Кандидат в мэры Лондона назвал себя потомком черкесской невольницы

[IKIKO]

10.03.2008, 10:52:50 http://lenta.ru

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Борис Джонсон.
Фото с сайта http://backboris.com/
Кандидат на пост мэра Лондона от Консервативной партии Борис Джонсон (Boris Johnson), известный своими экстравагантными высказываниями, заявил, что происходит от черкесской невольницы, проданной в Турцию. Об этом сообщает британское издание The Daily Mail. По словам Джонсона, его прапрабабушка, черкешенка с юга России, была продана его прапрадедушке в Турции, после того как бежала туда из-за войны на Кавказе в 1862 году. Затем, как утверждает Джонсон, они поженились, и его прапрабабушка получила свободу.

Доказательств рассказанной кандидатом в мэры истории пока не обнаружено. Джонсон признает, что письменных свидетельств этого нет, однако, по его словам, соглашения о покупке рабов редко составлялись в письменной форме в Турции XIX века.

По мнению экспертов, прадедушка Джонсона был турецким журналистом, а предки кандидата в мэры переселились в Великобританию в 1910 году, как сообщает британское издание The Guardian.

Нынешнее заявление Джонсона рассматривается как ответ тем критикам из Лейбористской партии, которые называют окончившего Итон Джонсона чрезмерно утонченным джентльменом, свысока относящимся к эмигрантам. Издание напоминает, что шесть лет назад он назвал выходцев из Африки "негритятами".

Джонсон, ставший единым кандидатом от консерваторов на пост мэра Лондона в сентябре прошлого года, настаивает на том, что является "гордым потомком турецких иммигрантов". По мнению наблюдателей, тем самым он пытается добиться поддержки мусульманской общины Лондона на выборах, которые пройдут в мае этого года.

В рейтинге известных остроумных людей, составленном британскими телезрителями в прошлом году, Борис Джонсон занял 13 место, уступив 12-е Маргарет Тэтчер.

[IKIKO]

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk
Boris Johnson: I am descended from a Russian slave
By DAVID WILKES - More by this author » Last updated at 08:48am on 10th March 2008

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Boris Johnson

Family folklore: Is Boris Johnson really the 'proud offspring of Turkish immigrants'

He is known for provocative remarks, such as calling the good folk of Portsmouth "obese drug takers" and claiming he finds Cherie Blair sexually attractive.

And it emerged yesterday that Boris Johnson's ancestry, so he claims, is as remarkable as many of his views on life.

The Conservative MP and candidate for London mayor is insisting he is directly descended from slaves – despite the fact that a BBC documentary on his family tree was unable to find proof.

Mr Johnson says his great-great-grandmother, a Circassian slave from a region in southern Russia, was sold to his great-great-grandfather after she fled from war to Turkey in around 1862.

She was set free only when the couple later married.

Although BBC researchers studying Mr Johnson's story for the series Who Do You Think You Are?, traced his family line to his great-grandfather, they were unable to go back any further.

Without the paper trail to back it up, the tale had to be treated simply as "family folklore", a source at the corporation said.

Yesterday, Mr Johnson insisted he was the "proud offspring of Turkish immigrants", saying: "This is not in any way casting aspersions on my great-great-grandfather.

"He wasn't a slave owner, he was a slave marrier.

"He liberated her: He paid the price of her manumission [release]."

Although he conceded there was "no written evidence", he told Sky News, "such contracts were not very often written" in 19th-century Turkey.

Eton-educated Mr Johnson's revelation was interpreted in some quarters as a rebuttal to accusations by senior Labour figures that he is an out-of-touch toff and a borderline racist after describing Africans as "piccaninnies" in a newspaper column six years ago.

[IKIKO]

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http://www.guardian.co.uk
he riddle of Boris's slave roots

He's accused of being 'too posh' - but now the London mayoral candidate claims he is descended from a Circassian slave bought by his Turkish forebears. Can his story be proved?

