Iran Backgrounder – Sassanids to Jundallah

This is an old repost from the old blog from three years ago, but I edited it to make it up to date. It goes you a bit of a background into the religious Sunni-Shia conflicts in the region and how they tie in with the conflicts in the region today. Most people do not realize that the famed Shah of Iran was actually a blood and soil, Persian supremacist, ethnic nationalist, primordialist, volkisch, fascist along the same lines as Hitler’s Nazis and Milosevic’s Serbs. Yet it is true – in fact, the Shah even formed an alliance with Nazi Germany. The Nazis attempted to form all sorts of alliances with people they mistakenly regarded as genetic inferiors – including Bosnian Muslims, Palestinian and Iraqi Arabs, Ukrainian, White Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian rightwing nationalists, Iranians and some of the upper-caste peoples of East India. The East Indians, of course, are part of the original Aryans – the light-skinned invaders who descended from the steppes into India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Afghanistan at various times in the past 3,500 years. In India, they displaced the native Indians – the Dravidians or South Indians – and pushed them to South. They also twisted the Hindu religion by adding on their casteism, which was apparently not present in the original pre-Aryan system. Originally, in the caste system, those at the top were the lightest-skinned and the lowest castes tended to be the darkest. It is interesting that over thousands of years the Brahmins have become progressively darker. The Nazis were fascinated that these Brahmins regarded themselves as fellow Aryans and even sent researchers over to India to measure skulls and analyze the facial characteristics of statues and engage in other peculiarities of Nazi racial research. The Brahmin class of India has always returned the favor and many have long been supporters of Hitler, Nazism and fascism in general. The fascinating article linked above deals with something that is little known to most Americans – a neat summary of many of the views expressed by what are best termed Iranian nationalists. Americans have no understanding at all of this ancient, proud culture. The piece notes the Western deceit that modern nationalism began with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1600’s Europe, when the principle of inviolable national borders was first codified. In fact, this is a Western narcissistic view. Other nations, in particular Persians and Iranians, have a long history of what could be called nationalism, depending on how one defines the term, dating back maybe 2500 years to Cyrus the Great. US idiots like George Bush and the council of clueless super-Zionist advisors whispering in his ear provoke this ancient culture at their peril. The piece goes on to discuss the Minorities Question in modern Iran. Most people do not recognize that Persian and Iranian are not synonymous. Persian is an ethnic group, but Persians only constitute 5 US imperialism and Kurdish nationalism make much of Azerbaijanis supposed desire to break away from Iran, but there is not much truth to that. Those who say such things do not understand history. It is true that there is an Azerbaijani minority that invokes irredentism and wishes to break away from Iran and reunite with “northern Azerbaijan”, the independent state of Azerbaijan. But the majority of Azerbaijanis have no desire to do such a thing. People do not understand that despite the racist Persian ethnic nationalism of the Shah, Azerbaijanis have typically ruled Iran for many centuries now. In fact the Supreme Jurisprudent Ayatollah Khameini is an Azerbaijani. The Sassanid Empire was one of the most prominent empires in the world from 200-600, a rival to the Roman Empire. This culture, to many, represents the pinnacle of Iran’s power in the world. Its religion was Zoroastrianism and it was characterized by great tolerance towards religious minorities, especially Christians and Jews. The Sassanids were defeated in the mid-650’s by invading Arab Muslim armies, many Iranians were put to the sword, and many Iranian nationalists have resented the resulting forced imposition of Islam ever since. According to these nationalists, there is a difference between those societies where Islam was “native” – supposedly Arab societies, and those where it was imposed by force – supposedly all non-Arab countries. This greatly simplifies matters, and in many ways is false. For instance, Islam has deep roots in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Muslim India, Eastern China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Albania, Kosova, Bosnia, the Caucasus and in Sub-Saharan Africa. So the case of Iran is not generalizable. In most cases, where Islam conquered non-Arab lands, many of the natives converted and become passionate Muslims. In fact, some of the world’s most ferocious and fundamentalist Muslims have traditionally come from non-Arab lands like Afghanistan and Pakistan. But in Iran, something different happened: Islam ran up against Persian nationalism. To understand the conflict between Iranian nationalism and Islam is essential to understanding modern Iranian culture. The Khomeinists have enraged Iranian nationalists by declaring wholesale war on Iranian nationalism. According to the mullahs, there is no need for Iranian nationalism since Islam supplants it. Iranian nationalists are often theologically diverse, secular, atheists, agnostics, or even Zoroastrians. Even worse, the mullahs seem to have imposed a pro-Arabism on Iran. This is sure to infuriate Iranian nationalists. Iranian nationalists have always had a resentful and bigoted attitudes towards Arabs (and some towards Muslims – who they regard as having a barbaric Arab religion). When you hear an Iranian nationalist hurl an insult like “lizard-eating Mohammadens”, this is the rage they are mining. It is the rage at a primitive culture of desert barbarian wanderers – so barbaric, in fact, that they “ate lizards” – that invaded the glorious, superior, Sassanid Zoroastrian Empire and destroyed it, supplanting it with inferior Arab Islamic culture and religion. The mullahs have not only waged war on symbols of Iranian nationalism, but they have also tried to import Arab culture and language, much to the fury of Iranian nationalists. Since, to Islamic fundamentalists, Arabic is the language of Islam (a bigoted and irrational construct on its face), they tend to promote Arab culture and language over native culture and language. This tends to produce friction between Islamic fundamentalists and non-Arab nationalists in the non-Arab parts of the Muslim World. For instance, it is often difficult to find a copy of the Koran in any language other than Arabic. And many non-Arab Muslims claim that Arabs, especially Gulf Arabs, look down on them and despise them when they go Mecca on hajj. The Arab chauvinism in Islam has been a long-term hindrance to spread of the religion. Furthermore, for centuries after the conquest of Islam, the greatest Iranian poets, authors and scientists – beloved by all Iranian nationalists – were ordered to be killed by the fundamentalist Islamic morons ruling Islam at the time. Few of these heroes of Iranian culture were killed, but the fact that their deaths were even condoned stings. It is important to note that Shia Islam was also imposed at the point of the sword sometime later and many Sunni Iranians were put to death. The remains of this violent religious imposition can be seen today, when one notes that Sunni Islam (Iran is only about 7 All of these parts of the Iranian state remain largely outside of the regime’s control, and Sunnis continue to complain, legitimately, of discrimination by Iranian Shia Muslims. The rage between Iranians and Arabs is difficult for outsiders to fathom, but is essential to understanding the region. Sunni Islam is synonymous with Arab identity and nationalism, as Juan Cole astutely notes, in the same way that White Christianity is synonymous with American nationalism. Hence, the secularism of Arab nationalists has always been a bit of a lie. The Arab masses and regimes are Sunni. Shia minorities have traditionally been suppressed in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and even in Lebanon. This is the root of the Sunni-Shia conflict that rages ferociously in Iraq today. See here for a particularly bigoted and insane example of Sunni Iraqi bigotry from the interesting blog of a secular Iraqi woman. Note that she ridiculously claims that Shia Islam was invented by the Iranians to destroy the Sunni Islamic civilization of the Arabs. I realize that sounds like the ravings of a mentally ill person, but this is how many Sunni Muslims, especially Sunni Arabs from Mesopotamia, the Gulf and the Levant, regard Iran and Shiism. When we understand this sick, crazy, racist hatred, we can understand why Saddam attacked Iran, and why he was supported in that war by all of the states in the Arab peninsula. We can understand why the secular King of Jordan intones darkly about a “Shia Belt” snaking ominously from Iran, across Iraq, to Syria and Southern Lebanon under Hizbollah control. We can understand the insane, Nazi-like massacres of crowds of Shia civilians – men, women and children of all ages – in Iraq by both the Sunni Islamist guerrilla animals and Saddam’s secular, Shia-hating fascist Arab nationalists. We can understand why the government of Yemen launched a murderous war on the Zaidi Shia of northern Yemen, who constitute 4 We can understand why the Sunni Muslim states of the Gulf are supporting the preliminary plans for a US attack on Iran, and why these states and the Iraqi Sunni-Nazi rebels will stand up and cheer till they can’t talk if the US invades Iran. We can understand why the viciously racist Sunni Arab bigots of Iraq intone darkly, “We will never be ruled by the blackhats (the Shia)”. While the Arab attitude towards Iran and the Shia has always been one of sheer, Nazi-like racist hatred, the Iranian attitude towards Arabs has tended to be one of the disdain of a supposedly superior people for a supposedly inferior one. I have droned on enough on this subject, and we need to move on to the rest of the post. If you wish to dive into this fascinating matter further, click the link above and take a crash course in Iranian history, the minorities of Iran and modern-day Iranian nationalism. I hope you enjoyed this excursion. Jundallah is an Al Qaeda oriented outfit has its origins in the Sunni population of the Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan. The Sunnis here complain of discrimination and ethnic cleansing by Iranian Shia officials, charges which have a basis in fact. There are suggestions that Jundallah may be based over the border in Afghanistan, possibly in the wild deserts of Nawruz Province. Clearly, Jundallah has a safe haven in the area where Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan all come together. This is one of the more dangerous places on Earth. Travelers heading there are advised to take a bodyguard, or preferably several bodyguards. None of the three governments in the region have much control over this area. It is overrun with drug traffickers (usually smuggling heroin or opium), who travel in large, very heavily-armed convoys. They periodically fight it out with Iranian troops. Iranian troops have lost an incredible figure of hundreds of troops in just a few years fighting running battles in this border region with drug traffickers. Jundallah has links to Al Qaeda. Iranian officials say that Jundallah is the arm of Al Qaeda inside Iran, and they say that Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Rigi is bin Laden’s right hand man in Iran. That is probably correct. In 2006, Syrian officials arrested dozens of leaders of the various Shia Arab Ahwaz fronts who are waging guerrilla war in Iran’s oil-rich Ahwaz Province. I cannot support this struggle, which is simply designed to steal much of Iran’s oil wealth. However, the Arabs in this region fought bravely in the Iran-Iraq War and suffered heavy casualties. They complain that they do not see much of the oil wealth in this region. The area was heavily damaged in the war, and the Iranian government hasn’t even rebuilt it very much. The Arabs also complain of discrimination. There is some truth to all of this, but one of Iran’s top military leaders is an Ahwaz Arab. If Iran had any sense, they would institute affirmative action to hire Ahwaz Arabs, rebuild the Ahwaz region and let the area see much more of their present share of the wealth. This conflict has always been fed by Arab nationalist fascists like the Baath fascists in Iraq, whose hatred of Iran borders on the insane and pathological. Furthermore, for the past few years, US and British Special Forces and intelligence are in the region assisting the insurgency. By arresting most of the top leaders of the insurgency, Syria is spitting in the eyes of Arab nationalist bigots all over the Arab World, and is throwing its lot in with Shia solidarity (Syria is ruled by a Shia sect) and Syria’s alliance with Iran. *****

