purpleworm [none/use name]

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2025

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  • The term “Semitic” doesn’t have the same boundaries as “antisemitic”. “Semitic” can be used to refer to a group of ethnicities including Arabs, Akkadians, Habesha people, etc, gets used to refer to ancient speakers of Semitic languages, and is also of course is used to refer to Semitic languages themselves.

    When fascists who hate Jews coined “antisemitic,” they were using “Semite” as a synonym for “Jew,” which is incompatible with any of the definitions given above. As far as I know, they were just trying to sound smart or something.

    If you learned Arabic or Hebrew, that would not make you a Semite, just a speaker of a Semitic language for the same reason that if I learned Mandarin or Cantonese, that would not make me Sinitic (i.e. I would tragically still not be Chinese), but just a speaker of a Sinitic language