• vortic@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    This is not intended to defend Israel. From what I’m seeing, what Israel is doing here is heinous. For example, the mass graves at al-Shifa hospital.

    This is just intended to point out that the modern usage of the term “anti-semitic” has come to mean “anti-jewish”, even if that doesn’t really fit with the older history of the word “Semitic”.

    From the Wikipedia article on “Semitic People”:

    Semitic people or Semites is an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East, including Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping “Semitic languages” in linguistics.

    The terms “anti-Semite” or “antisemitism” came by a circuitous route to refer more narrowly to anyone who was hostile or discriminatory towards Jews in particular.

    In 1879, the German journalist Wilhelm Marr began the politicisation of the term by speaking of a struggle between Jews and Germans in a pamphlet called Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum (“The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism”). He accused the Jews of being liberals, a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879, Marr’s adherents founded the “League for Anti-Semitism”, which concerned itself entirely with anti-Jewish political action.

    Objections to the usage of the term, such as the obsolete nature of the term “Semitic” as a racial term, have been raised since at least the 1930s.

    • kimjongunderdog@kbin.social
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      2 months ago

      So Israel is using the Nazi’s definition of Semite. Pretty sure the logic to stop using that would be the same as the reason we stopped giving credence to the Nazi’s definition of Aryan.