TIL the term "Semite" refers to both Jews and Arabs collectively.

@freemo Really? So, by that logic, Islamophobia is antisemitic?

@freemo Hmm, interesting. So, I wonder what the more specific term would be. Antijudaic?

@LouisIngenthron Interestingly despite a semite including all speakers of a semetic language, including jews and arabs, in general practice antisemite refers exclusively to jews... very confusing I know.

@freemo @LouisIngenthron I have never understood this. It gets more confusing when the Ashkenazi are Mediterranean Greek ancestry, and not Semitic. I had someone try to explain how "jewish" was both an ethnicity and a religion once, but the argument seemed to revolve around ignoring testable objective reality.

what I find challenging is exactly that conflation of "jew" with both ethnicity and religion, because even a just attack on ideology/religion/politics (particularly it's advocacy of violence and oppression) can easily be misconstrued (on purpose or otherwise) as an attack on ethnicity. the same to a lesser extent with "arab" or "muslim" to the extent they are synonymous in the popular mind of people outside those cultures.

@toiletpaper @freemo @LouisIngenthron it could not have been the 1st time I was presented with the argument, but my road to my current attitude on the use of the term "race" had several notable discussions about how it is applied to Jewish peoples. And later, Islamic people.

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