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The Dönmeh:
The Middle East’s
Most Whispered Secret
(Part I)
Wayne MADSEN (USA)
| 25.10.2011 |
Reposted from
Strategic-Culture Foundation
 There
is a historical “eight hundred pound gorilla” lurking in the
background of almost every serious military and diplomatic incident
involving Israel, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Greece, Armenia,
the Kurds, the Assyrians, and some other players in the Middle East
and southeastern Europe. It is a factor that is generally only
whispered about at diplomatic receptions, news conferences, and
think tank sessions due to the explosiveness and controversial
nature of the subject. And it is the secretiveness attached to the
subject that has been the reason for so much misunderstanding about
the current breakdown in relations between Israel and Turkey, a
growing warming of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and
increasing enmity between Saudi Arabia and Iran…
Although known to historians and religious experts, the
centuries-old political and economic influence of a group known in
Turkish as the “Dönmeh” is only beginning to cross
the lips of Turks, Arabs, and Israelis who have been reluctant to
discuss the presence in Turkey and elsewhere of a sect of
Turks descended from a group of Sephardic Jews who were expelled
from Spain during the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th and 17th
centuries. These Jewish refugees from Spain were welcomed
to settle in the Ottoman Empire and over the years they converted to
a mystical sect of Islam that eventually mixed Jewish Kabbala and
Islamic Sufi semi-mystical beliefs into a sect that eventually
championed secularism in post-Ottoman Turkey. It is
interesting that “Dönmeh” not only refers to the Jewish
“untrustworthy converts” to Islam in Turkey but it is also a
derogatory Turkish word for a transvestite, or someone who is
claiming to be someone they are not.
The Donmeh sect of Judaism was founded in the 17th century by Rabbi
Sabbatai Zevi, a Kabbalist who believed he was the Messiah but was
forced to convert to Islam by Sultan Mehmet IV, the Ottoman ruler.
Many of the rabbi’s followers, known as Sabbateans, but also
“crypto-Jews,” publicly proclaimed their Islamic faith but secretly
practiced their hybrid form of Judaism, which was unrecognized by
mainstream Jewish rabbinical authorities. Because it was against
their beliefs to marry outside their sect, the Dönmeh created a
rather secretive sub-societal clan.
The Dönmeh rise to power in
Turkey
Many Dönmeh, along with traditional Jews, became powerful political
and business leaders in Salonica. It was this core group of
Dönmeh, which organized the secret Young Turks, also known
as the Committee of Union and Progress, the secularists who deposed
Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II in the 1908 revolution, proclaimed the
post-Ottoman Republic of Turkey after World War I, and who
instituted a campaign that stripped Turkey of much of its Islamic
identity after the fall of the Ottomans. Abdulhamid II was vilified
by the Young Turks as a tyrant, but his only real crime appears to
have been to refuse to meet Zionist leader Theodore Herzl during a
visit to Constantinople in 1901 and reject Zionist and Dönmeh offers
of money in return for the Zionists to be granted control of
Jerusalem.
Like other leaders who have crossed the Zionists, Sultan Adulhamid
II appears to have sealed his fate with the Dönmeh with this
statement to his Ottoman court: “Advise Dr. Herzl not to take any
further steps in his project. I cannot give away even a handful of
the soil of this land for it is not my own, it belongs to the entire
Islamic nation. The Islamic nation fought jihad for the sake of this
land and had watered it with their blood. The Jews may keep their
money and millions. If the Islamic Khalifate state is one day
destroyed then they will be able to take Palestine without a price!
But while I am alive, I would rather push a sword into my body than
see the land of Palestine cut and given away from the Islamic
state.” After his ouster by Ataturk’s Young Turk Dönmeh in 1908,
Abdulhamid II was jailed in the Donmeh citadel of Salonica. He died
in Constantinople in 1918, three years after Ibn Saud agreed to a
Jewish homeland in Palestine and one year after Lord Balfour deeded
Palestine away to the Zionists in his letter to Baron Rothschild.
One of the Young Turk leaders in Salonica was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
the founder of the Republic of Turkey. When Greece achieved
sovereignty over Salonica in 1913, many Dönmeh, unsuccessful at
being re-classified Jewish, moved to Constantinople, later re-named
Istanbul. Others moved to Izmir, Bursa, and Ataturk’s
newly-proclaimed capital and future seat of Ergenekon power, Ankara.