* Gaby Hinsliff, political editor
* The Observer,
* Sunday March 9 2008

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This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday March 09 2008 on p3 of the News section. It was last updated at 01:41 on March 09 2008.
Boris Johnson MP

Boris Johnson says his great-great-grandmother was sold to his great-great-grandfather. Photograph: PA

With his old Etonian pedigree and schoolboy mannerisms, he may appear to be to the manor born. But Boris Johnson today makes the startling claim that he is directly descended from slaves.

He says his great-great-grandmother was sold to his great-great-grandfather and that she was only set free when they married. But intriguingly, when the BBC studied Johnson's story for a forthcoming edition of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, in which celebrities trace their family trees, it was unable to find proof.

A BBC source said that without the paper trail to back it up, the tale had to be treated simply as family folklore and would not figure in the programme. 'It's not in the film. They can only document the truth that can be backed up by documentation. It's just one of his old family tales,' said the source.

Whatever the truth, the battle of Johnson's roots may be a bitter one. Senior Labour figures have accused the Tory candidate for London's mayor of being an out-of-touch toff and - after describing Africans as 'piccaninnies' in a newspaper article six years ago - a borderline racist, accusations Johnson himself has dismissed as a 'put-up job'. The black playwright Patrick Augustus recently accused him of sounding like 'the slave master trying to keep the slaves down'.

Challenged over whether he considered himself posh, Johnson insisted that he was 'middle class and proud of it', before adding: 'I am the proud offspring of Turkish immigrants. I want you to know that my great-great-grandmother was a slave, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr Livingstone. She was a Circassian slave [from a region in southern Russia], and she was sold: my great-great-grandfather literally purchased her.'

Researching his family history had, he added, taught him 'how swiftly you discover literally hundreds of immediate ancestors whose names are lost in dateless deaths and who were illiterate paupers.' He said it was 'not clear' exactly how his great-great-grandmother had transformed herself from slave to wife but added: 'This is not in any way casting aspersions on my great-great-grandfather. He wasn't a slave owner, he was a slave marrier. He liberated her: he paid the price of her manumission [release].'

BBC researchers are understood to have traced the Turkish line as far as Johnson's great-grandfather, a Turkish journalist named Ali Kemal who was briefly interior minister: his great-grandparents came to the UK in 1910. But researchers could not establish the truth of the relationship between Kemal's parents.

It is known that there was a trade in Circassians that reached its height when they fled to Turkey from their homelands around the Black Sea in the mid-19th century during a war with their Russian neighbours. The women were prized for their beauty, fetching up to £100 a time as slaves to powerful Turkish families.

Johnson's disclosure comes as he emerges as the bookies' surprise favourite in the mayoral race following Ken Livingstone's difficulties over the resignation of his close aide Lee Jasper amid allegations about the distribution of funding. Privately some colleagues still harbour doubts about Johnson's predilection for gaffes if he does gain office, although one shadow minister said last week he was 'at least now properly hungry for it,' after a lacklustre start said to have left David Cameron exasperated.

Johnson's task now is to reinvent himself as a serious politician, bristling with statistics and sober ideas on issues from crime to the environment. He claims to have been battling against supermarket plastic bags three months before Gordon Brown signed up to the campaign to ban them, and to be doing his bit for climate change. 'I would like people to have clear and simple ways of cutting down on their fuel bills and lowering your carbon footprint,' he says. 'I want a council tax rebate funded by the energy companies for new home insulation.' If he won the May election he would, he says, build more affordable housing with architectural merit: he was impressed by a visit last week to a community of eco-homes in Dartford built by the Red or Dead designer Wayne Hemingway.

He thinks the answer to the school-run gas guzzlers is not a £25 congestion charge, but safer streets 'so that we are actually able to let our kids walk to school again' - and blames the speed bumps in his Islington neighbourhood for driving people into 4x4s. 'They are building these immense ziggurats ... What they didn't understand is that having constructed these barricades they simply give motorists in Islington every incentive to invest in a high-wheeled 4x4 in order to overcome the obstacle,' he says. 'I certainly won't be giving any money to Transport for London to put them in.'