The Ahmadinejad Regime as Reactionary Puritanical Nightmare Dictatorship Lie

The Ahmadinejad Regime as Reactionary Puritanical Nightmare Dictatorship is pretty much the standard lie you hear in the West, and especially via the agents of International Zionism who are sprinkled throughout our media. Forget it. It’s just not true. True, Tehran is not San Fransisco. But Iran has long been far more liberal than much of the Arab World, especially the Gulf. Sure the kids are mad. They want even more freedom than what they have. Kids everywhere want to screw and party, even in Iran. Problem is the kids are an outlier that does not represent conservative Iranian society. Ahmadinejad’s regime is not as reactionary as you think. The young people really hate the extreme conservatism, so the regime pretty much lays off and leaves the kids alone. The Iranian regime, including the Ayatollahs, allowed a transsexual mullah to be a judge, and Khomeini himself allowed this, issuing a fatwa that said that Shiism should sympathize with true transsexuals, since they were obviously created by Allah. This mullah got a sex change, turned into a woman, retained his clerical position, and soon married another genetically male cleric! The marriage was approved by the clerical establishment. There is dope all over Tehran, and lots of people smoke marijuana and hashish in their homes, particular the middle, upper middle and upper classes. This group drinks too, and they especially love to smoke opium (This has long been the favorite Iranian vice). As long as it is behind the closed doors of North Tehran, no one cares much about any of this (Anonymous 1994). The whole country is dope-flooded. The reason it is dope flooded is not so much that Iranians are inveterate dopers (they are not) but more than Iran is a Central Nexus in international dope smuggling. Dope, particularly opium and heroin, moves through Iran, typically via southwest Iran, and then on to Europe. It’s typically flown out on international flights out of Tehran. This is the heroin trade often referred to as the Turkish connection or the Marseilles connection (cf the movie French Connection), because much of the dope moves through Turkey and much is shipped in via ships to the ports of Southern France. Many hundreds of Iranian drug agents have lost their lives in the past decade alone. Large areas of southwest Iran are virtually no man’s lands, controlled by very heavily armed drug smugglers and their militias. There is a Sexual Revolution going on with the young, especially the upper middle classes of Northern Tehran, and no one does anything to stop it. There are chador-clad prostitutes walking certain streets of Tehran late at night. A serial killer was killing them a while back; the regime caught him and executed him, saying even street whores have a right to life. The prostitute problem is so serious in Tehran (25,000 in Tehran alone) that the regime was recently debating whether or not to put them in whorehouses with madams and guards. It would be done under the umbrella of temporary marriage. Prostitutes, when arrested, are usually sentenced to living in some halfway house under female supervision where they are rehabilitated. The holy city of Qom is full of male religious students along with thousands of young and pretty chador-clad female prostitutes to service them. This charade is conducted under the rubric of “temporary marriage.” A religious student picks a prostitute out of the crowd, goes to find a mullah, pays the mullah some money, and the guy and girl are “temporarily married” for a few hours or days or whatever. The girl gets paid by the guy and they go off to do it, often in public. Graveyards are a favorite place, since there are many tombs (Shia graveyards are full of elaborate tombs) where you can easily have sex out of sight, and Qom graveyards are full of young Iranians screwing away even in midday. Mullahs use the “temporary marriage” gambit liberally, and quite a few females get access to them this way. A prominent Iranian female religious scholar recently published interviews boasting of sleeping her way to the top of the mullahcracy, have sex with dozens of mullahs along the way, all under the cover of temporary marriage. No one cared about this astonishing revelation. Iranian society is way more liberal than you think.

References

Anonymous, 23 year old Female Tehran resident, a foreign student at California State University, Fresno. 1994. Personal communication. Fresno, California.

Ahmadinejad Wins Fair and Square in Iran – Imperialist/Zionist Green "Color Revolution" Smashed By the Iranian People

If you are looking at the news, you may note that there is rioting all over Iran now, especially in Tehran, Shiraz and some other places. Mirhoseyn Mousavi was the guy handpicked by US imperialism and International Zionism to overthrow Ahmadinejad, who has gotten the ire of the West, since his regime and Syria are the last two Arab or Islamic regimes who are standing up to Zionism. For an overview of why the steadfast Iranian regime is so hated by the West and Israel, see my overview here. Juan Cole lays out the arguments for why the election must have been stolen, including the excellent showing of Ahmadinejad in Iranian Azerbaijan, where Mousavi hails. However, there was a poll done shortly before the election by a Western firm, apparently an anti-Iranian regime firm at that (its name is Terror Free Tomorrow,  so I assume they are pro-West and anti-Iranian regime). The poll ( Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Asia, Conspiracies, Iran, Regional, South Asia11 Comments on Ahmadinejad Wins Fair and Square in Iran – Imperialist/Zionist Green "Color Revolution" Smashed By the Iranian People

