it’s not exactly a controversial or very original point to say that the meaning of antisemitism has been seriously trivialized, given how often it’s been used recently to mean justifiable criticism of israel
Israel has said flat out that it uses antisemitism accusations as a means to stifle criticism. Have you not seen the news since Oct. 7th? We have zionists swearing up and down that “from the river to the sea” is antisemitic for christ’s sake. It’s totally trivialized the word and given cover to actual antisemites, I’m talking real neo-nazis to spread hatred, it’s totally backfired.
The ADL is so fucking craven and cowardly with it’s shit. The head of it was gloating the other day on CNN over Asna Tabassum getting stopped from speaking.
Zionist are just extremely disingenuous. I read Innuendo Studio’s curious cat and every Israel apologist there just talks like they are trying to get him in a gotcha. Some examples that come to mind:
-Keep accusing him of wanting to exterminate Israel or being in the ‘Israel should not exist’ camp when his stand has always been ‘Israel should stop being an aparthied and grant equal rights to Palestinians’
-Accusing him of comparing Jews to nazis (more often than not is other curious cat askers on his page that are comparing Israel, not the Jews, to the nazis). Every time he says ‘Israel is conducting genocide’ these hasbara brigaders jump to accusing him of calling Jews Hitler.
-I remember one user who after Innuendo Studios said that Israel should stop being an ethnostate/ aparthied was like ‘oh so you support soft genocide where one race mixes with another to eventually produce offspring who dont resemble their parents’. When he called this mindset out as nazi shit they, predictably, accused him of calling Orthodox Jews nazis.
-Inventing bullshit hypothetical scenarios that are not happening right now. Like wrt the Ansar Allah blockade one asker was like ‘would you still support them if they were nazis’. Basically what he called Values-Neutral Governance in the You Go High, We Go Low Alt-Right Playbook video.
Israel should not exist. This is not anti-Semitic to say. Colonial projects have no legitimacy and Israel has no more right to existence than Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa
it has when used by anyone besides leftists. Center and right cannot distinguish between anti-zionism and anti-semitism so they cannot be trusted when they cry wolf.
I think there might be something wrong with you if you don’t look at 99% of the accusations of antisemitism being levied at people who are like “don’t genocide Palestine” and see something wrong with that
Or like shit like jk Rowling (who wrote very antisemitic caricatures in her shitty books) calling Corbyn an antisemite. Actually I literally only ever see accusations of antisemitism when it’s being used by right wingers like her in bad faith, or zionist Jews conflating criticism of Israeli imperialism with it.
I think there has to be something very wrong with you if you think that dishonest accusations of antisemitism renders the concept meaningless. This is a garbage post, and if you genuinely think that antisemitism has ceased to be a factor because of people like Podhoretz then you are also a garbage person.
They’re pretty explicit in talking about the word, not the concept. Nobody here is saying antisemitism, the concept, doesn’t exist or isn’t important, but that the signifier less and less frequently refers to the actual concept of antisemitism.
I think you might just be arguing at cross purposes. Original post was borderline a purely linguistic observation, but you’re talking about the underlying phenomenon.
In media especially, the popular use and meaning of antisemitism has been so thoroughly degraded and twisted that it’s not only largely useless, but I think should actually be a watchword for ‘more investigation of this claim is needed’.
But that doesn’t mean that the original and accurate meaning and the thing it actually describes does not exist or is not a problem, or that we should accept it’s shameless misuse and attempted perversion.
Wasn’t the original meaning/usage nazis trying to sound smart and scientific? Maybe this is wrong of me, but I think the word needs to be scraped for something more accurate.
