this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
64 points (95.7% liked)
GenZedong
4587 readers
118 users here now
This is a Dengist community in favor of Bashar al-Assad with no information that can lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton, our fellow liberal and queen. This community is not ironic. We are Marxists-Leninists.
This community is for posts about Marxism and geopolitics (including shitposts to some extent). Serious posts can be posted here or in /c/GenZhou. Reactionary or ultra-leftist cringe posts belong in /c/shitreactionariessay or /c/shitultrassay respectively.
We have a Matrix homeserver and a Matrix space. See this thread for more information. If you believe the server may be down, check the status on status.elara.ws.
Rules:
- No bigotry, anti-communism, pro-imperialism or ultra-leftism (anti-AES)
- We support indigenous liberation as the primary contradiction in settler colonies like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel
- If you post an archived link (excluding archive.org), include the URL of the original article as well
- Unless it's an obvious shitpost, include relevant sources
- For articles behind paywalls, try to include the text in the post
- Mark all posts containing NSFW images as NSFW (including things like Nazi imagery)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The Middle East Media Research Institute is an Israeli-US effort that deliberately mistranslates or otherwise misleads with a bias towards Israel. Assad didn't doubt the existence of the Holocaust nor that 6 million Jews were killed. He did state two problematic things, however:
Speaking imprecisely on the extent to which Jews were targeted when trying to draw attention to the fact that Germans used the same concentration camps and mass death on an even larger number of non-Jews.
Delving into the Khazar origins hypothesis for Ashkenazi Jews, which was originally based on scanty evidence and is now an academic quagmire in terms of genetic evidence. The real reason for the hypothesis in these situations is to undermine the idea that European Jews are a diaspora from The Levant in order to undermine Zionist claims to the land, and to that end it's a counterproductive overreach, as it rhetorically implies that a 2000-year-old diaspora would indeed have the right to settler-colonize and brutalize the populations living in "the homeland".
Both are in the spirit of lazy narratives that flirt with antisemitism but are not the naked antisemitism that the headlines are falsely claiming.
Isn't the Khazar hypothesis debunked long ago?
There is proven Jew presence in Germany from like III century and even the term Ashkenazi was used not long after destruction of Khazar Khaganate while there was entire centuries old Jewish organisation in Western Europe. Eastern European Jews are descended from mostly German Jews who were fleeing from the mass oppression and pogroms in XIII-XIV century.
Krymchaks and Karaites might be descendants of Khazar since last mentions of them are from Crimea and Krymchaks and Karaites do not speak Yiddish but a Turkic language, but it's unclear.
In terms of non-genetic evidence it's always been on shaky ground. Not necessarily disproven so much as it wasn't established as likely in the first place.
In terms of comparative genetics analysis, the studies are fraught. The more typical hypothesis of origins near the Levant is the most popular and does have decent evidence. At the same time, some scientists, including Israeli ones, have reasonably entertained hypotheses of origins in the caucuses and have some amount of evidence. IMO there have not been good enough studies in general, they need to sample more populations, particularly different ethnic groups, and do proper work testing alternative hypotheses under different (appropriate) modeling methods. This research is also challenging because of the hypothesis being favored by antisemites. I probably wouldn't work on the topic myself if I were in the field. There's a lot of potential for negative outcomes without having rock-solid evidence and rock-solid evidence may be impossible.
I generally don't think genetic research of ethnicity is very useful, it smells of calipers for mile and entire history already showed us it's basically completely irrelevant. Culture and language research is much more useful.