Europe: anti-Semitism?

Basically zionism nowadays isn't the simple creation of a jewish state, it is the growth of a jewish state, not just maintenance of the current one. Whether it's through continued growth or holding of certain lands or that ever growing notion of "defending yourself" stance which has many detrimental aspects to say the least. The basic notion which you and many others point to about those who don't want Israel as a nation to exist is outdated beyond belief. Yes there are a few extreme terrorist groups, but certainly not on a national level as it once was. That type of mentality is merely used as a scapegoat to excuse Israel's terrible policies and actions in recent times rather than a clear and defined view on the Middle East wanting to push the jews to the sea. There's been countless peace talks all aimed and discussed with a duel state plan and even non-nuclear Middle East talks, and it has stalled as a result of Israel and US intervention. In my opinion, in today's time frame, we're well beyond the point of saying one side is more responsible for wrong-doing than the other and in order to create a long term peace, both sides need to do lots. To say otherwise just simply is biased beyond fact.

FiveB247x wrote:

At some point, zionism (in todays form - not mere existence as you claim it, but growth of it) enables anti-semitism .. it fuels the fire, so basically it all goes hand and hand. It's easy to overlook this fact cause you don't believe it, but it doesn't make it any less true.

what annoys me about the antisemitic slur is that it has come to be attached to bigotry against jews only.

redrock wrote:

catefrances wrote:

what annoys me about the antisemitic slur is that it has come to be attached to bigotry against jews only.

Just the way the language evolved, I guess. I guess if one is anti-semitic but against the arabs, they would just shove it in the anti-arab group. Most won't know or bother with other semetic language groups such as the Assyrians.

yeah i know but it has conveniently excluded the other major ethnic group in the region who is invariably seen as 'the enemy'.

Ancient Semitic peoples

Approximate distribution of Semitic language around 1 A.D.The following is a list of ancient Semitic peoples.

Akkadians — migrated into Mesopotamia in the late 4th millennium BC and amalgamate with non-Semitic Mesopotamian (Sumerian) populations into the Assyrians and Babylonians of the Late Bronze Age.[4][5]
Eblaites — 23rd century BC
Aramaeans or Chaldea — 16th to 8th century BC[6] / Akhlames (Ahlamu) 14th century BC[7]
Ugarites, 14th to 12th centuries BC
Canaanite language speaking nations of the early Iron Age:
Amorites
Ammonites
Edomites
Hebrews/Israelites — founded the nation of Israel which later split into the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The remnants of these people became the Samaritans and Jews.
Moabites
Phoenicians — founded Mediterranean colonies including Carthage
Old South Arabian speaking peoples
Sabaeans of Yemen — 9th to 1st c. BC
Ethio-Semitic speaking peoples
Aksumites — 4th c. BC to 7th c. AD
Arabs, Old North Arabian speaking Bedouins
Gindibu's Arabs 9th c. BC
Lihyanites — 6th to 1st c. BC
Thamud people — 2nd to 5th c. AD
Ghassanids — 3rd to 7th c. AD
Nabataeans — adopted Arabic in the 4th century AD
[edit] Languages
Main article: Semitic languages

The Harvard Semitic Museum at Harvard UniversityThe modern linguistic meaning of "Semitic" is therefore derived from (though not identical to) Biblical usage. In a linguistic context the Semitic languages are a subgroup of the larger Afroasiatic language family (according to Joseph Greenberg's widely accepted classification) and include, among others: Akkadian, the ancient language of Babylon; Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia; Tigrinya, a language spoken in Eritrea and in northern Ethiopia; Arabic; Aramaic; Canaanite; Ge'ez, the ancient language of the Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox scriptures; Hebrew; Maltese; Phoenician or Punic; Syriac; and South Arabian, the ancient language of Sheba/Saba, which today includes Mehri, spoken by only tiny minorities on the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula.

Wildly successful as second languages far beyond their numbers of contemporary first-language speakers, a few Semitic languages today are the base of the sacred literature of some of the world's great religions, including Islam (Arabic), Judaism (Hebrew and Aramaic), and Orthodox Christianity (Aramaic and Ge'ez). Millions learn these as a second language (or an archaic version of their modern tongues): many Muslims learn to read and recite Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur'an, and many Jews all over the world outside of Israel with other first languages speak and study Hebrew, the language of the Torah, Midrash, and other Jewish scriptures.

It should be noted that Berber, Egyptian (including Coptic), Hausa, Somali, and many other related languages within the wider area of Northern Africa and the Middle East do not belong to the Semitic group, but to the larger Afroasiatic language family of which the Semitic languages are also a subgroup.[8] Other ancient and modern Middle Eastern languages — Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Persian, Gilaki, Turkish, ancient Sumerian, and Nubian — do not belong to the larger Afroasiatic language family.

For a complete list of Semitic languages arranged by subfamily, see list from SIL's Ethnologue.

