Friday, January 19, 2007
We've discussed the issue briefly here before, but Diana Muir Appelbaum and Paul S. Appelbaum have a lengthier and very interesting look at the science and the implications of the nexus of genetic studies and national rights in Azure: The Gene Wars
Genetically based claims to sovereignty are the newest tactics employed in old struggles over national sovereignty and borders.3 They are used to support assertions of historical primacy, the principle that the first of the nations still existing to have established collective life on a specific territory has a right to statehood there. The desire to claim historical primacy is so strong that national groups of recent origin and nations that arrived comparatively recently to the territory where they now demand sovereignty are inclined to invent histories alleging ancient roots...
An unsurprising development. Muslims in general and Arabs in particular have been screaming for years that there is legitimate Jewish claim to Israel because today's Jews, they claim, are genetic descendants of the Khazars, who never lived in Israel.
Ture, but now it can be proven that these Arab claims are bogus.
I thought that the Khazar theory was debunked a long time ago.
And why did the Arabs seize on the Khazar theory, anyway? It seems to me that they'll just latch onto anything that suits their political agenda. If someone floated the rumor that the Jews were originally from Mars, you'd soon hear about it from Fatah and Hamas.
When there was that New York Times article stating that y-chromosome studies showed a shared descent among Jews and close linkages with Levantine Arabs, the response was very muted. You can just imagine the hubbub there would've been if the studies had shown that the Jews were descended from the Khazars after all, or from the Poles, Russians, or Outer Mongolians ... anywhere but the Middle East.
As it was, the only acknowledgement I saw was the statement that many Palestinians may have been descended from Jews who had converted to Islam centuries ago...and, with that in mind, perhaps that will encourage the Jews to treat the Palestinians better. As I said, anything to suit a political agenda.
"the statement that many Palestinians may have been descended from Jews who had converted to Islam centuries ago... perhaps ... will encourage the Jews to treat the Palestinians better."
If Jews treated Palestinians badly because of racism, maybe. But since Israeli treatment of Palestinians is largely due to the repeated attempts of the latter to murder the former and rejection of the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish State, it wouldn't make much difference. When somebody is trying to kill you, you don't decide to let him do it just because he is a distant relative.
One bad turn earns another. The Macedonians are probably reacting to Greece's policy over the last twenty years. Greece has been venomously hostile to Macedonia (forcing other countries to refer to "FYROM", etc). This traces back to Greek occupation of this area in 1912-13, without regard to local wishes, and subsequent forcible hellenization of the primarily slavophone population. (Most of the hellenophone population there are descendants of Greek refugees from Asia Minor in 1920-21.) Greek insecurity about their claims drives them to nationalist excesses, which provoke responses like this.