhaled frequently. That was the point."
-Barack Obama
Confessing to drug use to audience of US magazine editors, November 2006.

"Who is Barack Obama? Contrary to the rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father Jor-El to save the Planet Earth. Many of you know that I got my name, Barack, from my father. What you may not know is Barack is actually Swahili for 'That One.' And I got my middle name from somebody who obviously didn't think I'd ever run for president. If I had to name my greatest strength, I guess it would be my humility. Greatest weakness, it's possible that I'm a little too awesome."
-Barack Obama


Disclaimer: The compilation of these quotes are the sole selection of the Editor.

Photo Design: Copyright © 2010 P. Panyin Forson. All rights reserved.
zionismunveiled.blogspot.com/

Friday, August 20, 2010

The Time Is Now!!!


"This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill: the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill: you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." - Morpheus, The Matrix

(The) 'Red pill' has become a popular phrase among cyberculture and signifies a free-thinking attitude, and a waking up from a "normal" life of sloth and ignorance. Red pills prefer the truth, no matter how gritty and painful it may be.

"I took the red pill"

Source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=red+pill
Photo Design: Copyright © 2010 P. Panyin Forson. All rights reserved.

zionismunveiled.blogspot.com/

Monday, August 16, 2010

The Politics of Schooling (EXCLUSIVE)



This is the time of year where parents are preparing to send their children back to school. But have you ever wondered why the schools, particularly American (U.S.) schools are in the shape they're in and who controls them? The outcomes are motivated by strategic and calculated DESIGN and deep SPECIAL INTERESTS.

Let's read a few quotes from the architects of what is know termed "public education:"


"Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent."
— Ellwood P. Cubberley, Conceptions of Education (1909)

"It was natural (that) businessmen should devote themselves to something besides business; that they should seek to influence the enactment and administration of laws, national and international, and that they should try to control education."
— Max Otto, Science and the Moral Life (1949)

"Most people don’t know who controls American education because little attention has been given the question by either educators or the public. Also because the question is not easily or neatly answered."
— James D. Koerner, Who Controls American Education (1968)

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
- Woodrow Wilson, from an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association, Jan. 9th, 1909


PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME

FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies

1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)

SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests

1) Key private foundations. About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.

2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT&T; CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.

3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.

4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.

5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.

6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.

7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.

THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry

1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers

Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.

There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chart—unless a culprit runs afoul of the media—an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tell all. Which explains why precious few experienced hands care to ruin themselves to act the hero. This is not to say sensitive, intelligent, moral, and concerned individuals aren’t distributed through each of the twenty-two categories, but the conflict of interest is so glaring between serving a system loyally and serving the public that it is finally overwhelming. Indeed, it isn’t hard to see that in strictly economic terms this edifice of competing and conflicting interests is better served by badly performing schools than by successful ones. On economic grounds alone a disincentive exists to improve schools. When schools are bad, demands for increased funding and personnel, and professional control removed from public oversight, can be pressed by simply pointing to the perilous state of the enterprise. But when things go well, getting an extra buck is like pulling teeth.

Some of this political impasse grew naturally from a maze of competing interests, some grew from more cynical calculations with exactly the end in mind we see, but whatever the formative motives, the net result is virtually impervious to democratically generated change. No large change can occur in-system without a complicated coalition of separate interests backing it, not one of which can actually be a primary advocate for children and parents.

THE FOUR ARCHITECTS OF FORCED MODERN SCHOOLING


Andrew Carnegie. An enthusiastic Darwinist and early proponent of planned economy and society, reunion with Great Britain. Beatrice Webb, the Fabian, called him "a slimy reptile." Photo: Carnegie Endowments.


J.P. Morgan. The foremost Anglican laymen in the world. He worked resolutely for the restoration of a class system in America, and Anglo-American sovereignty (White Supremacy) worldwide.



John D. Rockefeller, Sr. "Survival of the fittest is nature's way of producing beauty," said Rockeller. As a principal stockholder in U.S. Steel, he approved of school experiments in Gary, Indiana, to dumb down curriculum and seek more effective means of mind control. Photo: Rockeller Foundation.


Henry Ford. "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told a Detroit newspaper in 1931. In July 1938, automaker Ford received the Grand Crossof the Golden Eage, highest award the government could give a foreigner. Lenin ackowledged his debt to Ford's genius. Photo: Ford Foundation.

