Islamic Jihad has a photo essay of its "mujhadeen" participating in Ramadan Iftar meals, studying the Quran and praying with their masks and machine guns: (I'm not sure how they can eat with their mouths covered...)
I have never seen a Muslim complain about how terrorists are co-opting sacred Muslim rituals to make themselves look pious. Nor have I seen any Muslim complain that it is incongruous to say that Ramadan is a time for peaceful reflection and piousness while holding automatic weapons.
Maybe I am looking in the wrong places, though.
Are any Muslims upset when they see things like this, or do all Muslims look at this and think it is an appropriate way to mark Ramadan?
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi on Thursday to congratulate him on his landslide victory, the second time this week that a key Netanyahu ally won an election abroad.
On Sunday Netanyahu congratulated Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on his surprise re-election the day before.
“Narendra, my friend, congratulations! What an enormous victory,” Netanyahu enthused in a phone call. Excerpts of the call were videoed and placed on the prime minister’s Facebook page, after it became clear that Modi had won a clear majority following an election process that took six months.
“I hope that we can see each other very soon, as soon as you form a government and as soon as we form a government,” Netanyahu said. “There is much to discuss on so many other things.”
Netanyahu thanked Modi as well for his warm wishes following the Israeli elections, but added a caveat: “There is one difference: you don’t need a coalition, I do.”
Netanyahu – who likes to underline Israel’s vastly improved relations with a number of countries around the world – tweeted his congratulations to Modi in Hebrew even before their phone call. (h/t MtTB)
The surprise election victory of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison last weekend not only shook up the country’s political landscape but also potentially bodes well for another country thousands of miles away – Israel.
“We have had a strong and constructive relationship with Scott Morrison personally and had a very good working relationship with the government he led,” Jeremy Jones, director of international and community affairs for the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), told Jewish News Syndicate. “We also have worked with many members of the Opposition and the Cross-benchers. We saw the defeat of a number of racist candidates and MPs who associated with maximalist anti-Israel groups.”
The victory by Morrison, who hails from the center-right Liberal Party, echoes some of the surprise electoral success other decidedly pro-Israel right-wing candidates have seen in recent years around the world, such as with U.S. President Donald Trump and more recently with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and potentially in Canada as well next October. However, Austria’s Sebastian Kurz, who has also staked a strong pro-Israel stance in Europe, now faces snap elections after his junior coalition partner resigned from the government following a video scandal.
“The Australian government is not ‘populist’ in the sense of Donald Trump or Bolsonaro or even [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. It is conservative, center-right and ran on a platform of economic responsibility, not populism. Australia has compulsory voting, which militates in favor of responsible centrism,” said Jones.
Netanyahu, who visited Australia in 2017, quickly congratulated Morrison on his victory.
“I send congratulations to another friend of mine, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who won the elections after the polls consistently predicted that he would lose. At the last minute, in the final hours, he won,” Netanyahu said on Sunday during his cabinet meeting.
Morrison, who took office last August after ousting former party leader and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, drew headlines last fall after he suggested that he was “open” to the idea of moving the Australian embassy to Jerusalem.
At a rally on Sunday for the far Right German "Der Rechte" party, people held signs saying, "Israel ist unser Unglück", or "Israel is our misfortune!" - a direct and conscious retelling of the slogan of the Nazi Der Stürmer, "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!", or "The Jews are Our Misfortune!"
The Jewish community in Germany is understandably upset. Legal action is being taken and the issue is being reviewed.
The Federal Commissioner Felix Klein said: "Here is propaganda consciously linked to the National Socialists. Such propaganda against Jews and Israel must not be tolerated in our country. In my estimation, the police and regulatory laws of the federal states offer sufficient possibilities for municipalities to act against them. "
Amazingly, left-wing Jews and others still insist that the neo-Nazis are supporters of Israel and not supporters of BDS, like them.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Tel Aviv Is The Place To Be For Partyi- I Mean For Monitoring Human Rights
By Dominic Lord, human rights activist
Tel Aviv, May 23 - We activists take our role seriously: forming alliances, raising awareness, generating political pressure, and partying till all hours in this fabulous city. This is where the human rights action is, where Israeli public figures can be held accountable; where journalists frequent, facilitating attention to key human rights issues; where there isn't really any major problem, but damn, is the night life amazing. It's a key location in the human rights realm.
