Snit

The British-Israel-World Federation is having a crisis. It is having to face DNA evidence that British Israelism is wrong:

British Israel World Federation Facing DNA Evidence

It’s an embarrassing moment for an august institution over a century old. Here is an opportunity to admit the truth and disband. Will they? Here’s a hint:

There is a need to evidence that the progression from one haplogroup to another is most likely to have gone from a “developed” haplogroup (such as R or N) by losing DNA information. This does accord with decades of scientific research into both observed and artificially induced mutations which demonstrates that mutations involve a loss of DNA information.

In other words, the Great White Hope is that it can be proved that the Y Chromosome magically and mystically ‘transforms’ from one haplogroup to another. There is some speculation in other places that the Y Chromosome will change when subject to sunlight: Move from Africa to Europe and the next generations will change to white or move from Sweden to Nigeria and a generation or two later, voila, you’ll change to a black native Nigerian! No, it doesn’t look like the British Israel World Federation is about to admit the truth! They will staunchly resist truth and cling to a lie. They just can’t give up 100 years of tradition, no matter how wrong they are.

The Hope of Israel Ministries is doing the same thing. The British Israel Association of Canada are doing the same thing using idiocy championed by Martin Lightfoot. One of the most obstreperous strident groups demanding attention is Brit-Am as demonstrated in their article,

The DNA War Against Brit-Am.
Nazi Vermin Attack Brit-Am DNA Explanation.

It turns out that Brit-Am is in a snit. Apparently, they have come on several forums having a scientific bent and have been kicked off! Those terrible scientific people just aren’t going to listen to their ideas, so the best way to deal with the problem is an ad hominem attack, accusing them of being ‘Nazi Vermin’. There’s nothing like using stubborn resistance to facts and scientific proofs, refusing to listen to reason, to win over people to their point of view! Just like the cartoon above, Reality is so unfair! Reality should show more sensitivity to their deeply held religious beliefs, no matter how stupid and wrong they are. Any one who disagrees with them are Nazi Vermin!

It’s no wonder that Neil deGrasse Tyson made this comment on Twitter recently:

Neil deGrasse TysonVerified account ‏@neiltyson Dec 3

Odd that we live in a world where even objective truths count as controversial subjects

If proponents of British Israelism have their way, all DNA evidence used in our court system will have to be scrapped. After all, if you can’t rely on DNA to remain stable to prove anything, using it for paternity suits will be useless; scratch the rape kits; murders will go free because the DNA linking them to the crime will be thrown out. Great going guys: This is the ultimate in stupid crazy distorted perceptions.

Other proofs were available even before DNA was available to absolutely prove that British Israelism is a fraud.

There has never been any excuse for British Israelism.

Even without DNA, anyone could have known that British Israelism was false: The proof has always been there; it’s just been ignored for the sake of convenience.

British Israelism cult leaders have been too careless with the truth, totally dishonest or both.

1. DNA
2. History
3. Archeology
4. Linguistics
5. Failed Prophecies
6. Scripture

Archeology is particularly weak in supporting British Israelism.

What ever archeological evidence is proffered by British Israelism proponents, has taken artifacts and corrupted the scientific evidence to map to the desired outcome of proving British Israelism.

The proffered evidence is sketchy because when it comes to science, British Israelism is beyond speculative, relying on folklore rather than analytical methods.

For example, British Israel writers developed the belief that these “ten tribes” were able to retain their identity and cohesiveness, became lost to history, and wandered far from the Middle East. They concluded that the stone used in the coronation of King David was transported to the British Isles where it exists today as the Stone of Scone. The latter stone is still used for the coronation of British queens and kings. The writers promoted the belief that divine authority was transferred from ancient Israel to England along with the stone. In reality, the origin of the Stone of Scone has been traced to rock outcroppings in Scotland using standard geological analysis methods.

Adherents of British Israelism suggest that Behistun Inscription provides a link between the Israelites deported from their ancient lands and the Cimmerians and Scythians. It does not. Only the most careless research standards could even begin to find credibility for this proposition.

Bad Archeology

Bad Archaeology is the brainchild of a couple of archaeologists who are fed up with the distorted view of the past that passes for knowledge in popular culture. Here’s what the say over at their website at Bad Archeology:

We are unhappy that books written by people with no knowledge of real archaeology dominate the shelves at respectable bookshops. We do not appreciate news programmes that talk about ley lines (for example) as if they are real. In short, we are Angry Archaeologists.

Explore the diversity of archaeological misconceptions, mistakes and distortions.

We are dedicated to exposing Bad Archaeology wherever we find it, naming and shaming, pulling no punches in exploring all its shameless horror.

