The truth comes out! The Taliban-bashers are merely anti-Semites in disguise. -g-
sfgate.com
Taliban may have origin in ancient tribe of Israel - Anthropologist finds many similarities
Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, October 20, 2001
Jerusalem -- Preoccupied with their own terrorist
war at home, Israelis have paid less attention than
the rest of the world to the campaign against
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban.
Just as well, says an Israeli anthropologist --
because the Taliban might have had Jewish origins.
According to Shalva Weil, there is considerable
body of evidence suggesting that the Pathan ethnic
group, from which most of the Taliban are drawn, is
one of the fabled "10 lost tribes" of ancient Israel.
Indeed, as recently as half a century ago, Pathan
tribesmen themselves claimed that they were
descended from wandering Jews.
Writing in the weekly magazine "Jerusalem Report,"
Weil cites a report delivered to Israeli President
Yitzhak Ben-Zvi in the 1950s, based on the
encounter of a Jewish traveler with Pathan nomads.
The Pathans, who are also called Pashtuns, were
said to wear cloaks decorated with a symbol that
closely resembled the lamps lit by Jews at
Hanukkah. The traveler also reported that they
donned prayer shawls similar to those of their
Jewish counterparts in the West, insisted that men
grow side curls, and lit votive candles on Friday
evenings, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath.
Some anthropologists have also found Pathan
families that circumcise sons on the eighth day after
their birth, in keeping with Jewish custom.
A legend of the Pathans, as recounted to Weil when
she did field research among them in the 1980s
along the Pakistani border, tells of a "Jeremiah," a
son of King Saul -- but not the more familiar
Jeremiah of the Old Testament -- who sired a
daughter named "Afghana." Her descendants, the
legend maintains, made their way to the Central
Asian land that now bears her name.
A Jewish connection of more recent and
well-documented origin leads just across
Afghanistan's western frontier to the Iranian city of
Mashhad. It is the traditional home of the
"Mashhadi Jews," who were forcibly converted to
Shiite Islam after a pogrom in 1839.
Like some of their distant Sephardic cousins in
Islamic Spain, the Mashhadi Jews behaved in public
as faithful Muslims -- even making the pilgrimage to
Mecca when they could afford it -- but clung
secretly to Judaism at home.
Hundreds of them emigrated to the Shiite region
around Herat in western Afghanistan over the years,
which is today a major stronghold of the anti-
Taliban resistance.
The U.S. war against terrorism, in short, may be
unfolding amid a second war between two lost
tribes of Israel. |