Most people don't realize the centrality of geography as a factor in the human rights arena. Often we rely on volunteers and low-level staff in the field for data and for basic monitoring activities, and yes, such personnel perform valuable functions, but not everything we must accomplish can be accomplished in remote villages in Chad or Syrian towns facing bombardment and disease. Somebody has to undertake the serious work of living and working in Tel Aviv - some choose Jerusalem, for similar reasons - because those restaurants and night clubs are not going to visit themselves. Also, it's dangerous in sub-Saharan Africa.
Human rights workers embrace the challenges of this avenue of endeavor, formidable as they may be; difficulty inheres in all significant paths to achievement. Thus the fierce competition among UN, Red Cross, and other organizations' personnel for postings to Israel, where everyone knows Palestinian rights require ever-increasing protection, and where it's possible to eat at a different world-class restaurant every night and not have the same cuisine twice in six months. Plus we don't get shot at. Also, we have buddy-buddy relationships, not to mention romances, with journalists who share our assumptions about Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimhood and lack of moral or political agency, so this dynamic gets reinforced all the time.
That's a crucial piece of the puzzle, because if the human rights community ever admitted Israel didn't need the disproportionate attention we give the place, we'd lose our pretext to keep coming back here. And that would be a human rights tragedy. I've done work in Darfur, Central America, Southeast Asia, the Balkans, and even passed through some Arab states on my way, so I've been around, and I know which zones require the most urgent attention. Yes, people are being massacred, kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, and raped in those other places, but Jews are building homes here. Priorities.
Also, you can't expect those of us who are openly gay to actually spend time in the Palestinian territories. That would be suicide, and then who would do the crucial work of telling the world how barbaric Israelis are?
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
U.S. Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt told the UN Security Council on Wednesday: "It is simply unacceptable that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue to target Israeli communities, including hospitals and schools, in a cynical attempt to extract concessions from Israel. It is simply unacceptable that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue to use civilians in Gaza, including children, as human shields. It is simply unacceptable that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue to siphon the scarce resources of the people of Gaza to build their terror arsenal, while preventing donor aid from reaching the people."
"There will be no end to this suffering until all of us, together, say in public...Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are to blame for the suffering of the people of Gaza. Nothing can be meaningfully fixed until they renounce terror and cease their acts of violence and their vow to destroy Israel."
Remarks at a UN Security Council Briefing on the Middle East
AFP should have noted what 🇨🇭 Swiss FM said last year: “UNRWA has become part of the problem. It supplies the ammunition to continue the conflict. By supporting UNRWA, we keep the conflict alive. It’s a perverse logic.” https://t.co/MMPZiTLv4q
Starting in the Middle Ages, Jews have been accused of murdering children for ritual purposes, of poisoning wells, and more. Palestinians regularly renew the child-killing libel, claiming Israel deliberately murders Palestinian children.
Here is a new example from Abbas' Fatah Movement in Lebanon:
[Falestinona, website of Fatah’s Information and Culture Commission in Lebanon, May 6, 2019]
In the cartoon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is shown with a bloody hand, smiling over a presumably dead Palestinian infant from Gaza that has blood dripping from it. Netanyahu murdered the baby, leaving it for the Palestinian Muslim family (symbolized by the man's crescent head) for the month of Ramadan.
Temple University
professor Marc Lamont Hill recently made an astonishing claim when he
declared:
“I literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living.”
Perhaps Professor Hill doesn’t earn his living at Temple
University, because the subjects
(media and education) he teaches there seem to have absolutely
nothing to do with the study of Yemeni and Moroccan Jews. I was also
unable to find any scholarly study of the history of Yemeni and
Moroccan Jews authored by Hill.
But while Hill’s
claim looks very much like a pathetic attempt to assert academic
expertise, it’s noteworthy that he was apparently trying to create
an aura of authority for a project he has been working on. As Hill
announced: “I finished a film that devotes 20% to Mizrahis [i.e.
Middle Eastern Jews]. And I talk about them regularly.”
