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By Tom Stevenson

The Red Sea is usually one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Nearly 30 per cent of maritime container trade, and a significant quantity of oil, passes through the Suez Canal and the Bab al-Mandab. Or it used to, before the Houthis in Yemen began trying to shut it all down last month.

In October, they launched a number of ballistic missiles at Israel. Some were intercepted by Israel’s Hetz missile defence system; others were shot down by US Navy destroyers. But where these attacks failed the Houthis have enjoyed more success in the Red Sea.

The distance between the Red Sea’s jagged coral coasts is relatively narrow. Southbound ships usually keep west and northbound ships stay east, passing closer to Yemen. On 19 November, videos showed Houthi forces boarding and commandeering the Galaxy Leader, a ship flying a Bahaman flag, chartered in Japan and, according to the Houthis, Israeli-owned (though the Israeli authorities said the ship’s owners were British and it had nothing to do with them). The raid was followed by near daily attacks on passing commercial ships.

By mid-December, the world’s four largest shipping companies – MSC, Maersk, CMA CGM and COSCO – had suspended the Red Sea transit. Maersk has decided to reroute all its ships ‘for the foreseeable future’. Some smaller shipping companies have persisted.

The Red Sea has been the main maritime route between the east and west of the old world since the opening of the Suez canal in 1869. In the 19th century, the British Empire built a coaling station and colonial outpost at Aden to control trade between Bombay and London. The alternative is to sail round the Cape of Good Hope, adding thousands of miles to the journey.

The Houthis have made clear their ‘comprehensive blockade in the Red Sea’ is a direct response to Israeli crimes in Gaza. It is also a direct challenge to US naval dominance in the Middle East. Ineffectual missile attacks on a US protectorate were bad enough. Defying American power in the region’s second most important waters (after the Persian Gulf) was bound to provoke a response.

On 18 December, the US and a few allies declared Operation Prosperity Guardian to escort commercial ships through the Red Sea. US forces have been shooting down anti-ship missiles launched by the Houthis. Helicopters from the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower and the destroyer USS Gravely have seen off small attack boats. The Royal Navy destroyer HMS Diamond shot down a drone. No commercial ship has suffered very serious damage since the start of the operation, but that hasn’t been enough to get the giant shipping companies to return.

The Houthis are often still described as ‘rebels’, a term that might have been appropriate a decade ago but isn’t any longer. In the chaotic aftermath of the 2011 uprisings in Yemen, the Houthis – a composite movement of political, religious and tribal groups from the north of the country – were the qualified victors. They did not win a complete national victory. But by 2014 they were in control of the capital, Sanaa, and most of the densely populated parts of the country except Aden. They have survived a concerted and bloody assault designed to remove them from power, led by Saudi Arabia and backed by Britain and the US. They are the closest thing Yemen has to a government – much closer than the so-called Presidential Leadership Council concocted by the Saudis, which does most of its business out of the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh.

In Britain there have been calls to increase the Royal Navy’s involvement. The Telegraph columnist Tom Sharpe has published five articles calling for the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth to be deployed to the Red Sea, and for ‘offensive strikes into Houthi territory’. The years of brutal war in Yemen, sustained by Britain and the US, with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands, go unmentioned.

On 3 January, the US and UK issued a ‘final warning’ to the Houthis to stop the attacks. The Houthis responded the following day by sending an ‘unmanned explosives-packed surface boat’ into the shipping lanes. Another round of Anglo-American attacks on Yemen has become likely. But the Houthis have already shown they cannot be cowed. Last night they launched what is said to be their biggest attack yet, intercepted by American and British forces. A larger war isn’t getting any less likely.

The Red Sea crisis has revealed the absence not only of purported ‘middle powers’ but also of China. The shipment of manufactured goods from Shanghai to Rotterdam is the emblematic trade route of the modern world. Yet Beijing has issued a single bland pro forma statement, from the deputy director of the information department at the Foreign Ministry, urging ‘all sides’ to play a constructive role. In practice, the situation is left to the flailing violence of the US and its lesser allies.

Tom Stevenson is a contributing editor at the LRB. Someone Else’s Empire, a collection of essays, many of which first appeared in the paper, was published in November.

10 January 2024

Source: www.lrb.co.uk

By Craig Murray

Officials who supplied, incited or cheered on Israel’s monstrous atrocities in Gaza face legal actions with South Africa’s reference to the International Court of Justice. In the UK, Sunak, Cleverly and Shapps could be in the Old Bailey dock for genocide.

