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Comment by newspaper1 | Hacker News Reader

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How could that possibly be true when the only people perpetuating this word are groups like the ADL, Israel... If what you said was true, all of these Zionist institutions wouldn't be promoting it.

I checked wikipedia, and actually it states the same as the parent comment. That sentence has five references. It doesn't shock me, given the era, but rather than speculate and squabble, someone could check the references and see if they really do support the statement in the wiki.

So all of these Jewish institutions are promoting an anti Jewish word? Please explain why they would do that.

I assume hardly anyone remembered, or payed much mind, to the origin of that word by the 1920s. I don't know who coined 'homophobia' or 'feminism' or many other concepts; they're just common words we use.

Right, so the word as it's used today is what we're talking about. It's being used as a weapon to silence criticism of Israel and Zionism in general.

I dunno. Regardless of the exact words one uses, one can always accuse one's opponent of bias.

If the word 'antisemitic' didn't exist, the accusation, phrased in different words, would still carry weight.

And I would complain about the false accusation if that was the case. As it stands "antisemitism" is what's being used to label people who oppose Zionism. It's just like how "communism" was used during McCarthyism.

I think the accusations are sometimes unfair, and other times accurate. I wouldn't like for the world just to dismiss hatred towards Jews, or any other group, out-of-hand. More than anything, I would like to see measured and humane discussion in the media about the Middle East; but sadly I don't expect that will happen.

The amount of unfair accusations dwarfs any real ones. For instance many in the VC world have accused Paul Graham of being antisemitic for simply showing concern about Palestinians. To be clear no critique of Israel including that you don't think it has a right to exist is "antisemitic". Israel is a state not an ethnicity and it was formed under what most consider to be illegal and unethical circumstances and it grew through ethnic cleansing. It's official religion is of no consequence when judging its actions.

One way to address that is to become cynical about 'antisemitism', but I hope that doesn't become prevalent. We've already entered an era in which majority groups resent minority grievances. Seems like that could lead to a lot of backwardness.

I alluded to this already, but it's so rare to hear public figures discuss Israel/Palestine without distorting and filtering what they say to promote one or the other side, it makes resolving things impossible.

I think the only backwardness we're going to see is censorship and accusations of "antisemitism" to quiet criticism of Israel. The US House of Representatives literally passed a bill last night equating criticism of Israel with "antisemitism". If people want that word to mean something, the need to start using it for a purpose other than silencing critics.

The fact that people use 'think of the children' as justification to pass terrible bills doesn't mean we should take issues affecting children lightly, right?

A bad bill that weaponises 'antisemitism' is a good reason to oppose the bill's authors and supporters. It is a bad reason to minimise actual cases of antisemitism directed at people who had no involvement with the bill.

No one is minimizing antisemitism though, we're saying that it's being used, often and illegitimately to censor people standing against apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. I'm genuinely curious if you think there's any antisemitism in this thread, because I don't think there is.

Apologies if I worded things poorly in my previous comment.

What I was driving at is that it's easy for a society, once there are widespread complaints about the weaponisation of some problem to slip into dismissing actual occurrences of the problem.

They're using the current common terminology for the phenomenon, which does not have the roots you claimed it has.

That's the point, it doesn't matter what the origin was, how it is being used now is what is being critiqued.

I can promise you that "the ADL and Israel and the Zionist institutions" are not the only ones using the term "antisemitism". I'd personally prefer that it'd be called anti Jewish racism.

They are the main institutions using the term as a weapon, and the discussion here is based on Netanyahu's own words.

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