The film Hill
referred to is apparently “Black in the Holy Land”, and you can
watch the trailer on YouTube
– but before you do so, you should read an EoZ post
from last February. Amazingly enough, the trailer for Hill’s
“documentary” starts off with convicted terrorist Ali Jiddah, who
“planted four hand grenades on Strauss Street in downtown Jerusalem
in 1968. The blasts injured nine Israelis.”
Jiddah served 17
years in prison and was released in a prisoner swap. Since then, he
has devoted himself to demonizing Israel, and as he told
the Times of Israel a few years ago: “I am satisfied, and I
am convinced that the work I am doing today is more effective than
the bomb I planted in 1968.”
While the film is
apparently not yet released, it’s clear what to expect: if your
trailer prominently features a convicted terrorist who hopes to
achieve with words what he previously tried to achieve with bombs,
you really give your game away.
So it was hardly
surprising that Marc Lamont Hill wasn’t pleased when well-known
Israeli activist and writer Hen Mazzig recently wrote an excellent
article
that was published in the Los Angeles Times under the title
“No, Israel isn’t a country of privileged and powerful white
Europeans.”
If you missed the
heated exchange that developed between Hen and Hill on social media,
you can catch up by reading a Jerusalem Postreport
about it. Hill’s criticism of Hen’s widely read article included
the preposterous claim that “the 20th century identity category of
‘Mizrahi’ [i.e. Middle Eastern Jews]” was created “as a means
of detaching them from Palestinian identity.” According to Marc
Lamont Hill, those who are now considered Mizrahi should apparently
be called “Palestinian Jews” and we should all remember that they
“lived peacefully with other Palestinians.”
Well, if Professor Hill studies “Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a
living,” he presumably knows that they cannot really be described
as “Palestinian Jews.” Those Jews who lived among “other
Palestinians” – meaning presumably the non-Jews in the area that
the Romans designated as “Palestine” – had to endure the fate
of an oppressed minority ruled by their conquerors. And if we want to
consider the barely century-old history since the local Arabs
actually started to consider themselves as Palestinians, we find that
the Palestinian leader of the time was the man who started his career
by instigating murderous pogroms, and who later became notorious as
“Hitler’s mufti.” Incidentally, the mufti was an early
proponent of boycotts and would arguably deserve to be honored as the
father
of BDS. Under his leadership, “‘Filasteen Arduna wa’al
yahud Kilabuna’ (Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs)”
and “‘Itbach al Yahud’ (slaughter the Jews)” were the first
rallying cries of Palestinian
nationalism in 1920.
For the narrative
that undergirds Marc Lamont Hill’s vile
anti-Israel activism, this history has to be ignored. It’s no
less obscene than Rashida Tlaib’s recent attempt
to rewrite history by claiming that the Palestinians somehow provided
a “a safe haven” to Jews. But at least Tlaib doesn’t claim to
be “one of the leading intellectual voices” in the US, and
she doesn’t claim to “literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews
for a living.” As it happens, my dearest friends include both a
Yemeni and a Moroccan Jew, and if Marc Lamont Hill ‘studied’
them, he could learn a lot.
But as it is, we can
anticipate that Hill’s forthcoming “documentary” will document
first and foremost why Hill has fans both among supposedly
“progressive” anti-Israel activists and virulent Jew-haters like
Farrakhan’s Nation
of Islam and David
Duke.
________________________________
[EoZ]: This article inspired me to look at some previous posts of mine about the history of how Jews lived in Morocco and Yemen. I tweeted this today:
Absurdly, @MarcLamontHill says "I literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living" and he says they lived peacefully among Muslims. Ali Bey al Abbasi was the pen name of a traveler who described the lives of Jews in Morocco in 1805 quite differently.
There are plenty of examples of contemporaneous studies of Jews in Morocco describing how they were humiliated, daily, by Muslims there.
And Morocco was one of the best places for Jews to live!
Here you can see several attacks against Jews in Yemen between 1908 and 1913.
Marc Lamont Hill is not a scholar. He wants to whitewash history, ,not describe it.
This shows that his antipathy isn't against Zionists - but Jews.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Steven William Thrasher spoke at the NYU Doctoral Convocation a few days ago as a class representative. In his speech, he thanked anti-Israel groups and literally screamed his hate for Israel - to major applause.
