"President Bush should be declared a Distinguished Zionist", - quipped Tsahi HaNegbi, an Israeli thug-turned-Minister, when the words of the American president ceased to reverberate in the end-of-June heat of Middle East. "No, Bush should be co-opted into Likud caucus", - parried the opposition leader, Yossi Sarid. Israeli Labour leader, Shimon Peres, looked sillier than ever, as Bush took away his favourite prop, 'a threat of American intervention'. Peres and Sarid have never advocated Palestinian human rights out of sympathy or common humanity, but would rather hoodwink their supporters in the notoriously nationalistic Israeli electorate: "We would deal with Palestinians and their lands as ruthlessly as [right-wing] Likud, but we treasure our special relations with the US. Americans would not allow it; that is why we are forced to behave like human beings". Now their forced interpretation collapsed. Americans do not mind. They do not mind anything at all, and now Israel may continue its uninterrupted slide into fascist nightmare.

With a wry smile, I look through emails and articles of yesteryear, when Bush, Jr. was elected a President. Many right-wing pundits expressed an opinion that the Jews lost their stranglehold over American policy. "Jews in Bush's Cabinet? Don't Hold Your Breath" lamented Phillip Weiss of the Observer. Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com was gleefully pleased with what appeared as a Jewish setback. Just a few months later, they learned: the regained Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the United States was but a mirage. By astutely providing funds for both Republicans and Democrats, for practically all candidates of left and right, the Jewish leadership is able to influence the choice of the candidates they prefer. Maybe they can't order a specific person for this or other position, but they are able to influence the shortlist, when the final choice wouldn't matter at all. They know what they want: they prefer nincompoops, people of limited intelligence, competence, willpower and doubtful morality, whether they are called Bush or Gore.

"Choosing a weak ruler" is a name of the game for an ethnic or religious minority takeover, applied whenever the populace is not yet ready to accept its true rulers. In Babylon-5 and other SF movies, the aliens prefer a weak-kneed Terran man as their stooge. They learned it from history. In the second half of first millennium, a large Eurasian state of Khazaria was a subject of a similar takeover.

Indigenous Khazars were governed and protected by Turkic warrior nobility, headed by their elected Khan, the king. In 6th - 8th centuries they received a few waves of Jewish refugees, at first from Sasanid Persia, later from Abbasid Iraq and Byzantium. Benevolent and tolerant Turkic khans believed they acquire useful, clever and diligent subjects, but in no time at all, the new arrivals took over Khazaria.

For a while they preserved the façade of traditional aristocracy rule, and enthroned an increasingly weak Khan. In 803, Obadiah the Jew became the real ruler of Khazaria, while Khan the Goy was still shown to people once a year as a proof of legitimacy of Obadiah's power. Eventually, the last Gentile Khan was discarded, and the fiction of Khazar rule came to an end, while a Jewish Beg openly assumed the power in Khazaria.

It is often claimed that the Jewish rulers caused mass conversion of Khazars into Jewish faith. Arthur Koestler, a Jewish novelist, thought modern Jews are descendents of these Khazar converts[1], but two leading Russian scientists, an archaeologist Artamonov and a historian Leon Gumilev[2] came to conclusion that ordinary Khazars haven't been converted into Judaism. The Jews were the ruling class in Khazaria; they didn't share the Covenant or important positions with outsiders, according to Gumilev. Khazars became subjects of an ethnically and religiously alien rule. They had to pay for the army and police, and for adventurous foreign policy. In the end, they had lost their country.

The ruling Jews had it very good but very brief: within a hundred years after full takeover, the Khazar Empire disintegrated totally. Such setups do not last, as they destroy their own power base. Khazars did not mind: they had no share in the Empire's fabulous wealth. They became Tatars, Kazaks and other nations of steppe. The neighbours did not miss the Empire, as it was prone to genocide and slave trade. The Jews wandered out of devastated Caspian basin into deep-frieze of Poland and Lithuania, and dropped out of history for a thousand year slumber.

The Jews of Khazaria needed a nincompoop for a Khan, because their power was far from complete, and only a nincompoop would surrender to their demands. The Middle Eastern speech of Bush proved that this scion of wealthy and powerful family behaves like a rabbit caught in the lights of a car. The countdown for the American Empire demise had started.

[1] Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe
[2] Leon Gumilev, Russia and the Great Steppe (in Russian)

Israel Shamir is an Israeli writer and journalist. He lives in Jaffa. His other articles are available on the site www.israelshamir.net