Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his Macedonian ancestry

[Dimko-piperkata]

Another source that Kemal Ataturk was Macedonian;

that is the greatest find ever

[Risto the Great]

Yes, excellent find.
And why would not an extremely capable person of another ethnicity rise to the ranks of leader of the ruling class? This is the problem we have in our history books. Many people regarded as Turks or Greeks or Serbs were merely people who knew the system and made it work for them. Unfortunately, they lost something along the way.

[Risto the Great]

Separate point, if "Ata" means Father in Turkish.
Tatko/Tato/Tate is Father in Macedonian.
Do you think Otec or other more archaic words were used moreso before Ottoman times?

[Soldier of Macedon]

Macedonians, Croats, Czechs, Ukranians, Polish, etc all use Tato for 'Dad'. Otec is 'Father' hence used in a religious sense also. I think both were used before Ottoman times, given the religious nature of the Macedonians during this period, it is probable that Otec was used more commonly, at least in the literary sense.

[Dimko-piperkata]

in turkish it says BABA for TATO

[Daskalot]

that is the greatest find ever

Very good find TM!

[TrueMacedonian]

Thanks guys. Here's another source;

[Risto the Great]

That Balkan Ghosts book looks really interesting TM.
Thanks for sharing!

[TrueMacedonian]

It's a bit biased RTG. If you read it you'll see what I mean.

[Soldier of Macedon]

in turkish it says BABA for TATO

Baba is actually an Arabic word, which the Turks adopted at some stage during and/or after their conversion to Islam. The modern Greeks and Albanians also use the same word for the same purpose, while the modern Bulgarians use the Turkic Bulgar word Bashta.

In Old Turkic the word 'At' means a horse, while 'Ata' means 'father', but I am not sure of its origin, it resembles Indo-European, as does the city of Karakorum, a Turkic city name in Mongolia almost identical to the Karakoram ranges in Asia:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/312055/Karakoram-Range

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakoram

The name is explained as follows:

Kara = Black
Koram/Korum = Mountain.

Gora = Mountain in Slavic
Horos = Mountain in Greek (Agios Horos - Sveta Gora - Holy Mountain)

[Soldier of Macedon]

It's a bit biased RTG. If you read it you'll see what I mean.

It is biased, as a result even his reference to Kemal being "also a Macedonian" is not as conclusive as some of the other sources cited earlier.

[makedonin]

Separate point, if "Ata" means Father in Turkish.
Tatko/Tato/Tate is Father in Macedonian.
Do you think Otec or other more archaic words were used moreso before Ottoman times?

That is correct way to put it RTG.

<otĭcĭ> is father in old Church Slavonic

Tates, Tatas was Father in Brygian i.e. Phryigan according to Ilija Chashule "Basic Burushaski Etymologies"(Muenchen Newcastle , ISBN 3 89586 0891)

[VMRO]

In the book Salonica City of ghosts Christians Muslims and Jews, It provides another alternative that Kemal Attuturk is a descendant of Jews who converted to Islam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi

Sabbatai Zevi was apparently a Jewish Messiah who was forced to convert to Islam to save himself as the Sultan gave him an ultimatum, he alongside his followers converted.



ZICHRON YAAKOV - There were two questions I wanted to ask, I said over the phone to Batya Keinan, spokeswoman for Israeli president Ezer Weizman, who was about to leave the next day, Monday, Jan. 24, on the first visit ever made to Turkey by a Jewish chief of state. One was whether Mr. Weizman would be taking part in an official ceremony commemorating Kemal Ataturk.
Ms. Kenan checked the president's itinerary, according to which he and his wife would lay a wreath on Ataturk's grave the morning of their arrival, and asked what my second question was.
"Does President Weizman know that Ataturk had Jewish ancestors and was taught Hebrew prayers as a boy?"
"Of course, of course," she answered as unsurprisedly as if I had inquired whether the president was aware that Ataturk was Turkey's national hero.


