Emphasis added to the above quotation fromEric Heinze’s analysis in The JC.
“Rise of the Rus” — and the End of the Khazar Kingdom: Excerpt with Reference
Rise of Rus
Originally the Khazars were probably allied with various Norse factions who controlled the region around Novgorod. The Rus’ Khaganate, an early Rus polity in northwestern Russia, was probably heavily influenced by the Khazars. The Rus’ regularly travelled through Khazar-held territory to attack territories around the Black and Caspian Seas; in one such raid, the Khagan is said to have given his assent on the condition that the Rus’ give him half of the booty. In addition, the Khazars allowed the Rus to use the trade route along the Volga River. This alliance was apparently fostered by the hostility between the Khazars and Arabs. At a certain point, however, the Khazar connivance to the sacking of the Muslim lands by the Varangians led to a backlash against the Norsemen from the Muslim population of the Khaganate. The Khazar rulers closed the passage down the Volga for the Rus’, sparking a war. In the early 960s, Khazar ruler Joseph wrote to Hasdai ibn Shaprut about the deterioration of Khazar relations with the Rus: “I have to wage war with them, for if I would give them any chance at all they would lay waste the whole land of the Muslims as far as Baghdad.”
The Rus warlords Oleg of Novgorod and Sviatoslav I of Kiev launched several wars against the Khazar khaganate, often with Byzantine connivance. The Schechter Letter relates the story of a campaign against Khazaria by HLGW (Oleg) around 941 (in which Oleg was defeated by the Khazar general Pesakh; this calls into question the timeline of the Primary Chronicle and other related works on the history of the Eastern Slavs.
Sviatoslav finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s. The Khazar fortresses of Sarkel and Tamatarkha fell to the Rus in 965, with the capital city of Atil following circa 967 or 969. A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city: “The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch.”
The Roman Empire had never been Europe’s only organizing power.
The Germanic tribes, the Norse, the Mongols, and many others had been crossing that landscape for political community, trade, and war for centuries. However, it appears to have been the Varangians — descendants of the Vikings — who corrupted the Turkic Jewish Khazar, and when the protective kingdom thought better of looting some of its own villages (Muslim) in concert with the Varangians (and sharing the loot), the Varangians made war on the Khazar and destroyed the kingdom. Legends about that warfare — and the Jews — MAY have floated across northern, central, and eastern Europe for generations. Combined with Christian supersessionary ambitions for subscription and the elimination of Judaism as a contemporary religion, the seeds for Russian (and Greek Orthodox) anti-Semitism may have flourished.
Posted to YouTube by Kings and Generals, November 28, 2019. Note of Arab Muslim incursion into Europe: “. . . if the Khazars had lost, the whole history of Europe might have been very different” (4:39).
During Joe Biden’s presidential confirmation, the entire free world watched in horror and fear at the onslaught of incited crowds on the sanctuaries of American democracy – the Senate and House of Representatives. But for those of us who noticed Israeli flags hoisted alongside the neo-Nazi shirts, the experience was even more shocking.
For anyone for whom Zionism and humanism are important, especially those who remember the trauma of the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, it is hard to think of a more disturbing connection than the one we witnessed that night.
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis on Wednesday marked the 76th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by urging people to keep a close watch on ideological extremism, because “these things can happen again”.Slideshow ( 3 images )
In which virtual century would you wish to live — Putin's 19th of perpetual war mired in unresolvable religious differences that serve primarily political absolutism? Or the 21st Century with its democratic modernity and reality? https://t.co/jw3e6YtPJO
“AOC” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — arrives online so filtered and slanted by a media process more abundant with opinion than primary data that I just don’t wish to take so many presentations at face value. Conservatives in general and self-branded conservative Jews tend to demonize her in ways long on accusation and short on substantial material.
With regard to the image at the top of this post, I would like to know exactly when and where AOC held that sign, IF she actually held that sign.
Notice, please, the QAnon promotion of the same AOC image but with different signs providing the message.