[edit] Geography
Semitic peoples and their languages, in both modern and ancient historic times, have covered a broad area bridging Africa, Western Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest historic (written) evidences of them are found in the Fertile Crescent, an area encompassing the Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, extending northwest into southern Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the Levant along the eastern Mediterranean. Early traces of Semitic speakers are found, too, in South Arabian inscriptions in Yemen, Eritrea, Northern Ethiopia and later, in Roman times, in Nabataean inscriptions from Petra (modern Jordan) south into Arabia.

Later historical Semitic languages also spread into North Africa in two widely separated periods. The first expansion occurred with the ancient Phoenicians, along the southern Mediterranean Sea all the way to the Atlantic Ocean (colonies which included ancient Rome's nemesis Carthage). The second, a millennium later, was the expansion of the Muslim armies and Arabic in the 7th-8th centuries AD, which, at their height, controlled the Iberian Peninsula (until 1492) and Sicily. Arab Muslim expansion is also responsible for modern Arabic's presence from Mauritania, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, to the Red Sea in the northeastern corner of Africa, and its reach south along the Nile River through traditionally non-Semitic territory, as far as the northern half of Sudan, where, as the national language, non-Arab Sudanese even farther south must learn it.

Modern Hebrew was reintroduced in the 20th century, and together with Arabic, is a national language in Israel. Western Aramaic dialects remain spoken in Malula near Damascus. Eastern Neo-Aramaic is spoken along the northern border of Syria and Iraq, Southeast-Turkey (Turabdin) and in far northwestern Iran. These speakers are often called Chaldean or Neo-Assyrian. Mandean is still spoken in parts of southern Iraq. Semitic languages and peoples are also found in the Horn of Africa, especially Eritrea and Ethiopia. Tigrinya, a North Ethiopic dialect, has around six million speakers in Eritrea and Tigray. In Eritrea, Tigre is the language of around 800,000 Muslims. Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia and is spoken by at least 10 million Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. Semitic languages today are also spoken in Malta (where an Italian-influenced language derived from Siculo-Arabic is spoken) and on the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean between Yemen and Somalia, where a dying vestige of South Arabian is spoken in the form of Soqotri. The Maltese language is the only officially recognized Semitic language of the European Union.

[edit] Religion
In a religious context, the term 'Semitic' can refer to the religions associated with the speakers of these languages: thus Judaism, Christianity and Islam are often described as "Semitic religions" (irrespective of language family spoken by their adherents).

The term Abrahamic religions is more commonly used today. A truly comprehensive account of "Semitic" religions would include the Ancient Semitic religions (such as the religions of Adad, Hadad) that flourished in the Middle East before the Abrahamic religions.

[edit] Ethnicity and race
Further information: Caucasian race, Hamitic race, and Scientific racism

A stylised T and O map, depicting Asia as the home of the descendents of Shem (Sem). Africa is ascribed to Ham and Europe to JaphethIn Medieval Europe, all Asian peoples were thought of as descendants of Shem. By the nineteenth century, the term Semitic was confined to the ethnic groups who have historically spoken Semitic languages. These peoples were often considered to be a distinct race. However, some anti-Semitic racial theorists of the time argued that the Semitic peoples arose from the blurring of distinctions between previously separate races. This supposed process was referred to as Semiticization by the race-theorist Arthur de Gobineau. The notion that Semitic identity was a product of racial "confusion" was later taken up by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.[citation needed]

In contrast, some recent genetic studies found that analysis of the DNA of Semitic-speaking peoples suggests that they have some common ancestry. Though no significant common mitochondrial results have been yielded, Y-chromosomal links between Semitic-speaking Near-Eastern peoples like Arabs and Hebrews have proved fruitful, despite differences contributed from other groups (see Y-chromosomal Aaron). The studies attribute this correlation to a common Near Eastern origin, since Semitic-speaking Near Easterners from the Fertile Crescent (including Jews) were found to be more closely related to non-Semitic speaking Near Easterners (such as Iranians, Anatolians, and Caucasians) than to other Semitic-speakers (such as Gulf Arabs, Ethiopian Semites, and North African Arabs).[9][10]

Semiticization is a concept found in the writings of some racial theorists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[1] The term was first used by Arthur de Gobineau to label the blurring of racial distinctions that, in his view, had occurred in the Middle-East. Gobineau had an essentialist model of race according to which there were three distinct racial groups: "black", "white" and "yellow" peoples, though he had no clear account of how this division arose. When these races mixed this caused "degeneration". Since the point at which these three supposed races met was in the middle-east, Gobineau argued that the process of mixing and diluting races occurred there, and that Semitic peoples embodied this "confused" racial identity.

This concept suited the interests of antisemites, since it provided a theoretical model to rationalise racialised antisemitism. Variations of the theory are to be found in the writings of many antisemites in the late nineteenth century. The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg developed a variant of the theory in his writings, arguing that Jewish people were not a "real" race. According to Rosenberg, their evolution came about from the mixing of pre-existing races rather than from natural selection. The theory of Semiticization was typically associated with other longstanding racist fears about the dilution of racial difference, manifested in negative images of mulattos and other mixed groups.