Excited and Distressed
I thanked her and hung up. A few minutes later it occurred to me to call back and ask whether President Weizman intended to make any reference while in Turkey to Ataturk's Jewish antecedents. "I'm so glad you called again," said Ms. Kenan, who now sounded excited and a bit distressed. "Exactly where did you get your information from?"
Why was she asking, I countered, if the president's office had it too?
Because it did not, she confessed. She had only assumed that it must because I had sounded so matter-of-fact myself. "After you hung up," she said, "I mentioned what you told me and nobody here knows anything about it. Could you please fax us what you know?"
I faxed her a short version of it. Here is a longer one.
Stories about the Jewishness of Ataturk, whose statue stands in the main square of every town and city in Turkey, already circulated in his lifetime but were denied by him and his family and never taken seriously by biographers. Of six biographies of him that I consulted this week, none even mentions such a speculation. The only scholarly reference to it in print that I could find was in the entry on Ataturk in the Israeli Entsiklopedya ha-Ivrit, which begins:
"Mustafa Kemal Ataturk - (1881-1938), Turkish general and statesman and founder of the modern Turkish state.
"Mustafa Kemal was born to the family of a minor customs clerk in Salonika and lost his father when he was young. There is no proof of the belief, widespread among both Jews and Muslims in Turkey, that his family came from the Doenme. As a boy he rebelled against his mother's desire to give him a traditional religious education, and at the age of 12 he was sent at his demand to study in a military academy."





Secular Father
The Doenme were an underground sect of Sabbetaians, Turkish Jews who took Muslim names and outwardly behaved like Muslims but secretly believed in Sabbetai Zevi, the 17th-century false messiah, and conducted carefully guarded prayers and rituals in his name. The encyclopedia's version of Ataturk's education, however, is somewhat at variance with his own. Here is his account of it as quoted by his biographers:
"My father was a man of liberal views, rather hostile to religion, and a partisan of Western ideas. He would have preferred to see me go to a * lay school, which did not found its teaching on the Koran but on modern science.
"In this battle of consciences, my father managed to gain the victory after a small maneuver; he pretended to give in to my mother's wishes, and arranged that I should enter the [Islamic] school of Fatma Molla Kadin with the traditional ceremony. ...
"Six months later, more or less, my father quietly withdrew me from the school and took me to that of old Shemsi Effendi who directed a free preparatory school according to European methods. My mother made no objection, since her desires had been complied with and her conventions respected. It was the ceremony above all which had satisfied her."
Who was Mustafa Kemal's father, who behaved here in typical Doenme fashion, outwardly observing Muslim ceremonies while inwardly scoffing at them? Ataturk's mother Zubeyde came from the mountains west of Salonika, close to the current Albanian frontier; of the origins of his father, Ali Riza, little is known. Different writers have given them as Albanian, Anatolian and Salonikan, and Lord Kinross' compendious 1964 "Ataturk" calls Ali Riza a "shadowy personality" and adds cryptically regarding Ataturk's reluctance to disclose more about his family background: "To the child of so mixed an environment it would seldom occur, wherever his racial loyalties lay, to inquire too exactly into his personal origins beyond that of his parentage."


