Category: America

The emergence of Turkey’s hidden Jews

By MICHAEL FREUND

Fundamentally Freund: the Donmeh community, numbering several thousand people, descends from followers of the false messiah Shabtai Zvi.

Recently, at a small synagogue in New Jersey, a Jewish tragedy more than three centuries old came to an abrupt and long-awaited end.

Standing before a rabbinical court, a “hidden Jew” from Turkey closed an historical circle by emerging from the shadows of the past and formally returning to the Jewish people.

The young man in question, who now goes by his Hebrew name of Ari, is a member of the Donmeh, a community numbering several thousand people who are descendants of the followers of the false messiah Shabtai Zvi.

It might sound fanciful, or even far-fetched, but after all these years, there are still people who believe that he will yet return to redeem Israel.

In the 17th century, Zvi stormed onto the Jewish scene, raising hopes of redemption and electrifying Jews the world over. Armed with immense charisma, he traveled to various Jewish communities and promised that the long-awaited deliverance from exile was at hand.

But his messianic career came to a crushing end when the Ottoman sultan presented him with a dire choice: convert to Islam or die by the sword. The would-be claimant to King David’s throne tossed heroism aside and became a Muslim, along with 300 families who were among his most loyal adherents.

While they ostensibly practiced Islam, the Donmeh (also known as the Ma’aminim, Hebrew for “believers”) nonetheless continued to observe a mystical form of Judaism in secret.

Scholars such as Gershom Scholem wrote extensively about the Donmeh, and the University of California’s Marc David Baer recently published an important new study about them.

Until today, some of these Sabbateans preserve various Jewish customs, such as celebration of the festivals, study of the Zohar, and even the recital of portions of the book of Psalms each day. And they still follow the “18 Commandments” handed down to them by Shabtai Zvi, which includes an absolute prohibition on intermarriage.

For many years, they concentrated in the Greek city of Salonika, until they were expelled to Turkey in 1923-24 as part of the population exchanges between the two countries. This painful chapter in their history turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it saved them from the fate that befell Greek Jewry, most of whom were murdered by the Nazis.

But despite the Donmeh’s conversion to Islam and the passage of more than 300 years, they are still viewed with suspicion by Turkish Muslims, and are frequent targets of the country’s press, which accuses them of being part of an international Zionist conspiracy.

So it is no surprise that the Donmeh turned inward and essentially went underground, in effect leading double lives to survive. Though many of them have assimilated into Turkish society, several thousand still reside in cities such as Istanbul and Izmir.

TWO YEARS ago, on a visit to Istanbul, I met with some members of the younger generation of Donmeh, including Ari. Given the current state of Turkish- Israeli relations, I cannot divulge identifying details about them, other than to say they all expressed a deep yearning to return to Judaism.

When I met them in the lobby of a small hotel, Ari in particular seemed especially nervous. He was constantly peering around the room, initially afraid of being seen with a kippa-wearing Jew from Israel.

He told me of the mistreatment the Donmeh endure in the Turkish media, and said, “I am tired of hiding and I am tired of pretending. I want to be a Jew – I want to return to my people.”

When I probed him about his Jewish knowledge, I was astonished to see how conversant he was with various kabbalistic concepts. And I’m not referring to the pseudo-Kabbala practiced by Madonna and others in Hollywood, but to the real thing.

Ari later showed me around the city, pointing out the Donmeh cemetery and other sites central to the community’s hidden life. With an obvious sense of frustration, he explained how Turkey’s Jewish community will not go near the Donmeh issue, fearful of the reaction this might evoke.

“I am caught between two worlds,” he said. “The Turks see me as a Jew, but the Jews will not accept me.”

But all that changed a few weeks ago, when Ari took the brave step of traveling to America to undergo a return to Judaism. After the rabbis examined his case, taking into account the fact that his ancestors had only married among themselves, they welcomed Ari back into the fold.

