NOTES ON “ANTI-SEMITISM” AND “THE FIRST ANTI-SEMITES”

Note on “anti-Semitism”

It is time for the world to stop using “anti-Semitic” when it means “anti-Jewish.” “Anti-Semitism” of this meaning is either just a euphemism or enormously presumptive. About 95% of the world’s Semites are Arabs, many of whom are nowadays “anti-Jewish,” so what sense does it make to call a Semite who is “anti-Jewish” an “anti-Semite”? If you call a Palestinian throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers an “anti-Semite,” you’re saying that he’s anti-himself! It’s time to bring an end to this semantic lunacy. It makes no sense to call Yassir Arafat or Osama bin Laden “anti-Semitic” when each is far more of a Semite than Ariel Sharon or most other Israelis, whose descent is primarily mixed European, at best. The world will have not have come to its senses on this issue until “anti-Semitic” means “anti-Arab” and nothing else.

Note on “The First Anti-Semites”

Another fact we need to face up to—“anti-Jewishness” was invented by Jews, surprisingly enough. The Romans, Greeks, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Egyptians who from time to time enslaved or conquered the Hebrews were not “anti-Jewish,” they were simply doing what conquerors always do, and what the Hebrews themselves did to others during the brief period of their military might and empire—they enslaved the conquered and made them bend to their will. The horrible truth is that “anti-Jewishness” (which we now stupidly call “anti-Semitism”) was invented by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, Paul, and no doubt other Jewish Christians of the first century A.D., and carefully nurtured through the centuries by the Gentile Church to suit its various agendas. Especially culpable is whoever wrote the Book of Revelation, which is the book that first called Jews “Satanic” and which in damning non-Christian Jews to hellfire sanctioned all the pogroms to come. Jewish Christians damned their fellow Jews out of their severe and bitter disappointment at being dismissed by orthodox Judaism as frauds. The first Christians thought Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and fully expected to have him declared so by Judaism. But when that did not happen, their wrath at their Jewish brothers was extreme, a wrath that has crippled the Church with “anti-Jewishness” ever since. Those first Christians might be appalled to see how their backlash against fellow Jews has multiplied and intensified over the centuries and resulted in the death and persecution of ever more Jews, but there’s no doubt that the first Christians were the first “anti-Jewish” people. A tradition which the Church has kept alive through the centuries whenever it needed a scapegoat to ensure its own power, through pogrom after pogrom after pogrom.

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