Learning Hebrew
Did Kinross suspect more than he was admitting? I would never have asked had I not recently come across a remarkable chapter while browsing in the out-of-print Hebrew autobiography of Itamar Ben-Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the leading promoter of the revival of spoken Hebrew in late 19th-century Palestine. Ben-Avi, the first child to be raised in Hebrew since ancient times and later a Hebrew journalist and newspaper publisher, writes in this book of walking into the Kamenitz Hotel in Jerusalem one autumn night in 1911 and being asked by its proprietor: " 'Do you see that Turkish officer sitting there in the corner, the one* with the bottle of arrack?' "
" 'Yes.' "
" 'He's one of the most important officers in the Turkish army.' "
" 'What's his name?' "
" 'Mustafa Kemal.' "
" 'I'd like to meet him,' I said, because the minute I looked at him I was startled by his piercing green eyes."
Ben-Avi describes two meetings with Mustafa Kemal, who had not yet taken the name of Ataturk, 'Father of the Turks.' Both were conducted in French, were largely devoted to Ottoman politics, and were doused with large amounts of arrack. In the first of these, Kemal confided:
"I'm a descendant of Sabbetai Zevi - not indeed a Jew any more, but an ardent admirer of this prophet of yours. My opinion is that every Jew in this country would do well to join his camp."
During their second meeting, held 10 days later in the same hotel, Mustafa Kemal said at one point:"
'I have at home a Hebrew Bible printed in Venice. It's rather old, and I remember my father bringing me to a Karaite teacher who taught me to read it. I can still remember a few words of it, such as --' "
And Ben-Avi continues:
"He paused for a moment, his eyes searching for something in space. Then he recalled:
" 'Shema Yisra'el, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehad!'
" 'That's our most important prayer, Captain.'
" 'And my secret prayer too, cher monsieur,' he replied, refilling our glasses."
Although Itamar Ben-Avi could not have known it, Ataturk no doubt meant "secret prayer" quite literally. Among the esoteric prayers of the Doenme, first made known to the scholarly world when a book of them reached the National Library in Jerusalem in 1935, is one containing the confession of faith:
"Sabbetai Zevi and none other is the true Messiah. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."
It was undoubtedly from this credo, rather than from the Bible, that Ataturk remembered the words of the Shema, which to the best of my knowledge he confessed knowing but once in his adult life: to a young Hebrew journalist whom he engaged in two tipsily animated conversations in Jerusalem nearly a decade before he took control of the Turkish army after its disastrous defeat in World War I, beat back the invading Greeks and founded a secular Turkish republic in which Islam was banished - once and for all, so he thought - to the mosques.
Ataturk would have had good reasons for concealing his Doenme origins. Not only were the Doenmes (who married only among themselves and numbered close to 15,000, largely concentrated in Salonika, on the eve of World War I) looked down on as heretics by both Muslims and Jews, they had a reputation for sexual profligacy that could hardly have been flattering to their offspring. This license, which was theologically justified by the claim that it reflected the faithful's freedom from the biblical commandments under the new dispensation of Sabbetai Zevi, is described by Ezer Weizman's predecessor, Israel's second president, Yitzchak Ben-Zvi, in his book on lost Jewish communities, "The Exiled and the Redeemed":
'Saintly Offspring'
"Once a year [during the Doenmes' annual 'Sheep holiday'] the candles are put out in the course of a dinner which is attended by orgies and the ceremony of the exchange of wives. ... The rite is practiced on the night of Sabbetai Zevi's traditional bithday. ... It is believed that children born of such unions are regarded as saintly."
Although Ben-Zvi, writing in the 1950s, thought that "There is reason to believe that this ceremony has not been entirely abandoned and continues to this day," little is known about whether any of the Doenmes' traditional practices or social structures still survive in modern Turkey. The community abandoned Salonika along with the city's other Turkish residents during the Greco-Turkish war of 1920-21, and its descendants, many of whom are said to be wealthy businessmen and merchants in Istanbul, are generally thought to have assimilated totally into Turkish life.
After sending my fax to Batya Keinan, I phoned to check that she had received it. She had indeed, she said, and would see to it that the president was given it to read on his flight to Ankara. It is doubtful, however, whether Mr. Weizman will allude to it during his visit: The Turkish government, which for years has been fending off Muslim fundamentalist assaults on its legitimacy and on the secular reforms of Ataturk, has little reason to welcome the news that the father of the 'Father of the Turks' was a crypto-Jew who passed on his anti-Muslim sentiments to his son. Mustafa Kemal's secret is no doubt one that it would prefer to continue to be kept.





Was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, crypto-Jewish?

Conspiracy theories were quite prestigious in the 1970s and into the 1980s, but ever since the release of Oliver Stone's 1991 movie "JFK," the elite cultural atmosphere has turned strongly against them.

And yet, there really have been lots of secret societies, cabals, covert activities, and the like down through history. For example, the history of Italy since WWII can't be adequately explained without reference to the Mafia, Operation Gladio "leave-behind" cells, the P2 Masonic Lodge, and secret CIA funding of the anti-Communist parties, not to mention all of the Communist conspiracies on the other side.

It turns out, of course, that most of the secrets are pretty mundane. My late father-in-law, a 32nd degree Mason, liked to say that he couldn't tell any outsiders the secret protocols of the Masons because it might be fatal to them.

"Because if you told them, you'd have to kill them?" I asked.

"No, because if they heard what we really do, they might die laughing."

Secret groups are by no means omnipotent. In fact, they are generally less effective than public groups in most circumstances. Secrecy imposes costs and makes expansion harder.