3 Jan 2024 – Expect the UK to intervene on Israel’s side in the South African case against Israel for Genocide at the International Court of Justice. If Israel loses, British ministers, civil servants and military personnel could end up in the dock for genocide – not only in the Hague, but in the UK.

Infamously, UK courts give no force to international treaties even when the UK has ratified them, unless they are specifically incorporated in UK domestic legislation. The Genocide Convention was explicitly incorporated into UK law in 1969 by the Genocide Act. However the Genocide Act was repealed in 2001 and replaced by Section 51 of the International Criminal Court Act.

That is perfectly clear. Article 53 makes plain that this includes ancillary offences, eg aiding and abetting genocide.

What has the UK government done to aid and abet the genocide? It has:

1. Actively encouraged and incited genocide, including by the systematic obstruction of ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council.
2. Provided military equipment to Israel, with dozens of flights from RAF Akrotiri to Israel during the course of the genocide itself.
3. Provided communications intelligence to Israel to assist in genocide.
4. Provided aerial surveillance to Israel to assist in genocide.

These are for certain. It is also widely rumoured that UK Special Forces have participated directly in the genocide. That is something the prosecution will have to determine.

There has been a great sense of impunity among the zionist-controlled political classes: they have believed that they were in no danger of any personal retribution for their part in the brutal destruction of thousands and thousands of young children. In fact they felt able to turn the power of the state against anybody protesting that destruction.

There has been no legal jeopardy to anybody supplying, inciting or cheering on Israel’s monstrous atrocities. The jeopardy has all been felt by those opposing the atrocities.

That all changed with South Africa’s reference to the International Court of Justice. A determination of genocide by the International Court of Justice must be respected by the International Criminal Court and it will be impossible even for the odious Karim Khan to avoid bringing prosecutions against the perpetrators. Similarly in the UK, the fact of genocide being legally established, a police investigation will be obliged simply to focus on whether the UK aided and abetted it.

Quite simply, if you ask the police to investigate Sunak for aiding and abetting genocide today, they will laugh at you and say there is no genocide. After an ICJ judgment they can no longer do that.

Now I am not naive. Just as our rulers believe their backs are covered by Karim Khan KC at the International Criminal Court, they believe that their backs are covered in the UK by the provision that any prosecution must be with the consent of the Attorney General. A government therefore has to agree to the prosecution.

I gave evidence at great length to the police inquiry into UK complicity in CIA torture and extraordinary rendition, in which Tony Blair and Jack Straw had so much blood on their hands it would fill swimming pools. There were of course never any prosecutions.

But the world changes over time, and it feels like something has seriously shifted in both the international and domestic order from the open espousal by our ruling classes of the most extreme atrocities, happening again and again and again in plain sight.

Our ruling classes may find they are less fixed in power than they believe. I would not bet on their impunity being permanent. There is a good precedent of participants in the Holocaust being brought to justice many decades later. We may yet see justice, and I believe a good deal sooner than that.

Craig John Murray (born 17 Oct 1958) is a Scottish author, human rights campaigner, journalist, and former diplomat for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

8 January 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Julia Conley

“Israel’s murder of more than 22,000 Palestinian civilians, the majority of whom were women and children, in Gaza for nearly three months should not go unpunished in any way,” said a Turkish spokesperson.

3 Jan 2024 – South Africa is no longer alone in bringing its claim of genocide by the Israeli government to the International Court of Justice, following announcements from the Turkish Foreign Ministry and the Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that they support the case.

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

The Israeli government argues that it is in a mortal fight for survival against Hamas, and therefore must take every measure, including the very destruction of Gaza, to survive. This is false.

1 Jan 2024 – When Congress returns in January, President Joe Biden will push the case to deepen U.S. complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza through another US armaments package for Israel. North Americans should raise their voice in a resounding no.

By Caitlin Johnstone

Violently coercing someone into doing something and ensuring that they’ll die if they don’t do it is the exact opposite of what the word “voluntary” means.

2 Jan 2024 – Israeli officials are now openly admitting that they’re working on “encouraging” the migration of Palestinians from Gaza, ridiculously claiming that this migration would be “voluntary” despite their having deliberately made the enclave uninhabitable over the last three months.