Remember that these are real archeologists; proponents of British Israelism are not! They have reserved their ire for British Israelism in their blog at The Lost Tribes of Israel. We include the entire blog entry here because sometimes pages on the Internet get lost:

The Lost Tribes of Israel

Since the unexpected discovery in 1492 of humans not accounted for in the Bible, Europeans were keen to find out where they had come from. An ingenious solution was proposed: they were the tribes of Israel that disappeared from history with the fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the middle of the first millennium BC. A whole religion has been built on these foundations. There was also a movement in the late nineteenth century to identify the English with the same lost tribes. There are still traces of the ‘British-Israelite’ movement today.

The Israelite hypothesis

Very quickly after the discovery of the New World, Europeans began to treat its inhabitants as little more than their possessions. There was some debate about whether they were fully human and thus descendants of Adam. At first, few of their fellow Europeans protested, but in the early sixteenth century, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) became a champion of the Native American cause. He spent many years trying to improve the conditions under which they lived in the Spanish colonies in the West Indies, Peru and Guatemala. Las Casas believed that the Native Americans should be converted to Christianity, as he was convinced that they originated in Ancient Israel and felt that the Bible contained the proof that they were members of the Lost Tribes of Israel. He was not alone and it was in no small measure thanks to his efforts that Pope Paul III (1468-1549; pope 1534-49) declared that the Native Americans were fully human, after all, in 1537.

A report by the seventeenth-century Portuguese traveller, António Montezinos (also known as Aharón Leví de Montezinos), published in 1644, reawakened interest in the subject. He claimed that there was a Jewish tribe living beyond the mountain passes of the Andes and that he had heard them recite the She‘ma Yisro‘el (the expression of the Jewish faith) and saw them observe Jewish rituals. Alas, Montezinos was a fantasist whose stories were accepted uncritically.

Having decided that some of the Native Americans practised Hebrew rites and were therefore ancient Canaanites or the lost tribes of Israel, this meant that they were in dire need of conversion. Thomas Thorowgood’s Jewes in America, or, Probabilities that the Americans are of that race, first published in 1650, was one of the first to argue for the need to convert these lost tribes. The second edition of 1660 quotes the authority of John Eliot (1604-1690), the “Apostle to the Indians”, who went on to publish a translation of the bible into the Massachusetts dialect of Algonquin in 1663. Groups like the Corporation for Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England were founded by English settlers who believed that the Native Americans were lost Jews who would need to be reconciled with Christ at the end of time. Although the belief that Indians were Hebrews quickly faded as knowledge of their languages, customs and beliefs increased, Edward Johnson (1598-1672), author of The Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour (published in 1654), argued that a mass conversion of Indians was necessary if America were to be the site of the new heaven and new earth.

Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657), a respected Dutch Jewish scholar, was heavily influenced by the account of António Montezinos and wrote his best-selling book, The Hope of Israel, which he dedicated to the English Parliament. Meeting Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658; Lord Protector of England 1653-1658), he petitioned for the recall of the Jews (who had been expelled from England in 1290) and expressed his belief that the dispersion of Jews to all corners of the Earth was the beginning of the redemption. Certain Christian traditions claimed that when the Ten Tribes of Israel were found and restored to the Holy Land, the return of Christ to reign supreme was not far off, a belief that is still had by some, especially American, fundamentalist churches. There was thus a considerable vested interest among some believers to identify the Lost Tribes. Now that apparently Israelite tribes had been discovered in the Americas, ben Israel argued, Cromwell must readmit the Jews to England to bring about the Messianic era. Similar sentiments were expressed, albeit in more humanistic terms, in the second half of the eighteenth century during the American and French revolutions. Some abolitionists, for instance, claimed that the Messianic Age would be ushered in when the slaves were freed and when the native Americans, as descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes, were converted to Christianity. The sometimes eccentric religious beliefs of the pioneer settlers developed political overtones, with the production of bizarre propaganda works such as the Apocalypse de Chiokoyhikoy, chef des Iroquois (published in 1777 by the newly-formed Congress and condemned by the Inquisition in 1779). This purported to be an account of the end of the world by an Iroquois prophet, denigrating the English to support the cause for American independence by showing how the Iroquois would be better off under American rule.

This page was last updated on 23 July 2007
Written by: Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

This is not the end of it: Another article at the site specifically addressing British Israelism and dispatch it thoroughly. The article about The British Israelites may be found at The British Israelites and is given in its entirety here:

The British Israelites Introduction

The British-Israelite movement was a sect within the Church of England that emerged in the 1870s and formed a relatively powerful and influential voice in British middle-class Christianity until its rapid decline after 1945. Amongst its numerous bizarre and amusing beliefs there is a consistent obsession with antiquities and alternative archaeologies of various kinds, ranging from Celtic and Arthurian myths to Biblical archaeology and Egyptology. The present day pseudoscience of pyramidology is in many respects an after-effect of British-Israelite efforts in the 1870s and 1920s, as we shall see.