The Role of Iran in Arab -Islamic Resistance to Imperialism and Zionism

This post will provide an overview of why the Iranian regime is hated so much by US imperialism and Zionism, and why they plotted a Green “color revolution” to throw out one of the last holdouts of Arab – Islamic resistance in the region. Except for Iran, Syria, Hamas-Gaza and Hezbollah, all of the rest of the Arab and Islamic World has folded in the face of the Zionist onslaught or been bought off by US imperialism. Saddam was another rejectionist, but the Zionist traitor neoconservatives engineered an illegal invasion to bring him down. Ghaddafi was threatened with invasion by the same folks, and promptly folded. The Palestinians now effectively have no outside support. Egypt collaborates with Zionism to police the Gaza border and assists in the starvation and deprivation of the Gazans. Egyptian police prevent guns from flowing to the Gazans for their noble resistance to the Zionist enemy. Jordan was captured long ago. Elections are not allowed in Jordan, because the 6 Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco are bought off and sold to the US. Anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations are regularly crushed with brutality in Tunisia. None of these states are democracies, because democracy would allow an anti-Zionist and anti-US regime to be elected. In Arabia, there are no democracies. All of the regimes are sold out to the US. There are US military bases in all nations, for the sole reason of policing the Arabian peoples. The effect is that the Arabian peoples are under a dictatorship of US military bases combined with local satraps and Quislings. It’s true the Saudis allow fighters to go to Arab lands, but only to Iraq to fight the Shia that they hate so much. Lebanon has been under imperialist-Zionist assault for years now. With the election of a French Jew to head the French state, France is now firmly in the Zionist camp. This, along with a colonial attachment to the Lebanese fake state that never died, explains why France has gone along with imperialism-Zionism in Lebanon. Iraq is now occupied by imperialism-Zionism in the form of the US military and will be occupied into the forseeable future. Iraq was attacked because it was one of the only Arab holdouts that stood steadfast against imperialism and Zionism in the region. Also, they allowed no bases and opened up their oil to non-Americans. The invasion, in collaboration with the Zionist enemy, was planned to remove the holdout Saddam of the Arab resistance, to remove the competitors of US oil companies from the oil fields they were developing, to take over Iraq’s oil for the US, to use Iraqi oil to flood the oil market and lower the price, killing the Saudis and Gulf states of their oil weapon (the Gulf Arabians, while US allies, are distrusted by International Zionism, and they hatched the Iraqi invasion). With permabases in Iraq and the biggest US embassy on Earth in Baghdad, US control over the region was seized by force. It was only due to fortitude that the Iraqi resistance soon led an insurgency against the invaders. If they would not have done this, we know for a fact that the US military would have done a “left turn at Baghdad, and headed for Syria”, as their Zionist masters were ordering them too. With Iraq out of the way, Libya was quickly subdued with threats of force. Arafat was murdered by the Israelis. They placed a Mossad agent as his cook and poisoned his food. The Abbas clique went along with the poisoning since they hated Arafat. Getting Arafat out of the way was a long-standing goal of the Zionist agenda. Then elections were held in Palestine, but the results came out wrong and Hamas won. The Abbas forces were trained by the US to be the shock troops of Zionism in Palestine. Indeed, Abbas forces are utilized primarily against those Palestinians in Hamas who still dare to resist the Zionist enemy. A plot was concocted to oust the pro-Syrian regime in Lebanon, but it failed. Syria probably killed Hariri, but Hariri was selling out Lebanon to imperialism and Zionism, and Syria would not stand for that. What does Syria want? One thing and one thing only. They want the Golan back. For this, they will sacrifice everything, the Palestinians, Arabism, you name it. The only card left that Syria holds to enable it to get back the Golan is their auxiliary force in Lebanon, Hezbollah. This is why Syria must not allow Hezbollah to be dismantled. If Hezbollah is dismantled, Syria has lost their last cards too get the Golan back, and they will never be able to get their land back. The killing of Hariri resulted in international pressure against Syria, including sanctions. There was also an international effort made to disarm and dissolve Hezbollah. The effort to get rid of Hezbollah seems to have failed, although pro-Hezbollah forces won 4 A few years ago, with the connivance of US imperialism, US neoconservatives along with Israel concocted a plot to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon. The purpose here was to decisively defeat Hezbollah and wipe out their substantial missile stockpile. This invasion largely failed to accomplish this mission. The UN was then given the task of occupying South Lebanon to enforce Zionist and imperialist rule on sovereign Lebanese land. This effort has largely failed, as Hezbollah has restocked their missiles and they are now better armed than before the invasion. This background shows you that Ahmadinejad is one of the last holdouts in the region against total dominaton by US imperialism and Zionism. This is why the Iranian regime is being targeted so forcefully.

The Purest Whites of Them All

Repost from the old blog. Indicates that, contrary to White nationalist dumbasses, the purest Whites of all are not Nordics but the Whites of the Caucasus and, of all folks, those nasty Jews! Holy Semites, Batman! What now? This very term itself is a little bit absurd, but as long as White nationalists like to talk about pure Whites versus non-pure Whites, let’s evaluate the matter. On a board I think to frequent called Human Biodiversity (mostly non-racists interested in race, genetics, anthropology, etc.), someone said that the purest Whites are from the Caucasus anyway, and the White Power types don’t even consider them White. Recall that hundreds of Armenian White Power types were tossed off Stormfront recently for being “non-Whites”. So I decided to look into the matter. From my research:

Group         
Iraqi Jews     
Iranian Jews   
Sephardic Jews 
Georgian Jews  
Kurdish Jews   
Ashkenazi Jews 
Azerbaijan     
Armenia        
Georgia        

*Note that these are just averages. Some studies have claimed to show that individual Ashkenazim have some Black in them. Figures from my post A Little Black in All Of Us. The only Whites that I know that don’t have any Black blood are those those Mizrachi (Eastern) and Mountain Jews and those Whites from the Caucasus above. All other White groups have some Black in them. Horrors! I’m not sure if Sephardic refers to Mizrachi or actual Sephardics from Iberia. I suspect Mizrachis from the Arab World. On the board where I posted this, I got some hostile responses. One asked me why Jews should have avoided this presumably terrible situation (having a few drops of Black). I suggested that in part it was due to the purity of the bloodline in the Jews and their long-term hostility to mixing with non-Jews. Ashkenazim came to Europe in 500 or so and moved into the Continent over the next 500 years, taking in some non-Jewish genes. Typically, Jewish men would move to a new area, marry a non-Jewish woman who would convert and then stay pure after that. After 1000, Talmudic rules kicked in with very heavy penalties for Jews, especially Jewish women, having sex with non-Jews, and only 1 in 200 matings in Ashkenazim were with non-Jews. I suspect that there were few Blacks in Europe from 500-1000. What few there were were in far Southern Europe. After 1000, there seems to have been a few more Blacks moving into Europe as part of colonial armies, freed slaves and whatnot. The Mizrachi Jews have no Black in them because they were not Muslim. Black went into Arab blood due to slaves and freed slaves coming via Islam. I would suspect that Christian Arabs also have little Black. The slavery of Blacks in the Arab World was very much associated with Islam. Jews probably just did not keep slaves, and in the rare event that they did, they probably almost never had sex with them. In the Arab World, the Black genes came from Arab men having children with the Black slave women. Black slaves hardly had sex with Arab women at all, although there was some of this in Yemen. The Yemeni Jews are the only Jews outside Africa to have some Black blood, and they have a fair amount. I’m not sure how this came about, but Blacks have probably been a more important part of Yemen than any other Arab country. The Caucasus has no Black blood because there were probably few to no Black slaves in the region. Most of the region is Christian, and the Muslims there did not keep slaves. If anything, the region’s Christians were raided by the Turks for White slaves. See Circassian Beauties for more. Interestingly, the reason that the women of the Caucasus were so prized by the Turks was because they were considered to be the “purest” Whites of all (see above). The same pure Whites who get tossed out of White Power forums on the net. Go figure. This research takes a lot of time, and I do not get paid anything for it. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a a contribution to support more of this valuable research.

Do the Yezidis Worship the Devil?

Repost from the old site. This is a very, very long piece, so be warned. But the subject, the Yezidi religious group, is extraordinarily complex, as I found out as I delved deeper and deeper into them.

They are still very mysterious and there is a lot of scholarly controversy around them, mostly because they will not let outsiders read their holy books. However, a copy of their holiest book was stolen about 100 years ago and has been analyzed by scholars.

I feel that the analysis below of the Yezidis (there are various competing analyses of them) best summarizes what they are all about, to the extent that such an eclectic group can even be defined at all. The piece is hard to understand at first, but if you are into this sort of thing, after you study it for a while, you can start to put it together. There are also lots of cool pics of devil and pagan religious art below, for those who are interested in such arcana.

The Yezidis, a Kurdish religious group in Iraq practicing an ancient religion, have been accused of being devil worshipers by local Muslims and also by many non-Muslims.

The Yezidis appeared in Western media in 2007 due to the stoning death of a Yezidi teenage girl who ran off with a Muslim man. The stoning was done by eight men from her village while another 1000 men watched and cheered them on. Afterward, there has been a lot of conflict between Muslim and Yezidi Kurds.

As Western media turned to the Yezidis, there has been some discussion here about their odd religion. For instance, though the local Muslims condemn them as devil worshipers, the Yezidis strongly deny this. So what’s the truth? The truth, as usual, is much more complicated.

The Yezidis believe that a Creator, or God, created a set of deities that we can call gods, angels or demons, depending on how you want to look at them. So, if we say that the Yezidis worship the devil, we could as well say that they worship angels. It all depends on how you view these deities.