The Times of Israel reports:

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s two senior far-right partners endorsed the rebuilding of settlements in the Gaza Strip and the encouraging of “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians on Monday, while hawkish opposition MK Avigdor Liberman called for Israel to reoccupy southern Lebanon.

“Speaking during their parties’ respective faction meetings in the Knesset, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich presented the migration of Palestinian civilians as a solution to the long-running conflict and as a prerequisite for securing the stability necessary to allow residents of southern Israel to return to their homes.

“The war presents an ‘opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza,’ Ben Gvir told reporters and members of his far-right Otzma Yehudit party, calling such a policy ‘a correct, just, moral and humane solution.’

“‘We cannot withdraw from any territory we are in in the Gaza Strip. Not only do I not rule out Jewish settlement there, I believe it is also an important thing,’ he said.

“The ‘correct solution’ to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ‘to encourage the voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees,’ Smotrich told members of his Religious Zionism party, predicting that ‘Israel will permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip,’ including through the establishment of settlements.”

The repeated use of the word “encourage” stands out in these remarks, given that encouraging Gaza’s inhabitants to flee their homeland is exactly what Israel’s actions since October have been doing. Once you’ve made 90 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants homeless with internal displacement, forced half the population into starvation via siege warfare, destroyed the enclave’s entire healthcare system to the point where disease is now running rampant, all while raining death and destruction from above in a wildly unpredictable manner with airstrikes routinely hitting designated safe zones, you’re offering the population some very strong “encouragement” indeed to vacate the region as soon as possible.

This obviously makes the argument for the “voluntary migration” of Gazans completely nonsensical, since violently coercing someone into doing something and ensuring that they’ll die if they don’t do it is the exact opposite of what the word “voluntary” means.

But that’s the slogan we’re seeing pop up again and again as Israel draws closer to its final solution to the Palestinian problem in Gaza. Netanyahu and his cohorts have been repeatedly uttering phrases like “voluntary resettlement” and “voluntary migration” to describe the plan for Gaza’s Palestinian inhabitants to either move to refugee camps set up in the adjacent Sinai Peninsula in Egypt or to be taken in by other nations around the world.

Netanyahu has said that a team must be established to “ensure that those who want to leave Gaza to a third country can do so.” Iraq invader Tony Blair was reportedly being eyed as a potential leader of such a team by Israeli officials, though Blair has denied this.

Mitchell Plitnick wrote the following on the absurdity of the “voluntary migration” talking point in an article for Mondoweiss last month:

“The term ‘voluntary emigration’ is likely to be heard quite a lot in the coming weeks and months, and it is one of the most cynical, dishonest terms one can imagine. There is, of course, nothing voluntary about people leaving Gaza. Israel has made the place unlivable, and that was before the current bombardment.

“Now, they are essentially being forced to leave under the threat of imminent death. The people of Gaza did not suddenly lose their attachment to Palestine. They will die if they stay, as will their children. If you cut off water, electricity, food, and medical care, destroy all the shelter, and then ask a person, ‘Would you still like to stay?’ their decision to leave is obviously not voluntary.”

But that’s the narrative they’re going with apparently.

And it’s nothing new; Israel has been falsely claiming for generations that its violent forced expulsion of Palestinians known as the Nakba was voluntary as well. In 2000 Palestinian academic Ghada Karmi wrote that “The Israeli version of history — that the Palestinians left voluntarily or under orders from their leaders and that Israelis had no responsibility, material or moral, for their plight — has been successfully marketed to the world community for decades.”

The plot to relocate Palestinians from territories desired by Israel is also far from new. In a 2002 article for The Guardian titled “A new exodus for the Middle East?”, Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that the agenda to “transfer” Palestinians to other countries has existed for as long as modern Zionism:

“The idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century. And driving it was an iron logic: There could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants, who opposed its emergence and would constitute an active or potential fifth column in its midst. This logic was understood, and enunciated, before and during 1948, by Zionist, Arab and British leaders and officials.

“As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the prophet and founder of Zionism, wrote in his diary in anticipation of the establishment of the Jewish state: ‘We shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country … The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.’”

This is a very, very old agenda, being presented as something brand new that is only just occurring to Israeli officials just now. They didn’t just come up with this. It’s been fantasized about for as long as Israel was a twinkle in its founding fathers’ eyes.

