Antisemitism does Not Exist!
by Charles Pinwill
The word “semitic” was originally used to identify a group of languages. It had a biblical derivation and was supposed to have arisen from the the descendants of one of Noa’s sons “Shem” who disembarked from the arc in the centre of where these languages are spoken.
Semitic languages were spoken by the ancient Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians and Hebrews, and are still spoken in the form of Amharic in Ethiopia, Tigre in Sudan and Aramaic in Lebanon, Hebrew in Israel, and there are others too.
These languages have in common six vowel systems and three types of consonants. I don’t think hostility to others on the basis of their linguistic structures is existant.
In Germany around 1870 one Wilhelm Marr first coined the word “antisemitism” as a racial description. The Semitics he had in mind were Jewish. Though over 90% of the “semites’ in the world are Arabs, and the Jews probably less than 3 %, either through ignorance or some other unknowable reason, to Marr they were all Jews.
To the coming Zionists this was most fortuitous. Just as when talking to Germans in the 1950’s one was always advised “Don’t mention the War”, one could refer to Jew-haters without speaking of Jews.
The tremendous windfall which fell to Judaism and the coming Zionism, was that henceforth the dislike of them could be alleged to be racial, not philosophical or ethical. Holding to the idea of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”, and maintaining a fierce rejection of Christ’s advise “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you”, could not be the basis of antisemitism. It must be racial. Those who condemn Israel today do so on the basis of Gaza. None even know that Noa had a son called Shem..
Before the term “racist” was got at by the modern politically adept it had a straight forward an innocent meaning. It simply meant one who believed that race exists. Those who believed that a deity existed, were deists too.
Then came the twist. One cannot believe that race is real unless one hates on a racial basis. Further, those who think that genocide committed by Israel in Gaza is not OK, must do so on the basis of some foggy and faltering ancestry of the perpetrators.
It is not like that at all. We think that Israel’s genocidal activity is the product of demonic and hateful attitudes which after about 2,000 years, might be put aside. The Philistine/Palestinian conflict has gone on for over 2,000years now. If Jews decided that they could afford to have a little love for these people, that just might change things a little.