Speaking to me shortly afterward, Ari could not contain his emotions: “It is a miracle – I am now an ‘official’ Jew, after all these years!” The following Sabbath, he was honored at a New York-area synagogue with carrying the Torah before the congregation. He held the scroll tightly and lovingly in his hands, cradling it like a newborn infant as tears of joy and relief trickled down his cheeks.

Ari is not alone. There are many other young Donmeh also looking to find their way back, and it behooves the Jewish people to help them. Whatever mistakes their ancestors may have committed, the Donmeh of today have clung to their Jewish heritage and kept it alive. Those who wish to reclaim their roots should be enabled to do so.

Welcome back to our people, Ari, and may your return pave the way for other Donmeh.

The writer serves as chairman of Shavei Israel (www.shavei.org), a Jerusalem-based group that assists “lost Jews” seeking to return to the Jewish people.

www.jpost.com, 23.03.2011

March 25, 2011
Turkey to represent US interests in Libya

Washington – The Turkish government has agreed to represent US diplomatic interests in Libya, the US State Department said Tuesday.

‘Turkey has agreed to be our protecting power in Libya. And we’re, indeed, very grateful for Turkey for accepting that role,’ spokesman Mark Toner said.

The United States closed its embassy after Libyan leader Moamer Gaddafi launched a massive crackdown against dissidents last month. In March, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the US was cutting ties to the Libyan embassy in Washington and expected it to shut down.

via Turkey to represent US interests in Libya – Monsters and Critics.

March 23, 2011
Armenia and the Turks in the Time of Lawrence

Benny Morris

While Colonel T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) sympathized with Armenian aspirations for sovereignty and, indeed, in a map he drew up after the Great War of a desirable Middle Eastern share-out of the Ottoman Empire he provided for an independent Armenia (in Cilicia), he was also party to the prevalent anti-Armenian prejudices of his day.

Lawrence was a member of the British delegation to the 1919 postwar Paris peace conference. On November 3 he told Frank Polk, the American “Commissioner” in Paris, that the Armenians were prone to lend “money at exorbitant rates of interest” and took “the Turks’ land or horses in security for payment,” and this at least in part explained the Turkish atrocities against them during World War I.

But there was another factor. “Armenians,” he told Polk, as related in Polk’s report on their conversation, “have a passion for martyrdom, which they find they can best satisfy by quarrelling with their neighbors . . . They can be relied upon to provoke trouble for themselves in the near future.”

In general, Lawrence felt, “it would be most undesirable to attempt to establish an Armenian state.” Except in a specific territory, where they would be overwhelmingly preponderant. “The idea of an Armenian State infuriates all the other races, and it would require 5 divisions of troops (100,000 troops) to maintain it.”

According to Lawrence, the Turks had been exhausted by the Great War and their “army is rotten with venereal disease and unnatural vice.” Hence, their birth rate was falling. He thought that if the Turks were “confined to their own territories, in thirty years’ time [Turkey] would once more be bounding with health and, incidentally, lusting for conquest.” (Perhaps Lawrence’s use of the words “vice” and “lust” were influenced by his personal experiences during the war years.)

About his friend the Emir Faisal, the military leader of the Arab Revolt and the de facto ruler at the time in Damascus, Lawrence said that he was “cautious, moderate, usually honest but capable of treachery if it suited him.”

Surprisingly, Lawrence told Polk that “the Jews get on well with the Arabs ” and added that, contrary to prevailing opinion at the time among British officials, “the Jew is a good cultivator both in Palestine and Mesopotamia [he was speaking here of Iraqi Jews].” The problem was that “the conditions [in the Middle East] preclude enterprise in the shape of improvements and [the Jew] requires five shillings a day to live on against the Arab’s or Syrian’s sixpence [i.e., half a shilling: there were twenty shillings to the pound sterling].”

Lawrence concluded by saying that “the Zionist movement has ‘many prophets but no politicians’ [had he lived into the 21^st century he would have thought otherwise] . . . The movement has been mismanaged in the last nine months,” he thought.