Similarly, I am extremely grossed out by the common usage of the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe acts of violent displacement and genocide of people. It’s uncritically accepting the framing and language of the perpetrator of the crime, that they are doing a “cleansing” act by killing “unclean” people. That even leftists use the term gives me big heeby-jeebies.
idk that compound always made the “cleansing” part sound really gross to me, like a nazi was saying it and winking, rather than any association with cleanliness. If you don’t hang out with newage crystal healing weirdos you probably don’t even hear the word “cleanse” outside of the genocidal context.
the term is not used with a wink though, as a satirical critique of perpetrators of genocide. It is used straight, as a flat description of the process of “genocide lite”. Like even international legal documents will call it “ethnic cleansing” which is not appropriate whatsoever in my view, to accept the Nazi phraseology in such explicit ways
It’s weird, I have too had issues with the term, but never really thought of it in the sense of accepting the language of the perpetrator. I just hate it in the context of Palestine, where it is sort of used by libs to, as you say, soften the accusation of genocide. This of course rests on the false premise that the Israeli don’t want to outright genocide Palestinians, but simply “drive them out”, as if Palestinians were just generic “arabs” who will immediately assimilate and become Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians etc. if they flee, and not a unique people with a unique culture and a homeland - which the Israelis want to destroy and build fucking beach resorts on. It’s kind of a bullshit term for people too chickenshit to call a genocide what it is.
Anyway, not sure I added anything to your point, I just thought your almost etymological objection to the word was interesting. Just another reason to call a genocidal spade a genocidal spade.
It always struck me as weird how the word calls Jews “Semites”… like what’s that about? We call bigotry against Muslims islamophobia so I don’t understand why we don’t call bigotry against Jews judeophobia.
Where it gets really weird for me is there are other semites, but you would never hear someone being called anti semitic for hating Arabs. It kinda feels like erasing them.
Definitely agree with you on judeophobia being a better word.
quite interesting there’s no word in English that’s commonly used for hatred of Arabs. There’s islamophobia for Muslims, but not all arabs are muslims and not all muslims are arabs (See: Iranians, Chechnyans, Uighurs, Christian Palestinians, etc)
This is something quite relevant to me as a non-practicing secular Arab Muslim (effectively an atheist). If someone were to commit a hate crime against me for looking Arab, would it be called “islamophobia”? Doesn’t seem quite accurate to what is actually at play since I don’t have a beard, don’t wear traditional Muslim garb or signifiers, if someone attacked me it’s because I’m Arab/brown/leftist not because I’m Muslim most likely.
As far as i understand it, the usage of “semitism” originates in the accusation that jews as a diaspora organize completely separately from the nations they live in for their own benefit, basically that they are only loyal to themselves.
This is also why it’s suggested that you never hyphenate “antisemitism”, as one word it only describes the beliefs of antisemites, while hyphenated it treats “semitism” as a legitimate force.
the -phobic suffix is used much like the -phillic suffix in sociology, it generally means “averse to X” or “attracted to X” respectively. It’s not used in the sense of an actual psychological fear, but as a sociological flat amoral description of a group being anti-X and averse to it.
Think Hydrophobic and Hydrophillic. Rightwing groups are homophobic because they are averse to homosexuality and don’t want to interact with it, and when they come into contact with it they react negatively. Hydrophobic molecules are not “afraid” of water in a literal sense, it’s a description of their reaction to water.
I can accept that as an explanation of academic use of the terms.
where do you think any of these terms come from? They all originate in academia in a more scientific and rigorous setting, and then leak out into the mainstream ideology. Specificity and rigor is lost when strict control over the definition is lost and the word enters the public zeitgeist and takes on a meaning of its own.
This type of non-moralistic descriptionist language is what Marxists should seek to use when describing society, our role is to do a cold autopsy not to sit in moral judgment. We will never be able to control the public usage and steer language and how it develops, but we can control how we describe the world scientifically to each other. What others do with it later is their problem.
The concept of an innocent fear is frequent rhetoric, especially was during the late 90s and early aughts regarding homophobia
I don’t recall this personally, I recall instead it being framed not as fear but as ignorance and lack of understanding and willingness to understand. The 90s common knowledge among the more social-liberal portions of the public was that racism and bigotry were finished as powerful forces in the West, that they only existed in vestigial corners where education and diversity had not yet reached. It was not shown as innocent fear, but as a regrettable silly superstition that would be flushed out by history’s end if we all just keep being polite to each other.