Source material gathered from the book, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Prison of Modern Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto, a former New York State and New York City educator. The book can be purchased or read online for free: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/. This is certainly required reading for the inquiring mind.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

BLACK ATHENA (Editor's Pick)


Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1 by Martin Bernal

Winner of the American Book Award and a Socialist Review Book Award. What is classical about Classical Civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the whole basis of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied, or supressed since the eighteenth century--chiefly for racist reasons.

The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers--or Aryans--from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this "Aryan model." They did not see their political institutions, science, philosophy, or religion as original, but rather as derived from the East in general, and Egypt in particular.

Black Athena is a three-volume work. Volume 1 concentrates on the crucial period between 1785 and 1850, which saw the Romantic and racist reaction to the Enlightment and the French Revolution, and the consolidation of Northern expansion into other continents. In an unprecedented tour de force, Bernal makes meaningful links between a wide range of areas and disciplines--drama poetry, myth, theological controversy, esoteric religion, philosophy, biography, language, historical narrative, and the emergence of "modern scholarship." Martin Bernal is Professor Emeritus of Government Studies at Cornell University; he was formerly a Fellow at King's College, Cambridge.

What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the whole basis of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century - chiefly for racist reasons. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.
Universal Product Identifiers
Product ID: 168646
Language/Country: English
ISBN-10: 0813512778 (0-8135-1277-8)
ISBN-13: 9780813512778 (978-0-8135-1277-8)
ASIN: 0813512778
Paperback: 608 pages
Edition: 1 (1989-02)
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Saturday, August 14, 2010

WHY WE MUST NOT FOLLOW JEWISH TRADITION



Editor's Note: The following article is a message to Hebrew Israelites

JEWISH - OF OR RELATING TO JEWS, / OF JUDAISM

TRADITION -A CUSTOM, OPINION OR BELIEF HANDED DOWN TO POSTERITY ESP. ORALLY OR BY PRACTICE.

JUDAISM - THE RELIGION OF THE JEWS, / THE JEWS COLLECTIVELY.

THE ABOVE DEFINITIONS ARE FROM THE ILLUSTRATED OXFORD DICTIONARY.

As you should know by now, the people who are known as Ashkenazi Jews are not true descendants of the ancient Israelites. They are descendant from a people known in history as the Khazars. (Be sure to read the Edom and Khazars page). The majority of Jews living in Europe, Russia, Israel and the United States are secular (don't believe in a Elohim). The ones who are religious or have a belief in a god, practice what they call JUDAISM. As you can see from the definitions above, Judaism is the religion of the Jews, it is also a nickname for Jewish culture.

When Yah the Most High gave the laws to Moses (Moshe) on Mt. Sinai, he never once mention anything about Judaism. Judaism is not of Yah, it is the creation of men who are inspired by Satan.

As Israelites our main goal is to return back to Yah our father, with all our soul, mind and heart. The only way Israel can return, is to follow the only true path Yah has laid down for us. If we take any other route then we are still on the path to destruction.

Over the years in my Israelite Journey, often I come across Israelites who are new students to the truth. Many of these brothers and sisters believe that we are to copy everything Jewish, they believe we are suppose to practice Judaism, wear the six pointed star, etc I don't blame them for their ignorance (Not Knowing), but after you have learned the truth, you must do better.

In my walk with Yah, I have learned to stay away and do away with all things that are Jewish, and Christian for that matter. Not because they are Jewish (alone) but because it is not from Yah, and it can cause confusion, which leads to destruction.

Before any hater of the truth reads this and try to make it seem as if I'm a racist. I'm not, this subject is scriptural, all scriptures are from Yah, if you have a problem with this, take it up with the Master.

This page will explain why we as Israelites must not follow Jewish tradition. It's real simple, Jewish tradition is not from Yah the father. I will point out a few of the traditions that Israelites fall into, believing they are doing right.

THE TALMUD VS THE SCRIPTURES AND THE LAW

TALMUD - The Body of Jewish Civil and ceremonial law and legend comprising the Mishnah and the Germra.

The Talmud is one of the "holy" books of Judaism. This book is held higher than scriptures in some forms of Judaism, this is stated in the Talmud.

Erubin 21b (Soncino edition): "My son, be more careful in the observance of the words of the Scribes than in the words of the Torah (Old Testament)."

The Talmud is a collection of rabbinic writings. Jews say these writing are the oral law of Israel, everything Moses didn't write down on Mt. Sinai is said to be in the Talmud. Example: How to properly slaughter animals etc.