Some texts suggest that the Dönmeh numbered no more than
150,000 and were mainly found in the army, government, and business.
However, other experts suggest that the Dönmeh may have represented
1.5 million Turks and were even more powerful than believed by many
and extended to every facet of Turkish life.
One
influential Donmeh, Tevfik Rustu Arak, was a close friend and
adviser to Ataturk and served as Turkey’s Foreign Minister from 1925
to 1938.
Ataturk, who was reportedly himself a Dönmeh, ordered that
Turks abandon their own Muslim-Arabic names. The name of
the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine, was erased from
the largest Turkish city, Constantinople. The city became Istanbul,
after the Ataturk government in 1923 objected to the traditional
name. There have been many questions about Ataturk’s own
name, since “Mustapha Kemal Ataturk” was a pseudonym. Some
historians have suggested that Ataturk adopted his name because he
was a descendant of none other than Rabbi Zevi, the self-proclaimed
Messiah of the Dönmeh! Ataturk also abolished Turkey’s use
of the Arabic script and forced the country to adopt the western
alphabet.
Modern Turkey: a secret Zionist
state controlled by the Dönmeh
Ataturk’s suspected strong Jewish roots, information about which was
suppressed for decades by a Turkish government that forbade anything
critical of the founder of modern Turkey, began bubbling to the
surface, first, mostly outside of Turkey and in publications written
by Jewish authors. The 1973 book, The Secret Jews, by Rabbi
Joachim Prinz, maintains that Ataturk and his finance minister,
Djavid Bey, were both committed Dönmeh and that they were in good
company because “too many of the Young Turks in the newly formed
revolutionary Cabinet prayed to Allah, but had their real prophet [Sabbatai
Zevi, the Messiah of Smyrna].” In The Forward of January
28, 1994, Hillel Halkin wrote in The New York Sun that Ataturk
recited the Jewish Shema Yisrael (“Hear O Israel”), saying that it
was “my prayer too.” The information is recounted from an
autobiography by journalist Itamar Ben-Avi, who claims Ataturk, then
a young Turkish army captain, revealed he was Jewish in a Jerusalem
hotel bar one rainy night during the winter of 1911. In addition,
Ataturk attended the Semsi Effendi grade school in Salonica,
run by a Dönmeh named Simon Zevi. Halkin wrote in the New
York Sun article about an email he received from a Turkish
colleague: “I now know – know (and I haven’t a shred of doubt) –
that Ataturk’s father’s family was indeed of Jewish stock.”
It was Ataturk’s and the Young Turks’ support for Zionism,
the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, after World War I
and during Nazi rule in Europe that endeared Turkey to Israel and
vice versa. An article in The Forward of May 8, 2007,
revealed that Dönmeh dominated Turkish leadership “from the
president down, as well as key diplomats . . . and a great part of
Turkey’s military, cultural, academic, economic, and professional
elites” kept Turkey out of a World War II alliance with Germany, and
deprived Hitler of a Turkish route to the Baku oilfields.” In his
book, The Donme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries and Secular
Turks, Professor Marc David Baer wrote that many advanced to exalted
positions in the Sufi religious orders.
Israel has always been reluctant to describe the Turkish massacre of
the Armenians by the Turks in 1915 as “genocide.” It has always been
believed that the reason for Israel’s reticence was not to upset
Israel’s close military and diplomatic ties with Turkey. However,
more evidence is being uncovered that the Armenian genocide was
largely the work of the Dönmeh leadership of the Young Turks.
Historians like Ahmed Refik, who served as an intelligence officer
in the Ottoman army, averred that it was the aim of the
Young Turks to destroy the Armenians, who were mostly Christian. The
Young Turks, under Ataturk’s direction, also expelled Greek
Christians from Turkish cities and attempted to commit a
smaller-scale genocide of the Assyrians, who were also mainly
Christian.
One Young Turk from Salonica, Mehmet Talat, was the official who
carried out the genocide of the Armenians and Assyrians. A
Venezuelan mercenary who served in the Ottoman army, Rafael de
Nogales Mendez, noted in his annals of the Armenian genocide that
Talat was known as the “renegade Hebrew of Salonica.” Talat was
assassinated in Germany in 1921 by an Armenian whose entire family
was lost in the genocide ordered by the “renegade Hebrew.”