I am so proud, so proud of NYU’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and of Jewish Voice for Peace, and of GSOC, and of the NYU student government, and of my colleagues in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis for supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the apartheid state government in Israel — because this is what we are called to do. This is our NYU legacy — that we are connected in radical love, and we have a duty and a privilege in this position to protect not the most popular amongst us, but the most vulnerable amongst us on every campus where we serve in every community where we live, in every place that we work.
This is our duty and we must stand together to vanquish racism and Islamophobia and antisemitism and injustice and attacks on women and attacks on abortion rights in Tel Aviv, in Shanghai, in Abu Dhabi, in New York City, in Atlanta, in Washington, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco and everywhere in the world.
He is going to teach journalism at Northwestern University starting next month.
It is difficult to think of someone less qualified to be a journalist.
NYU has a major problem. Here is a thread from Melissa Weiss that shows just how bad it has been in just this past school year.
__________________________
An incoming college freshman, whose great-grandfather founded @nyuniversity’s music dept and was a professor there for many years, withdrew her acceptance to the university. There will be more like her until NYU shuts down rampant anti-Semitism on campus.
What led to a young Jewish woman walking away from an education at such a prestigious institution as NYU, you ask? A thread on anti-Semitism at NYU...
Last year, members of NYU Students for Justice in Palestine burned an Israel flag during a celebration for Israel’s Independence Day.
Just days after this resolution passes, the Hillel building at NYU is forced to closed for security reasons following the discovery of anti-Semitic, threatening posts from an NYU student. The posts including the terms “nyjews” and “zionist kkkunts.”
In March 2019, half a dozen NYU departments cosponsor an on-campus event featuring Linda Sarsour. The event is held while many Jewish students are out of town for a conference and unable to defend against Sarsour’s blatant lies. apa.nyu.edu/event/skirball…
On May 2, as Jews around the world (and on NYU’s campus) commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day, NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis ends its relationship with NYU Tel Aviv.
Also earlier this month, Students for Justice in Palestine, an organized that less than a year ago burned an Israeli flag and saw its members arrested, received NYU’s Presidential Service Award.
And there you have it, my friends. The decision to turn down an acceptance to a prestigious university is a personal and difficult one. But it’s reflective of the increasingly anti-Semitic climate that NYU has done relatively little to stop over the last year.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Last week I reported on an answer that the EU provided to a question about Palestinian textbooks:
It can be confirmed that an academic study on Palestinian school text books is planned. Necessary funds have been reserved in the 2019 budget.
The study shall be carried out by an independent and internationally recognised research institute. Terms of Reference for the study are currently being prepared with a view to identifying possible incitement to hatred and violence and any possible lack of compliance with Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) standards of peace and tolerance in education.
The study shall provide for a comprehensive analysis of the current Palestinian text books. The work on the study is indicatively scheduled to start in spring 2019.
Incitement to violence is fundamentally incompatible with advancing a peaceful two-state solution and is greatly exacerbating mistrust between the communities, as already pointed out in the report of the Middle East Quartet of 1 July 2016(1). The EU has therefore repeatedly discussed this issue with the two parties.
The European Union has said that it has not initiated any study on the content of the Palestinian curriculum and that the allegations of incitement to violence in Israel and Palestine are discussed regularly with the parties.
Asharq al-Awsat also seemed to get mixed messages, where they report that the EU says that it is not initiating any study about the Palestinian curricula. In the next sentence the EU office in Jerusalem is quoted as saying that “there is an intention to conduct an academic study that is meant to provide an objective and comprehensive study of the current Palestinian school books”. Then the statement goes on to say: “This proposed independent academic study of Palestinian school books – in case it is conducted – will assist in examining the Palestinian school books in line with international criteria, for example the criteria of UNESCO about peace and tolerance and non-violence in education."
The headline in Asharq al-Awsat says that the EU will "review" the textbooks, not "investigate" them.
When speaking to the Europeans, it is a plan, with funding and a schedule. To Arabs, it is merely a possibility being discussed that might not even happen.
Which is the truth? Given the support for terror in the newest schoolbooks, which have probably been funded by the EU, this is a very important question.
(h/t Ibn Boutros)
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In a Facebook post on May 20 slamming Hen Mazzig’s article in The LA Times, American academic and activist Marc Lamont Hill described Mizrahi Jews as an “identity category” that had been detached “from Palestinian identity.” CNN severed ties with Hill last year after anti-Israel comments.
