DNA Study Busts Myth that One Million Appalachians are of Turkish Descent

DNA Study

DNA Study Busts Myth that One Million Appalachians are of Turkish Descent

By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier

For decades, Turkish pseudo-historians and propagandists have made bizarre claims about Turks being the ancestors of various ethnic groups around the world, including Native Americans, African-Americans, and the strangest of all -- Melungeons -- a little-known group of dark-skinned residents of Appalachia.

To counter Armenian political activities in Washington, the Turkish government regularly reaches out to anyone who could be co-opted with all-expense paid trips, special gifts, and other financial inducements, including funding studies and conferences on the alleged Turkish origin of Melungeons. Even though these one million Appalachians do not carry much political clout in Congress, Ankara is interested in claiming them to be of Turkish descent, hoping to strengthen its political and economic clout in the United States.

The Turkish initiative faced one ‘minor’ problem: there was no evidence that Melungeons were descendants of Turks. This issue was easily resolved when the Turkish government provided a “research grant” to a Melungeon named N. Brent Kennedy. In April 1995, he flew to Istanbul and wrote a book alleging that hundreds of captured Ottoman sailors were dumped on the shores of North Carolina by Sir Francis Drake in the 16th century!

Kennedy compiled a long list of “amazing” similarities between Turks and Melungeons, such as eating beef and mashed potatoes, the habit of hugging each other, Appalachian quilts having Ottoman designs, Anatolian folk dancers performing square dance, and Turkish music sounding like bluegrass! He discovered that the Turkish word “neyaygara” sounds like Niagara, “dilhah yer” is pronounced Delaware, “tenasuh” means Tennessee, “kan tok” is Kentucky, and “allah bamya” is Alabama!

Kennedy further stated that Turkish scholars have “long believed that a connection existed between themselves and eastern seaboard American Indians, based on both physical appearance and shared words and customs.” He gathered these “important facts” from Turkish “historians” during his meetings at Marmara University in Istanbul. “Several hundred Ottoman sailors could exert a powerful genetic, cultural, and linguistic influence on the sixteenth-century Native American Tribes into which they married,” Kennedy confidently concluded.

Appalachians, however, were infuriated by the distortion of Melungeons’ ethnic origin and exploitation of their history. Historian and award-winning journalist Tim Hashaw of Houston, Texas, sent a letter asking me to “investigate the tawdry connection between the ATAA (Assembly of Turkish American Associations) and the Melungeon Heritage Association.” Hashaw asserted that “Melungeons are an obscure tri-racial (white, black, and American Indian) community in Appalachia -- Virginia and Tennessee. We are not now, nor have we ever been, Turkish. Yet, Melungeons are being wrongly exploited by Turkish associations to deny the Armenian Genocide and to support questionable Turkish agendas in Washington DC.”
Cont. here:

http://jackgoins.blogspot.com/2015/09/dna-study.html


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Turkey Spends Millions to Cover Up Armenian Genocide

State of Denial

By David Holthouse
Intelligence Report
Summer 2008


The Armenian Genocide in History Read More
The Sites: A list of genocide denial websites. Read More
Information for Teachers Read More

Early this year, the Toronto District School Board voted to require all public high school students in Canada's largest city to complete a new course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications." It includes a unit on the Armenian genocide, in which more than a million Armenians perished in a methodical and premeditated scheme of annihilation orchestrated by the rulers of Turkey during and just after World War I.

The school board members each soon received a letter from Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, rebuking them for classifying the Armenian genocide in the same category as the Holocaust. "The tragic fate of the Armenian community during World War I," Lewy wrote, is best understood as "a badly mismanaged war-time security measure," rather than a carefully plotted genocide.

Turkish president Abdullah Gul warns of severe repercussions to the relations between the United States and Turkey if the "Armenian allegations are accepted."

Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide — a network so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers and even its president to reverse long-held policy positions.
Lewy makes similar revisionist claims in his 2005 book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide and in frequent lectures at university campuses across the country. Speaking at Harvard University in March 2007, he chalked up the ghastly Armenian death toll to "bungling misrule," and stressed that "it is important to bear in mind the enormous difference between ineptness, even ineptness that had tragic consequences" and deliberate mass murder.

"Armenians call the calamitous events of 1915-1916 in the Ottoman Empire the first genocide of the twentieth century," he said. "Most Turks refer to this episode as war time relocation made necessary by the treasonous conduct of the Armenian minority. The debate on what actually happened has been going on for almost 100 years and shows no signs of resolution."

