Comment by reissbaker
1 year ago
Anti-Semitic refers specifically to anti-Jewish racism [1], "Arabs are also Semites so..." isn't an accurate understanding. English isn't Latin, combining roots can form a word with new meaning.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say things about "latent feature of Islam or Muslim culture." I do not think cultures are predetermined by hidden latent variables unique to them and are unrelated to their environments, and so that if something was introduced to the culture environmentally it somehow doesn't count. Similarly, European culture was once much less anti-Black a thousand years ago, and so anti-Black racism isn't a "latent feature" by the same standard. Nonetheless we can look at how cultures are
1. today, and
2. in the recent past
And see that anti-Black racism is now endemic. Similarly, anti-Semitism has been common for hundreds of years in Muslim societies, and blaming it on Israeli statehood is a non-sequitur since it has existed for less than a hundred.
If you insist on searching for hidden variables that are independent, I will point out that the Quran says that Jews are majority treacherous and "you will always find deceit on their part, except for a few" [2]. But of course, much of the Quran is simply a reference to the Christian Bible (e.g. references to the Jews killing Jesus [3], who Islam considers a prophet), so is it truly "latent" or is it an import from Christianity? Ultimately cultures are not machine learning models trained independently from each other on separate hardware; everyone steals from everyone else, so I think the distinction isn't meaningful. There has been significant anti-Semitism in the Muslim world for a long time, and it was endemic long before Israel existed. I reject victim-blaming the Jews for Muslim anti-Semitism due to the Jews creating Israel.
1: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority...
And this is exactly why the point about Semites comes into play; Arabs and (Middle-Eastern) Jews are functionally the same race. A Jewish person who converted to Islam would no longer be dhimmi, and would no longer pay the jizya or any other tax levied against non-Muslim populations. None of the discrimination noted would legally apply to him or her. It is not a status built on the race of the individual, but on their religion. Hence, it is literally not racist in the most basic way imaginable - it is not based on race! It's like calling ancient Spartan oppression of helots racism, or the British discrimination against the Irish sexism, or South African apartheid transphobia; it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what those words mean. This is why I said that racism is not the most useful lens to view the relationship between the groups through. They are the same race, with differing religions.
I mean, racism is a fairly fuzzy term and not based on hard science; plenty of people refer to the condition of Palestinians in Israel as "racism" (or in fact do use the word "apartheid"), but to invert what you're saying here — they can just convert to Judaism [1], so should the term apply? Anyway, regardless of whether we want to call it racism, Muslim societies were definitely anti-Semitic.
1: E.g. this man who actually did convert, immigrated to Israel, and then was jailed and beaten by the PA when he tried to visit his family in the West Bank https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-convert-to-judaism...