Hill’s latest excoriation of Israel, posted to his 90,000 followers, followed Mazzig’s argument that Israel is not a country of “privileged and powerful white Europeans.” Mazzig sought to emphasize the role of Mizrahi Jews in Israeli history and condemned the tendency of critics to define Israelis as Ashkenazi Jews alone. Hill responded that Mazzig ignores “the racial and political project that transformed Palestinian Jews (who lived peacefully with other Palestinians) into the 20th century identity category of ‘Mizrahi’ as a means of detaching them from Palestinian identity.”
Mazzig posted a screenshot of another exchange with Hill in which Hill wrote that “I literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living.”
Jimena, an organization that describes itself as committed to achieving universal recognition to the heritage and history of 850,000 indigenous Jewish refugees from Arab countries, said Hill was trying to speaking over the voices of Mizrahi Jews.
“Because he ‘studies us’ for a living," Jimena wrote on Twitter. "Nothing new here, yet another non-representative ‘social justice’ activist who erases Mizrahi voices to assert an anti-Israel agenda.”
He responded to my post. He studies Middle Eastern & North African Jews for a living AND devoted 20% of a film to Mizrahis (now he calls us Mizrahim, I feel blessed)
So I’m just gonna go die, as he knows more about Middle Eastern and North African Jews in Israel then Hen Mazzig. pic.twitter.com/FmKaDkVwlu
The dispute between Mazzig and Hill comes at a sensitive time in the US where there is an increasingly active anti-Israel narrative that has attempted to label Israel a “white supremacist” country. Activist Shaun King wrote in June last year that “white supremacists” in Afula in Israel were surrounding an Arab home because “they want the neighborhood to be for white Jews only.” These comments come at a time in the US when Jews are also being attacked as “white Jews.” Women’s March leaders last year were accused of claiming that Jews “uphold white supremacy.” It is part of a wider agenda to label Jews as a different minority from the rest of American minority groups who are part of the intersectional social justice agenda. For instance, Jews have been told that discrimination against them is not systemic, while Islamophobia is.
We’re used to hearing the media describe well recognized terror organizations with euphemisms like, militants, extremists, or sometimes even obscenely activists. One might reasonably come to believe that terrorism has no definition at all, or that it’s all a matter of subjective opinion. After all, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” right?
Wrong.
In truth, terrorism can be clearly defined, nations do clearly designate terror organizations as a matter of policy, and the “freedom fighter” quote doesn’t mean what you think.
Words have power, and when journalists use deceptive, vague or inappropriate words, they unfortunately prejudice readers. That’s why misleading terminology is a form of media bias.
Related reading: Defining Bias: Misleading Terminology
Terrorists or freedom fighters?
After the attacks of 9/11, Stephen Jukes, then Reuters’ global news editor, sent a memo instructing the wire service staff not to use the word terror. His explanation became a catch-phrase for the news industry’s moral ambiguity: We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist.
The Jukes quote is now famous. Less well known is that David Schlesinger, Reuters’ global managing editor later explained the real reasoning behind the decision: after a local newspaper named CanWest used a Reuters article, but added the word “terrorist.” Schlesinger objected to the modification, saying that such changes could lead to “confusion” about what Reuters is reporting and possibly endanger its reporters in volatile areas or situations.
The annual assembly of the UN’s World Health Organization today voted 96 to 11 for a resolution, co-sponsored by the Arab bloc and the Palestinian delegation, that singled out Israel over “Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.”
Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, condemned the delegates’ abuse of the UN body as a forum to target Israel.
“Out of 21 items on the meeting’s Agenda, only one—Item No. 14 against Israel—focused on a specific country. There was no agenda item or resolution on any other country, including Syria, where hospitals and medical infrastructure have suffered devastating bombings by Syrian and Russian forces; Yemen, where 19.7 million people lack access to health care service due to the current crisis; or Venezuela, where the health system has collapsed, causing millions to flee the country,” said Neuer.
“Today’s resolution is a fantastic lie. The UN reached new heights of absurdity by enacting a resolution which accuses Israel of violating the health rights of Syrians in the Golan, even as in reality Israeli hospitals provide life-saving treatment to Syrians fleeing to the Golan from the Assad regime’s barbaric attacks,” he said.
