Israel Pays Students Grants To Lie Online

As you remark, not all Jews like what Israel is doing. But the government’s disinformation campaign is not only effective abroad, it’s pervasive in Israel: in the schools, universities, synagogues, military, everyone is bombarded with disinformation. Only those who go to the trouble to look elsewhere can learn the truth, just as in the US (which is the main country that directly supports Israel – others go along with US policy mostly because of the pressure we put on them).

The biblical quotation isn’t a basis for rational argument in a modern society, it’s a reflection of some people’s religious beliefs, but interesting in that regard.

As for the Ashkenazi part, that’s an interesting observation, probably largely explainable by their more recent cultural heritage from France, Germany and the United States. These countries were notorious for their lawless imperialism in the twentieth century. The Sephardim, most recently from Spain, Portugal, North Africa, and the Middle East, have a much different cultural background. For the most part they no longer had imperial capabililty by the twentieth century.

For what it’s worth, here’s interesting news based on a paper in Nature, where studies of mitochondrial (maternal) DNA shows Ashkenaz were descended from Europeans, not Khazars:

The majority of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from prehistoric European women, according to study published today (October 8) in Nature Communications. While the Jewish religion began in the Near East, and the Ashkenazi Jews were believed to have origins in the early indigenous tribes of this region, new evidence from mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on exclusively from mother to child, suggests that female ancestors of most modern Ashkenazi Jews converted to Judaism in the north Mediterranean around 2,000 years ago and later in west and central Europe.

The new findings contradict previous assertions that Ashkenazi mitochondrial lineages originated in the Near East, or from mass conversions to Judaism in the Khazar kingdom, an empire in the north Caucasus region between Europe and Asia lasting from the 7th century to the 11th century whose leaders adopted Judaism. “We found that most of the maternal lineages don’t trace to the north Caucasus, which would be a proxy for the Khazarians, or to the Near East, but most of them emanate from Europe,” said coauthor Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in the U.K.