I see people thinking that semite=Jew, but bear in mind that “semite” was a term created in 1781 by german philologist Ludwig Schlotzer to describe languages that are similar (Arabic, hebrew, Aramaic, etc).
Many other languages are considered semite, and Hebrew was not even the first of them.
If you check in Wikipedia, you can also see how this people migrated over time:
I don’t think I can cosign a message like this. When talking about semetic, people aren’t talking about the language families. They are talking about instead a concept of Jewish people belonging to a Semitic race, race in reference to a racial “science” category. Antisemitism is explicitly anti-Jewish and Islamophobia is inciting hatred against Muslims. I don’t think Jewish people are laying claim to the entire Semetic language family and excluding ones like Arabic, nor do I see any new definition of antisemitism now referring to non-Jews.
This just leads to an ineffective argument that crumbles under pressure. I wouldn’t bother using this concept unless some day all people speaking Semitic languages are lumped together and oppressed by that category. and besides, anti-black and Islamophobic sentiment already does enough lifting to attack both Jews and non-Jews who speak Semitic languages on top of the already-existing antisemitism that was prominent 19th and 20th century.
How? Anti-black and islamophobia are so different from anti-Semititism. I’d like to know how those two things also affect other demographics beyond their main targets (those being B-POC and Muslims)
Imagine someone speaking a Semitic language in public, likely in the United States. Regardless of the language, think about what they look like. They are likely black, from Africa, or they “look” Arab (in American terms, they look like a terrorist). If this person was discriminated against after speaking that language, do you think it’s because of antisemitism? I doubt it.
The antisemitic attacks seen are those against people working in finance/banking, orthodox Jews, synogogues, and “secret society” meetings like the freemason lodges. Conspiracy theory brained at best, explictly vile antisemitism otherwise. We know these stereotypes and they have nothing to do with the Semitic language family.
I don’t believe the attacks on an orthodox Jew is the same as an attack on someone speaking Arabic. The first is antisemitism plain and simple, the latter Islamophobia.
The reason I mentioned blackness is because of the US’ historical targeting of black (black as in African-American here) muslim populations in the country as well as dark-skin and black Muslims from Somalia, Sudan, etc
Even though these attacks are primarily Islamophobic and/or anti-black, it is still true that some Jewish people get caught in the middle of it. But those Jewish people are not targeted due to antisemitism in these particular cases.