In the history of religion, the gods of one religion are often seen as the devils of another. This is seen even today in the anti-Islamic discourse common amongst US neoconservatives, where the Muslim God is said to be a demonic god, and their prophet is said to be a devilish man.

Christian anti-Semites refer to the Old Testament God of the Jews as being an evil god. Orthodox Jews say that Jesus Christ is being boiled alive in semen in Hell for eternity.

At any rate, to the Yezidis, the main deity created by God is Malak Taus, who is represented by a peacock. Although Yezidis dissimulate about this, anyone who studies the religion closely will learn that Malak Taus is actually the Devil.

On the other hand, the Yezidis do not worship evil as modern-day Satanists do, so the Satanist fascination with the Yezidis is irrational. The Yezidis are a primitive people; agriculturalists with a strict moral code that they tend to follow in life. How is it that they worship the Devil then?

First of all, we need to understand that before the Abrahamic religions, many polytheistic peoples worshiped gods of both good and evil, worshiping the gods of good so that good things may happen, and worshiping the gods of evil so that bad things may not happen. The Yezidis see God as a source of pure good, who is so good that there is no point in even worshiping him.

In this, they resemble Gnosticism, in which God was pure good, and the material world and man were seen as polluted with such evil that the world was essentially an evil place. Men had only a tiny spark of good in them amidst a sea of evil, and the Gnostics tried to cultivate this spark.

This also resembles the magical Judaism of the Middle Ages (Kabbalism). The Kabbalists said that God was “that which cannot be known” (compare to the Yezidi belief that one cannot even pray to God).

In fact, the concept of God was so ethereal to the Kabbalists that the Kabbalists said that not only was God that which cannot be known, but that God was that which cannot even be conceived of. In other words, mere men cannot not even comprehend the very concept of God. A Kabbalist book says that God is “endless pure white light”.

This comes close to my own view of what God is.

Compare to the Yezidi view that God “pure goodness”. The Yezidi view of God is quite complex. It is clear that he is at the top of the totem pole, yet their view of him is not the same as the gods of Christianity, Islam, Judaism or of the Greeks, although it is similar to Plato’s conception of the absolute.

Instead, it is similar to the Deists. God merely created the world. As far as the day to day running of things, that is actually up to the intermediary angels. However, there is one exception. Once a year, on New Years Day, God calls his angels together and hands the power over to the angel who is to descend to Earth.

In some ways similar to the Christian Trinity of God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost, the Yezidis believe that God is manifested in three forms.

An inscription of the Christian Trinity, the father, or God, as an old man with a beard; Jesus, a young man, and the Holy Ghost, here depicted as a winged creature similar to Malak Tus, the winged peacock angel. Compare to Yezidi reference for Šeiḫ ‘Adî, Yazid and Malak Tus (Father, Son and Holy Ghost)

 

The three forms are the peacock angel, Malak Tus; an old man, Šeiḫ ‘Adî (compare to the usual Christian portrayal in paintings of God as an old man with a long white beard); and a young man, Yazid (compare to the usual Christian paintings of Jesus as a healthy European-looking man with a beard and a beatific look – a similar look is seen in Shia portraits of Ali).

Since there is no way to talk to God, one must communicate with him through intermediaries (compare to intermediary saints like Mary in Catholicism and Ali in Shiism). The Devil is sort of a wall between the pure goodness of God and this admittedly imperfect world.

This is similar again to Gnosticism, where the pure good God created intermediaries called Aeons so that a world that includes evil (as our world does) could even exist in the first place. On the other hand, Malak Tus is seen my the Yezidis as neither an evil spirit nor a fallen angel, but as a divinity in his own right.

One wonders why the Malak Tus is represented by a bird. The answer is that worshiping birds is one of the oldest known forms of idol worship. It is even condemned in Deuteronomy 4: 16, 17: “Lest ye corrupt yourselves and make a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air.”

More likely, the peacock god is leftover from the ancient pagan bird-devil gods of the region. The ancient Babylonians, Assyrians both worshiped sacred devil-birds, and carvings of them can be seen on their temples. The Zoroastrians also worshiped a sort of devil-bird called a feroher.

A winged demon from ancient Assyria. Yezidism appears to have incorporated elements of ancient Babylonian and Assyrian religions, making it ultimately a very ancient religion. Note that devils often have wings like birds. Remember the flying monkey demons in the Wizard of Oz?

 

The pagan Phoenicians, Philistines and Samaritans worshiped a dove, and the early monotheistic Hebrews condemned the Samaritans for this idol-worship. The pagans of Mecca also worshiped a sacred dove. Pagan Arabian tribes also worshiped an eagle called Nasar.

What is truly odd is that peacocks are not native to the Yezidi region, but instead to the island of Sri Lanka. The Yezidis must have heard about this bird from travelers and incorporated it into their religion somehow.

In the Koran, both the Devil and the peacock were thrown out of Heaven down to Earth, with the Devil and the peacock both suffering similar punishments. So here we can see Islam associating the peacock with the Devil also.

In popular mythology, peacocks tend to represent pride. Note that the Koran says that the Devil was punished for excessive pride (compare with a similar Christian condemnation of excessive pride). Peacocks are problematic domestic fowl, and tend to tear up gardens, and so are associated with mischief.

The Yezidis revere Malak Tus to such a great extent that he is almost seen as one with God (compare the Catholic equation of Mary with Jesus, the Christian association of Jesus with God, and the Shia Muslim association of Ali with Mohammad).

Malak Tus was there from the start and will be there at the end, he has total control over the world, he is omniscient and omnipresent and he never changes. They do not allow anyone to say his name, as this seems to imply that he is degraded. Malak Tus is the King of the Angels, and he is ruling the Earth for a period of 10,000 years.

They also superstitiously avoid saying an word that resembles the word for Satan. When speaking Arabic, they refuse to use the Arabic shatt for river, as it sounds like the word for Satan. They substitute Kurdish ave instead. Compare this to the Kabbalist view of God as “that which can not even be comprehended (i.e., spoken) by man.

In addition to Malak Taus, there are six other angels: Izrafael, Jibrael, Michael, Nortel, Dardael, Shamnael, and Azazael. They were all at a meeting in Heaven when God told them that they would worship no one other than him. This worked for 40,000 years, until God mixed Earth, Air, Fire and Water to create Man, as Adam.

God told the seven angels to bow before Adam, and six agreed. Malak Taus refused, citing God’s order to obey only Him. Hence, Malak Taus was cast out of Heaven and became the Archangel of all the Angels. Compare this to the Christian and Muslim view of the Devil, the head of the angels, being thrown out of Heaven for the disobedience of excessive pride.

In the meantime, Malak Taus is said to have repented his sins and returned to God as an angel.

So, yes, the Yezidis do worship the Devil, but in their religion, he is a good guy, not a bad guy. They are not a Satanic cult at all. In Sufism, the act of refusing to worship Adam (man) over God would be said to be a positive act, one of refusing to worship the created over the creator, as in Sufism, one is not to worship anything but God.

The Yezidis say that God created Adam and Eve, but when they were asked to produce their essences, Adam’s produced a boy, but Eve’s was full of insects and other unpleasant things. God decided that he would propagate humanity (the Yezidis) out of Adam alone, leaving Eve out of the picture. Specifically, he married Adam’s offspring to a houri.

We can see the traditional views of the Abrahamic religions of women as being sources of evil, tempters, sources of strife, conflict and other bad things. The Yezidis see themselves as different from all other humans. Whereas non-Yezidis are the products of Adam and Eve, Yezidis are the products of Adam alone.

Eve subsequently left the Garden of Eden, which allowed the world to be created. So, what the Abrahamic religions see as man’s greatest fall in the Garden, the Yezidis see as mankind’s greatest triumphs. The Yezidis feel that the rest of humanity of is descended from Ham, who mocked his father, God.

Compare this to the Abrahamic religions’ view of women as a source of corruption. Christians say that Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, causing them to be tossed out. In Islam, women are regarded as such a source of temptation and fitna (dissension) that they are covered and often kept out of sight at all times. In Judaism, women’s hair is so tempting to men that they must shave it all off and wear wigs.

The Yezidis say they are descended directly from Adam, hence they are the Chosen People (compare to the Jewish view of themselves as “Chosen People”).

Yezidism being quite possible the present-day remains of the original religion of the Kurds, we must acknowledge that for the last 2,000 years, the Yezidis have been fighting off other major religions. First Christianity came to the region.