British-Israelism was primarily a movement of the upper middle classes, particularly within the military, the clergy and the colonial middle classes, although there were famous and prominent supporters including George VI, the poet Patience Strong and Princess Alice of Athlone. The core ideology of the movement is the belief that:

“The Jews are not the whole of God’s people Israel, as so many imagine, but only a small part of the chosen race – at the most two tribes out of twelve… and British-Israelites maintain that the Anglo-Saxon race embody, and are, the ten-tribed kingdom of Israel” (Dixon, 1915: 16, emphasis in original).

Racial Origin Myths

The British-Israelites’ attempts to integrate the fashionable race-science of the 1930s into their beliefs was fraught with difficulties. While they wished to prove their pure Aryan credentials, they were stymied by their frenzied hatred of Germany and their crude but endearing philo-semitism.

The solution to this thorny problem emerged when the Germans were declared to be the descendents of the Assyrians, oppressors of the Israelites and definite non-Aryans, while the Jews were proven to be Aryans by references to the supposedly Nordic-looking Jewish population of Palestine. This tortuous non-logic and appeals to vague bodies of evidence is typical of the ever-evolving British-Israelite ideology. “On this rock I will build my church” – The Stone of Scone Biblical literalism is a cornerstone of British-Israelite dogma, with obscure passages of scripture wielded as blunt instruments in religious debates. Their obsession with the Stone of Scone or coronation stone is a good example of this: in their paroxysms of patriotic fervour, such an obscure but resolutely British object as the coronation stone must be found at least one biblical provenance.

In the event they found two. The stone is (literally of course) ‘Jacob’s Pillow’, as attested by Scottish tradition: the stone on which Jacob rested his head, then blessed as a pillar in the temple of God. The second and more obscure connection is to the (clearly metaphorical) “stone that the builders rejected” in the Psalms, interpreted by later Christians as referring to the rejection of Jesus by humanity. For the British Israelites, this connects the stone of scone to the Great Pyramid (see below), as builder error in the construction of the pyramid allegedly meant that the intended capstone was unable to be fitted. This then became the coronation stone. This clumsy attempt to shoehorn vague materials and sites into equally vague or totally allegorical fragments of scripture is typical of bullshit biblical archaeology at its worst.

Tomb Raiders – Pyramidology

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the British-Israelites played a significant role in the creation and promulgation of the pseudoscience of pyramidology, which has remained one of the most popular and profitable branches of alternative archaeology ever since. Prominent British-Israelite pyramidologists include Charles Piazzi-Smyth (1819-1900), David Davidson, Colonel J Garnier, and James Bernard Nicklin (1881-?). Between them, these scholars (who included an engineer and an astronomer) created a rich and enduring tradition of prophecy and historical interpretation, based on the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Khufu in general and its interior measurements in particular.

For the British-Israelites, the pyramid is nothing less than “the Bible in Stone”, as important an aspect of their millenarian beliefs as the holy book itself. The main passage and the King’s chamber are, in this model, a timeline of British-Israelite history from the creation through the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, to the First World War and the start of the British Mandate in Palestine. Along the way, these measurements highlight such earth-shattering events as coronations, treaties and the end of the gold standard.

In the later stages, the measurements were taken with such accuracy that the start and end dates of the First World War were claimed to be accurate to the hour, assuming a scale of one pyramid inch = one month. The similarity between the imperial inch and the (invented) pyramid inch is another basis of the claim that the pyramid was built by the Israelites under divine supervision.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – The Hill of Tara

The British-Israelites only venture into field archaeology, aside from their obsessive measuring and re-measuring of the Pyramid, was a series of excavations carried out at the hill of Tara in Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century. Due to the usual combination of scriptural misinterpretation and blind acceptance of obscure fragments of folklore, the British-Israelites came to believe that Tara was the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant.

Allegedly brought to Ireland by an Israelite princess, the Ark had been buried for protection and for future use. In an archaeological initiative that makes Indiana Jones look professional, enthusiastic British-Israelites tore into the mound with picks and spades over several years. No Ark was found and the controversy around the desecration of the monument put a stop to further work, but the British-Israelites had made their mark in the long and inglorious history of mad, bad and otherwise god-crazed archaeology.

This page was last updated on 19 August 2007
Written by: Gabriel Moshenska for Bad Archaeology

There’s no reason to get into a snit. British Israelism doesn’t need DNA to prove it false, but it does quite a good job.

So here’s the deal:

Admit the truth, apologize and go out of business