They conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism & anti-crimes against humanity in order to trample on people’s first amendment rights to speech & assembly.
Imagine being a Jewish student and having to be asked like 5x a day about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as of you have anything to do with it.
Yeah that’s gotta suck, but also imagine being a Jewish student protesting Zionism and genocide and being called antisemitic for partaking in a Jewish political stance that predates the modern nation of Israel.
We absolutely need to be fighting antisemitism, I’m very scared for my Jewish friends and loved ones. But we can’t do it by conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. And we especially can’t do it by conflating calls for Israel to display military restraint with antisemitism. Israel is not Judaism, it is not the international community of Jewish people, and it doesn’t hold authority over either group.
And I also worry about Arabic and Muslim students and citizens. Much like our Jewish neighbors they too don’t have a say in this conflict and deserve and need protection. And I’m not seeing any similar fights from the government for them and that concerns me.
ETA: this position was influenced by some recent conversations with Jewish friends who are very concerned with the silencing of Jewish calls for peace.
The ultimate irony: zionism was the product of antisemitism.
See: “Der Judenstaat” and the life of Theodor Herzl.
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That doesn’t sound fun, and I imagine I’d be pretty pissed off at Zionists right now.
saw video of an IDF troop or Israeli cop (not sure which) choke-slamming an anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish man for holding a Palestinian flag.
when I say Zionism is antisemitic, it’s based on what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard from Jewish people.
the guy got right back up, put his kippah back on, picked up the flag and got in the aggressor’s face. Braver than I’d be.
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There is much conflation going on, much of it intentional and sinister, but antisemitism does have a specific meaning & etymology pertaining to Jews, according to Wikipedia:
Due to the root word Semite, the term is prone to being invoked as a misnomer by those who interpret it as referring to racist hatred directed at all “Semitic people” (i.e., those who speak Semitic languages, such as Arabs, Assyrians, and Arameans). This usage is erroneous; the compound word antisemitismus (lit. ‘antisemitism’) was first used in print in Germany in 1879 as a “scientific-sounding term” for Judenhass (lit. ‘Jew-hatred’), and it has since been used to refer to anti-Jewish sentiment alone.
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No, the term was adopted by Jew-haters in Germany because it sounded more “scientific” than the older term Judenhass (Jewhate). Recall, many people once believed that the idea of “race” was a scientific explanation for differences among peoples. They believed that anthropology, linguistics, and evolutionary biology would back up their local cultural prejudices.
However, the German antisemites never cared about Arabs, Ethiopians, or other Semitic-speaking peoples. It was always about Jews: they wanted support for the political position that Europe’s Jews were a foreign corrupting influence who should be expelled or killed. “Antisemitismus” was a thin façade of bad social science over a continuation of the same Jewhate that Martin Luther and medieval passion-plays had expressed.
I mean, if we’re being pedantic Semite is an ethnic group and since Israel opens citizenship to anyone who is just religiously Jewish and very few people choose to immigrate to Palestine…
It’s hard to look at the two countries and say that the Antisemitic group isn’t the one committing human rights abuses and war crimes against the country overwhelming made up of Sematic people.
Israel just constantly tries to conflate religion and ethnic groups. I tried to find the racial breakdown of Israel, all I could find was it broken down by religion
Like, if someone with 0% Jewish heritage converts and move to Israel, they’re recorded as ethnically Jewish. And supporters of Israel say that justifies them seizing land from the people whose families have lived there for centuries
I’m pretty sure that using the term “Semite” in any other context than the modern interpretation of “antisemitic”, meaining prejudice against Jews, stopped being a thing roughly around the same time that we stopped treating the bible as an authority on the classification of human races. Same with Hamites and Japhetites.
“Semitic languages” are a language family that includes Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Amharic.
However the notion of a “Semitic race” is pseudoscience.
This is an intellectually disingenuous argument that tries to sound like a clever gotcha, instead it’s just antisemitic in and of itself.
Seriously? Gonna be pedantic about “semitic” and then intentionally use “Zionist” wrong?
The departments of Justice and Homeland Security are partnering with campus law enforcement to track hate-related threats and provide federal resources to schools, according to the plan, which was shared exclusively with NBC News.
So pretty much doing what they were already doing. Just being more proactive against people that were considering violence.
I don’t think this is a wrong measure. We are not ruled by lynch mobs, hunting witches.
People should be logical and rational against such hurtful opinions, but I think death against such individual crosses a line of morals that just hurts any productive solutions we could come up with.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is unveiling new actions Monday to combat antisemitism on college campuses after an “alarming” uptick in incidents since the Israel-Hamas war started in early October.
The departments of Justice and Homeland Security are partnering with campus law enforcement to track hate-related threats and provide federal resources to schools, according to the plan, which was shared exclusively with NBC News.
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona will meet with leading Jewish organizations to discuss the issue of growing antisemitism at colleges Monday, the official said.
Later this week, Cardona and White House domestic policy adviser Neera Tanden will visit a college campus and hold a roundtable with Jewish students.
Just last month, two weeks before the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, the administration rolled out additional actions to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia more broadly across several federal agencies, citing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The White House has also gone after former President Donald Trump — who is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — over his push for an expanded travel ban that would affect many people in Muslim nations, calling it “revolting and disgusting.”
The original article contains 864 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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No, the term “antisemitism” was not coined by Israelis. It was adopted by Jew-haters in Germany because it sounded more “scientific” than the older term Judenhass (Jewhate). Recall, many people once believed that the idea of “race” was a scientific explanation for differences among peoples. They believed that anthropology, linguistics, and evolutionary biology would back up their local cultural prejudices.
However, the German antisemites never cared about Arabs, Ethiopians, or other Semitic-speaking peoples. It was always about Jews: they wanted support for the political position that Europe’s Jews were a foreign corrupting influence who should be expelled or killed. “Antisemitismus” was a thin façade of bad social science over a continuation of the same Jewhate that Martin Luther and medieval passion-plays had expressed.
Thanks for the clarification!
