Palestinian Activists Adopt Neo-Nazi View of Jews

Anti-Israel activists are openly adopting the peculiar position of Christian Identity, white supremacist and Neo-Nazis that modern Jews are not the Hebrews of the Bible.

One example is Sam Hamod in Counterpunch

most of those Ashkenazim Jews who were born and raised in America, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Feith, are not even Jews genetically because they are descended from Slavic tribes known as the Khazars who converted to Judaism and whose native language was Slavic and whose first language in America has been English, as was the case of Robert Novak. I am not saying all Ashkenazim are not Jews, but the way some of them behave is certainly not in the way Moses brought Judaism from God through the Torah. One has but to look at the haters and war-mongers in the Bush circle of influence and this is evident; no God would want them to be associated with his name. ...

An excellent and accurate source for this history is Arthur Koestler (himself an Ashkenazi), THE THIRTEENTH TRIBE. The ADL and others have attacked, and continue attacking this book, but scholars know of its truth. The book is difficult to find, but one may find it with tenacity. This is not a condemnation of Ashkenazis and their intent to convert to Judaism, but it does mean they have enough genetic DNA in them not to have the same feelings about Judaism and life in the Middle East as do the Sephardic genetic Jews.

The Sephardic genetic Jews Hamod seems to be saying are willing to accept dhimmi status, unlike those nasty Ashkenazis who demand equality.

Columbia University professor Joseph Massad advances the crackpot idea in a column in Al-Ahram

In keeping with the Protestant Reformation's abduction of the Hebrew bible into its new religion and its positing of modern European Jews as direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews, post- Enlightenment haters of Jews began to identify Jews as "Semites" on account of their alleged ancestors having spoken Hebrew.

Why is someone who pushes such outlandish ideas even being considered for tenure at Columbia? (For a futher critique of Massad's column see this from Across the Bay.)

The most prominent advocate of this viewpoint is Yale University Professor Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, the leader of the Al-awda Right of Return and a leader in the pro-Palestinian movement. His recent book Sharing the Land of Cannan   argues that Azhenazis are Khazars not Jews and have no claim to a state in the Middle East. I think it can be shown that Qumsiyeh seriously and systematically mis-represents the evidence even when he writes in his area of academic expertise, which is biology. When he writes on history and politics, it is almost hilarious. About the only reason he supplies to back the myth of Arab and Muslim tolerance is that his father told him how nice everyone got along before the Zionists came.

In case you're wondering, what Qumsiyeh means by "sharing" is that there should be no Jewish state.

Update 12/18

Chip Berlet, one of the best informed and most astute right-watchers shared this background in a paragraph from Right-Wing Populism in America (Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons
New York: Guilford Publications, 2000)

Bankers, Reds, Jews, and Satan

The main antisemitic subtext of McCarthyism was enforcing obedience among Jews, who were suspected of having dual loyalties. At the same time, there was a sector of the Right that linked anticommunism with more open and nasty forms of antisemitism.
John Beaty’s 1951 book The Iron Curtain over America is an example. The false and fantastic thesis of the book concerns the descendants of the Khazars, whose tiny ruling oligarchy centuries ago converted to Judaism and then dispersed across Europe.[i] According to Beaty and other authors, the Asiatic racial descendants of the Khazars founded and controlled the Russian Communist Party as a step toward destroying western Christian civilization. A related and equally false corollary is that many Jews in the United States are descendants of the Khazars and thus likely candidates for enlistment by foreign Khazarite Jewish communists as subversives and spies.[ii]

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[i] For a thorough debunking of the Khazar myth and its relationship to antisemitism, see Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right, pp. 136–142.

[ii] Beaty, Iron Curtain over America, especially pp. 37–43.

ANOTHER UPDATE. Noontide Press the publishing house of notorious anti-Semite Willis Carto. says this in its description of Beaty's book

The extraordinarily well-informed and courageous Beaty was one of the first Americans to breach the Iron Curtain of silence guarding the Holocaust hoax and the Middle East mess.

I find it quite interesting that these false and pernicious ideas of Khazar not Hebrews, holocaust denial, and anti-Israel go together and have gone together for decades.