As would be expected, the Nestorian Christians of Northern Iraq, or “Nasara” Christian apostates, as an older tradition saw them, hold that the Yezidis were originally Christians who left the faith to form a new sect. The Nestorians and other ancient Christian sects deny the human or dual nature of Jesus – instead seeing him as purely divine.

This is in contrast to another group also called “Nasara” in Koran – these being the early Jewish Christian sects such as the Ebionites, Nazarenes and Gnostics, who followed Jesus but denied his divine nature, believe only in the Book of Matthew, and retained many Jewish traditions, including revering the Jewish Torah, refusing to eat pork, keeping the Sabbath and circumcision.

Mohammad apparently based his interpretation of Christianity on these sects. The divinity of Jesus was denied in the Koran under Ebionite influence. The Koran criticizes Christians for believing in three Gods – God, Jesus and Mary – perhaps under the influence of what is called the “Marianistic heresy”. At the same time, the Koran confused human and divine qualities in Jesus due to Nestorian influence.

Finally, the Koran denied the crucifixion due to Gnostic influence, especially the apocryphal Gospel of Peter. The local Muslims, similarly, hold that the Yezidis are apostates, having originally been Muslims who left Islam to form a new religion.

There is considerable evidence that many Yezidis were formerly Christians, as the Christian story holds. Šeiḫ ’Adî, one of the tripartite of angels worshiped by the Yezidis, was a Sufi Muslim mystic from Northern Iraq in the 1100’s. He attracted many followers, including many Christians and some Muslims who left their faith to become Yezidis. Yezidism existed before Šeiḫ ’Adî, but in a different form.

Šeiḫ ’Adî also attracted many Persian Zoroastrians, who were withering under the boot of Muslim dhimmitude and occasional massacre in Iran. Šeiḫ ‘Adî (full name Šeiḫ ‘Adî Ibn Masafir Al-Hakkari) was a Muslim originally from Bait Far, in the Baalbeck region of the Bekaa Valley of what is now Eastern Lebanon.

He came to Mosul for spiritual reasons. He was said to be a very learned man, and many people started to follow him. After he built up quite a following, he retired to the mountains above Mosul where he built a monastery and lived as a hermit, spending much of his time in caves and caverns in the mountains with wild animals as his only guests.

His followers were said to worship him as a God and believed that in the afterlife, they would be together with him. He died in 1162 in the Hakkari region near Mosul. At the site of his death, the Yezidis erected a shrine and it became one of the holiest sites in the religion. However, Šeiḫ ’Adî is not the founder of Yezidism, as many believe. His life and thought just added to the many strains in this most syncretistic of religions.

The third deity in the pseudo-“Trinity” of the Yezidis is a young man named Yezid. They say they are all descended from this man, whom they often refer to as God, as they sometimes refer to Šeiḫ ’Adî. In Šeiḫ ’Adî’s temple, there are inscriptions to both Šeiḫ ’Adî and Yezid, each on opposing walls of the temple. In a corner of this temple, a fire, or actually a lamp, is kept burning all night, reminiscent of Zoroastrianism.

There is a lot of controversy about what the word Yezid in Yezidi stands for. The religion itself, in its modern form, probably grew out of followers of Yazid Ibn Muawiyah Ibn Abu Sufyan, the 2nd Caliph in the Umayyad Dynasty of Caliphs. Yazid fought a battle against Mohammad’s grandson, Hussayn, in a battle for the succession of the Caliphate.

Hussayn’s followers were also the followers of Ali, the former caliph who was assassinated. The followers of Hussayn and Ali are today known as the Shia. The Sunni follow in the tradition of the Umayyads. In a battle in Karbala in 680, Hussayn and all his men were killed at Kufa and the women and children with them taken prisoner.

To the Shia, Yazid is the ultimate villain. Most Sunnis do not view him very favorably either, and regard the whole episode as emblematic of how badly the umma had fallen apart after Mohammad died.

Nevertheless, there had been groups of Sunnis who venerated Yazid Ibn Muawiyah Ibn Abu Sufyan and the Umayyads in general in northern Iraq for some time even before Šeiḫ ’Adî appeared on the scene. Šeiḫ ’Adî himself was descended from the Umayyads.

Reverence for Yazid Ibn Muawiyah mixed with the veneration of Šeiḫ ’Adî in the early Yezidis. It was this, mixed in with the earlier pagan beliefs of the Semites and Iranians discussed elsewhere, along with a dollop of Christianity, that formed the base of modern Yezidism. But its ultimate roots are far more ancient. Yezidism had a base, but it was not yet formed in its modern version.

Here we turn to the etymology of the word Yezidi. It is possible that the figure of “Yezid”, the young man-God in the Yezidi trinity, represents Yazid Ibn Muawiyah. By the mid-1200’s, the local Muslims were getting upset about the Yezidis excessive devotion to these two men. In the mid-1400’s the local Muslims fought a large battle against the Yezidis.

To this day, the top Yezidi mirs are all related to the Umayyads. Muslim scholars say that Yezid bin Unaisa was the founder of the modern-day Yezidis. Bin Unaisa was one of the early followers of the Kharijites, an early fanatical fundamentalist sect that resembled our modern-day Al Qaeda and other takfiri Salafi-jihadi terrorists. Bin Unaisa was said to be a follower of the earliest Kharijites.

These were the first Kharijites. Early split-offs from Ali’s army, they took part in the Battle of Nahrawan against Ali’s forces outside Madaen in what is now the Triangle of Death in Iraq. In 661, the Kharijites assassinated Ali, one of the penultimate moments in the Sunni-Shia split.

At some point, bin Unaisa split from the Kharijites, except for one of their early followers who were following a sect Al-Abaḍia, founded by ‘Abd-Allah Ibn Ibad. He said that any Muslim who committed a great sin was an infidel. Considering his fundamentalist past, he developed some very unorthodox views for a Muslim.

He said that God would send a new prophet to Persia (one more Iranian connection with the Yezidis), that God would send down a message to be written by this prophet in a book, and that this prophet would leave Islam and follow the religion of the Sabeans or Mandeans. Nevertheless, he continued to hold some Kharijite beliefs, including that God alone should be worshiped and that all sins were forms of idolatry.

In line with this analysis, the first Yezidis were a Kharijite subsect. The fact that bin Unaisa said that the new prophet would follow Sabeanism implies that he himself either followed this religion at one time or had a high opinion of it.

Muslim historians mention three main Sabean sects. They seemed to have derived in part from the ancient pagan religion of Mesopotamia. They were polytheists who worshiped the stars. After the Islamic conquest, they referred to themselves as Sabeans in order to receive protection as one of the People of the Book (the Quran mentions Jews, Christians and Sabeans and People of the Book). One of the Sabean sects was called Al-Ḫarbâniyah.

They believed that God dwelt within things that were good and rational. He had one essence but many appearances, in other words. God was pure good, and could not make anything evil. Evil was either accidental or necessary for life, or caused by an evil force. They also believed in the transmigration of souls (reincarnation).

It is interesting that the beliefs of this sect of Sabeans resemble the views of modern Yezidis. So Yezîd bn Unaisa believed in God and the Resurrection Day, he probably respected angels and the stars, yet he was neither polytheistic nor a true follower of Mohammad.

At the same time, he lined himself up with those People of the Book who said that Mohammad was a prophet, yet did not follow him (in this respect, he was similar to Western non-Muslims who acknowledge Mohammad as the prophet of the Arabs).

Although most orthodox histories of the Yezidis leave it out, it seems clear at this point that Yezîd bn Unaisa was the founder of the Yezidi religion in its modern form and that the Yezidis got their name from Yezîd bn Unaisa. This much may have been lost to time, for the Yezidis themselves say that Yezidi comes from the Kurdish word Yezdan or Êzid meaning God.

After naming their movement after Yezîd bn Unaisa, the Yezidis learned of Šeiḫ ‘Adî’s reputation, and become his followers, along with many Muslims, Christians and Iranians.

Like their founder, the Yezidis believe in God and the Resurrection, expect a prophet from Iran, revere angels and stars, regard every sin as idolatry, respect Mohammad as a prophet yet do not follow him and at the same time pay no attention to Ali (recall that the early Kharijites assassinated Ali). Being opposed to both Mohammad and Ali, bn Unaisa is logically despised by both the Sunni and the Shia.