He offered Polk one general, final reflection about the Middle Eastern peoples: “No nation must expect gratitude from the East or anything but the ‘Order of the Boot’ as soon as they can manage it [meaning that the Arabs or the Turks would boot out foreign powers as soon as they could affect it, no matter how beneficial these powers had been to the locals in previous years].”

nationalinterest.org, March 8, 2011

March 19, 2011
Colombia Plans To Start Free Trade Talks With Turkey

BOGOTA -(Dow Jones)- Colombia plans to start free trade talks with Turkey later this year, part of an ongoing effort by Bogota to broaden its trade ties around the world as hopes for a free trade agreement with the U.S. remain in doubt.

A statement from Colombia’s trade ministry said officials from Turkey and Colombia met earlier this week in Ankara and agreed that a first round of talks could begin in Bogota as early as late May.

The announcement comes a few weeks after the trade ministry said it hoped to wrap up a free trade deal with South Korea by late June and that it is also aiming for a free trade agreement with Japan.

Colombia for years has been vying for a permanent free trade agreement with the U.S., its main trading partner, but lawmakers in Washington have so far failed to ratify any such deal.

That’s led to frustration in Bogota, and President Juan Manuel Santos said recently that if a deal with the U.S. isn’t formalized soon, Colombia will give up trying. In the meantime, he said his government will continue pursuing other trade deals around the globe.

Colombia’s push to increase the number of countries it trades with is also in response to a 2009 decision by Venezuela, its neighbor and a major trading partner, to begin cutting back on trade due in part to Bogota’s close ties with the U.S.

Trade between Colombia and Turkey is minimal, reaching just $271 million last year. Colombia exported $214 million worth of products to Turkey, including coal. Turkey in turn shipped about $57 million worth of goods, including artillery parts, auto parts and textiles.

-By Dan Molinski, Dow Jones Newswires; 57-310-867-6542; dan.molinski@ dowjones.com

via Colombia Plans To Start Free Trade Talks With Turkey.

March 17, 2011
I’m Proud of P.J. Crowley

I’m proud of Philip J. Crowley. As Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, Crowley had the guts to denounce the sustained (mis)treatment of Private Bradley Manning as “ridiculous” and “counterproductive” and “stupid.” For this burst of principled honesty, the Obama administrationcashiered him. Never has the moral obtuseness of the Obama/Hillary Clinton duumvirate been more clearly displayed.

Crowley and I have two things in common: We’re from the same hometown, and we made our first careers in the Air Force (I served for 20 years; Crowley for 26). Our hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts is a working-class town, proud of its reputation as the “City of Champions” (especially the heavyweight boxer Rocky Marciano and the middleweight boxer “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler), and prouder still of its pragmatic patriotism based on a sense of decency and fair play. By any standard, the treatment of Manning (solitary confinement, forced nudity, constant harassment) has been indecent and unfair. I have no evidence for this, but I’d like to think Crowley’s hard-hitting jabs against the Pentagon hailed in part from his roots as a Brockton Boxer.

But, more than anything, I suspect Crowley’s stance came from his twenty-six year career in the U.S. Air Force. Like him, I swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same. The U.S. Constitution protects us all from cruel and unusual punishment: an apt description of the military’s treatment of Private Manning.

Indeed, anyone who respects the U.S. Constitution can’t help but be appalled by the military’s treatment of Manning. It’s worse than ridiculous or counterproductive or stupid: it’s patently inconsistent with our nation’s ideals as expressed in our Bill of Rights.

Again, I commend P.J. Crowley for being a man in the arena, for standing up for what he believed in, for taking some hard swings before a milquetoast establishment forced him out of the ring. Pick yourself up, P.J., and hold your head high. For those who fired you, they deserve only to hang their heads in shame.

Photo: Newssofap

The Huffington Post

March 14, 2011
The Grievous Return of Henry Kissinger – An Analysis

by Dr. Lawrence Davidson

The gods protect us, Henry Kissinger is back!

Henry Kissinger was President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State. He also held the latter position under President Gerald Ford. While it would be unfair to characterize him as someone who never gave a piece of good advice (he did encourage Nixon to engage in Detente with the Soviet Union), his record weighs heavily on the side of unwise counsel. As we will see he is back in exactly that role, plying bad advice that, in this case, could further erode America’s already messed up intelligence agencies.

