[Peace-discuss] [OccupyCU] 9/11 Truth, The Elephant in the Room video ....

[David Gehrig]

I followed it. I haven't read the book. My take is that Sand missed his window; Koestler could support the Khazar replacement theory because he wrote before the science of genomics, while Sand was demonstrably wrong from the git-go about the Jewish people being "invented."

As a pop history by a professor of French literature, of course, you wouldn't expect the book to spend much time in the math of statistical analysis of DNA studies, and he wasn't aiming at the kind of reader who would. That is, the book is by intent political, not scientific.

Anti-zionists loved it because they could wave it to claim there wasn't any historical link at all between the Israelis and the Israelites.

And the Francises of the world loved it because they could wave it to claim that there is something inherently fraudulent about the Jews. You've seen him make the claim several times on this list.

But the genetic studies take its main claim right off the table.

I first encountered the Khazar replacement theory, by the way, in the context of the white separatist Christian Identity movement in the 1980s. They considered themselves the true descendants of the House of David, and the Jews merely Khazar impostors. And white power sites I've visited while watching the Holocaust denial movement were filled with pejorative references to the Jews as "Khazars" long before Sand.

@%<

> On Mar 27, 2014, at 1:27 PM, "Carl G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 
> David, have you followed the controversy occasioned by Shlomo Sand's "The Invention of the Jewish People" (Verso, 2010)?
> 
> What's your take on it? --CGE
> 
> 
>> On Mar 27, 2014, at 1:05 PM, David Gehrig <david-cu at nukulele.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Does it prove he's wrong? No, it just makes it much more likely. In a larger sense, it means that the situation has gone from "all papers fail to support the Khazar replacement theory" to "all papers but one fail to support the Khazar replacement theory." That's enough to hang your hat on if you're very keen to call the Jews en masse impostors. Which you are. And which the white supremacist Christian Identity movement was, back in the 1980s, being the first time I heard the Khazar theory. But one outlier not enough to overturn scientific consensus. And we'll have to see what the scientific reaction to the paper is.
>> 
>> The general consensus as I understand it is that there is a recognized Khazar contribution to the collective Jewish gene pool, in terms of statistical correlation. But there is also strong genetic evidence that the Jews per se are indeed descended from the Mideast, not the Asian steppes. One doesn't preclude the other. I'd give citations, but you won't read them.
>> 
>> The "cui bono" test -- that's the one that says: if my neighbor gets hit by lightning and has willed me his car, then we can conclude that because I got the car, I therefore caused the lightning. Cui bono, man, cui bono. Open and shut case.
>