That a certain portion of conservative and reactionary Republicans have chosen to develop and spread lies about George Soros — it’s practically an industry — comes as no surprise. Push-back, however, seems to me comparatively rare. The Political Correctness of the Far White Right immediately demonizes those who would defend the billionaire’s spacious philanthropy on behalf of authentic democracy, freedom, and progress.
The post that follows came about through involvement in one such conversation.
From the Awesome Conversation
Soros’s funding engages and liberates. Some of the people you hate so much appear to be fashionably “Marxist” but in fact hustling capitalist and modern Americans themselves, but they are leveraging substantial American challenges (involving bigotry) into careers.
BackChannels has come to regard the co-founds of Black Lives Matter as fashionably “Marxist” — the term has been overplayed as a dog whistle for the nation’s reactionaries — but in fact deeply “capitalist” — i.e., making their way — as modern moral entrepreneurs, each uniquely engaged in the address of the more stubborn aspects of America’s issues with class and race.
The Trump Administration lies to Americans — not as yet a still conscionable FBI (please do look up “FBI, Antifa” up to this day (August 8, 2020) and let BackChannels know of any substantiation of claims about either “Antifa” and “Black Lives Matter” as the direct drivers of protester violence.
I’ve had enough and not only of the posting-with-an-agenda crowd on Facebook — everybody’s making a point! — but with the Far Right demonizing of billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Having now been summoned to his defense often (for having done a little bit of earnest homework on Soros as a global notable), I thought here to file and pull some of the barbs launched and planted around the Internet to aid the Putin-manipulated “Newest Nationalists” (I shall call them) for the purpose of leading EU/NATO (America First!) back to archaic, bloody, tried, and finished feudalism.
MUNICH – Neither the European public nor European political and business leaders fully understand the threat presented by Xi Jinping’s China. Although Xi is a dictator who is using cutting-edge technology in an effort to impose total control on Chinese society, Europeans regard China primarily as an important business partner. They fail to appreciate that since Xi became president and General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), he has established a regime whose guiding principles are diametrically opposed to the values on which the European Union was founded.
In an interview published on Monday by German newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine, Soros said ongoing tensions between the world’s two largest economies and President Donald Trump’s blaming of China for the Covid-19 pandemic were complicating potential joint efforts to eradicate the virus.
However, Soros himself was not an advocate of closer relations with Beijing.
“There are a lot of people who say we should be working very closely with China (on tackling the crisis) — but I am not in favor of doing that,” he said. “We must protect our democratic open society. At the same time, we must find a way to cooperate on fighting climate change and the novel coronavirus. That won’t be easy.”
With the concept of “Malignant Narcissism” readily at hand for all engaged in political psychology, we may know more about authoritarian leaders than we do about their followers who appear simply ill-informed about the world and vulnerable to its framing by persons with other than democratic and noble intentions.
Barbs
George Soros: Anti-Semite and Coward? No.
As the Nazi program uncloaked for the destruction of Jewry in its entirety, father Tivadar and son George found themselves in Hungary with few options for survival. While Anne Frank and family had found Dutch help for hiding in a sufficient compartment at the rear of a complicated house, the Hungarian father chose social camouflage, i.e., blending into invisibility. Our George was fourteen years old and listened to his father. The barbs launched at the pair today: “cowards”. I’ve heard that it would have been more laudable for them to have died in the camps or joined the resistance — although there was no resistance — no units to join — in Hungary.
Today, real and thinking Jews know that against the unbridled horror of the Nazi Jew-killing machinery, merely to survive it would be to triumph over it!
(There’s a quotation to the left on this blog attributed to Simon Wiesenthal on the occasion of his 90th Birthday celebration held in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria, formerly Hitler’s favorite destination: “The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing”).
Soros father and son, as had painfully too few other Jews, survived the Holocaust, and in relation to the anti-Semitism mixed into so much Soros-related disinformation and invective, this is the way to appreciate them: both were Jews by birth — in the traditional matrilineal way — and both became Holocaust Survivors.
George Soros, Communist, Globalist, Totalitarian — Not Quite
What kind of mind and personality would incline to accept everything said by an “authority” or “big shot” — or “big talker” — with nodding approval and little curiosity and independence?