That's strange because no where in the 66 books of scripture or the books that were removed (Book of Jasher, Enoch, Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha), do we see any mention of a Talmud or oral law. Oral law is another name the Jews use for Talmud. The Laws Moses got from Yah was written down.

Exodus 24:12 And YAH said unto Moses, Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them.

31:18 And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of YAH.

32:15 And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written.

There is no mention of a Oral law being given to Moses. Another Point, If the Talmud represents the oral law that was given to Moses how did it survive this long being that the Israelites had forgotten about the WRITTEN LAW.

2nd Kings 22:8 And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of YAH. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it.

2nd Chronicles 34:15 And Hilkiah answered and said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of YAH. And Hilkiah delivered the book to Shaphan.

21 Go, inquire of YAH for me, and for them that are left in Israel and in Judah, concerning the words of the book that is found: for great is the wrath of the YAH that is poured out upon us, because our fathers have not kept the word of YAH, to do after all that is written in this book.

24 Thus saith YAH, Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, and upon the inhabitants thereof, even all the curses that are written in the book which they have read before the king of Judah:

The Talmud or Oral law, should not be adhered to by Hebrew Israelites, that book is a fraud, it is not of Yah or from Yah. The Talmud was created sometime in the 2nd - 5th century C.E. (common Era). It is not from our ancient forefather, they had no knowledge of a Talmud they only knew of the Torah (laws, instructions) and Scriptures.

Proof being the Ethiopian Hebrews, our brethren from the tribe of Dan had no knowledge of the Talmud when they reentered Israel.

According to the N.Y. Times of Sept. 29, 1992, p.4:

"The problem is that Ethiopian Jewish tradition goes no further than the Bible or Torah; the later Talmud and other commentaries that form the basis of modern traditions never came their way."

Lets look at a few of the wicked passages from the Talmud.

Moed Kattan 17a: If a Jew is tempted to do evil he should go to a city where he is not known and do the evil there.

Penalty for Disobeying Rabbis

Erubin 21b. Whosoever disobeys the rabbis deserves death and will be punished by being boiled in hot excrement in hell.

Hitting a Jew is the same as hitting God

Sanhedrin 58b. If a heathen (gentile) hits a Jew, the gentile must be killed.

O.K. to Cheat Non-Jews

Sanhedrin 57a . A Jew need not pay a gentile ("Cuthean") the wages owed him for work.

Jews Have Superior Legal Status

Baba Kamma 37b. "If an ox of an Israelite gores an ox of a Canaanite there is no liability; but if an ox of a Canaanite gores an ox of an Israelite...the payment is to be in full."

Jews May Steal from Non-Jews

Baba Mezia 24a . If a Jew finds an object lost by a gentile ("heathen") it does not have to be returned. (Affirmed also in Baba Kamma 113b). Sanhedrin 76a. God will not spare a Jew who "marries his daughter to an old man or takes a wife for his infant son or returns a lost article to a Cuthean..."

The Talmud is where the so called racist curse of Ham started. The Talmud says black people are cursed with black skin because Noah cursed his son Kham (Ham) on the Ark. That is none scriptural, the Talmud is a book we must stay far away from.

TANAKH VS TORAH

TANAKH - JEWISH WORD THAT REFERENCE THE OLD TESTAMENT OR HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

TORAH - HEBREW WORD MEANING LAW OR INSTRUCTIONS. REFERENCE TO THE FIRST FIVE BOOKS OF SCRIPTURE ALSO CALLED THE BOOKS OF MOSES.

Some of you may be surprised that I am including the word Tanakh with Jewish tradition. Many Israelites use this word today instead of Old Testament. All the scriptures from Genesis to Malachi is named the Tanakh by rabbinic scholars.

Tanakh is not the Hebrew word for the old testament, Tanakh is a created word, It stands for TORAH (LAW, INSTRUCTIONS), NEVI'IM (The Prophets) and KETHUVIM (The Writings) TNK insert the vowel points and you have TANAKH. TANAKH just like Judaism and Talmud it's not mention in scriptures, the reason being they all are words created by unlearned Gentiles who call themselves Jews.

I don't like the terms old testament or new testament, the book is the same, it's one continual work. The word Scripture or the word of Yah is a more accurate term in reference to Yah's truth.

