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Comment by gatlin | Hacker News Reader

I never understood this: the Palestinian children whose family and limbs are torn from them for Israeli sport are also Semites. It seems like the ultimate erasure to claim "antisemitic" for only Jews.

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Etymologically you're correct that semites refers to [all] people from middle east and horn of Africa. But the label is from the European perspective, where it was used to refer to Jews. I'm sure that if they'd had a say in it, they would not have referred to themselves as Jews.

But yeah, there is indeed some irony in the term "antisemitism" in the context you describe

European origin jews are not semites btw. Antisemitism is a misnomer, when they refer to antisemitism they refer to Jews only.

Semitic does not refer to people nor to a race of people, but to a family of languages including Hebrew and Arabic. The man who coined the term "antisemitic" used it to describe his own views which were specifically anti-Jew.

The only erasure is the attempt to diffuse the term to include Akkadians, Amharics, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Black Israelites, adherents to the Nation of Islam, all 1.3 billions Arabs, what-have-you, when it always and only ever referred to anti-Jew hatred.

There is no such thing as a "semite." It's an archaic racial category that 19th century German race science used since "anti-semite" sounds more scientific than "Jew hater." Consequently, that's why it's applied to Jews rather than a larger pseudoscientific racial group.

(More broadly, "they're semites too" is the "Elon Musk is African American" of I/P discourse. You can recognize extraordinary human tragedy without re-using race science.)

Speakers of Semitic languages are Semitic. This isn't controversial, unclear, or irrelevant.

I don’t know why you would assert this like it’s any of those things. You can look it up if you don’t believe me; you would be considered extremely weird for talking about “Semites” as a coherent racial or ethnic category around anthropologists.

(By comparison: nobody who isn’t a racist talks about Japhetites or Hamites, but these are the coextensive groups implied by the existence of Semites.)

I have simply referred to speakers of Semitic languages. You are the one concerned about whether this group comprises some kind of orthodox taxonomic grouping.

Speakers of Semitic languages are not "Semites" either.

I'm sorry for responding as though we were using the received definition, because we're now solidly in the "Elon Musk is African American" quadrant of stupid I/P meta-arguments.

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