This is the real objective in Gaza. Not the “elimination of Hamas” (whatever the hell you want to pretend that would look like in practice), but the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

Hamas is not the target in Gaza. Hamas is just the excuse.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper.

8 January 2024

Source: transcend.org

By John J. Mearsheimer

4 Jan 2024 – I am writing to flag a truly important document that should be widely circulated and read carefully by anyone interested in the ongoing Gaza atrocities.

By South China Morning Post

29 Dec 2023 – As the Russian musical Anna Karenina is set to be staged in Shanghai and Beijing this month, theatre director Alina Chevik hopes to see how it can connect the two peoples at a time when Russian artists have been shunned in Western markets.

By John Wight

Pretoria is challenging the Israeli government’s claim to innocence, which for far too long has allowed it to act with impunity against the long-suffering Palestinians.

4 Jan 2024 – The collective West will forever stand disgraced and exposed due to its blind support of Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since Oct. 7.

What passes for governance in Washington, Berlin, Paris, London et al. has forced us all to bear witness to infanticide, high crimes and war crimes without end these past few months. Said crimes have been committed not in the name of self-defence but rather in the name of ethno-nationalism, settler-colonialism and white supremacy.

Israel’s ability to act with impunity is a feature of the innocence it has claimed to enjoy as the national home of a Jewish people whom Hitler marked out for extermination in a European Judeocide that ranks as a crime of the ages.

The tragic aspect to this horrific episode in “European history” is the cynical fashion in which a Zionist movement, rooted in the ethnic cleansing of a people deemed to belong on a lower rung of a malign cultural ladder, manipulated it in order to achieve its aims.

The mantra of “never again!” has, ever since, been deployed as a sword against a people and region entirely innocent of the attempt to wipe European Jewry off the map, rather than a shield to ensure that the crime of genocide never re-occurs against any people, anywhere, and at any time again in human affairs.

Which brings us to the current government of the Republic of South Africa’s quite stunning intervention in bringing legal proceedings against the state of Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands, under the auspice of The Genocide Convention, brought into international law by a nascent United Nations in 1948.

Israel, predictably, has come out swinging against what it views as the temerity of any government to dare accuse it of genocide. The accusation of blood libel has been leveled at Pretoria, in other words anti-Jewish racism, along with a litany of baseless slurs.

Here, again, we are invited to adhere to a rendering of the Holocaust which holds that violence unleashed by the state of Israel is done so in the name of the dead of Auschwitz, and therefore comes anointed with the halo of impunity.

Crashing into this mythos was Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brazen and chilling biblical injunction, included in a speech he gave to his people at the start of Israel’s military operation in and against Gaza in October.

To wit:

“Remember what Amalek did to you (Deuteronomy 25:17).”

This particular Old Testament injunction sanctions the extermination of the ancient tribe, Amalek, by God in the name of his chosen people, the Jews, after they emerge from bondage in Egypt.

That Netanyahu, leader of a 21st century state, saw fit to include it in said speech at the outset of Israel’s ground invasion constitutes, does it not, a de facto case of genocidal intent?

Landmark Proceedings in The Hague

This, inter alia, forms the backbone of what will be landmark proceedings in front of the ICJ in The Hague, scheduled to take place on Jan. 11 and 12.

Black South Africa has long supported the Palestinian struggle. Famously, its most illustrious son, Nelson Mandela, once declared the following during a 1997 speech marking that year’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people:

“But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Just on the simple refrain that “it takes one to know one,” post-apartheid South Africa has never been in any doubt that Israel is an apartheid state. In this it has now been joined by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and all people of conscience and consciousness around the world.

That post-apartheid South Africa, with this legal case, now accuses Israel of being a genocidal state breaks new ground. Again, on a moral and historical level, it challenges the State of Israel’s claim to the innocence which for far too long has allowed it to act with impunity against the long-suffering Palestinians.

In this respect, it bears emphasizing that Hamas is a symptom rather than a cause. It is the product of structural oppression, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the countless Oct. 7s endured and suffered by the Palestinians since 1948. It is not the cause.

In the last analysis, either international law applies everywhere or it applies nowhere. In bringing forward this case against the state of Israel, the Republic of South Africa stands tall. Where she goes others will hopefully now follow. [Turkey and Malaysia have expressed support for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.]

John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps (2021), writes on politics, culture, sport.

