The Turksih/Saudi fracas has really stirred up the CT muck. All kinds of rancid junk has floated to the surface. But, even if stuff is CT, if it is believed and acted upon, one must pay attention. That is, even though "the evil Jew" was Nazi CT, it was acted upon and millions were murdered.

So, with that context, let me introduce to you a CT that has floated around the Arab world for many years, and was published at Strategic Culture in 2010, well before the current Moslem Brotherhood/Wahabbi Tong War.

The Dönmeh: The Middle East’s Most Whispered Secret (2 parts, link to second at end of first)

First off, the article explaining this to Westerners is written by Wayne Madsen, a major CT player for decades. He is on record as insisting on Saudi complicity in 911 as early as 2003. In 2012 he published a book insisting that Obama was a creation of the CIA. To me, these are not CT, but insight. Bottom line: I don't know if the guy is a paranoid nutbag or an under-acheiving Snowden wannabee. So, I will let you draw your own conclusions about this Dönmeh stuff.

Madsen begins by reciting some non-controversial history about the Donmeh.

The Donmeh were... a sect of Turks descended from a group of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain during the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th and 17th centuries. These Jewish refugees from Spain were welcomed to settle in the Ottoman Empire and over the years they converted to a mystical sect of Islam that eventually mixed Jewish Kabbala and Islamic Sufi semi-mystical beliefs into a sect that eventually championed secularism in post-Ottoman Turkey.

The Donmeh sect of Judaism was founded in the 17th century by Rabbi Sabbatai Zevi, a Kabbalist who believed he was the Messiah but was forced to convert to Islam by Sultan Mehmet IV, the Ottoman ruler. Many of the rabbi’s followers, known as Sabbateans, but also “crypto-Jews,” publicly proclaimed their Islamic faith but secretly practiced their hybrid form of Judaism, which was unrecognized by mainstream Jewish rabbinical authorities. Because it was against their beliefs to marry outside their sect, the Dönmeh created a rather secretive sub-societal clan.

Basically, these guys were the Islamic equivalent of "conversos". (Although the presence of yet another self-declared Messiah with his own new religion tends to make these particular conversos look bad.) Then, Madsen wanders off into what could well be Islamic CT land by claiming that the Donmeh were the Islamic equivalent of the Rothschilds. Grey eminences working behind the scenes to undermine religious Islam and replace it with secularism, i.e. eventually Ataturk. The CT claims that the Young Turks were Donmeh, and that Ergodan is part of a long line of religious Turks who want to get rid of the secularists, not only because they are atheists, but also because they are the puppets of external forces (the West and Israel).

Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) seem to have finally seen a way to break free from the domination and cruelty of the Dönmeh, whether in the form of Kemalist followers of Ataturk or nationalist schemers and plotters in Ergenekon. But with Turkey’s “Independence Day” has come vitriol from the Dönmeh and their natural allies in Israel and the Israel Lobby in the United States and Europe. Turkey as a member of the European Union was fine for Europe as long as the Dönmeh remained in charge and permitted Turkey’s wealth to be looted by central bankers like has occurred in Greece.

To me as a Westerner and non-scholar of Islam, this is, so far, just some political spin on an acknowledged historical fight inside Turkey.

But then it jumps the shark. Its cites heavily from an Iraqi security document that was captured and declassified by the DIA in 2002 to the effect that the Saudi monarchy and the Wahhabi religion were founded by some of these Islamic conversos. Good job, Wayne, you just poisoned your entire interesting take on why Ergodan wants to get rid of the secularists by spouting complete nonsense from Saddam Hussein's intelligence shop. These statements would be enough for any GOS censor to ban me for even referring to the article. Might even get me banned from Fakebook, if I had been stupid enough to ever sign up there.

Having denounced this CT, I want to go back to my original point. This crazy CT is believed in anti-Wahhabi Islamist circles. It informs policy. It inflames the masses. So, it sort of important for Westerners trying to follow this inter-Islamic religious war to be aware that this CT is out there. Unfortunately, this kind of CT makes Ergodan look every bit as unhinged as the Wahhabi head choppers.

So the next time you hear about the Moslem Brotherhood/Wahhabi fight, and Ergodan's desire to be Caliph, you can be aware that this fight is at least a century, probably two centuries old. The good thing I learned from reading this sewage is that I don't have the slightest clue what motivates the various Islamic sects. And, I doubt the US government does either.

OTOH, the Israeli government, has quite a good track record of understanding and manipulating Islamic actors. So, it wouldn't surprise me at all to hear that the US is simply doing what Israel suggests about the MB/W fight. The Russians also have quite a strong foreign policy infrastructure with a lot of scholarship; there are also a huge number of Russian emigres in Israel.

Bottom line here: the US has walked (or were shoved by the Cheney neocons) into the middle of a centuries old religious war without a clue what is going on. They rely on the Israelis to explain things, which gives the Israelis a huge amount of leverage over US Mideast policy. In other words, once we stuck our foot into the Mideast quicksand, the need for neocons to be proactive vanished. The US now is forced to depend on Israeli experts because the US itself has the foreign policy acumen of a Bolivian civics teacher.

The US is so screwed, and its leaders are too stupid and/or too corrupt to even comprehend that.