Here on BackChannels is a short listing of “Globalist” organizations –>
We “Earthlings” really do live on just one planet that in our modern world has been fully connected for international material and social exchange via communication technologies, global shipping, and every form of human travel so far invented. While we may be slowed down by COVID-19 and related restrictions on commerce and travel, we should not be pushed backward by it politically or socially into the shortcomings of earlier political eras or stages.
We have the Internet.
We have our better and wiser selves.
While we of little to modest means work on making the world a better place — and also keeping its 7,000 living language cultures (fewer) and about 4,200 religions (and a disputed and much smaller number of “Major Religions”) intact, George Soros, who chose some time ago to channel off investment revenue into global philanthropy through his Open Society Foundations, has been planting money and cultivating improvements in Qualities of Living worldwide.
In answer to latest Far Whacked Out Right flap doodle on Black Lives Matter, which in parts of its radical agenda can never work but will now be visible and discussable in the public discourse, one may have a look into Borealis Philanthropy, the organization that handles the money and monitors its performance downstream. Where that money goes astray, as it were and as it may — BLM is a “big tent” with fractious cliques, some of them perhaps Left of the Far Out Left — we may let the FBI figure it out as it will where crimes have been committed or incited.
Who Hates George Soros? Authoritarians, Dictators, Political Absolutists, Would-Be Fascists
Authoritarians and Far (White?) Right immoral nationalist entrepreneurs hate George Soros. Here are two practically unavoidable notes on the Soros-Orban relationship involving just one of the philanthropist’s notable enemies –>
VIENNA — Forced out of Hungary, Central European University marked its relocation to Vienna on Friday with a bittersweet ceremony that amounted to a victory for Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orban, in his campaign against liberal values.
Founded and endowed after the fall of the Iron Curtain by George Soros, the billionaire financier and philanthropist, the university promoted democracy and liberal thought in a region where they had been suppressed for a century under fascism and communism.
Should the Jews of Hungary pack their bags? Those with an eye to history might wonder. Last March, in a formal speech commemorating the 170th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, President Viktor Orban said the following:
“They do not fight directly, but by stealth; they are not honourable, but unprincipled; they are not national, but international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs. They are not generous, but vengeful, and always attack the heart – especially if it is red, white and green [the colours of the Hungarian flag].”
With these words, Mr. Orban pursued his marginalization of Hungary’s Jews. He didn’t name them. He didn’t have to. His familiar anti-Semitic tropes, which might have been lifted from any number of German sources between the late 18th-century and the defeat of Adolf Hitler in 1945, would have resonated clearly in the minds of his audience.
And this is the point: anybody who has ever lived under another form of government—that is, under a dictatorship which cannot be removed without bloodshed—will know that a democracy, imperfect though it is, is worth fighting for and, I believe, worth dying for. This, however, is only my personal conviction. I should regard it as wrong to try to persuade others of it.
We could base our whole theory on this, that there are only two alternatives known to us: either a dictatorship or some form of democracy. And we do not base our choice on the goodness of democracy, which may be doubtful, but solely on the evilness of a dictatorship, which is certain. Not only because the dictator is bound to make bad use of his power, but because a dictator, even if he were benevolent, would rob all others of their responsibility, and thus of their human rights and duties. This is a sufficient basis for deciding in favour of democracy—that is, a rule of law that enables us to get rid of the government. No majority, however large, ought to be qualified to abandon this rule of law.
I started developing my philosophy as a student at the London School of Economics in the late 1950s. I took my final exams one year early and I had a year to fill before I was qualified to receive my degree. I could choose my tutor and I chose Karl Popper, the Viennese-born philosopher whose book The Open Society and Its Enemies had made a profound impression on me.