You’re right. These words don’t describe fear, they describe persecution. Framing it as fear absolves people of their active and purposeful involvement and makes them sound like victims. As if transphobia or homophobia or whatever is akin to agoraphobia. And as if targeted harm can only be done by the mentally ill.
It also leads us to falsely conclude that the solution to bigotry is individual - reaching out and educating bigots one by one. It totally ignores the systemic causes that motivate such bigotry and how oftentimes, it’s not even bigotry! It’s just people rationally working within the ghoulish constraints that capitalism imposes which is honestly worse.
See my comment, it’s a phrase that is scientific and comes from the social sciences. It’s not about “absolving people” of sins, that’s moralism and unscientific and Liberal idealism. It’s a scientific description of a relationship between forces. You will never defeat the forces of reaction if you believe they stem from inherent evil in the souls of people instead of a materialist framework describing and addressing the root causes of the reactionary ideology
What’s different about the academic term from the colloquial word? I don’t see the distinction that you’re referring to.
And yeah we’re in agreement: reactionary ideology is rooted in material reality. And oftentimes what we call bigotry isn’t bigotry per se, but rather people making calculated decisions, intentionally and purposefully.
Read my comment below, the correct original use is akin to hydrophobic. IE, Y can be described as X-phobic if it shows an adverse reaction or rejection of X. It has nothing to do with fear in the psychological sense, which is the colloquial definition that you are attacking.
Describing reactionaries who don’t like gay rights as “homophobic” is 100% correct and accurate and has nothing to do with baggage you are bringing in about fear or morals
It has not, and that’s a bad path to go down to even suggest so.
it’s not exactly a controversial or very original point to say that the meaning of antisemitism has been seriously trivialized, given how often it’s been used recently to mean justifiable criticism of israel
Israel has said flat out that it uses antisemitism accusations as a means to stifle criticism. Have you not seen the news since Oct. 7th? We have zionists swearing up and down that “from the river to the sea” is antisemitic for christ’s sake. It’s totally trivialized the word and given cover to actual antisemites, I’m talking real neo-nazis to spread hatred, it’s totally backfired.
look at the ADL’s “antisemitism tracker”
The ADL is so fucking craven and cowardly with it’s shit. The head of it was gloating the other day on CNN over Asna Tabassum getting stopped from speaking.
that doesn’t mean that the word antisemitism has no meaning or that antisemitism isn’t a real and present factor.
The concept is very real, and absolutely a pressing problem.
The word becomes less and less meaningful the more zionists use it to justify blowing children to smitherines.
Zionist are just extremely disingenuous. I read Innuendo Studio’s curious cat and every Israel apologist there just talks like they are trying to get him in a gotcha. Some examples that come to mind:
-Keep accusing him of wanting to exterminate Israel or being in the ‘Israel should not exist’ camp when his stand has always been ‘Israel should stop being an aparthied and grant equal rights to Palestinians’
-Accusing him of comparing Jews to nazis (more often than not is other curious cat askers on his page that are comparing Israel, not the Jews, to the nazis). Every time he says ‘Israel is conducting genocide’ these hasbara brigaders jump to accusing him of calling Jews Hitler.
-I remember one user who after Innuendo Studios said that Israel should stop being an ethnostate/ aparthied was like ‘oh so you support soft genocide where one race mixes with another to eventually produce offspring who dont resemble their parents’. When he called this mindset out as nazi shit they, predictably, accused him of calling Orthodox Jews nazis.
-Inventing bullshit hypothetical scenarios that are not happening right now. Like wrt the Ansar Allah blockade one asker was like ‘would you still support them if they were nazis’. Basically what he called Values-Neutral Governance in the You Go High, We Go Low Alt-Right Playbook video.