8 January 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Matthew Ehret

4 Jan 2024 – Today, I would like to go a little deeper into the longer wave of history shaping our presently confused age by taking a look at the forgotten Jewish Kingdom of Khazaria (7-11^th century CE).

Taking the time to investigate this important part of world history is additionally important as China’s New Silk Road currently represents the greatest hope for peace amongst various faiths and cultures not only in the Middle East, but globally. This is not the first time that the Silk Road ushered in a hope for a new age of reason amongst diverse cultures and as we shall soon see, the Kingdom of Khazaria played a major role in that endeavor which St Augustine called a City of God well over a millennium ago.

The Mystery of Khazaria in the Modern Era

Typically well informed readers who frequent alternative media either have never heard of the Jewish Khazar Kingdom that dominated central Europe, southern Russia and the Caucuses in the 7-10^th century or IF THEY HAVE heard of it, they tend to believe that this Kingdom was the source of everything evil up until modern times. Many mainstream scholars tend to simply deny all evidence that this Jewish kingdom ever even existed.

I would like to take a novel approach to this anomalous matter of Khazaria and the broader role of Judaism in world history. Not only do I assert that bountiful evidence allows us to conclude that this Jewish Kingdom certainly did certainly exist, but all existent evidence points to the fact that it was the very opposite to a hotbed for “evil Ashkenazi Jewry” as so many lazy researchers have claimed. Instead, this report will attempt to prove that the forgotten kingdom was not only a beautiful phenomenon uniting all three major Abrahamic faiths under one ecumenical alliance of cooperation for well over a century, but also served as a keystone to the newly reborn Silk Road trade routes uniting Asia with Europe through the Confucian Tang Dynasty (618-912 CE).

Much of the following report was made possible by the pioneering work of historian Pierre Beaudry in his online book The Charlemagne Ecumenical Principle.

Under a primitive version of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations doctrine, the Venetian Empire and the Ultramontane Church which were the heirs of the recently collapsed Roman oligarchy hated the rise of the Carolingian Empire under Charlemagne and the Augustinian humanist educational and economic reforms enacted during Charlemagne’s reign. More importantly, they hated the brilliant alliances Charlemagne oversaw alongside his co-thinker Harun al Rashid (Caliph of the Abassid Dynasty of Baghdad who ruled from 786-809 CE) and the new King Bulan of Khazaria who converted his kingdom to Judaism in the mid-8^th century.

The Turkish Conversion to Judaism: The China Angle

Khazaria was first established in the mid-7^th century by the western Turkish Kaghanate that had become independent from any obedience to the eastern Turkish parent empire when the later had been defeated militarily by the Taizong Emperor of the Tang Dynasty of China in 643 CE. With the Western Khaganate’s defeat, an important Chinese-Turkish Alliance was established that endured for another century.

With this 643 victory, the Chinese Emperor was made “Tengri Khagan” (Heavenly King), supreme authority over all Turks. 100 000 Turks then migrated to China’s vastly expanded realm and 10 000 Turkish elites settled in the capital. Letters from various Turkish leaders to the Tang court all the way until 741 CE continued to recognize China’s emperors as Heavenly Khagan.

Confucianism spread electrically across the entire Turkish Empire and the newly independent Turks of the west quickly established a highly developed centralized government in Khazaria whose economy would be based primarily upon fisheries, and agriculture. Khazaria became a keystone in the Silk Road with primary routes of the Steppe Silk Road going east-west over land from Uygur Territory in the east to western Crimea and export/import lines along the Dnieper, Don and Volga Rivers which fed into the Caspian and Black Seas. Khazaria also held the vital North-South trade route along the Volga from Scandinavia through Central Russia to Islamic Iran and Azerbaijan. Since Venetian steered-wars with Islam made Mediterranean trade impossible, and also made it unsafe for Christians or Muslim merchants to move through each other’s’ territories, this Khazarian route was vital and the role of Jews indispensable for trade.

Anomalies of Jewish Khazars

The fact that Khazaria was founded by Turks with a strong link to China cannot be ignored. When evaluating this fact, we must hold three important facts in mind:

1) Countless scholars have noted the strong Confucian philosophy embedded in the western Turkish Khaganate that established the Kingdom of Khazaria before King Bulan’s later conversion to Judaism sometime around 750CE. Even though they were shamanistic, the Confucian principle of the Mandate of Heaven was a core belief of the Khazarian turks.

