Herzl first turned to the Ottoman Empire for help: “If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”240 Herzl approached Sultan Abdul Hamid with this offer through emissaries (as reported in his journal, June 9, 1896): “Let the Sultan give us that piece of land, and in return we shall set his house in order, straighten out his finances, and influence public opinion all over the world in his favor.” In other words, he promised to devote to the service of Ottoman Turkey the two Jewish weapons par excellence: the bank and the press. The Sultan categorically and repeatedly rejected all offers, saying, as reported in Herzl’s journal, June 19: “I cannot sell even a foot of land, for it does not belong to me, but to my people. […] Let the Jews save their billions. […] When my Empire is partitioned, they may get Palestine for nothing. But only our corpse will be divided. I will not agree to vivisection.” As he had already done at the Berlin Congress, the Sultan opposed any Jewish mass immigration to Palestine. Four years later, after many more attempts, Herzl concluded (June 4, 1900): “At present I can see only one more plan: See to it that Turkey’s difficulties increase; wage a personal campaign against the Sultan, possibly seek contact with the exiled princes and the Young Turks; and, at the same time, by intensifying Jewish Socialist activities stir up the desire among the European governments to exert pressure on Turkey to take in the Jews.” Although nothing emerged from this interview, Herzl used the diplomatic coup as a stepping stone for his negotiations in Europe. Pulling out all the stops, he went to St. Petersburg in 1903 (soon after the first pogrom of Kishinev) and was received by the finance and interior ministers, to whom he hawked Zionism as a solution to the problem of revolutionary subversion. Undoubtedly armed with the same argument, Herzl met Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898, presenting Zionism as a means of diverting the Jews from communism. Shortly before the outbreak of the World War, in 1908, the sultanate itself would be destroyed from within by the secular revolution of the Young Turks, a movement described by T. E. Lawrence as “50% crypto-Jewish and 95% freemasonic,” and, according to Rabbi Joachim Prinz, led by “ardent ‘doennmehs’,” that is, crypto-Jews who, though nominally Muslims, “had as their real prophet Shabtai Zvi, the Messiah of Smyrna” (The Secret Jews, 1973).246 After having attracted Armenians to their revolution with the promise of political autonomy, the Young Turks, once in power, suppressed their nationalist aspirations by the extermination in 1915–16 of 1,200,000 of this ancient and vibrant people whom rabbinic tradition assimilated to the Amalekites of the Bible. copy/pasted from the book From Yahweh to Zion