Comment by woodruffw
2 days ago
There is no such thing as a "semite." It's an archaic racial category that 19th century German race science used since "anti-semite" sounds more scientific than "Jew hater." Consequently, that's why it's applied to Jews rather than a larger pseudoscientific racial group.
(More broadly, "they're semites too" is the "Elon Musk is African American" of I/P discourse. You can recognize extraordinary human tragedy without re-using race science.)
Speakers of Semitic languages are Semitic. This isn't controversial, unclear, or irrelevant.
I don’t know why you would assert this like it’s any of those things. You can look it up if you don’t believe me; you would be considered extremely weird for talking about “Semites” as a coherent racial or ethnic category around anthropologists.
(By comparison: nobody who isn’t a racist talks about Japhetites or Hamites, but these are the coextensive groups implied by the existence of Semites.)