2) The presence of Jews in China at this time was anomalously large with the first recorded influx of Jews occurring in 618 CE with the start of the Tang Dynasty. As the Tang emperor revived the Silk Road trade routes that had fallen apart after the fall of the Han Dynasty in the 200 CE, Buddhists, Hindus, Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians, Muslims and Jews flocked to China. This was an especially positive breath of fresh air for Jews as Professor Pan Guang stated: “they could preserve their native customs and religious beliefs… In education, work, buying and selling of land, marriage and the right to move, they enjoyed the same rights and treatment as Han Chinese. They never faced discrimination”.

 This tolerant Chinese policy stood in stark contrast to the persecution and forced conversions had run rampant across the west. Much of this persecution stemmed less from religious reasons and more from geopolitical ones as the earlier Jewish Himyaritic Kingdom’s conversion to Judaism in 380 CE destroyed Byzantium’s designs to take control of Arabia. Waves of violence descended upon Jews during this time and beyond Himyaria’s collapse in 525 CE as vengeance for resisting imperial hegemony.

3) The primary group in this early phase of the renewed Silk Road routes were Jewish Radhanite traders originating from the city of Radhan in Iraq. According to Persian scholar al Masudi (896-956), these Jewish traders spoke Arabic, Greek, Persian, Slavic, Spanish and Frankish and according to 9^th century geographer Ibn Khurdabhe, there were four Radhanite trade routes linking Europe to China. The primary and most active corridor moving through the Middle East and to Europe was “the Steppe Silk Road” much of which under the jurisdiction of Khazaria.

The Ecumenical Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Confucian Alliance

Al Masudi reported his Meadows of Goldthat the Jewish Khazars had established an incredible military alliance with the Islamic Abbasid Dynasty who supplied an army of 10 000 Muslim soldiers to the Jewish Khazars under the condition that if any future Jewish leader were to declare war on Islam, that army would fight for Islam! This incredible safeguard was a creative flank which brought the self-interests of both cultures together in ways that made orchestrated imperial conflict nearly impossible.

Another distinguishing feature of Khazaria was its unique judicial system which wisely represented the diverse faiths which sought refuge in this Jewish land. Khazaria had become renowned for its tolerance and openness (the majority of the population were a mix of Christian, Muslim and Pagan though the King and his court were Jewish). 10th century Persian historian Abu al-Istakhri described the Khazarian Supreme Court of Justice whose judges comprised two Christians, two Muslims, two Jews and one Pagan stating: “The king has 7 judges [hukkan] from the Jews, Christians, Muslims and Idolators. When the people have a lawsuit, it is they who judge it. The parties do not approach the king himself but only these judges.”

The Abbasid Dynasty played another indispensable role in preserving the Silk Road and Confucian renaissance in conjunction with their alliance with Khazaria. At a decisive moment in 755 CE, the Tang Dynasty faced a terrible crisis known as the An-Shi Rebellionwhen a renegade General An Lushan declared himself emperor of the North threatening both civil war and the dissolution of the new Silk Road. Caliph al-Mahdi (grandfather of the great Harun al Rashid) sent 4000 Muslim soldiers to aid the Emperor in putting down the rebellion, preserving the ecumenical alliance!

It is unfortunate that the Tang Dynasty was never able to recover to its pre-Civil War prestige and the Silk Road lost valuable vitality just as the Christian-Jewish-Muslim alliance was attaining its apex.

Septimania: European Entry to the Silk Road

We have already noted many surprising and important ecumenical alliances around a higher concept of divine justice and common good in opposition to the policies of the 2^nd Roman Empire which operated exclusively on “divide to rule” tactics. However we have left out another important creative alliance worth mentioning.

In 751, the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain lost a major territory called Septimania to the new Carolingian Dynasty of a Frankish King named Pepin the Short (father of Charlemagne) who ruled from 751-768. Septimania, a large area which hosts the strategic port city of Narbonne, had a large Jewish and Muslim population which Pepin and his son allied with against the intrigues of Venice. This area later became a leading renaissance zone reviving the study of Greek classics, astronomy, poetry and medicine under the Andalusian Renaissance centuries later.