Kissinger was originally an academic. His doctoral dissertation was on the diplomacy of two early 19^th century statesmen, Britain’s Viscount Robert Castlereagh and Austria’s Prince Klemens von Metternich. These men were major players at the great Congress of Vienna that took place after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. At that meeting Metternich argued for returning Europe to its pre French Revolution political status. Pursuing that impossible end, he backed repressive policies and regimes. One gets the impression that the history of Kissinger’s public service was, at least in part, an effort to achieve the stature of a Metternich. Toward this end Kissinger would pursue “realpolitik” which, more often than not in its American manifestation, entailed the backing of repressive policies and regimes.

Here are some of the things Kissinger espoused: the bombing of North Vietnam in order to achieve “peace with honor;” support for the murderous, Fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and the equally bloody military dictatorship in Argentina; acquiescence in the annexation of East Timor by the Indonesian dictator Suharto, which was followed by genocidal massacres; acquiescence in the Serb and Croat wars against the Bosnian Muslims; support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and last but certainly not least, active lobbying for the admittance into the U.S. of the ailing Shah of Iran (yet another American supported dictator) which led immediately to the hostage taking of U.S. diplomats in 1979 and the continuing animosity and tension between America and Iran. I saved this piece of bad judgment till last because it of a piece with Kissinger’s latest excursion into playing the great statesman by pushing folly.

So what would Dr. Kissinger have us do now? Well, according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Kissinger has sent a letter to President Obama “urging him to commute the prison term of Jonathan Pollard, who is serving life term for spying for Israel.” Kissinger claims that he has consulted with others such as former Defense Secretary Weinberger, former Secretary of State George Schultz and former CIA Director Woolsey (all of whom are supporters of Israel) and found their “unanimous support for clemency compelling.” Kissinger’s letter follows on a lobbying effort by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has made an official request to Obama for the same granting of clemency. Here is what Netanyahu had to say, “Both Mr. Pollard and the Government of Israel have repeatedly expressed remorse for these actions [of spying], and Israel will continue to abide by its commitment that such wrongful actions will never be repeated.” There is something almost childish in this approach. Caught with Israel’s hand in the cookie jar, the spies and their handlers say ‘Oh I’m sorry. If you commute the punishment we promise to be good from now on.’ Actually, in the world of espionage, such promises aren’t worth the paper they are written on. Thus, in 2004 the FBI caught another government employee,, spying for Israel and using the Zionist American lobby AIPAC as the conduit through which to pass the stolen information. So much for promises of future good behavior.

What Kissinger and the rest Pollard’s supporters seem not to find compelling, or even noteworthy, is the fact that ever since the 1987 trial that sent Pollard away for life, the career officers in the American intelligence services have quietly threatened mass resignation if this Zionist spy went free. Keep in mind that ever since George W. Bush and his neo-conservatives wrecked havoc with the CIA in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, the one Kissinger so obligingly supported, the intelligence agencies of this country have found their morale at the sub-basement level. If Obama commutes Pollard’s sentence it will be yet another blow to their professional well-being.

But what does Dr. Kissinger care about a bunch of government employees? In his realpolitik version of reality neither government servants nor ordinary citizens are worth much. Here are a couple of Kissinger quotes to show what I mean. Having helped condemn the Chilean people to 16 years under the murderous rule of Ernesto Pinochet, Kissinger rationalized the decision this way, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” And, as to the career analysts in the various intelligence agencies, most of whom really are experts in the countries they study, Kissinger just dismisses that expertise as inconsequential. “Most foreign policies that history has marked highly,” he tells us, “have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.” Well, that is all the “experts” except Dr. Kissinger.

The real Henry Kissinger, who implausably received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, borders on being a war criminal. That should tell us what his advice is really worth. President Obama would be a fool to listen to a man whose blood stained career should have long ago come to an ignoble end.

www.tothepointanalyses.com, 9 March 2011

March 13, 2011