But it's not only Armenians calling the slaughter a genocide, and there is no real debate about its essential details, according to the vast majority of credible historians. Although Lewy's brand of genocide denial is subtler than that of Holocaust deniers who declare there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, it's no less an attempt to rewrite history.

"The overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide — hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades — is consistent," the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated in a 2005 letter to the Turkish government.

"The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens — an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years."

Full Article Here:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?

Native Americans Targeted for Turkish Alliance

The Armenian Reporter March 15, 2008

Turks are saying they were the first Americans

Real Native Americans say they speak with forked tongue

by Anoush Ter Taulian

''Last month, I reported about a January 26 panel discussion on
Turkic and Native American connections, held at the Turkish Center in
New York (see the story in the Community section of the Feb. 9
Reporter) in which the Turks presented their theory that their
ancestors crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas and thus are
the ancestors of some of the present day Native Americans. Since
then, I've been asking Native Americans and what they think of this
theory and I've found they do not welcome these Turkish
claims...............................

............However, the presenters also put forward a claim of
Turkish-Native American relatedness from a much more recent time. It
involves a group of Turks who claim to be related to
the "Melungeons": a population of mixed Indian, white, and black
ancestry, whose members say they are the descendants of the 200
Moors, West Africans, Portuguese soldiers, South American Indians,
and Ottoman Turkish galley slaves that Sir Francis Drake brought to
Roanoke Island, Virginia, in 1586.* There is no record of the number
and origin of the rescued prisoners who made up the diverse
ancestors of today's Melungeons (the group designated "Ottoman
slaves" could have included Bulgarians, Circassians, Abkhazians,
Arabs, Berbers, Greeks – evenArmenians). Nevertheless, there are now
Melungeon societies in the Appalachians; and the town of Wise,
Virginia, and Cesme in Turkey have become "sister cities" and plan to
engage in economic trade – all on the basis of this claim of a
Turkish-Melungeon connection. But according to Anton Edwards, a mixed
Native and African American, "The claims of these Turks are
preposterous." Edwards familiarized himself with some of the
materials used by the Turkish-Melungeon advocates, but came away
unconvinced..........

Continued here
http://www.reporter.am/pdfs/A0315.pdf

* This assertion has no basis in fact. It has not been proven that Sir Francis Drake left any people in North America or if he did, that any survived. And the leap to identifying them as ancestors of the Melungeons is a very long leap, indeed. Additionally, it is a matter of historical record that Drake returned the Turks to their homeland. See David Beers Quinn.

Janet Crain

Affrimation of the Armenian Genocide

"I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."Henry Morgenthau, Sr., U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire


April 24, 1915

April 24 symbolizes the beginning of an organized campaign by the Young Turk government to eliminate the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire became the target of heightened persecution by the Ottoman Turks. These persecutions culminated in a three decade period during which the Armenians were systematically uprooted from their homeland of 3,000 years and eliminated through massacres or deportation. Sultan Abdul Hamid's brutal reign ended in 1908 when a coalition known as the Young Turks came to power and established a new constitution. Initially there was tremendous support for the new rulers who promised many reforms and appeared to favor fraternity among the various nationalities within the empire. However, by 1914, the triumvirate of Young Turk dictators, Talat, Enver and Jemal Pashas, had adopted pan-Turkism as a nationalist ideology and set out to Turkify the country's minorities, beginning with the Armenians. Before World War I, they had already declared that the war would create an opportune time to pursue a final solution to the Armenian Question. These premeditated, well-planned decisions were put in effect and deportations and exterminations started under the Ottoman Government's order and supervision.

Full Article

http://hokis2.free.fr/genocide.htm

See:

http://www.armenian-genocide.org/encyclopedia/young_turks.htm

Key Clinton Backer Guilty in Sibel Edmonds Case

The Melungeon Community does not at present endorse any candidates for election. This article is being published here in the interest of public awareness of foreign interests meddling in our citizen's affairs. And the gullibility of some citizens to allow this. We appose the ATAA. We recognize the Armenian Genocide.