“Shame on France, Belgium and Sweden for encouraging this hijacking of the annual world health assembly, and diverting precious time, money, and resources from global health priorities, in order to wage a political prosecution of Israel, especially when, in reality, anyone who has ever walked into an Israeli hospital or clinic knows that they are providing world-class health care to thousands of Palestinian Arabs—including last week to Palestinian leader Jibril Rajoub—as well as to Syrians fleeing Assad,” Neuer added.
The vote was 96 to 11 on the resolution, with 21 abstentions and 56 absent.
Antisemitism should be spelled
without the hyphen. It’s something I’ve known for years, even if auto-correct
just won’t get the message. Neither will the media, of course, or even most
dictionaries.
“What’s the difference?” you
might well ask. “It’s just a little mark on the page. Meaningless.”
Ah, but it’s not.
The concept of “antisemitism”
(without the dash, thank you) and the term, were introduced by Wilhelm Marr when
he founded the DieAntisemitenliga, the League of
Antisemites, in 1879. Materials put out by the league often employed the word “antisemitism.”
The league, in fact, was the first popular political movement based solely on
anti-Jewish sentiment. Marr’s famous and oft-reprinted tract, The Victory of Judaism Over Germandom, made
the claim that “the
Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.”
Statutes of the Antisemitism League flanked by two of Marr's antisemitic tracts
Marr wore the title “antisemite”
as a badge of honor. From the perspective of Marr and his colleagues, to be an
antisemite was to be “woke.” But then, politics with a specifically anti-Jewish
flavor and focus were big all over Europe in the years leading up to the 20th
century.
The word “antisemitism” had its
roots in an 18th-century treatise on languages which analyzed the
differences between Aryan and Semitic languages. The terminology that was used
led to the false assumption that there were racial groups corresponding to
these two groups of languages. The minds of the time made a leap so that “Jew”
became synonymous with “semite” in the lexicon of the day.
The interesting thing here is
that there was already the perfectly good expression Judenhass, or “Jew hate,” in the popular lexicon. But Marr wanted
to make his hatred about race, rather than religion. The new term he coined
avoided altogether the question of religion. “Antisemitism” also sounded more
scientific, more intellectual, therefore more credible and more acceptable. Also,
people just liked it. So the word “antisemitismus”
spread like wildfire as a new way to speak about hating the Jews.
But the thing is, there’s no such
thing as a “semite” or even a “semitic” people. The terms were invented by some
historians in the 1770s
to refer to people who speak Semitic languages But in truth, there are onlySemitic languages. There
is no race or people that are “semites.”
In other words, when you spell
the word with a hyphen, the word makes no sense. Because you can’t be against
something that doesn’t exist. And there’s no such thing as a semite.
The other problem is that
people say that Arabs are semites, too, therefore Arabs can’t be antisemites,
because they can’t be against themselves.
Except there’s no such thing as
a semite.
The term antisemite, you see,
is standalone. It only means “someone who hates Jews.” And that is all it was
ever intended to mean.
Antisemitism, as a term, is based on racist claptrap. The word was lifted from the field of linguistics to give
weight to the idea of hating the Jews (and only the Jews) as a race (which they
aren’t). The pseudoscientific sound of the term gave it loft and validity.
Which is stupid.
To be clear: Jews aren’t
semites. Neither are Arabs.
Antisemites hate Jews, not
Arabs.
So when you use the hyphen you’re
unwittingly espousing turn of the century European racism. You’re also ignorant
of history. If Marr had meant to include Arabs he would have spelled the word
he invented with a hyphen to include them.
Historians, at least those who care
about academic rigor, are careful to spell the word without the hyphen. But the media
continues to hyphenate the word. And spell-check and the auto-correct function
of Word just won’t get the message. Historian Shmuel Almog, in
fact, wrote about the problem
with the hyphen all the way back in 1989:
“So the hyphen, or rather its omission, conveys a message; if
you hyphenate your 'anti-Semitism', you attach some credence to the very
foundation on which the whole thing rests. Strike out the hyphen and you will
treat antisemitism for what it really is—a generic name for modern Jew-hatred
which now embraces this phenomenon as a whole, past, present and—I am
afraid—future as well.”
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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Friday, May 24, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
