Some notes on Race, Religion and National Identity.
Q\
No Arabs or Muslims so far. Let's see as we progress.
p.s. Why am I writing this? Because a charge has been made: " ...The arab nations who want to anahilate Jews .." I shall give the facts. You decide. Fair enough?
For those who do not realize this, Fahim happens to be Arab, I'm Jewish and the Iranian President and the Shia mullahs, (Persian Shia Muslims for the most part) are non-Arabs! We should not ascribe to Arabs the threats of made by the Iranians. Yes, Arabs and Jews have differences that are serious and need addressing. Muslims States have at times committed crimes, but on the whole, they have been a haven compared to being Europe.
At least for the past 3,000 years approximately, Iranians are different groups culturally from Arabs.
There are actually no logically viable reasons for using the word "Race" anymore as it was in the last century. The term race is a description of superficial, but easily recognizable body habitus, skin tones and facial shapes, that have been mistakenly considered as indicating major or significantly advantageous differences in actual make up. We can describe people by some of these hardly important features, together with culture, language or religion and shared self-declared identity as being a people! Race as a concept, is more of a conceit, an ever changing bubble of delusion folk live in! There's actually no white race!! We have external features that distinguish people externally and they may have more of a myriad of gene variants, but that's all! There's certainly no white race to be defended against blood contamination. No one is superior! The "White race", BTW, is just a very recently invented xenophobic political term and has no scientific basis. Rather we all have in common many mixtures, (or better assemblages) of unique genetic coding sequences, as all people are built of genetic lego blocks, (runs of unique DNA sequences of bases pairs, some of which first appeared some 70,000 years ago in Africa and 50,000 years ago in India before migrating to the middle East and Europe.
"most modern evidence points to “indeed, nearly all Europeans — and by extension, many Americans — can trace their ancestors to only four mtDNA lines, which appeared between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago and originated from South Asia.”"*
"in simple terms, India acted “as an incubator of early genetic differentiation of modern humans moving out of Africa.”2*
[Again], "In simple terms, except for Africans, all humans have ancestors in the North-West of the Indian peninsula. In particular, one migration started around 50,000 BP towards the Middle East and Western Europe" *
Religion, Shia v. Sunni and even Christianity, are too recent markers in this context. Still, the Iranian Persian peoples are
culturally distinct, from Arabs and
look different, even though all so close genetically. To get a better sense of this, lets look at some premium cars, the Mercedes and the Lexus. The ideas built in to both cars brands correspond to our (runs or of) building blocks of DNA. They are closely related and share variations of thousands of inventions, designs and patents but in different recipes. Still, the Mercedes and Lexus brands are immediately recognizable on sight and are made in different locations and by mostly different part manufacturers.
*From an
excellent article on genetic analysis of human populations using large samples from divers populations.
I hope this serves as a soothing bandage for those who have fiery rhetoric about uniqueness of peoples. While I'm proud of my Jewish heritage and culture, I recognize the valuable and essential interchange and contributions of so many diverse civilizations to our present modernity and advantages. It's also obvious, that no group can claim some racial purity or uniqueness, but rather an enrichment of some archaic DNA runs of base pairs compared to more genetically distant folk. Still we are all made up of the same archaic pieces African and Indian of DNA from, originating in just handfuls of unique and ambitious men and women (hunter/gatherer/farmer) travelers of 50-70,000 years ago!
Asher