In his books Popper argued that the empirical truth cannot be known with absolute certainty. Even scientific laws can’t be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt: they can only be falsified by testing. One failed test is enough to falsify, but no amount of conforming instances is sufficient to verify. Scientific laws are hypothetical in character and their truth remains subject to testing. Ideologies which claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth are making a false claim; therefore, they can be imposed on society only by force. This applies to Communism, Fascism and National Socialism alike. All these ideologies lead to repression. Popper proposed a more attractive form of social organization: an open society in which people are free to hold divergent opinions and the rule of law allows people with different views and interests to live together in peace. Having lived through both Nazi and Communist occupation here in Hungary I found the idea of an open society immensely attractive.
For some years, I have kept a “quick list” of articles about George Soros. I had compiled the list of URL’s to haul into intellectual battle involving those more loaded with attitudes and beliefs than facts and histories. Not all items so stashed were favorable the the Soros image, but as evidenced here the best work fits the mosaic of a son and father who both well knew the horrors of dictatorship and tyranny, survived both, and were to set themselves against both for the rest of their lives.
Here is the “Quick List” of Soros URL’s (and preceding note) relayed here verbatim in the plain text in which it has been maintained –>
Schwartz György
George Soros, Hon FBA is a Hungarian-American billionaire investor and philanthropist. As of February 2018, he had a net worth of $8 billion, having donated more than $32 billion to his philanthropic agency, the Open Society Foundations. Wikipedia Born: August 12, 1930 (age 89 years), Budapest, Hungary Net worth: 8.3 billion USD (2020) Spouse: Tamiko Bolton (m. 2013), Susan Weber (m. 1983–2005), Annaliese Witschak (m. 1960–1983) Children: Alexander Soros, Jonathan Soros, Andrea Soros, Robert Soros, Gregory Soros Nationality: Hungarian, American, British
—> Google brief results, “Hungarian surname Soros”
The group has brought together Arab journalists, artists, politicians, diplomats, Quranic scholars and others who share a view that isolating and demonizing Israel has cost Arab nations billions in trade. They say it has also undercut Palestinian efforts to build institutions for a future state, and torn at the Arab social fabric, as rival ethnic, religious and national leaders increasingly apply tactics that were first tested against Israel.
The wisdom that comes to mind: “The enemies of Israel defeat themselves.”
In modern thought, however, I believe in humanist ethics and principles that over time defeat family, feudal, and tribal pressure and torque while at the same time degrading the motivations for war itself. We have only one planet; we are all of the Earth herself; and whether we like it or not, we are going to have to arrange and contain ourselves for our sense of efficacy, freedom, and survival.
Too often, those who drive conflict — who incite others to violence — have for themselves aggrandizement and greed in mind foremost. Only to a certain extent may they define “the way of the world”. The way of the world is everyone else, and the truth is “everyone else” gets tired of being victimized by other people’s made-up battles — or psychoses.
All who want more death, more injury, more jealousy, more resentment, more fear, more authority, more force for suffocation of the human spirit . . . keep fighting. Everyone one else — take care of everyone else.
On Facebook, frequent Time of Israel columnist Fred Maroun wrote in light of the above cited article:
“Stop the expansion of settlements on Palestinian land, and ensure full rights for Palestinians”. One may not agree with Ilan Omar on everything, but she’s right on that point. And if Israel won’t give West Bank Palestinians equal rights within the state of Israel, it should let them run their own state in which Palestinians would be citizens. The current state of limbo — no equality and no Palestinian state — is not acceptable and is not worthy of the great democracy that Israel is.
This editor’s riposte has picked up more than a dozen FB “Likes” and “Loves” since it was added to the conversation. Here it is as part of the assault on the “Middle East Conflict” itself, not on the Palestinians who have been made to suffer through 70+ years of Arab Apartheid and Soviet/Post-Soviet disinformation, manipulation, and political repression by their own corrupt and kleptocratic “leaders”.
Palestinians do run their own “territories”, which would be states if their leadership were not in the end murderous!
Omar’s ploy is to eliminate Israel as a Jewish-Majority state. She either conveniently or ignorantly forgets that Israel is 20 percent Arab Muslim enfranchised.
To this point, the Palestinian leaders have appeared to prefer lying to their people — and taking their money for themselves — to buckling down into clearly responsive and responsible governance. If ever there were a place to being building a New Palestinian Society, it would be Shuafat!
