Editor’s Note: On June 3, the day after Jeff Rosen’s re-election as Santa Clara’s District Attorney, I went to San Jose to pull the court documents for the long list of criminal charges against Lior Zeevi, the principal alleged victim in the March 8, 2026 Santana Row incident. On June 15, there was a “Subpoena Duces Tecum” hearing in Santa Clara Superior Court about Mr. Zeevi’s need for a public defender, a matter reportedly complex enough to cause the hearing to be continued until July. But from the documents I have already pulled, it seems even more apparent how biased the reporting by local media has been. And as the media’s original “Antisemitism!”™️ narrative about the Santana Row charges seems to be falling apart, local reporters are staying away from the hearings.
But in doing so, they’re missing a deeper, far more interesting story. I plan to continue monitoring the hearings, and in the meantime, I wanted to share the following:
In researching Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen’s over-prosecution of three young Assyrian Americans in the March 8 Santana Row incident, I noticed what might at first seem an unremarkable disparity between the County and its DA office. While Santa Clara County has issued at least two resolutions related to the long-hidden genocide of Assyrian Christians, there appeared to be no public recognition from the District Attorney Office – despite considerable advocacy from the Assyrian Americans in Rosen’s jurisdiction.
(Email queries about this matter to all three members of Rosen’s communications team remain unanswered.)
The pro-Israel District Attorney’s apparent silence on the issue is in stark contrast to Rosen’s frequent invocation of the German genocide of Jewish Europeans, including in his controversial campaign fundraising efforts. Notably, Rosen, a member of the Bay Area’s powerful pro-Israel lobby, appears to maintain the same denial regarding the Ottoman Genocides of Assyrian Christians as does the State of Israel.
There are a variety of political reasons for Israel’s refusal to acknowledge the Ottoman genocides of Christians, not least of which is Israel’s fear of offending the current Turkish government, which it considers an essential ally. Turkey still refuses to acknowledge the Ottoman genocides of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks.
But there is an additional factor that would make Israel’s recognition of the Ottoman genocide of Assyrian Christians embarrassing:
As attested in articles in the Times of Israel; the Jewish Review of Books; several books on the Ottoman genocides in UC Berkeley’s vast Doe Library; and a recent Ph.D. dissertation: prominent Jewish figures and early Jewish Zionists were actively engaged in promoting the Ottoman genocide of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks.
Early Zionist Complicity in the Ottoman Genocides:
In a 2018 article (linked here), the Times of Israel examines Hans-Lukas Kieser’s book, Talaat Pasha, Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Kieser’s 552-page book lays out the motivation for the early Zionists to curry favor with the geopolitically strategic Ottoman Empire toward the eventual creation of a Jewish State in Palestine. (A remarkable omission in the TOI article is any mention of Assyrians or Greeks, hundreds of thousands of whom were genocided by the Ottoman Empire at the same time as the Armenians.)
Per the TOI in 2018:
“Israel’s recent decision to continue to remain silent on the 103-year-old genocide has garnered its share of criticism from historians, academics, writers and human rights activists — many from within Israel itself….
According to Kieser, recognizing the Armenian genocide holds a relevance for Israelis today beyond the usual discussion of Israel-Turkey relations. Jews, he says, historically played a key role in promoting propaganda from the Ottoman side as Armenians continued to be slaughtered.
The historian recalls how many Jews loyal to the Ottomans largely looked the other way where the suffering of Armenians was concerned. This included figures such as Alfred Nossig, who helped found both the General Jewish Colonization Organization (AJK) and the Zionist Organization (ZO).
Both were set up for the purpose of Jewish lobbying across the Middle East and elsewhere, and subsequently encouraged intimate relations between Jews and Ottomans.”
Kieser’s book notes that this occurred during a critical pre-Balfour Declaration period in 1917, when Zionist Jews were in the position of seeking diplomatic favors to build what eventually became the state of Israel.
Thus did Jewish newspapers even in Germany run propagandistic pieces hyping relations between the “Young Turks” of the Ottoman Empire and its Jewish diplomats and politicos. These publications were extremely effective in quelling German opposition to the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks.
The Times of Israel notes the importance to these early Zionists in cultivating relationships with Pasha Talaat, the architect of the Armenian genocide.
“In 1913, an article published in the Istanbul-based L’Aurore, a Jewish newspaper financed by Zionists, praised the benefits of Jewish-Turkish relations, even hinting that an alliance between Pan-Judaism and Pan Islamism in Turkey could be a viable political option — something Kieser says Talaat was seduced by... ‘In spring 1915 — which was a honeymoon for the Zionists in Istanbul — Talaat made sure there were no conflicting issues internationally because he wanted to strike the Armenians, says Kieser.”
