Red-headed step-children

A very good friend, who normally e-mails in Dutch, and whom I know is not a red-head, may have been trying to get my goat when he sweetly asked me about a text he had run across that hot-aired for redhead superiority over the rest of the world.

That wouldn't be unlike him, as throwing the cat among the canaries (or, somewhat more pungently put, tossing a turd into the punch-bowl) is not an unusual conversational gambit among Dutch speakers.


He wrote: "...I am curious to find out more about famous red-haired people (esp. Jews ?), but not so willing to get a FREE [brand name blipped] membership, I thought maybe you could be some kind of 'helpdesk' to me regarding this subject."


I'm a sucker for an appeal to my knowledge......

Okay, I'm a sucker.


The short paragraph I read, on his urging, proved so repulsive, that I had to react - rather like having to heave after swallowing an unidentified lump in a glass of milk.

[And no, I am NOT going to post a link to it - you really do NOT need to read stuff like that, and you probably already have, and felt ill afterwards. See, I care about your well-being.]


It is utterly repellent.


Quote 1: "Among great artists, musicians, scientists, generals, and conquerors, there is a disproportionate share of redheads".

Only if you discount most of the rest of the world, and do not consider their achievements as being worth a damn.
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Quote 2: "If there ever was a red-haired race, it would be intellectually superior."

More likely, so inbred as to be mongoloid. Recessive genes. Takes generations of marrying one's relatives before red hair becomes common in any group.
[For a recessive characteristic to be manifested there must not be a corresponding dominant gene present. Therefore, the only way for this to happen is if each of the inherited pair of genes are BOTH recessive.
For two recessive genes to be present, they must be inherited from both of parents, with no corresponding dominant gene being passed on.]
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Quote 3: "In modern times, red hair is found mostly in northwestern Europe, in the same places where most progress has come from."

Only comparatively recently has northwestern Europe been worth noticing.

Until about the 1500s northwest Europe was a primitive unwashed backwater that could not compare to the Arab world or the far East (and had not even risen back up to the level of Rome - which, by the way, thought it 'civilized' to throw people to the lions, or have them fight each other in arenas).
[And remember, Europe was until recently not so much a genetic cesspool with everything, as a genetic backwater.]

Then Europe developed printing, and started drinking caffeinated beverages.

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Quote 4: "Europeans conquered most of the world, including North America, Oceania, Africa, south and southeast Asia."

Gunpowder, paper, and disease. Gunpowder, paper, and disease. Gunpowder, paper, and disease. Gunpowder, paper, and disease. Gunpowder, paper, and disease. Gunpowd.....
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Quote 5: "Some people claim that Columbus was a Jew with reddish-blond hair and blue eyes."

That keeps getting brought up. And it keeps getting debunked.
Some people also claim that Christopher Columbus was a freemason.
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Quote 6: "The more successful Jews often have Nordic traits and red hair."

The Rambam and Ibn Ezra were redheads? Rashi was a red head? Obediah Sforno was a redhead? The Gaon of Vilna was a redhead? Rabbi Akiva was a redhead? Bejamin Disraeli? Spinoza?

But okay, Woody Allen was indeed a redhead.
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Quote 7: "Jews from areas like Yemen and Morocco have IQs of around 90 and have accomplished nothing worthwhile."

This is probably the most objectionable thing I've seen in years. And totally unfounded. Besides showing what a staggeringly ignorant and bigoted pustule the writer of the statement actually is.
I am flabbergasted that anyone would even write this, let alone believe it for a moment. But I over-estimate my rednecked fellow hominids. That may be a character flaw - I'll try to change.
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Quote 8: "In Russia most of the intelligent people are Jews, and Jews are often the only people in Eastern Europe with red-hair. In Slavic Europe, the intelligentsia consisted of Jews, Germans, and aristocrats."

Where to begin? There is so much wrong with this statement that it boggles the mind.
Think in terms of suppressio veri & sugestio falsi. As merely the most obvious error in this statement.
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I'll skip over the quote from the German """scientific""" text - I'll simply take it for granted that it is sodden with Aryanismus (it was printed in 1929). That also tells you where the author of the red-headed piece got his ideas from.

Likewise, I'll pass by that 'intermarriage with Nordics bit', as it posits a dominance by the smallest genetic contributor (and remember, recessive gene!!!) - unless the author of that statement wishes to assert that Jews were swamped by Nordics (in which case, their survival as Jews would have been unlikely, to say the least).

The Khazar tribe fable has also been pretty much discredited, though it is still much out there on anti-Semitic websites. Entirely aside from which, the author seems to be suggesting that the Khazars may have been Nordic, and then uses discredited Celto-supremacist garbage to describe their social system, before nevertheless suggesting that they were racially inferior to Germans.

I'm passing over the complete cock-up of the history of Jews in Poland too.
It isn't supported by any documentation, in any case, whereas the migration from the Rhineland to Poland is.


Then the author makes one comment which absolutely negates anything else, and trashes everything he's asserted, namely that "red hair was not uncommon in ancient Israel".
IN THAT CASE, RED-HEADED JEWS DID NOT DESCEND FROM NORDICS, AND THAT ENTIRE MISHEGOSS ABOUT NORDICS, RED HEADED KHAZARS, EASTERN EUROPEANS AND LOW IQs WAS POINTLESS.
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Now, my turn.

Obviously the author of that piece is a redhead, and that is the only thing that makes him proud. He has achieved nothing else in his life, and may have even flunked out of a mid-continent high-school with a decent football program, and lower academic standards than many other schools in his state.
He may be unemployed, or only marginally employed, the poor bastard. Nebech.

But he is a redhead. So he's probably related to himself on both sides of his family. And in his case, that may not have been accidental, as I really doubt that he comes from a small village somewhere behind a Norwegian peat-bog.
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As a side note, I wonder how many Chinese poets were redheads.

With the possible (but nevertheless very unlikely) exception of Li Po, whose family was of mixed Chinese and Turkic ancestry, it is unlikely any of them were redheaded genetically, though malnutrition often causes reddish hair (and some of them were. at times, malnourished).


For that matter, how many of the great Urdu poets would've been redheads? Other than of course the ones who used henna to hide the grey in their beards.

The more I think about that repulsive little bit of redhead racialist propaganda, the more I want to bash in the author's pointy little red head with a Louisville slugger.
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By the way, not a redhead in the family - though most of us qualify for mensa. No blondes either. Most common hair hues seem to be mouse or darkish brown. No offense to anybody, but, to grossly generalize, most of the redheads I've ever met were unstable and smelled a bit.

And as a further by the way, some of us used to belong to mensa, until we met far too many people who either believed crap like that red-hair idea, or had been on flying saucers with big-eyed green or grey alien beings.

And scientologists.


Post-Scriptum: I have also slightly edited the quotes, so that you cannot cut and paste to find them on the web. You really do not need to give that sick-bastard any more hits, and I really do not want your gorge to rise. Especially not this close to the chag of the big-inedible bird.