Rather than fall into Jewish vs Christian vs Muslim conflicts which the oligarchy would have liked, Pepin instead called for a Jewish leader from Baghdad descended from the House of David named Natronai al Makhir (725-765) to become king of Septimania even giving his daughter Alda to Makhir as wife. Al Makhir in turn gave his Jewish daughter to King Charlemagne in marriage as part of a diplomatic flank against the war mongers in Rome.

Charlemagne ended the anti-Jewish policy dominant in Europe for centuries and even gave Jews rights to land ownership and titles unprecedented in that age. Whenever Charlemagne or his father established diplomatic embassies with the Muslim Abbasids, diplomatic envoys selected were always Jewish. Ultramontane Pope Stephen III who advocated a ‘clash of civilizations’ policy, attacked Charlemagne’s policy in 768 CE writing to the Archbishop Aribert:

“Christians work the vineyards and the fields of these Jews. Christian men and women live under the same roof as these prevaricators, listening to their blasphemous language, night and day; these miserable men and women always have to humiliate themselves before the demeaning display of dogs. What communion hath light with darkness and what concord hath Christ with Balial?”

Both Pepin and Charlemagne ignored the Vatican’s many demands to renounce their ecumenical program.

The governance of Septimania was later divided by Charlemagne with 1/3 under the authority of Archbishop Thomas of Normandy, 1/3 under the Islamic Viscount and 1/3 under Jewish governance ironically putting a Muslim territory under Jewish and Christian protection!

This policy of creative war avoidance and win-win collaboration tied into a Muslim-Christian agreement led by Harun al Rashid in 800 CE when he gave control of the Holy Land to Charlemagne declaring that the Christian leader’s land would be protected by Muslim rule. According to the records of the Monk Zacharias, this diplomatic entente was negotiated by Charlemagne’s Jewish Ambassador to Baghdad Isaac of Rachen.

Tying this alliance back to the international geopolitical stage, it is important to recall that Narbonne/Septimania was the key entry point for Silk Road goods to Europe, and its early collapse would have been devastating to the humanist cause. This ecumenical alliance was strong enough to last 90 years before collapsing under the later intrigues of Venice which had managed to get Charlemagne’s small-minded grandchildren to fall into civil war breaking the Carolingian Empire with the 842 Oath of Strasbourginto conflicting regions that later came to become the borders of modern Europe.

The Carolingian Renaissance

Without going into the details of Pepin and Charlemagne’s bold reforms centering on infrastructure (vast roads, bridges over the Rhine, canals, cathedrals and schools), their Irish monastery movement, and financial reforms which saw private financiers lose control as Charlemagne’s government took control of coinage and credit… it is enough for now to state that the Carolingian Renaissance earned its name for the right reasons. The philosophical basis for Charlemagne’s ability to break with anti-Jewish hate was found in the doctrine of Witness formulated by St. Augustine in the early 5^th century and which asserted that Jews should no longer be slaughtered, but rather protected since their very existence and adherence to the Old Testament was a living testimony to Christian faith.

Historian Thomas MacDonald said of Augustine’s Doctrine: “His positions is that the Jews are under a divine order of physical protection, and that not only must they be protected, but they must be allowed to worship as Jews… His reason for this view is demeaning for Jews but it also informed centuries of theology and countless orders of protection of Jews living in Christian lands. When Jews were persecuted at the hands of Christians, it was in direct defiance of this doctrine, and when they were protected it was because of this influence.”

The Abbasid Renaissance

In Islam, Augustine’s doctrine found a parallel in the Doctrine of Dimi which asserted that Muslims must protect Jews because they had direct intercourse with the One God whom all Abrahamic faiths share in common.

It is also worth noting that the Abbasid Dynasty was known rightfully as the “Islamic Golden Age” which ushered in a parallel bureaucratic, monetary, and educational reform under the Confucian principle of the Mandate of Heaven (i.e.: A leader’s right to rule was valid only through his obedience to the laws of nature and the common good). This was an anti-oligarchical concept of governance shared by Charlemagne and Caliph al Rashid. Under the humanist leadership of Caliph Al Mahdi, his son Harun Al Rashid and grandson al Mamun, networks of humanist education centers were created called “Houses of Wisdom” which brought Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars together to translate ancient works of Greek and Latin, study astronomy, literature, medicine and engineering. Paper mills were established in 832 CE in Samarkand, Cairo, Damas and Baghdad applying Chinese technology to broaden humanity’s access to knowledge.