It is believed by some historians of the Armenian genocide that the
Armenians, known as good businessmen, were targeted by the
business-savvy Dönmeh because they were considered to be commercial
competitors.
It is not, therefore, the desire to protect the Israeli-Turkish
alliance that has caused Israel to eschew any interest in pursuing
the reasons behind the Armenian genocide, but Israel’s and the
Dönmeh’s knowledge that it was the Dönmeh leadership of the
Young Turks that not only murdered hundreds of thousands of
Armenians and Assyrians but who also stamped out Turkey’s
traditional Muslim customs and ways. Knowledge that it was
Dönmeh, in a natural alliance with the Zionists of Europe, who were
responsible for the deaths of Armenian and Assyrian Christians,
expulsion from Turkey of Greek Orthodox Christians, and the cultural
and religious eradication of Turkish Islamic traditions, would issue
forth in the region a new reality. Rather than Greek and Turkish
Cypriots living on a divided island, Armenians holding a vendetta
against the Turks, and Greeks and Turks feuding over territory, all
the peoples attacked by the Dönmeh would realize that they had a
common foe that was their actual persecutor.
Challenging Dönmeh rule:
Turkey’s battle against the Ergenekon
It is the purging of the Kemalist adherents of Ataturk and his
secular Dönmeh regime that is behind the investigation of the
Ergenekon conspiracy in Turkey. Ergenekon’s description matches up
completely with the Dönmeh presence in Turkey’s diplomatic,
military, judicial, religious, political, academic, business, and
journalist hierarchy. Ergenekon attempted to stop the
reforms instituted by successive non-Dönmeh Turkish leaders,
including the re-introduction of traditional Turkish Islamic customs
and rituals, by planning a series of coups, some successful like
that which deposed Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan’s Refah
(Welfare) Islamist government in 1996 and some unsuccessful,
like OPERATION SLEDGEHEMMER, which was aimed at deposing Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2003. Some
Islamist-leaning reformists, including Turkish President Turgut Ozal
and Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, died under suspicious
circumstances. Deposed democratically-elected Prime Minister Adnan
Menderes was hanged in 1961, following a military coup.
American politicians and journalists, whose knowledge of the history
of countries like Turkey and the preceding Ottoman Empire, is often
severely lacking, have painted the friction between Israel’s
government and the Turkish government of Prime Minister Erdogan as
based on Turkey’s drift to Islamism and the Arab world. Far from it,
Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) seem to
have finally seen a way to break free from the domination and
cruelty of the Dönmeh, whether in the form of Kemalist followers of
Ataturk or nationalist schemers and plotters in Ergenekon.
But with Turkey’s “Independence Day” has come vitriol from the
Dönmeh and their natural allies in Israel and the Israel Lobby in
the United States and Europe. Turkey as a member of the
European Union was fine for Europe as long as the Dönmeh remained in
charge and permitted Turkey’s wealth to be looted by central bankers
like has occurred in Greece.
When Israel launched its bloody attack on the Turkish Gaza aid
vessel, the Mavi Marmara, on May 31, 2010, the reason was not so
much the ship’s running of the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The
brutality of the Israelis in shooting unarmed Turks and one
Turkish-American, some at point blank range, according to a UN
report, indicated that Israel was motivated by something else:
vengeance and retaliation for the Turkish government’s crackdown on
Ergenekon, the purging of the Turkish military and intelligence
senior ranks of Dönmeh, and reversing the anti-Muslim religious and
cultural policies set down by the Dönmeh’s favorite son, Ataturk,
some ninety years before. In effect, the Israeli attack on
the Mavi Marmara was in retaliation for Turkey’s jailing of several
top Turkish military officers, journalists, and academics, all
accused of being part of the Ergenekon plot to overthrow the AKP
government in 2003. Hidden in the Ergenekon coup plot is
that the Dönmeh and Ergenekon are connected through their history of
being Kemalists, ardent secularists, pro-Israeli, and pro-Zionist.
With tempers now flaring between Iran on one side and Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and the United States on the other, as the result of a
dubious claim by U.S. law enforcement that Iran was planning to
carry out the assassination of the Saudi ambassador to the United
States on American soil, the long-standing close, but secretive
relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia is coming to the
forefront. The Israeli-Saudi connection had flourished during
OPERATION DESERT STORM, when both countries were on the receiving
end of Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles.