He would, however, put more police on London buses to stop intimidation by rowdy teenagers on the top deck and encourage passengers back on to public transport. 'Some of my happiest hours were spent by bus,' he says. 'I used to catch the 277 when I needed to go to Canary Wharf. I used to sit next to [Labour cabinet minister] Yvette Cooper and we would have long arguments.' Is that what he means by rowdy behaviour? Johnson turns gently reproachful: 'Please don't trivialise this.' It could be his campaign catchphrase.
The people he claims as his ancestors

· The Circassians were originally a thriving population of two million living in the northern Caucasus, spreading from the Black Sea coast around the borders of modern Chechnya and Ossetia into what is now Abkhazia.

· For almost a century, they fought a gruelling war against their Russian neighbours before succumbing to a scorched-earth campaign in 1862 that prompted a mass exodus.

· Around half a million Circassians ended up in Turkey, where many of the women entered the white slave trade. They were seen as more prestigious than Africans, also enslaved by the Turks, but a report in the London Post in 1856 recorded that the market had become so swamped that 'never, perhaps, at any time was white human flesh so cheap'. The price of a 'good middling' Circassian girl had slumped, it notes disapprovingly, to £5, and while previously she could have been confident of going into a good family, 'where not only good treatment, but often rank and fortune awaited her', now the women were going to people who had never kept slaves before.

· Circassians living in Russia were accused by Stalin of co-operation with the Nazis and deported to the steppes. Today, people of Circassian origin are scattered across Turkey, the Middle East and parts of Russia, but as the label is a western one used for the peoples of at least five tribes, the community itself is more likely to identify itself as Cherkess.

[crazy-mike]

10.03.2008, 10:52:50 http://lenta.ru

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http://img.lenta.ru/news/2008/03/10/boris/picture.jpg
Борис Джонсон.
Фото с сайта http://backboris.com/
Кандидат на пост мэра Лондона от Консервативной партии Борис Джонсон (Boris Johnson), известный своими экстравагантными высказываниями, заявил, что происходит от черкесской невольницы, проданной в Турцию. Об этом сообщает британское издание The Daily Mail.

Вот если бы он заявил - что является потомком халифа Османа....:grum:

[Alex5448]

Главное что избавились от подонка, антисемита и антисиониста Ливингстона.

[IKIKO]

Вот если бы он заявил - что является потомком халифа Османа....:grum:

Этот парень у вас в NY на 5 авеню живет: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ertugrul_Osman_V

Хотя вру - его предок не халиф Осман, но сам он наследник титула халифов:D

[IKIKO]

Главное что избавились от подонка, антисемита и антисиониста Ливингстона.

Я вообще не в курсе этой гонки:D
И об этом Борисе только что узнал из-за этого прикола:lol:

[crazy-mike]

Этот парень у вас в NY на 5 авеню живет: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ertugrul_Osman_V

Хотя вру - его предок не халиф Осман, но сам он наследник титула халифов:D

Непонятно - как такого мужика "упустили для политических комбинаций" - он ведь мог быть халифом в объединённом Ираке и Сирии (с американской военной миссией у себя при дворе)... :grum:

[IKIKO]

Непонятно - как такого мужика "упустили для политических комбинаций" - он ведь мог быть халифом в объединённом Ираке и Сирии (с американской военной миссией у себя при дворе)... :grum:

Он не араб, а у арабов сейчас плохо с "туркофилией".
Наверное берегут для турков :lol:

"Мультипринц": потенциальный халиф, падишах, султан, император, базилевс, кесарь, в котором течет кровь османских и византийских императоров - круто:D

И живет через стенку от Рокфеллера:lol:

[crazy-mike]

И живет через стенку от Рокфеллера:lol:

В конце-концов после разрушенного "Багдадского халифата" можно было бы попробовать "воссоздать Османский" (тем более - что у современной Турции такой красивый и символичный государственный флаг...:grum
Да и "тюркоязычного населения" в Исламском мире намного больше чем "каких-то там арабов"...:grum: А эти арабы с их "непомерными амбициями" вообще-то Исламскому миру должны бы уже надоесть....