The TOI is careful to include an additional detail from Kieser regarding some critical Zionist spies’ concern for Armenians, but states that the Armenian-sympathetic group constituted a minority of Zionists. This seems an echo of relatively smaller groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now being largely incapable of dissuading the vast majority of Jewish Americans and Jewish institutions from supporting Israel even after two years of Israel’s expanding genocide across West Asia:
“There were, however, some exceptions — notably, a group of young Zionists called Netzah Yisrael Lo Yeshaker (NILI), or, The Eternal One of Israel Will Not Lie, a pro-British espionage group in Palestine at the time. NILI felt a strong sense of solidarity with the Armenian victims, even writing reports which they sent out to the international community in the hope of waking them up to the atrocities.
“The NILI group — which contained people like Aaron Aronson and others — saw the Armenian genocide, and even wrote long reports about it,” Kieser says. “They saw that this total stigmatization and finally extermination was a process that could also happen with the Jews. So they were deeply sympathetic not just emotionally, but also in a Biblical and prophetic approach,” he adds. “But they were a small minority.”
TOI quotes Kieser on the ongoing complicity of Jews in Israel and Turkey in suppressing the history of the Armenian genocides:
“Unfortunately, the silence carried on many decades after the war. So you had Jews in Israel and the Jews in Turkey who continued to help Turkey deny the Armenian genocide,” Kieser says.
It is impossible not to notice that the TOI neither acknowledges the equally ill-fated Greek and Assyrian victims of the Ottoman Genocides, nor does it ask how the NILI group could evince sympathy for the Armenians, while laying the groundwork for massacres of Palestinians that occurred even prior to the establishment of the state of Israel.
Max von Oppenheim as “Father of Jihad”
Meanwhile, Assyrian genocide scholar Tessa Hofmann provided another clue in a chapter contained in the collection Sayfo 1915: An Anthology of Essays on the Genocide of Assyrians/Arameans During the First World War (Gorgias Press, 2018):
“The Ottoman proclamation of jihad on November 14th, 1914 had been instigated by German policy, whose mastermind was the Oriental scholar, wartime diplomat and archeologist Max von Oppenheim, dubbed by contemportaries Abu Jihad, ‘father of Jihad’.”
Oppenheim, born into the wealthy Oppenheim banking family, was regarded as a German spy by the British and the French, a reality that became harder to deny when the half-Jewish Oppenheim was later shielded and funded by the Nazis. But even in 1915, Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, wrote that von Oppenheim had been in mosques promoting the Young Turks’ genocide of Armenians, a position that conveniently aligned with Germany’s laissez-faire attitude toward its allied Ottoman Empire.
Oppenheim’s Harem of Concubines Presages Epstein’s Human Trafficking
Oppenheim’s trajectory has some jarring similarities with the late American blackmailer, intelligence asset, and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Both men trafficked in underage victims and both worked as intelligence operatives.
As the Jewish Review of Books described it:
“During his periods in Cairo and elsewhere in the Middle East, Oppenheim often dressed in Arab garb, living lavishly and keeping a harem of young concubine slaves. But Oppenheim’s involvement in the Middle East was not limited to orientalist curiosity and apparently realized sexual fantasies. Passionately involved in the intricacies of Arab politics, he filed hundreds of reports with the German Foreign Office between 1896 and 1909 on Ottoman politics and Germany’s possible role in them.”
The Jewish Review of Books praises and cites Sean McMeekin’s The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, which draws attention to what McMeekin describes as Oppenheim’s 1914 “blueprint for a global jihad engulfing hundreds of millions of people.”
Per the JRB, Oppenheim’s “Memorandum Concerning the Fomenting of Revolutions in the Islamic Territories of Our Enemies” covered:
“…everything from propaganda, the burning of oil wells, and the full-blown invasion of British Egypt and India, to a ruthless writing off of minorities deemed not to serve German interests. The sultan-caliph was to head this global jihad, thus mobilizing the entire Islamic world to fight alongside the Central Powers ‘in the greatest war that has ever erupted on this earth.’ Toward that end, Oppenheim created propaganda centers, recruited agents to stir up religious passions, raised considerable amounts of bribe money, met with and armed potential tribal allies, and had a guiding hand in the ultimately failed attempt to create the Baghdad-Berlin express, the train which was to have united East and West and laid the infrastructure for Germany’s Weltpolitik. No wonder that the British called him “the kaiser’s spy.
The combination of pan-Germanism and anti-imperialist Islam under the Ottoman Turks initiated an imperialist race. In response, the British subsidized Wahhabism and the sherifate of Mecca to take on the role of the caliphate. Today’s revival of ambitions for a caliphate and the slaughtering of ‘infidels’ has its partial origins in the stratagems of the competing, conniving European powers. ‘The killing of infidels who rule over the Islamic lands,’ Oppenheim declared in a chilling pamphlet, ‘has become a sacred duty, whether it be secretly or openly, as the great Koran declares in its words: Take them and kill them whenever you come across them….’”
The JRB is careful to note the contradictions of Oppenheim’s planned “jihad”, which conveniently excluded Turkey and its allies, including Germany. So there is something slightly ironic in that some of the Arab subjects of von Oppenheim’s propaganda eventually turned on Germany.