The Dönmeh:
The Middle East’s
Most Whispered Secret
(Part II)
Wayne MADSEN (USA) | 26.10.2011
Reposted from
Strategic-Culture Foundation
 What
will surprise those who may already be surprised about the Dönmeh
connection to Turkey, is the Dönmeh connection to the House of Saud
in Saudi Arabia.
An Iraqi Mukhabarat (General Military Intelligence Directorate) Top
Secret report, “The Emergence of Wahhabism and its Historical
Roots,” dated September 2002 and released on March 13, 2008, by the
U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in translated English form, points
to the Dönmeh roots of the founder of the Saudi Wahhabi sect of
Islam, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab. Much of the information is gleaned
from the memoirs of a “Mr. Humfer,” (as spelled in the DIA report,
“Mr. Hempher” as spelled the historical record) a British spy who
used the name “Mohammad,” claimed to be an Azeri who spoke Turkish,
Persian, and Arabic and who made contact with Wahhab in the mid-18th
century with a view of creating a sect of Islam that would
eventually bring about an Arab revolt against the Ottomans and pave
the way for the introduction of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Humfer’s memoirs are recounted by the Ottoman writer and admiral
Ayyub Sabri Pasha in his 1888 work, “The Beginning and Spreading of
Wahhabism.”
In his book, The Dönmeh Jews, D. Mustafa Turan writes that Wahhab’s
grandfather, Tjen Sulayman, was actually Tjen Shulman, a member of
the Jewish community of Basra, Iraq. The Iraqi intelligence report
also states that in his book, The Dönmeh Jews and the Origin of the
Saudi Wahhabis, Rifat Salim Kabar reveals that Shulman eventually
settled in the Hejaz, in the village of al-Ayniyah what is now Saudi
Arabia, where his grandson founded the Wahhabi sect of Islam. The
Iraqi intelligence report states that Shulman had been banished from
Damascus, Cairo, and Mecca for his “quackery.” In the village,
Shulman sired Abdul Wahhab. Abdel Wahhab’s son, Muhammad, founded
modern Wahhabism.
The Iraqi report also makes some astounding claims about the Saud
family. It cites Abdul Wahhab Ibrahim al-Shammari’s book, The
Wahhabi Movement: The Truth and Roots, which states that King Abdul
Aziz Ibn Saud, the first Kingdom of Saudi Arabia monarch, was
descended from Mordechai bin Ibrahim bin Moishe, a Jewish merchant
also from Basra. In Nejd, Moishe joined the Aniza tribe and changed
his name to Markhan bin Ibrahim bin Musa. Eventually, Mordechai
married off his son, Jack Dan, who became Al-Qarn, to a woman from
the Anzah tribe of the Nejd. From this union, the future Saud family
was born.
The Iraqi intelligence document reveals that the researcher Mohammad
Sakher was the subject of a Saudi contract murder hit for his
examination into the Sauds’ Jewish roots. In Said Nasir’s book, The
History of the Saud Family, it is maintained that in 1943, the Saudi
ambassador to Egypt, Abdullah bin Ibrahim al Muffadal, paid Muhammad
al Tamami to forge a family tree showing that the Sauds and Wahhabs
were one family that descended directly from the Prophet Mohammed.
At the outset of World War I, a Jewish British officer from India,
David Shakespeare, met with Ibn Saud in Riyadh and later led a Saudi
army that defeated a tribe opposed to Ibn Saud. In 1915, Ibn Saud
met with the British envoy to the Gulf region, Bracey Cocas. Cocas
made the following offer to Ibn Saud: “I think this is a guarantee
for your endurance as it is in the interest of Britain that the Jews
have a homeland and existence, and Britain’s interests are, by all
means, in your interest.” Ibn Saud, the descendant of Dönmeh from
Basra, responded: “Yes, if my acknowledgement means so much to you,
I acknowledge thousand times granting a homeland to the Jews in
Palestine or other than Palestine.” Two years later, British Foreign
Secretary Lord Balfour, in a letter to Baron Walter Rothschild, a
leader of the British Zionists, stated: “His Majesty’s government
view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home
for the Jewish people . . .” The deal had the tacit backing of two
of the major players in the region, both descendant from Dönmeh Jews
who supported the Zionist cause, Kemal Ataturk and Ibn Saud. The
present situation in the Middle East should be seen in this light
but the history of the region has been purged by certain religious
and political interests for obvious reasons.