Nonetheless, there are aspects of the world that do resemble a Jorge Luis Borges story, such as the murky role of crypto-Jewish pseudo-Muslims, the "Donmeh," in modern Turkey. Three and a half centuries after the forced conversion from Judaism to Islam of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, his followers and their secular descendents remain, apparently, strongly represented among the anti-Muslim fundamentalist political, business, and cultural elites in Istanbul and Ankara.

But what about the founder of modern Turkey himself, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk? Was he a crypto-Jew?

Hillel Halkin, the respected New York native turned Israeli journalist who is a regular in Commentary and a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and the New York Sun, thinks so. In a January 28, 1994 article in New York's Forward, a Jewish newspaper, entitled "When Kemal Ataturk Recited Shema Yisrael: 'It's My Secret Prayer, Too,' He Confessed," Halkin wrote:


Stories about the Jewishness of Ataturk, whose statue stands in the main square of every town and city in Turkey, already circulated in his lifetime but were denied by him and his family and never taken seriously by biographers. Of six biographies of him that I consulted this week, none even mentions such a speculation. The only scholarly reference to it in print that I could find was in the entry on Ataturk in the Israeli Entsiklopedya ha-Ivrit, which begins: "Mustafa Kemal Ataturk - (1881-1938), Turkish general and statesman and founder of the modern Turkish state. "Mustafa Kemal was born to the family of a minor customs clerk in Salonika and lost his father when he was young. There is no proof of the belief, widespread among both Jews and Muslims in Turkey, that his family came from the Doenme. As a boy he rebelled against his mother's desire to give him a traditional religious education, and at the age of 12 he was sent at his demand to study in a military academy."

The Doenme were an underground sect of Sabbetaians, Turkish Jews who took Muslim names and outwardly behaved like Muslims but secretly believed in Sabbetai Zevi, the 17th-century false messiah, and conducted carefully guarded prayers and rituals in his name.

The encyclopedia's version of Ataturk's education, however, is somewhat at variance with his own. Here is his account of it as quoted by his biographers: "My father was a man of liberal views, rather hostile to religion, and a partisan of Western ideas. He would have preferred to see me go to a * lay school, which did not found its teaching on the Koran but on modern science. "In this battle of consciences, my father managed to gain the victory after a small maneuver; he pretended to give in to my mother's wishes, and arranged that I should enter the [Islamic] school of Fatma Molla Kadin with the traditional ceremony. ... "Six months later, more or less, my father quietly withdrew me from the school and took me to that of old Shemsi Effendi who directed a free preparatory school according to European methods. My mother made no objection, since her desires had been complied with and her conventions respected. It was the ceremony above all which had satisfied her."

Who was Mustafa Kemal's father, who behaved here in typical Doenme fashion, outwardly observing Muslim ceremonies while inwardly scoffing at them? Ataturk's mother Zubeyde came from the mountains west of Salonika, close to the current Albanian frontier; of the origins of his father, Ali Riza, little is known. Different writers have given them as Albanian, Anatolian and Salonikan, and Lord Kinross' compendious 1964 "Ataturk" calls Ali Riza a "shadowy personality" and adds cryptically regarding Ataturk's reluctance to disclose more about his family background: "To the child of so mixed an environment it would seldom occur, wherever his racial loyalties lay, to inquire too exactly into his personal origins beyond that of his parentage."

Did Kinross suspect more than he was admitting? I would never have asked had I not recently come across a remarkable chapter while browsing in the out-of-print Hebrew autobiography of Itamar Ben-Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the leading promoter of the revival of spoken Hebrew in late 19th-century Palestine. Ben-Avi, the first child to be raised in Hebrew since ancient times and later a Hebrew journalist and newspaper publisher, writes in this book of walking into the Kamenitz Hotel in Jerusalem one autumn night in 1911 and being asked by its proprietor:

"'Do you see that Turkish officer sitting there in the corner, the one* with the bottle of arrack?' "

"'Yes.'"

"'He's one of the most important officers in the Turkish army.'"

"'What's his name?'"

"'Mustafa Kemal.'"

"'I'd like to meet him,' I said, because the minute I looked at him I was startled by his piercing green eyes."

Ben-Avi describes two meetings with Mustafa Kemal, who had not yet taken the name of Ataturk, 'Father of the Turks.' Both were conducted in French, were largely devoted to Ottoman politics, and were doused with large amounts of arrack. In the first of these, Kemal confided: "I'm a descendant of Sabbetai Zevi - not indeed a Jew any more, but an ardent admirer of this prophet of yours. My opinion is that every Jew in this country would do well to join his camp."