We shouldn't use Tanakh, for the simple reason, Yah didn't use it, Yahshuah didn't use it. Yahshuah taught from the word of Yah, when He taught the people did he ever tell them to search the Tanakh? NO he told them to search the scriptures or the word of Yah. (Editor's Comment: Yah didn't use the word "Bible" either, which is the Latin word for "book". However, we use the word "Bible" in our contemporary lexicon. The reasoning here is a bit sketchy, but overall, the article has strong points concerning Biblical truth versus Jewish/Rabbinic tradition.)

Matthew 21:42 Yahshuah saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Yah's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes?

22:29 Yahshuah answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.

Luke 24:45 Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures,

John 5:39 Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.

Mark 7:13 Making the word of Yah of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.

Luke 5:1 And it came to pass, that, as the people pressed upon him to hear the word of YAH, he stood by the lake of Gennesaret,

Luke 8:21 And he answered and said unto them, My mother and my brethren are these which hear the word of YAH, and do it.

JUDAISM VS THE LAWS AND COMMANDMENTS

From the definition of Judaism at the beginning of this page, we see it's the religion of the Jews. As I have stated, Judaism is not the laws and commandments that Yah gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Judaism is a religion created by Jewish rabbis for Jewish people and those who convert to the Jewish culture. Yah's laws and commandments are not a religion but a set apart way of Life. Hebrew Israelites don't practice Judaism, we adhere to Yah's Torah (Instruction, laws).

EXODUS 24:12 And YAH said unto Moses, Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them.

He didn't say come and get Judaism, the Tanakh or The Talmud and teach them. No He said come and Get the Laws and commandments.

There are several branches of Judaism

Conservative
Reform
Orthodox
Hassic

All these sects use the Talmud in higher esteem over the scriptures.

KOSHER VS CLEAN MEATS

KOSHER - Of Food or premises in which food is sold, cooked or eaten fulfilling the requirements of JEWISH LAW.

The law of clean and unclean meats can be found in the book of Leviticus 11. Yah gave us meats that are clean or healthy for us to eat, this is what the term clean meats refer to. Jews have created a word that many think is the proper Hebrew term for clean meats. This word as you may know is Kosher. Kosher is not the Hebrew word for clean meats, it doesn't refer to the laws of clean and unclean meats. Kosher refers to the way the animal is slaughtered, and how to drain a majority of it's blood. They have Kosher pigs, in fact the state of Israel has one of the largest pig farms in the world.

Leviticus 11:7 And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.
8 Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not touch; they are unclean to you.

Any animal can be Kosher as long as it's slaughtered according to the Jewish law. Kosher comes from the Jewish Talmud, that alone should let us know we shouldn't deal with it. Just because you see Kosher on a food label does not mean that product contains 100% clean meat. All it means it that the animal used for that product was slaughter in a certain way that the rabbi's approved of.

RABBIS

Hebrew Israelites shouldn't refer to ourselves as Rabbi.

Matthew 23: 8 But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Messiah; and all ye are brethren.

Enough said.

Other Jewish traditions and culture you don't want to get involved with are:

1. THE JEWISH CALENDAR (they began their new year in Sept, when the scriptures say the new year begins with the month of Abib which is around "March" Or "April".

2. THE 6-POINTED STAR OR SHIELD (Which ever name you refer). The 6 pointed Star is pure idolatry. It's an ancient Idol, that can be traced back to the old babylon under Nimrod. Today's witches and warlocks use this star along with the occult secret societies. Yah commanded us not to have idols, this includes the star, which has nothing to do with King David.

3. WEEKLY SHABATH READINGS, (reading the Torah is good, but the Jews have almost made a commandment that you must read certain scripture approved by their rabbi each week.

4. MAKING AND WEARING FRINGES Be Careful that you are not doing this according to how the Jews do theirs, they are following the authority of the rabbis and not Yah.

5.FESTIVAL (FEAST) DAYS OBSERVANCE
Stick to the script, don't look to jews for knowledge on how to keep the feast days, check the scriptures. 9 times out of 10 the Jews are observing the feast according to the Rabbinic law found in the talmud.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST CALLING YOUR SELF A JEW. This is a big NO NO. Hebrew Israelites are not Jews, we are of the house of Israel, Jews are not. Only those true Israelites who convert to Judaism and do exactly as the Jews do, wear that misnomer title JEW. The Next page will explain this in full detail, why we are not Jews.

Brothers and Sisters there is only one path to Yah, following Jewish tradition and customs will not put you on that path. YOU ARE NOT JEWS OR JEWISH, YOU DO NOT FOLLOW JUDAISM.

Stick to the scriptures, leave those other man made devices and doctrines alone. I will have a follow up to this page called 'WHY WE MUST NOT FOLLOW CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS, that too is just as important to know.