The fact that the Yezidis renounced the prophet of the Arabs (Mohammad) while expecting a new one from Iran logically appealed to a lot of Persians at the time. Hence, many former Zoroastrians, or fire-worshipers, from Iran joined the new religion, surely injecting their strains into this most syncretistic of religions.

There is good evidence that many Yezidis are former Christians. The Yezidis around Mosul go by the surname of Daseni, of Dawasen in the plural. It so happens that there was a Nestorian diocese in Mosul called Daseni, or Dasaniyat. It disappeared around the time of Šeiḫ ’Adî. The implication is that so many of its members became Yezidis that the Diocese folded.

Furthermore, many names of Yezidi villages are actually names in the Syriac (Christian) language, more evidence that many Yezidis are former Christians.

Adding even more weight to this theory, the Yezidis retain two Christian customs – the baptism and the Eucharist.

The Yezidis must baptize their children at the earliest possible age, and the priest puts his hand on the child’s head as he performs the rite. Both customs mirror the Christian baptism precisely. When a Yezidi couple marries, they go to a local Nestorian Church to partake of the Eucharist. The cup of wine they drink is called the cup of Isa (Jesus). The Yezidi have great respect for Christian saints and houses of worship, and kiss the doors and walls of churches when they enter them.

When a Yezidi woman goes to the home of her bridegroom on wedding day, she is supposed to visit every every religious temple along the way, even the churches. On the other hand, Yezidis never enter a mosque. Sadly, the Yezidi reverence for Christianity is not returned by the Eastern Christians, who despise the Yezidis as devil-worshipers.

They revere both Jesus and Mohammad as religious teachers, not as prophets. They have also survived via a hefty dose of taqqiya, or dissimulation, in this case pretending outwardly to be some species of Shia Muslims.

This is common for minority faiths around the region, including the Alawi and Druze, who have both proclaimed at the top of their lungs that they are Muslims and have hidden to the aspects of their religion which would cause the Muslims to disown them at best or kill them at worst. The primary Islamic influence on the Yezidis is actually Sufism, not Shiism per se.

There are traces of other religions – Hinduism may possibly be seen in the five Yezidi castes, from top to bottom – Pir, Shaikh, Kawal, Murabby, and Mureed (followers). Mureeds are about on a par with Dalits or Untouchables in Hinduism. Marriage across castes is strictly forbidden, as it has been disapproved in India.

On the other hand, pre-Islamic Iran also had a caste system, and the base of the Yezidi religion seems to be derived from Persian Zoroastrianism. The Yezidi, like the Druze and the Zoroastrians, do not accept converts, and like the Druze, think that they will be reincarnated as their own kind (Druze think they will be reincarnated as Druze; Yezidis think they will be reincarnated as Yezidis).

The Yezidis can be considered fire-worshipers in a sense; they obviously got this from the Zoroastrians. The Yezidis say, “Without fire, there would be no life.” This is true even in our modern era, if we substitute “electrical power” for fire, our lives would surely diminish. Even today, when Kurdish Muslims swear on an oath, they say, “I swear by this fire…”

Many say there is a resemblance between Malak Taus and the Assyrian God Tammuz, though whether the name Malak Taus is actually derived from Tammuz is much more problematic. Tammuz was married to the Assyrian moon goddess, Ishtar. But this connection is not born out by serious inquiry.

Ishtar the Goddess of the Moon, here represented as a bird goddess. Worship of birds is one of the oldest forms of pagan idolatry known to man. What is it about birds that made them worthy of worship by the ancients? The miracle of flight?

Where do the Yezidis come from? The Yezidis themselves say that they came from the area around Basra and the lower Euphrates, then migrated to Syria and then to Sinjar, Mosul and Kurdistan. In addition to worshiping a bird-god, there are other traces of the pre-Islamic pagan religions of the Arabs in Yezidism.

They hold the number seven sacred, a concept that traces back to the ancient Mesopotamians. The Yezidis have seven sanjaks, and each one has seven burners of the flame. Their God created seven angels, and the sculpture carved on the temple of Šeiḫ ’Adî has seven branches.

The Sabeans, another ancient religion of Mesopotamia who are now called star-worshipers by their detractors, also worshiped seven angels who guided the courses of seven planets – it is from this formulation that our seven days of the week are derived. In the ancient religion of Assyria, Ishtar descended through seven gates to the land of no return. The ancient Hebrews likewise utilized the number seven in their religion.

An ancient seven-armed candelabra, a symbol nowadays used in the Jewish religion, with demonic sea monsters drawn on the base.

The Yezidis worship the sun and moon at their rising and setting, following the ancient Ḥarranians, a people who lived long ago somewhere in northern Iraq. Sun-worship and moon-worship are some of the oldest religious practices of Man. The ancient pagans of Canaan worshiped the Sun.

At the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the religion practiced there had little in common with Talmudic Judaism of today. For instance, the horses of the Sun were worshiped at that temple (see II Kings 25: 5, 11). The ancient Judeans, who the modern-day Jews claim spiritual connection with, actually worshiped the “host of heaven” – the Sun, the Moon and the Planets. So much for “the original monotheists, eh?

In Babylonia, there were two temples to the Sun-God Shamas.

Another pre-Islamic Arab pagan belief is the belief in sacred wells and sanctuaries that contain them. The springs contain water that has curative powers. The holy water found at the Zamzam Well in Mecca is an example; even to this day, Muslims bottle the water and carry it off for this purpose. Often sacred clothes are used to make these pilgrimages, because ordinary clothes are thought to contaminate the holy site.

In pre-Islamic days, when the pagans circled the rock at the Kaaba, they were completely naked. In Islam, men and women are supposed to remove their clothing and wear a special garb as they circulate around the rock. In Mandeanism, both men and women go to the Mishkana, or tabernacle, take off their clothes, and bathe in the circular pool. Emerging, they put on the rasta, a ceremonial white garment.

At the temple of Šeiḫ ‘Adî, there is a sacred pool. The Yezidis throw coins, jewelry and other things into this pool as offerings. They think that Šeiḫ ‘Adî takes these things from time to time. And they must remove their clothes, bathe, and wear a special garment when they visit the holy valley where this temple resides.

The ancient Arabs also worshiped trees. There were sacred trees at Nejran, Hadaibiya and Mecca. The pagans hung women’s ornaments, fine clothes, ostrich eggs, weapons, and other items.

Similarly, the Yezidis also worship trees. They have their favorite trees, and sick people go to these trees and hang pieces of cloth on them, hoping to get well, and believe that whoever takes one of these down will get sick with whatever disease the person who hung the cloth had.

An inscription of a sacred tree from Ancient Babylonian civilization. Trees were worshiped not just in ancient Arabia; they were also worshiped in Mesopotamia.The Christian Trinity combined with the pagan Tree of Life, in an interesting ancient Chaldean inscription that combines pagan and Christian influences. The Tree of Life was also utilized in Kabbalism, Jewish mysticism from the Middle Ages. Nowadays the symbol is used by practitioners of both White and Black Magic. Radical Islam is committing genocide once again on the Christians of Iraq, including the Chaldeans.

Yet another Tree of Life, this time from ancient Assyria, an ancient civilization in Mesopotamia. The concept of a tree of life is a pagan concept of ancient pedigree.

The ancient Meccans used to worship stones. At one point the population became so large that they had to move out of the valley where the Kaaba resided, so when they formed their new settlements, they took rocks from the holy place and piled them outside their settlements and made a sort of shrine out of these things, parading around the rock pile as they moved around the Kaaba.

In Palestine, there were sacred wells at Beersheba and Kadesh, a sacred tree at Shekem and a sacred rock at Bethel. As in animism, it was believed that divine powers or spirits inhabited these rocks, trees and springs. This tradition survives to this day in the folk religion of the Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.

The Yezidis also have certain stones that they worship. They kiss these stones in reverence. When the Yezidis reach the goal of their pilgrimage or hajj, they become very excited and start shouting. After fasting all day, they have a big celebration in the evenings, with singing and dancing and gorging on fine dishes.

This hajj, where they worship a spring under Šeiḫ ‘Adî’s tomb called Zamzam and then climb a mountain and shoot off guns, is obviously taken from the Muslim hajj. Mecca has a Zamzam Spring, and pilgrims climb Mount ‘Arafat on hajj.

The shouting, feasting, singing, dancing and general excitement is typical of a pagan festival. The non-Yezidi neighbors of the Yezidis claim that Yezidis engage in immoral behavior on this hajj. No one knows if this is true or not, but if they do, it may be similar to the festivals of the Kadeshes discussed in the Old Testament, where people engaged in licentious behavior in their temples.