During their second meeting, held 10 days later in the same hotel, Mustafa Kemal said at one point:" 'I have at home a Hebrew Bible printed in Venice. It's rather old, and I remember my father bringing me to a Karaite teacher who taught me to read it. I can still remember a few words of it, such as --' " And Ben-Avi continues: "He paused for a moment, his eyes searching for something in space. Then he recalled: "'Shema Yisra'el, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehad!'

"'That's our most important prayer, Captain.'

"'And my secret prayer too, cher monsieur,' he replied, refilling our glasses."

Although Itamar Ben-Avi could not have known it, Ataturk no doubt meant "secret prayer" quite literally. Among the esoteric prayers of the Doenme, first made known to the scholarly world when a book of them reached the National Library in Jerusalem in 1935, is one containing the confession of faith: "Sabbetai Zevi and none other is the true Messiah. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." It was undoubtedly from this credo, rather than from the Bible, that Ataturk remembered the words of the Shema, which to the best of my knowledge he confessed knowing but once in his adult life: to a young Hebrew journalist whom he engaged in two tipsily animated conversations in Jerusalem nearly a decade before he took control of the Turkish army after its disastrous defeat in World War I, beat back the invading Greeks and founded a secular Turkish republic in which Islam was banished - once and for all, so he thought - to the mosques.

Ataturk would have had good reasons for concealing his Doenme origins. Not only were the Doenmes (who married only among themselves and numbered close to 15,000, largely concentrated in Salonika, on the eve of World War I) looked down on as heretics by both Muslims and Jews, they had a reputation for sexual profligacy that could hardly have been flattering to their offspring. [More[


Keep in mind that Halkin loves this kind of tale, as he admits in a column about his meeting with a tipsy gentleman who claims to be the last descendent to the throne of the legendary Khazar Jews:


The fact is that I've always been a sucker for this kind of stuff. Ever since I was a kid growing up in Manhattan, I've lapped it up: stories about the lost tribes, descendants of the Marranos, shadowy Jewish kingdoms in the Middle Ages, Jews turning up in far places — the mountains of Mexico, the jungles of Peru, Kaifeng, the Malabar Coast, Timbuktu . The Jews of Manhattan were boring. Jews spotted by Marco Polo on the China coast or surviving centuries of the Inquisition in the hills of Portugal gave me goose pimples.

Call it the romance of Jewish history. The idea that we were a profoundly more adventurous, infinitely more varied, more far-ranging, more interesting people than the Jews I knew.


Halkin's 2002 book Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel makes the case that the obscure Mizo ethnic group on the India-Burma border are really the descendants of Manasseh, one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.


This is just one bit of evidence about Ataturk, and most of the other evidence seems to suggest that Ataturk, although exposed to Donmeh influence, both growing up in Salonika (home of the Donmeh) and later in his career, was not a Sabbatean himself.


To shift gears, all this might help explain a little how the struggle between Turkey and its hostile neighbors, Greece and Armenia, is waged in Washington. The Greeks and the Armenians play an "outside game," based on grassroots hostility toward Turkey among Greek-Americans and Armenian-Americans. For example, the Armenian Caucus in Congress numbered almost 100 a few years ago, even though only one Member of the House was Armenian. In some Congressional districts, such as Pasadena-Glendale in California, promising to stick it to the Turks is a major vote-getter.

In contrast, the Turks play an "inside game" in Washington, relying on high level contacts in the Executive branch. For instance, in 2000, the House was minutes from passing a long awaited resolution blaming the 1915 genocide of Armenians on the Turks, when a phone call from President Clinton to Speaker of the House Hastert, reminding Hastert how important Turkish good will is to the American position in the Middle East, led to the vote being called off.

The Bush Administration has strongly supported Turkey becoming a part of the European Union, despite the evident downsides of opening the borders of Europe to 70 million more Muslims.

A key to Turkey's inside game in Washington, besides American defense contractors, has been the powerful Jewish lobbies in Washington, who support Turkey because, among other reasons, Turkey spends a lot of money on Israeli arms. It's interesting that Richard Perle and Douglas Feith had a lobbying firm in the 1990s, International Advisors Inc., whose main client was the government of Turkey. Morris Amitay of AIPAC was an employee.