Source: http://www.hebrewisraelites.org/jewishtradition.htm

Editor's Disclaimer: I am still growing in a lot of the Israelite truth. As I study, I keep Christ as the center of all my interpretation of Scripture. But this synopsis is excellent and instructive, nonetheless.

*All italicized and bold-faced items are the emphases of the Editor.

Friday, August 13, 2010

A PHYSICAL ISRAEL



The following is extracted from a short play entitled "Spiritualizing Scripture, The Crime" by Martin Zender:

What about this "spiritual Israel" business?

It’s the same thing—figures of speech. What a great deception has been founded by people who have failed to grasp figures of speech. Worse, this unscriptural phrase has shipwrecked the faith of millions who now disbelieve God’s promises to Israel. I dislike this term more than I dislike meatloaf.

People get this idea because Paul uses so many Israelite terms to describe those of the nations who are in the body of Christ.

I know. Galatians 3:7, for example: "Those of faith, these are sons of Abraham." The way most people understand this verse is: anyone who believes—Jew or Greek—becomes a spiritual son of Abraham. And everybody knows that a spiritual son is better than a literal one. Since this is so, then God doesn’t have to fulfill His literal promises to literal Israel, seeing as how He’s now got spiritual sons of Abraham, that is, spiritual Israelites.

That’s the way the thinking goes.

There’s only one slight problem.

It’s a metaphor?

Right. The nations are not spiritual Israel. They’re figurative Israel. They’re metaphoric Israel. They don’t in any way replace Israel. They’re used to picture Israel, to show that they are—in a way—like Israel.

Is there another example of this from the Scriptures?

In Matthew 26:26, Jesus held up a piece of bread in front of His disciples and said, "This is My body." Now, was the bread literally His body? Did the bread go out and get crucified?

No. The bread represented His body. It being broken was a picture of what would happen to Him.

Exactly. Literal bread, literal body, figurative identification. But what a great deception has been built by failing to recognize this metaphor. With this error in mind, think of those who use Paul’s phrase, "Those of faith, these are sons of Abraham" to cancel God’s promises to the literal seed. To be consistent, they should also teach that, after Christ used the bread to represent Himself, He, Himself, was canceled! That would be the case if a metaphor eliminates a reality. But it doesn’t. A metaphor pictures a reality. Does the ocean disappear when you take a picture of it? Not hardly. The bread that pictured Christ did not eliminate Christ. Likewise, those of the nations who picture what God will someday effect for Israel, do not eliminate Israel. Galatians 4:28 confirms this—"Now you, brethren, as Isaac, are children of promise." See? The nations are like Isaac. They are as Isaac. But they neither eliminate Isaac, nor do they nix the promises God made to Isaac and his literal descendants.

Besides, to say that the body of Christ is spiritual Israel denies that Israel, itself, is spiritual.

Yes; that’s been my point all along. People try to spiritualize things that God has already made spiritual. It’s pride. If men can spiritualize God’s Word, then people will start looking to the men and not to the Word. And this is just what has happened in the spiritualization camps. The Word is nice, but they don’t really need it. I’ve been to meetings like that. It’s scary. The doctrines they come up with are even scarier. This person had a dream; that person heard a voice; that person had an eerie feeling driving past the graveyard. Pity the poor clod who presents a Scriptural fact. At the meetings where I speak, people are looking down at their Bibles. It’s not very good for the ego.

I think people get a head trip from thinking of themselves as spiritual Israel.

Do they! Tell them that they’re figurative Israel, and the cookie crumbles. "Gee, Mildred. I found out today that I’m only the wrong end of a metaphor." When you get right down to it, humans are dumb and ordinary. It’s God Who dazzles us with His Word and His works. And wait until you see what He’s going to do with Israel. He’s going to stun the world, that’s what. What could be more spiritual than Israel coming into her promised kingdom? Man, don’t let anybody spiritualize away that blessed truth. That truth is spiritual!

***EDITOR'S NOTE: THE REST OF THE SCRIPT DEALS WITH THEOLOGICAL QUESTIONS REGARDING THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION, THE TEMPLE OF GOD, GOD'S THRONE, AND THE LAW...WHICH I ALSO THINK IS A PROFITABLE READ.

Let’s talk about the book of Revelation for a moment. People will make fun of you for thinking that everything written there is literal. Do you really believe that there will be a wild beast with seven heads and ten horns?