Although the Yezidis have a strict moral code, observers say that they allow adultery if both parties are willing. That’s pretty open-minded for that part of the world.

Ralph Peters Advocates Killing War Journalists

Figures. He is affiliated with JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs). This is definitely one of the most evil organizations on Earth. If you want to know who drummed up the Iraq War, look no further than to these maniacs. This place is Neoconservative Central. These are basically rightwing super-Zionist and Cold Warrior Jews with lots of Gentiles, especially former and current US military, sprinkled among them. For instance, Dick Cheney is a member. They have a very subversive program that sends US military officers to Israel in order to more or less tie the US and Israeli militaries together by an umbilical cord. After the tours, the officers usually become strong supporters of the Israelis. One of their journals is called the Journal of International Security Affairs. This where Peters’ screed appeared. Peters has said many a crazy thing in recent years, and he was recently behind a neocon “thought experiment” in which the regime change was accomplished in many Middle Eastern states and states seen as hostile to US and Israeli interests were chopped up into bite-sized chunks.

The borders of the Middle East redrawn by neocon maniac Ralph Peters.
The borders of the Middle East redrawn by neocon maniac Ralph Peters.
The map is a bit difficult to follow. Basically, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Syria, and Pakistan have all gotten chopped up to one degree or another. A hatchet especially has been taken to supposed US ally Saudi Arabia. Iran has been lopped up good and Pakistan doesn’t have a lot left of it. This map is indicate of the fears of the Pakistani, Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and Turkish states and it shows why they won’t acquiese to separatist movements in their borders. The map actually makes sense in a way, but since it is being drawn up by US imperialism and International Zionism, no country in the region should go along with it. If the place ever settles down, maybe it might make sense. A big problem here is that Saudi Arabia and Iran lost most of their oil and gas fields to something called the Arab Shia State. It will be a cold day in Hell when either country lops off their prime natural resources that their whole economy is based on. Jordan and Yemen gain territory at the expense of the Saudis. New states called Free Baluchistan and Free Kurdistan impinge on Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Azerbaijan grows and takes a bite out of Iran. Gaza is donated to Egypt, who doesn’t want anything to do with it. A Sunni Iraqi state is lopped off, seen as a terrorist entity, and hence denied any real resource base in oil and gas, all of that going either to Free Kurdistan or the Arab Shia State. It’s funny how US imperialism opposes all separatism except when it involves enemies of the US. Then we become separatist advocates. Realpolitik was always the most cynical and disgusting kind of game, with no morals anywhere in sight. Figures Kissinger thought it up. The guy is basically a functioning psychopath. Sublimination is nothing new. Winston Churchill could have been Charles Manson, but for some self-controls. Peters is a former US ,military intelligence officer who served for many years, but he never saw any combat. That doesn’t stop him from calling real vets serving in office “war virgins” for not attacking whoever he thinks they ought to attack today.

Lawrence Auster's View From the Right

For the first time, I am reading Lawrence Auster’s View From the Right. There is actually much interesting material here, and I am stunned to note that I agree with much of what he says. OMG! Does this mean that I am a closet reactionary? Dubious. Auster is a racialist and paleocon. He hates modern feminism, multiculturalism, political correctness, illegal immigration, the whole insipid nine yards of Kool-Aid. In other words, when it comes to the insanity of the modern Western Left, he thinks like a sane human being instead of some weird programmed PC cyborg. For daring to think like a normal human, his fellow rightists, the neocons at Little Green Fascists, I mean Little Green Footballs, call him a NAZI. Truth is, Auster is by no means a Nazi. Auster is Jewish, and contrary to the endless lies of most Jews, very few even self-hating Jews are actual Nazis. I figure your average Jewish self-hater would walk a mile to help a fellow Jew with a broken toenail. So much for Jewish “self-hatred.” Ethnocentrism runs deep in the hyperethnocentric culture of Jews, and Jewish culture takes a bite out of you that you never get back. As we might expect, he’s a Zionist (that’s the Jewish part that he can never shake loose no matter how many times he goes to church), and a pretty nasty one too (once again rational considering his Far Right leanings). But it all makes sense considering his anti-Black racism and his sympathy for White separatism. What’s Zionism but White Nationalism for Jews? He’s just expanding his Zionist racism against Palestinians towards additional Others, like Blacks, a logical progression. Anyway, Auster’s not about to heap it on the Jews. He’s basically a White nationalist, but he’s always unloading on the rest of them for their incessant (And moronic!) anti-Semitism. He’s recently hinted at White separatist sentiments, a degeneration typical of most all afflicted with White Nationalism Disease at some point or other. He’s widely hated by the anti-Semites in the movement for not fessing up to the devious role da evil Joooz have played in forcing poor innocent Whites to act like masochistic and suicidal dumbfucks, but that’s to be expected. Much of interest here. Lots on Black crime! How I do love Black crime! I especially love the lurid and truly evil kind where the hot young and of course eternally innocent White chick goes off with the more or less societally acceptable Black dude but then ends up murdered in the most horrible and despicable way by the savage Black animal masquerading as upstanding member of society. WN’s do have a nice take on this. The media ignores Black crime. Especially the most inflammatory Black crime of all, where the, you know, savage, ape, jungle, etc. Black missing link dudes kill hot White chicks in the most evillest and Ted Bundiest of ways. It’s sick, it’s fucked up, it’s sets box office records. It’s so horrible and awful, please give us some more. The media, like, buries that stuff. I guess for fear of mass race riots. The WN’s are right, and this mini-epidemic is indeed buried. Where WN’s are wrong and stupid as always is in thinking these animals only massacre White chicks. For every White girl cruelly murdered, probably 5-10 Black chicks are done in, often in an equally sadistic manner. But no one cares about Black females who die. They were invisible alive, so they are invisible dead, and their last terrifying moments are worthy of no more than a passing sigh before we Whites move on. Auster has an interesting take on all this. Hot young White chicks are massacred by Black psychopaths because they are ho’s who stay out late unchaperoned and drink in bars and stuff. And, I guess, walk alone on the streets at 4 AM and other shameless ho-like stuff. Yeah. I don’t understand this. Most White guys think the modern trend of young White women to act like ho’s is admirable in a utilitarian sense. But Auster is old, and I guess he can’t get it up anymore? Cool article on how the Professional Liars in the meatpacking industry ruined a bunch of great paying jobs by hiring mostly illegals and destroying the unions. Go capitalism go! Oh, and wages dropped 5 ICE raided the scumbuckets, and they had to hire White people and stuff. Turns out…whoa! There were lines around the block, and they stayed in business. Real Americans lined up 5 people strong for every opening for an illegal who got canned. Despite all his noble obeisance to sanity, Auster wrecks it all by being an uber-dumbfuck when it comes to religion. Judaism is sort of horrible as a religion, but at least you get to be Chosen. There’s moronic stuff in there, but it’s all subject to Talmudic hedging, denying, second-guessing and backtracking. And you can always be Reform and believe in nothing but Chosenness and some God you can’t even define in 500 words or less. So this brainy Jew leaves the ultimate intellectual’s religion behind for Christianity. No problem I guess. But like a dumbass, he flies headlong into the stupidest Christianity of all, the fundamentalist Protestant kind. Effect is like some high-IQ guy who streaks down the street every day. One of his obsessions on here is how Evolution never happened. If that you’re that dumb, you’re like someone with a weird sexual fetish. Keep it to yourself for Chrissake. But instead Auster spends half of his blog telling us how Evolution never happened. Which is like dancing around in the street and screaming what a dumbass you are. He also spends a disturbing amount of of time casting doubt on the Out of Africa Theory, suggesting that the human races actually began separating many hundreds of thousands of years ago. He also suggests that we bred in with Erectus. These views are controversial to say the least. However, while not subscribing to the hard theory, I would suggest that some aspects of this theory may be possible: Scenario 3 (which I present as Coon’s theory):

Erectus 1 evolved into Race 1, Homo sapiens. This Homo sapiens migrated to the territories of the four other Erectus types and interbred with them. This produced four new sapiens strains–each containing “a bit of Erectus.”