I have no idea if this is relevant to the story of crypto-Jewish influence in modern Turkey, but one recurrent pattern is that American neocons, based on their warm ties with the Turkish elites, have repeatedly over-estimated how pro-Israel and pro-American are Turkish voters, most notoriously on the eve of our war to bring "democracy" to Iraq, when Paul Wolfowitz was shocked by the Turkish parliament democratically voting against allowing America to invade Iraq from Turkey despite a huge payoff promised to the Turkish government.

This is not to say that there is a conscious conspiracy between the neocons and the Donmeh, but it may help explain why the neocons have misinterpreted what Turkey is really like. So many of their Turkish contacts have been people with whom they feel culturally comfortable that they can't really fathom what Turkish democracy unfettered by secularist military coups (which is what Turkish accession to the European Union would deliver) will really turn out to be like.

[VMRO]

Was Ataturk Jewish?

If you can't or won't read my segue for the above 'revelation,' scroll to the middle of this post highlighted in red to be directed to Steve Sailer's blog, for the answer.

Ataturk I've hinted in past posts, Turkey and Turks have to tackle the 'taboo' factor prior to global adjudication. Among the many illustrations, including the Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish questions, honor killings, Turkish interpretation of Islam, the role of nationalism, and others, none more is regarded in pure idolatry as the 'father' of modern Turkey, the first President of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

He is credited and revered by Turks and non-Turks alike, personally responsible for many accomplishments, too numerous to mention, that Turks even today are thankful for. Almost 70 years after his death, his popularity, justifiably and deservedly so, is of the utmost importance and highest placement among public figures encompassing the entire population of Turks both in Turkey and abroad.

However, whenever powers of natural evolution involving cultural, political, social irregularities push the envelope, the 'public' servants, as well as the 'peacekeepers,' namely the Turkish military, although with more limited powers in recent years, scream for cover under the umbrella of Ataturk the 'philosophy,' not Ataturk the man.

Moreover, the public display of affection sometimes contradicts the private concerns of how much longer we will need to ask/beg for his 'divine' intervention, whenever we find ourselves powerless, or facing some sort of a radical ideology we fear is going to take over the country, as part of an organized conspiracy instituted by a higher power than our willpower.

From my previous post titled "Taking the 'Boo' out of Taboo:"

"Why do we have to defer all of our current and foreseen obligations to the man (or the symbolism of such idolatry,) whom we call the father of our country?"

First and foremost, does such an ever-so-often request for 'walking in his path' produce the results we aim for, or is it just another unwarranted excuse for the inability to manufacture an acceptable outcome for the current time being.

Forget the internal danger of anti-Ataturk sentiment we believe is lurking toward us if we stop using the shielding of the Ataturk mask. Shouldn't we at least pay attention to, if not for righteous reasons but maybe for the simple awareness factor of being able to face the facts or refute the dishonorable, some of the independent and non-independent external sources are saying about this holier than thou man.

A few years ago, Antonio Banderas, the actor selected to play Ataturk in a big budget, major production movie still in the conceptual mode after so many years, rejected the offer after the Greeks and others campaigned, I guess effectively judging from the outcome, right or wrong, in highlighting some of the dictatorial tendencies, as well as the sadistic atrocities they blamed Ataturk for.

Pro-Turkish-view Tall Armenian Tale posted the following regarding the above:

" . . . Notices of Mr. Banderas's intention to play Ataturk began appearing In Greek-American publications . . . One of them published a letter signed by "a member of the Greek community of N.Y." describing Ataturk as a "savage maniac" who was also "a child molester of both sexes, a mass murderer, a destroyer of Greek civilization and in general a disgrace to human civilization as we know it . . . "

And now comes my recent discoveries for your perusal. First, this from a self-proclaimed journalist and founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, Steve Sailer, on iSteve.com's archive site (dated June 26, 2006,) who reports that Ataturk was a convert according to the sources he links to:

" . . . Three and a half centuries after the forced conversion from Judaism to Islam of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, his followers and their secular descendents remain, apparently, strongly represented among the anti-Muslim fundamentalist political, business, and cultural elites in Istanbul and Ankara . . . "

" . . . Turkish Jews who took Muslim names and outwardly behaved like Muslims but secretly believed in Sabbetai Zevi, the 17th-century false messiah, and conducted carefully guarded prayers and rituals in his name . . . "

" . . . Kemal confided: 'I'm a descendant of Sabbetai Zevi - not indeed a Jew any more, but an ardent admirer of this prophet of yours' . . ." Steve Sailer also provides a link to Mavi Boncuk who reported on this back in 2004.