People are all the time telling me that Revelation must be read "spiritually." This is the same voo-doo I’ve been talking about. Revelation doesn’t need to be read spiritually, but with a solid grasp of figures of speech. I know this will take all the fun out of it, but we want truth, not fun. Almost the entire book of Revelation is, itself, a figure of speech known as Vision. John is seeing things that do not exist at the time. Did John see a seven-headed beast with ten horns? You bet he did! Why do you think he got shook up so bad?

But then the messenger of the Lord explained to John what this represented.

Right. The messenger said: "The ten horns which you perceived are ten kings."

Literal kings?

They have to be. "Ten horns are ten kings" is a metaphor. In a metaphor, the nouns on either side of the verb "to be" are to be taken literally. The figure lies in the verb "to be"—in this case, "is." And the last noun in the metaphor is the thing being pictured by the others. So don’t look for ten horns, but do look for ten kings. Poor John—he saw the ten horns.

So in the book of Revelation, there are many literal things being described figuratively.

That’s a good way to put it. In Revelation, look for figures within the principle figure, describing literal events.

Too bad you sound so calculating!

This is more spiritual than making the lame walk. But try to put it on Christian television and get people to watch.

"Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."

A figure of speech called Implication. The similarity between our Lord’s body and the temple is implied.

"Heaven is God’s throne."

Good one! Here are three figures in one. Because heaven is not only said to be like a throne, but to be a throne, "throne" is a metaphor. But "throne" is also a figure called Association; since a throne is so closely associated with rule, it’s put for it. And since "throne" implies that the Deity sits down, it’s also a figure called Condescension, where God is given human attributes He doesn’t actually possess. Too bad this verse isn’t in Revelation. Then all these figures would be included in the principle figure: Vision.

I’d feel better about this if you would jump up and speak in tongues.

I could do that. But we wouldn’t learn as much.

Why has spiritualizing—or I guess I should say, finding allegories in the Word—become so popular?

Because it’s easy. All you need is a gut feeling. You may be right, you may be wrong. In my opinion, Marvel is nuts. Melvin and Mayhem may be onto something, but which one is right? They both said different things. When someone begins an exposition on allegorical grounds, a red flag should pop up. Proceed with caution, is all I have to say. Test it against the literal Word. If it rings true, then enjoy it. If it’s Marvel, tell her to go home and blow-dry her road atlas.

People have told me that I spend too much time in the Word. They say that I need to "flow with the spirit."

Have you noticed something about that? "Flowing with the spirit" apparently includes watching television, going to the mall and reading romance novels. Just don’t spend too much time with them Bible words! I’d like to have a dollar for every time someone has said to me, "The letter killeth."

I’ll settle for a nickel.

Even a brief glance at the context of Second Corinthians 3:3-7 will show that the letter that kills is the Mosaic law chiseled in stone, not the Word of God. Jesus said in John 6:63 that His words were spirit and life, but that some were simply not believing those words. Where are His words recorded? In the Scriptures. Would we know them apart from the Scriptures? Sorry, but no.

When people spiritualize the Word—can I use that term?—they don’t have to understand it or correctly cut it.

Spiritualizing God’s Word is, many times, a smoke screen for Scriptural carelessness.

I think so, too.

Second Timothy 2:15 says, "Endeavor to present yourself to God qualified, an unashamed worker, correctly cutting the word of truth." This is work! In Second Timothy 1:13, Paul exhorts Timothy to have a pattern of sound words. Words, man! Many of God’s people have taken to spiritualizing Scripture because, by doing so, anyone can become an instant "expert." You don’t need a knowledge of grammar, or of figures of speech, or of Greek or Hebrew. A spiritualizer automatically pirouettes to the head of the class. He’s beyond instruction. Nobody can teach him because practical instruction has become, to him, unspiritual. He has a mysterious insight into God’s Word that nobody else can attain. This is a whole lot easier than becoming an unashamed worker. If you spiritualize Scripture, you don’t have to be a worker. You don’t have to be precise. You don’t have to be a student. You don’t need words. You don’t need facts. When someone approaches with a fact, you can simply write him off by saying, "facts are unspiritual." Then you can twist verses like "the letter killeth" to justify your ignorance.

EDITOR'S NOTE: THE READER IS ENCOURAGED TO READ THIS SHORT PLAY IN ITS ENTIRETY AT: http://martinzender.com/Zenderature/spiritualizing_scripture.htm

Photo: Judean Captives of the Assyrians taken from Lachish, circa 701 BC.