The speakers of Arabic and Aramaic languages are semitic peoples. The irony of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth in European capitals about anti-Jewish racism is that the most vocal treat these other semites exactly the same.
For generations now, they have been dehumanised daily by our popular media, their lives considered of little worth. Every racist trope reserved for the Jews of Europe for millennia has been redeployed to deprive their cousins of their humanity.
Most tragically, this is done in the name of defending Jewish people from racism: anti-racism in the service of racism, or vice versa. Mostly it seems to be promulgated by non-Jewish people as a smokescreen for their own rabid racism.
Certainly, they would not like to hear the accounts of our Sephardic Jewish neighbours, whose ancestors had been granted refuge by the Ottoman empire when they were expelled from Spain in 1492, where they remained until 1969.
It seems that instead, virulent critics of the semitic way prefer to superimpose their own prejudices on others. Do they really care for either of these groups of people, or are they just a means to an end? The test is to compare what they write about one group today to all that was written about the other in the past.
Last modified: 14 November 2023