After World War I, the British facilitated the coming to power of
the Saud regime in the former Hejaz and Nejd provinces of the
Ottoman Empire. The Sauds established Wahhabism as the state
religion of the new Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and, like the Kemalist
Dönmeh in Turkey, began to move against other Islamic beliefs and
sects, including the Sunnis and Shi’as. The Wahhabi Sauds
accomplished what the Kemalist Dönmeh were able to achieve in
Turkey: a fractured Middle East that was ripe for Western
imperialistic designs and laid the groundwork for the creation of
the Zionist state of Israel.
Deep states and Dönmeh
During two visits to Turkey in 2010, I had the opportunity of
discussing the Ergenekon “deep state” with leading Turkish
officials. It was more than evident that discussions about the
Ergenekon network and its “foreign” connections are a
highly-sensitive subject. However, it was also whispered by one
high-ranking Turkish foreign policy official that there were other
“deep states” in surrounding nations and Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Jordan, and Syria were mentioned by name. Considering the links
between Ergenekon and the Dönmeh in Turkey and the close
intelligence and military links between the Dönmeh-descendent Sauds
and Wahhabis in Arabia, the reports of close links between ousted
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his intelligence chief Omar
Suleiman and the Binyamin Netanyahu government in Israel may be seen
in an entirely new light… And it would explain Erdogan’s support for
Egypt’s revolution: in Turkey, it was a democratic revolution that
curbed the influence of the Dönmeh. The influence of Wahhabi
Salafists in Libya’s new government also explains why Erdogan was
keen on establishing relations with the Benghazi-based rebels to
help supplant the influence of the Wahhabis, the natural allies of
his enemies, the Dönmeh (Ergenekon) of Turkey.
Erdogan’s desire to set the historical record straight by restoring
history purged by the Kemalists and Dönmeh has earned him vitriolic
statements from Israel’s government that he is a neo-Ottomanist who
is intent on forming an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in the
Arab countries. Clearly, the Dönmeh and their Zionist brethren in
Israel and elsewhere are worried about Dönmeh and Zionist historical
revisionism, including their role in the Armenian and Assyrian
genocide, and their genocide denial being exposed.
In Egypt, which was once an Ottoman realm, it was a popular
revolution that tossed out what may have amounted to the Dönmeh with
regard to the Mubarak regime. The Egyptian “Arab Spring” also
explains why the Israelis were quick to kill six Egyptian border
police so soon after nine Turkish passengers were killed aboard the
Mavi Marmara, some in execution style, by Israeli troops. Dönmeh
doctrine is rife with references to the Old Testament Amalekites, a
nomadic tribe ordered attacked by the Hebrews from Egypt by the
Jewish God to make room for Moses’s followers in the southern region
of Palestine. In the Book of Judges, God unsuccessfully commands
Saul: “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that
they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, and
infant, ox, and sheep, camel and donkey.” The Dönmeh, whose doctrine
is also present in Hasidic and other orthodox sects of Judaism,
appear to have no problem substituting the Armenians, Assyrians,
Turks, Kurds, Egyptians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Iranians, and
Palestinians for the Amalekites in carrying out their military
assaults and pogroms.
With reformist governments in Turkey and Egypt much more willing to
look into the background of those who have split the Islamic world,
Ataturk in Turkey and Mubarak in Egypt, the Sauds are likely very
much aware that it is only a matter of time before their links, both
modern and historical, to Israel will be fully exposed. It makes
sense that the Sauds have been successful in engineering a dubious
plot involving Iranian government agents trying to assassinate the
Saudi ambassador to Washington in an unnamed Washington, DC
restaurant. The Iraqi intelligence report could have been referring
to the Zionists and Dönmeh when it stated, “it strives to . . .
[the] killing of Muslims, destructing, and promoting the turmoil.”
In fact, the Iraqi intelligence report was referring to the Wahhabis.
With new freedom in Turkey and Egypt to examine their pasts, there
is more reason for Israel and its supporters, as well as the Sauds,
to suppress the true histories of the Ottoman Empire, secular
Turkey, the origins of Israel, and the House of Saud. With various
players now angling for war with Iran, the true history of the
Dönmeh and their influence on past and current events in the Middle
East becomes more important.
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