the term is no bueno in a discussion that includes arabs.


the term came into vogue, historically, when jews were being oppressed in europe. hebrew is a semitic language, jews are a semitic people. but they are not the only semitic people.

so the whole 'anti-semitic' thing breaks down when you inject that into discussions of people hating or disparaging jewish people (or merely criticizing them) from a position of advocacy or defense of arabic people, such as the palestinians, because they are also 'semitic' people.

farrakhan is anti-jewish. that's more precise and prevents nullification of the lives and experiences of palestinians who have legitimate grievances with israel and its supporters.

fun fact:

arabic is the most widely spoken semitic language. amharic (spoken in ethiopia) is second.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages

"The most widely spoken Semitic languages today are (numbers given are for native speakers only) Arabic (300 million), Amharic (22 million), Tigrinya (7 million), Hebrew (~5 million native/L1 speakers), Tigre (~1.05 million), Aramaic (575,000 to 1 million largely Assyrian fluent speakers) and Maltese (483,000 speakers)."


that has nothing to do with the genetic origins of folks who are jewish.

that label gets thrown on people a LOT for advocacy on behalf of palestinians or even for questioning the actions of the nation state of israel. but calling someone anti-semitic behind that makes as much sense as calling someone anti-asian for hating chinese people but really loving the japanese.

when farrakhan says some anti-jewish shit, he's not necessarily coming from the same bag as the nazis, but, un-ironically, a lot of the generalizations and mythologizing and demonizing is shared, and that's problematic. and been so.





peace & blessings,

x.

www.twitter.com/poetx

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I'm an advocate for working smarter, not harder. If you just
focus on working hard you end up making someone else rich and
not having much to show for it. (c) mad