The Chinese Renaissance

In China, the Tang Dynasty (618-907) distinguished itself early on as an ecumenical safe haven for all cultures and saw influxes of Muslims, Jews and large groups of Nestorian Christians who all made China their home. During the 300 years of Tang Rule, the arts rose to new heights, and the Poet-statesman became an actualized ideal as the greatest poets and painters (such as Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu) played major roles as political figures. Torture and death penalties were nearly done away with and public schools were built at record numbers. Unfortunately, wars with Muslims, Turks, and Tibetans did occur over the years and many internal struggles occurred from within weakening the Dynasty.

Physical evidence of the Khazar Kingdom were nearly all destroyed or suppressed leaving very little empirical evidence to work with for modern scholars (and leaving much room for speculative gossip led by such British Imperial assets like Arthur Koestler or lizard-man quackidoodle David Icke). Luckily, dozens of Christian and Muslim scholars of the 8-12 centuries have written extensively of its existence, and some of the 250 000 fragments discovered at the end of the 19^th century in the Cairo Geniza are finally being made public- bringing direct evidence to light for the first time in millennia.

One question is still unanswered: Why did the Khazar Kingdom end by the 10^th century and why were all traces of this golden age among Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam destroyed?

The Venetian Takeover and the Rise of ‘Jewish Bankers’

Here we must look to towards that ugly center of spiritual pus: The heirs of the Roman Oligarchy found in the Lagoons of Venice and Byzantine Empire (soon to be undone by the wilier Venetians in 1251 as outlined in my recent report The League of Cambrai and the BRICS Today and 2009 film The New Dark Age).

LPACTV: The New Dark Age

Although it took a couple hundred years of effort, the oligarchy was finally successful in breaking up Charlemagne’s unified kingdom into warring factions, and the Islamic Empire soon fell into its own internal and external discord. Finally in 1095, Venice and the Ultramontane Papacy were successful in launching the first Crusade against Islam turning the world upside down. It is noteworthy that all trade routes established by Rhadanite Jews were the first things destroyed in Europe by the Crusaders who then took over those routes, using this infrastructure to wage a most unholy war.

Whatever happened to cause the weakening and ultimate collapse of Khazaria under Kiev Rus invasions in 969 is not clear. What is clear is that anti-Jewish laws were imposed at unprecedented rates from the 11^th-16^th centuries of Venetian global dominance. In the late 10^th century, Jews were cut off from Khazaria as all east-west trade routes were taken over by Genoa and Venice. Though other nations soon followed suite, Venice was the first to ban Jews from all international trade with the Venetian Senate passing a law in 945 CE forbidding any ship to Asia from carrying a Jew. Laws were soon passed across Europe on Venice’s direction forbidding Jews from owning land, joining trade guilds of weavers, dyers, carpenters or blacksmiths or owning any trade companies. Other laws like the 1181 English Assize Laws forbade Jews from owning weapons, serving in military or even farming.

The word Ghetto began in Venice as well, as Jews were here relegated to a small neighborhood called the Ghetto and were excluded from any normal form of profession being forced to either deal in old rags, pawn broking or money lending for (nominally) Christian oligarchical families who used them as HofJuden servants.

Historian Cecil Roth addressed this devastating situation saying: “The situation would have been an impossible one but for the presence of the Jew, who, precisely as he found himself excluded from other methods of gaining a livelihood, was forced into this most unhonoured profession. The non-Jewish capitalists lent to kings and magnates, under the cover of various devices (such as making out the bond for a larger amount than the sum lent, or euphemistically calling the interest by some other name). The more open, least lucrative, and most unpopular branches of the profession, such as lending on pledge for a short period to the artisan and tradesman, were forced upon the Jews. ”

“In Venice, for example, down to the close of the eighteenth century, the Jewish community was only tolerated on the express condition that it maintains in the Ghetto four loan-banks (a more polite term for pawn broking establishments)… The only other professions legally permitted there were old clothes dealing and the wholesale export trade to the Levant, which did not compete with Christian traders. The same was the case in the cities of the terra firme. This ignominious condition of affairs was sternly enforced, and any attempt on the part of the Jews to broaden their economic status, or to place it on a slightly more dignified plane, was the systematically blocked.”

This now opens the door to our next installment which will introduce a new perspective to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Matthew Ehret is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, a  journalist, and co-founder of the Rising Tide Foundation.

8 January 2024

Source: transcend.org