Key Clinton Backer Guilty in Sibel Edmonds Case

Posted by lukery in General Discussion
Wed Feb 13th 2008, 08:15 AM

The UK's Times has already run three bombshell articles on the nuclear black market element in the case of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds this year, and we are expecting more fallout in the near future as new evidence and witnesses come forward.In the meantime, another important angle to Edmonds' case has opened up. Earlier this week, the New York Post ran a Page 6 piece, ODD FILM BY HILLARY BACKER, which highlights the close relationship between Hillary Clinton and Chicago-based Turkish businessman Mehmet Celebi. Celebi, "one of the national leaders of the Turkish-American community in the US," is a key fundraiser for Clinton, and is one of Clinton's Chicago delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Celebi was also heavily involved in the controversial 2006 movie "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq" which has been widely regarded as "anti-Semitic, anti-American, conspiratorial agitprop."Mehmet Celebi is also a key figure in the Sibel Edmonds case - he is heavily involved in the narcotics trade in the US and the corruption and bribery of high-level US officials.According to Celebi's bio:

He has been serving as the President of the Turkish-American Cultural Alliance (TACA) since 2000, and as Member of the Board/Vice-President of the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations (ATAA), a Washington, D.C. based umbrella organization representing 57 organizations.The Chicago-based Turkish-American Cultural Alliance (TACA) and the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations (ATAA) both figure prominently in Sibel Edmonds' case. Both are reported to be front groups for criminal activity involving illegal weapons sales, narcotics trafficking, and the bribery and corruption of high level US officials.Mehmet Celebi first came to my attention in my first interview with Sibel in January 2006. My notes from that interview read:

"Sibel mentioned the mafia nature of the Turkish business establishment - in particular she mentioned Celebi as one of the key players - apparently they are involved in an arms trading cartel, and they ship narcotics in the cargo of their planes as they zoom around.One of the Celebi family members (Mehmet Celebi) is chairman of the Turkish American Cultural Association (TACA) in Illinois. (Sibel has often pointed to both Chicago, and also to 'cultural exchanges')."TACA and the ATAA were both targets of an FBI counter-intelligence operation investigating the corruption and bribery of high-level US officials from 1997 onward, including the period when Celebi had high level positions at these organizations.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/lukery/9

The Truth Will Set You Free

by Khatchig Mouradian


In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Martin Luther King, JR.

If you want proof that telling what one is convinced is the truth can cost one his/her job in the US State Department, then a public reference to events that happened 91 years ago is as good as any. The latter, it appears, has sealed the fate of John Evans, the (soon-to-be former) U.S. ambassador to Armenia. A career diplomat, Evans had taken up that post, his first ambassadorial appointment, in August 2004. A few months later, during a tour which took him to some of the most vibrant Armenian-American communities throughout the United States, he uttered the following words at a public gathering hosted by the Armenian Studies Program at University of California, Berkeley: “I will today call it the Armenian genocide.” He was describing the deportation and mass annihilation of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. An estimated one million and a half Armenians fell victim to this state-sponsored decimation, which is now recognized as genocide by most Holocaust and genocide scholars,[1] many parliaments around the world, and even 39 of the 50 states in America.


http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10422

The Melungeon People condemn the Armenian Genocide.

Dennis Maggard's Resignation from MHA Letter

I want it on the public record and in the archives of this list that I have severed my ties with the MHA. My letter to the MHA president, SJ Arthur, is appended below.

Dennis

Feb. 4, 2008

Ms. SJ Arthur, President

The Melungeon Heritage Association

Wise, Virginia

Re: My Status as an MHA Consultant

Dear Ms. Arthur,

As you doubtlessly know, two and a half weeks ago it came to light that Turkey has been claiming for quite some time that the MHA is lobbying US politicians on its behalf in support of its on-going efforts to deny and cover up the genocide it conducted against the Armenian people, and others, in 1915 and the years following. I was appalled to discover that the Turks were using the MHA's name -- and, by association, my name as an MHA consultant -- on behalf of any political purpose, let alone one so morally reprehensible.

As you also doubtlessly know, this matter was immediately brought to the attention of MHA vice-president Wayne Winker who assured me that no such lobbying effort on behalf of Turkey had taken place, and I assumed the MHA would speedily act to set the public record straight and to restore its good name, and mine. Unfortunately, however, the MHA response to date has not been nearly as clear, vigorous or timely as I expected.

Therefore, in all good conscience, I cannot continue my association with the MHA and must ask that my name be removed forth with as an MHA consultant, and that my name also be stricken from the MHA's membership roll.

Sincerely,

Dennis Maggard

(posted with permission)