Not Just A Spy, but A Spy Moonlighting As A Thief:
Oppenheim wasn’t “only” a spy, he was also an archeologist with a keen interest in unearthing and absconding with various ancient artifacts from Syria, specifically the site Tell-Halaf. Many of these items he later stored in Berlin, where he was subsequently protected (and funded) by the Nazi regime, ostensibly because Oppenheim’s work for the Third Reich in West Asia was considered valuable.
As is often the case of treasures that are stolen from the lands to which they properly belong, many the remarkable artifacts stolen by Oppenheim and stored in Berlin were destroyed during a bombing raid in 1943. This unhappy outcome “rhymes” with the shipwreck loss of many of the Parthenon marbles which Lord Elgin stole from Greece. In another twist, some of the artifacts that Oppenheim stole were later seized by the U.S. Office of Alien Property.
The Political Convenience of Genocide Denialism in the United States:
The Ottoman Genocides aren’t the only genocides that Israel and the U.S. have denied. (Formal U.S. Congressional recognition of the Ottoman Genocides was finally issued in 2019, over 100 years after the fact.)
The premise that the Holocaust was the most severe genocide, or that genocide was magically unique to Germany, allows Americans to look past the far more devastating genocide perpetrated by the U.S. military on the Native American population, which by some accounts was reduced from an estimated 10 million prior to colonization to a mere 300,000 people by 1900.
The First Genocides of the 20th Century:
But even ignoring the inspiration that the Nazis found in the vast, centuries-long U.S. genocide of Native Americans, there remains the stubborn fact of two twentieth-century genocides that preceded and set the stage for the Holocaust/Shoah, and which were proportionally far more devastating for the impacted populations.
The first of these was the 1904-1908 German genocide of the Nama and Herero people in what is now Namibia, in which 80% of the Herero people and 50% of the Nama people were killed.
The German government, which has provided over $95 billion in reparations to Jewish Holocaust victims, only recently acknowledged its genocide in Africa, and produced a conditional $1 billion in reparations, to be paid over 30 years on infrastructure – none of it directly to the tribes impacted, and none of it to be used to buy back land illegally seized by German nationals during the genocide.
The second is the aforementioned Ottoman Genocides of Armenians, Anatolian Greeks, and Assyrian Christians, which took place from the 1910’s into the early 1920s.
Addendum: How the State of California Funds the Local Israel Lobby’s Ongoing Genocide Denial, and News from the JFCS
From mid-2024 to early 2025, I reported on $8.5 million dollars in state educational grants improperly funneled through the Marin County Office of Education to the private, nonprofit, centi-millionaire “Jewish Family and Children’s Services” (JFCS) for a politically biased “Holocaust and Genocide Education” curriculum.
The JFCS partnered on this project with the powerful Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area, of which District Attorney Jeff Rosen is an active and influential member.
Both groups continue to deny that Israel is engaged in genocide in Gaza, or ethnic cleansing in South Lebanon. Neither the JFCS nor the JCRC have issued any formal statement regarding the full extent of the Ottoman Genocides.
In the time since I first reported on the mismanagement of the JFCS/CTC program, they have, however, made one concession. In late 2025, the JFCS/CTC announced that it had made a partnership with a scholar of the Ottoman genocide of Assyrian Christians, and a recent review of the JFCS/CTC lesson plans reveals that the material is finally being included.
Still excluded in the lesson plan titles are politically inconvenient genocides such as (but sadly not limited to): the Ottoman genocide of Anatolian Greeks; the German genocide of Nama and Herero peoples; genocidal bombings by the United States of Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians; any mention of the thousands of mass lynchings of Mexicans in the U.S. Southwest; or any proportional accounting of the vast genocide of Native Americans by the U.S. military.
Lesson plans covering the Guatemalan genocide omit any reference to Israel’s provision of military training, surveillance tech, and weapons to the Guatemalan military.
And on the most obvious level: Among the JFCS/CTC lesson plans, you will still find absolutely zero reference to Israel’s expanding genocide across West Asia, which impacts Palestinians most severely, but increasingly impacts South Lebanese, Iranians, and even Assyrian Christians in Syria, Iran, and Iraq.
The JFCS/CTC will be hosting a conference in Southern California later this month. Attempts to reach Morgan Blum Schneider, who oversees the program, have been unsuccessful for years, and the JFCS staff is currently using the upcoming conference to claim that they are too busy to answer questions.
If you are an educator who plans to attend the conference, please feel free to contact me with any insights. You can reach me at marincountyconfidential (at) gmail.com or use Signal, my account is marinco.2026
Upcoming:
Upcoming on Thursday: A closer look at John Alden, the newly hired Inspector General for Marin County’s Civilian Oversight Commission.
©2026 Eva Chrysanthe
Many thanks to patient readers for insights, support, and ideas. If you would like to contribute to this ongoing reporting project, I would be grateful. Please feel free to donate using Venmo, the account is: @marincountyconfidential
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Eva Chrysanthe, 2111 San Pablo Avenue, #2075, Berkeley, CA 94702
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