Israel should not exist. This is not anti-Semitic to say. Colonial projects have no legitimacy and Israel has no more right to existence than Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa
it has when used by anyone besides leftists. Center and right cannot distinguish between anti-zionism and anti-semitism so they cannot be trusted when they cry wolf.
are you
I think there might be something wrong with you if you don’t look at 99% of the accusations of antisemitism being levied at people who are like “don’t genocide Palestine” and see something wrong with that
Or like shit like jk Rowling (who wrote very antisemitic caricatures in her shitty books) calling Corbyn an antisemite. Actually I literally only ever see accusations of antisemitism when it’s being used by right wingers like her in bad faith, or zionist Jews conflating criticism of Israeli imperialism with it.
I think there has to be something very wrong with you if you think that dishonest accusations of antisemitism renders the concept meaningless. This is a garbage post, and if you genuinely think that antisemitism has ceased to be a factor because of people like Podhoretz then you are also a garbage person.
They’re pretty explicit in talking about the word, not the concept. Nobody here is saying antisemitism, the concept, doesn’t exist or isn’t important, but that the signifier less and less frequently refers to the actual concept of antisemitism.
I think you might just be arguing at cross purposes. Original post was borderline a purely linguistic observation, but you’re talking about the underlying phenomenon.
Okay you’re just an idiot, bye
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it has when zionists use the term
Both can essentially be the case.
In media especially, the popular use and meaning of antisemitism has been so thoroughly degraded and twisted that it’s not only largely useless, but I think should actually be a watchword for ‘more investigation of this claim is needed’.
But that doesn’t mean that the original and accurate meaning and the thing it actually describes does not exist or is not a problem, or that we should accept it’s shameless misuse and attempted perversion.
Wasn’t the original meaning/usage nazis trying to sound smart and scientific? Maybe this is wrong of me, but I think the word needs to be scraped for something more accurate.
Similarly, I am extremely grossed out by the common usage of the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe acts of violent displacement and genocide of people. It’s uncritically accepting the framing and language of the perpetrator of the crime, that they are doing a “cleansing” act by killing “unclean” people. That even leftists use the term gives me big heeby-jeebies.
idk that compound always made the “cleansing” part sound really gross to me, like a nazi was saying it and winking, rather than any association with cleanliness. If you don’t hang out with newage crystal healing weirdos you probably don’t even hear the word “cleanse” outside of the genocidal context.
the term is not used with a wink though, as a satirical critique of perpetrators of genocide. It is used straight, as a flat description of the process of “genocide lite”. Like even international legal documents will call it “ethnic cleansing” which is not appropriate whatsoever in my view, to accept the Nazi phraseology in such explicit ways
It’s weird, I have too had issues with the term, but never really thought of it in the sense of accepting the language of the perpetrator. I just hate it in the context of Palestine, where it is sort of used by libs to, as you say, soften the accusation of genocide. This of course rests on the false premise that the Israeli don’t want to outright genocide Palestinians, but simply “drive them out”, as if Palestinians were just generic “arabs” who will immediately assimilate and become Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians etc. if they flee, and not a unique people with a unique culture and a homeland - which the Israelis want to destroy and build fucking beach resorts on. It’s kind of a bullshit term for people too chickenshit to call a genocide what it is.
Anyway, not sure I added anything to your point, I just thought your almost etymological objection to the word was interesting. Just another reason to call a genocidal spade a genocidal spade.
It always struck me as weird how the word calls Jews “Semites”… like what’s that about? We call bigotry against Muslims islamophobia so I don’t understand why we don’t call bigotry against Jews judeophobia.
Where it gets really weird for me is there are other semites, but you would never hear someone being called anti semitic for hating Arabs. It kinda feels like erasing them.