For more about the Sabbatean movement and the secretive community, which plays an important role in Turkey, you may want to read another post by Steve Sailer. Steve goes on to report that Sabbateans of today "are not Jews either. The Jewish community wants nothing to do with them. 'As far as we're concerned,' says Rabbi Yitzhak Haleva, deputy chief rabbi of Istanbul, 'there are only Jews and Muslims. There's nothing in between.' "

My Note: Obviously, there's nothing wrong with being Jewish, or a convert from one religion to another, or am I suggesting such a thing as a raw deal. However, my annoyance is with the limitations of the Turks' right and access to their founder and his background and debate its relevance.

Followed by an 'Open Letter to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk' by Kani Xulam in Kurdistan.org. Here is an excerpt:

" . . . According to Lord Kinross, you actually wished all Turks were Christians. Since you were drunk most of the times, it is a little bit hard to say if you meant what you said or were engaging in some sort of jest. What was it? But your animosity towards Islam and its clergy, especially when you were tipsy, was proverbial and reminds me of how the pre-Christian era Roman Emperors treated the Disciples of Christ.

One incident out of Lord Kinross’ book left me gasping for air by the time I was done with it. The Shah of Iran had come to Turkey for a state visit. You had taken him on of a tour of your old battlegrounds at the Dardanelles. On the way to Izmir, in the presidential train, you had gotten yourself drunk. In Usak, a large crowd had gathered to greet you and your guest. Among the throng, you spotted a Muslim cleric with his traditional garb and began hurling profanities at him. The poor man, according to Lord Kinross, took to his heels to escape the presidential assault. You were so incensed that you ordered the imprisonment of the governor and the bombardment of the city. When you sobered up, you apparently forwent your decision . . . "

And here is another by quickfound.net, a news multisearch service. On its 'Turkey' page (scroll to the bottom of the page,) the following excerpts from TIME Magazine circa 1953 appear:

" . . . One evening in 1926, he gave a champagne party for foreign diplomats; it turned into an all-night carousal. Returning home at dawn, the diplomats saw the corpses of the entire opposition leadership, among them Kemal's old friends, hanging in the town square . . . "

" . . . In 1938, exhausted by periodic debauches and drinking bouts, undermined by diseases, he died . . . "

Can we intelligently, without quick reactionary and anger-ridden tendencies, respond to these and other claims, and surely we should. But at the same time, we need to be able to debate and study the cause and effect factors of this ideology we named 'Kemalism,' without defacing the man and his persona.

The intentional laws written by Turkey to protect Ataturk from any 'negative' criticism, without personal attacks but with the ability to debate his methods and policies, by its citizens, contradicts the open-book policy of the generally accepted principles of today's global or civilized societies where nothing is untouchable. In fact, if we expect exactly that from our current leaders, political or otherwise, why do we feel the need to 'protect' such a past reference of our recent history? To be honest, I've seen or heard more criticism of some of the actions of the Ottoman Sultan credited for the great conquest of Constantinople, ending one era while commencing another.

If we have nothing to fear or hide, then why are we afraid to openly discuss Ataturk's merits, along with his shortcomings, which might teach us to accept and correct any inconsistencies that others may use against us in times of their convenience.

If the general consensus is that we should not critique or debate someone whose time has passed, then should we expect him to, at every opportune moment, always deliver the goods (never happens anyway) that we desperately feel the need for. Maybe we should practice the patience necessary for the allowance of developing a follow up leader who, given the chance, may pleasantly surprise us.

[Atesh]

Atatürk say: "We are, turkish, kurds, arabs, laze, but today we are Turkey citizen who live under Turkey's Flag is turkey citizen." I think Atatürk was macedonian ethincity, or Balkanik, but I know that, Atatürk fought versus Ottoman sultans and european (+ russian) for liberty of Turkey. He was studing Turks history and knew that turks were come asia to europe.