He quotes blogger Mathilda who has made such things into her raison de etre. Mathilda is an otherwise great blogger, but on these issues, she is simply insane. Mathilda also spends a very large amount of time arguing that Southern Europeans have little or no Black in them. This, along with opposition to Out of Africa and suggestions that racial differences are hundreds of thousands of years old, is creepy. Almost everyone arguing along these lines is some kind of a White racist, usually a virulent one. Matilda insists she is not one, but I’m very worried about her obsessions. That Auster buys into all of this, along with Auster’s hostility towards Blacks, amply displayed on his blog, suggests that not only is Auster a racist, but he is one Hell of a nasty one too. Auster is also afflicted with most of the usual trad Conservative obsessions. He hates homosexuals, and suggests that they are mentally ill. I don’t hate gays at all, but I have one gay male friend who thinks gays are screwed up in the head. I don’t think it’s homosexuality that makes them nutty but instead it’s acting feminine. Acting feminine is not normal, and men who act feminine are going to be punished by nature for this transgression by being unhappy and a little crazy. He also really hates Islam. I have major issues about Islam myself, but he takes this way too far, suggesting that Muslims should be removed from the US. He says we need to attack Iran, and we also need to attack Pakistan now that the nukes are in danger of being seized by the Taliban. He doesn’t think the Pope should be reconciling with Islam, which is just retarded of Auster. The less you dialogue with Muslims, the angrier they get. That’s why the loss of the Arab Christians is so tragic. The Arab Christians are our link between the Christian West and the Muslim Arab World. Anyway, all around interesting read from a weird but sui generis mind.

Some Toponyms of the Near and Mid Orient

Looking east from Europe, as we Eurocentrists are wont to do of course, we find a variety of baffling terms, most of which are not used much anymore, but which are still often useful for pinpointing an area. The problem is if you go by official definitions, you get tremendous overlap, so let’s try to make some exclusive definitions if we can. First of all, the Near East. I am not quite sure what this means, but I will hazard a guess that it means at least Turkey, Greece and Cyprus in the southeast Mediterranean. I suppose we can throw in Egypt too, since it always seems silly to call Egypt part of the Middle East while leaving out the rest of North Africa. Wikipedia has it including the Arab lands of the East and Southeast Mediterranean too, but nowadays, that is usually referred to as the Middle East. An excellent term you may come across from time to time is West Eurasia. I like it myself because it’s guaranteed that hardly anyone will know what I am talking about when I say that, and that way I get to sound really smart. West Eurasia redirects to Eurasia in Wikipedia, Eurasia being something like Europe and Asia combined. How is this helpful? So the Whites and the Yellows can gang up on the Blacks and the Reds? It’s useless. West Eurasia, though, is pretty neat. It doesn’t seem to have much of a solid definition, but the best I could come up with mucking around was something like “the Caucasus and environs.” It’s debatable whether or not we should toss in something called “Anatolia”. Maybe the eastern part of it? Sounds good. Another nice one is the Middle East. Everyone loves to utter this one these days. Wikipedia’s definition is way too expansive. It clearly includes all of Arabia, but it ought to exclude most of North Africa, although we often throw in Egypt. Greece, Turkey and the Caucasus should clearly be excluded. Iran often gets lumped in, but there are better ways to describe Iran. The Middle East is pretty much Arabia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Israel and Egypt. It has a heavy connotation with the Arabic language and also Israel. For the constituent parts of the Middle East, let us look first at Arabia. It’s nothing but the Arabian Peninsula, as Wikipedia points out. It includes Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE and Kuwait. Whether you want to include Bedouin regions of neighboring states is a harder question. Culturally, sure, they are Arabia, but toponymically? Dubious. You can also use it in sort of a weird way to mean “the Arab-speaking world”, but that’s a little tricky. Arabia is a fun term to toss around because people will look at you funny when you say it. Some smart people will ask, “You mean Saudi Arabia?” Then you put on your glasses and look down at them a bit and describe how actually it means the whole Gulf. Egypt is in a class of its own in the Middle East. All the rest of the North African Arab states are not really part of the Middle East, as they are getting farther and farther west and are on the same longitude as much of Europe so Eurocentrically it’s absurd to say they are medially eastern to Europe proper. They’re south of Europe, and in many ways, they are part European. Further, the culture, genes and even language is more Berber than Arab. Even the Egyptians are pretty Berberized. We must make a distinction between the true Arabs of the Middle East east of the Suez and Berberized North Africans. The Levant is a cool term. Wikipedia’s version once again appears a bit expansive. It now includes Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. In Arabic it’s called Al-Sham. We can also use the adjective Levantine to describe this region. It really needs to be set off from Egypt, Arabia and Mesopotamia for a variety of reasons. The Levant is another cool term you can throw around so people can’t understand you and will think you are smart. Next we come to Mesopotamia. For many reasons, it is not properly a part of the Levant or Arabia, though the Bedouin regions to the South, west and especially southwest are culturally part of Arabia. But hey, so are the Sinai, the Negev, eastern Jordan and even eastern Syria. Mesopotamia, one of the world’s most ancient great cultures, is clearly in a class of its own. Further, it has substantial Persian influence. And as one of the world’s greatest and oldest cultures, every other moron ought to know what Mesopotamia means, but hardly anyone does. So this is one more cool way you can act smart and make people hate you. Another cool term is Southwest Asia. No one will know what you mean when you say this either, but at least it will make them think. Your average American moron has a dim idea of where Asia is, and most of them know what southwest means (except for the directionally impaired females), but put the two together and it’s Baffle Hour. Wikipedia says Arabia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus and Iran are part of Southwest Asia. Since we already have neat terms for those places, there is no need to get confusing. Truth is, Southwest Asia is a great way to describe…Iran. You can also fairly easily throw in the Caucasus too, especially the southern portions. Maybe even Kurdistan if you are feeling generous. All the rest is overlap and best explained by other terms. Going east from Iran, we run into the mysterious South Asia. This means something like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives. Afghanistan is not included in most definitions, but we need to toss it somewhere, so here it goes. Other definitions include Tibet, Burma and Iran. I don’t know where to put Tibet. Burma is Southeast Asia. We already dealt with Iran. Iran is better seen as southwest Asia than South Asia.

Muslims Show Kindness To Iraqi Homosexuals

This is pretty much par for the course in parts of Arabia. In Palestine, male homosexuals are routinely murdered by the both the secular PLO and the Islamist Hamas. They actually flee to Israel to save their lives. In Lebanon, they get off easy. All Hezbollah does is beat them up (gay bash them). In Egypt, they go to prison when they catch them on a gay boat out on the Nile, but if you keep it under wraps, Egypt is actually a lot better, and all across North Africa, there is tons of homosexuality going on. Young males will play the male role in sex with guys, and as long as they play the guy, they don’t consider themselves gay. There’s a tremendous amount of this sort of thing going on in Morocco. In Arabia, it’s pretty much wide open so to speak. There is an incredible amount of at least male homosexuality going on in Saudi Arabia, but they are supposed to be discreet about it. Gay lovers can walk down the street arm in arm, but if a male and female do it, the religious police are right there on top of them. It’s almost like the worst paranoid fears of gay-hating Western religious right being played out. Homosexuality is legal, but heterosexuals are beaten and hauled off to prison. There is also lots of homosexuality in Kuwait. This is all male homosexuality, by the way. However, in the Kingdom, a lot of the Princesses (there are 1000’s of them) miserable under the weight of horrible misogyny, drink, take pills, suffer psychosomatic illnesses and depression and in particular take to lesbian affairs with each other. We don’t like first four too much, but as far as the last one goes, they need to make internet videos of them and email them to me right now. It is in Iraq where Muslim kindness towards homosexuals reaches its pinnacle. Iran is close. There they just hang young male gays who they catch while an audience watches and I guess eats popcorn and cheers or something. The Shiite militias in East Baghdad have recently shown the way by leading the world in Islamic tolerance and kindness towards gays. Male gays are kidnapped, stripped naked, tied up, and have a special glue applied to their anuses that can only be removed by surgery. I think it’s called Super Asshole Sealer or something. They make it in Iran, probably especially for this purpose. I’ve heard of covering your ass, but this is just ridiculous. Then they force feed the guys laxatives, which causes diarrhea. Since their butts are glued shut, the diarrhea has no escape route and it eventually somehow kills the poor guy. Cause of death: I have no idea. I guess a blown-up asshole or something. Shivers. Good God, what a Hell of a way to go. Best of all, the kind and loving Muslims then distribute videos of the gruesome murders on cell phones to other Muslim sickos, who gleefully watch them for entertainment. The Socialist Worker Party Trots are right, Islam is a de facto progressive religion. All us Western Lefties need to get behind it right now. Better yet, convert.

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