Definitely agree with you on judeophobia being a better word.
quite interesting there’s no word in English that’s commonly used for hatred of Arabs. There’s islamophobia for Muslims, but not all arabs are muslims and not all muslims are arabs (See: Iranians, Chechnyans, Uighurs, Christian Palestinians, etc)
This is something quite relevant to me as a non-practicing secular Arab Muslim (effectively an atheist). If someone were to commit a hate crime against me for looking Arab, would it be called “islamophobia”? Doesn’t seem quite accurate to what is actually at play since I don’t have a beard, don’t wear traditional Muslim garb or signifiers, if someone attacked me it’s because I’m Arab/brown/leftist not because I’m Muslim most likely.
As far as i understand it, the usage of “semitism” originates in the accusation that jews as a diaspora organize completely separately from the nations they live in for their own benefit, basically that they are only loyal to themselves.
This is also why it’s suggested that you never hyphenate “antisemitism”, as one word it only describes the beliefs of antisemites, while hyphenated it treats “semitism” as a legitimate force.
Whoa really? So “antisemitism” is itself antijewish, that’s fucked up
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the -phobic suffix is used much like the -phillic suffix in sociology, it generally means “averse to X” or “attracted to X” respectively. It’s not used in the sense of an actual psychological fear, but as a sociological flat amoral description of a group being anti-X and averse to it.
Think Hydrophobic and Hydrophillic. Rightwing groups are homophobic because they are averse to homosexuality and don’t want to interact with it, and when they come into contact with it they react negatively. Hydrophobic molecules are not “afraid” of water in a literal sense, it’s a description of their reaction to water.
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where do you think any of these terms come from? They all originate in academia in a more scientific and rigorous setting, and then leak out into the mainstream ideology. Specificity and rigor is lost when strict control over the definition is lost and the word enters the public zeitgeist and takes on a meaning of its own.
This type of non-moralistic descriptionist language is what Marxists should seek to use when describing society, our role is to do a cold autopsy not to sit in moral judgment. We will never be able to control the public usage and steer language and how it develops, but we can control how we describe the world scientifically to each other. What others do with it later is their problem.
I don’t recall this personally, I recall instead it being framed not as fear but as ignorance and lack of understanding and willingness to understand. The 90s common knowledge among the more social-liberal portions of the public was that racism and bigotry were finished as powerful forces in the West, that they only existed in vestigial corners where education and diversity had not yet reached. It was not shown as innocent fear, but as a regrettable silly superstition that would be flushed out by history’s end if we all just keep being polite to each other.
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You’re right. These words don’t describe fear, they describe persecution. Framing it as fear absolves people of their active and purposeful involvement and makes them sound like victims. As if transphobia or homophobia or whatever is akin to agoraphobia. And as if targeted harm can only be done by the mentally ill.
It also leads us to falsely conclude that the solution to bigotry is individual - reaching out and educating bigots one by one. It totally ignores the systemic causes that motivate such bigotry and how oftentimes, it’s not even bigotry! It’s just people rationally working within the ghoulish constraints that capitalism imposes which is honestly worse.
See my comment, it’s a phrase that is scientific and comes from the social sciences. It’s not about “absolving people” of sins, that’s moralism and unscientific and Liberal idealism. It’s a scientific description of a relationship between forces. You will never defeat the forces of reaction if you believe they stem from inherent evil in the souls of people instead of a materialist framework describing and addressing the root causes of the reactionary ideology
What’s different about the academic term from the colloquial word? I don’t see the distinction that you’re referring to.
And yeah we’re in agreement: reactionary ideology is rooted in material reality. And oftentimes what we call bigotry isn’t bigotry per se, but rather people making calculated decisions, intentionally and purposefully.
Read my comment below, the correct original use is akin to hydrophobic. IE, Y can be described as X-phobic if it shows an adverse reaction or rejection of X. It has nothing to do with fear in the psychological sense, which is the colloquial definition that you are attacking.
Describing reactionaries who don’t like gay rights as “homophobic” is 100% correct and accurate and has nothing to do with baggage you are bringing in about fear or morals
It has. Read this article by Em Cohen
https://emcohen.medium.com/on-the-dangers-of-fighting-antisemitism-c888c0bbd79f