Arabs are a semitic people.
Hebrews and Arabs are like cousins. Persians are not a semitic people, which is why I said ‘Persians, too’.
Anti-Arab feeling is anti-semitism, but it’s like a fnord. People see right past it.
I percieve, as well as anti-semitism, a bigotry against Persian people (who are not semites).
No, not at all. If a black, fat, handicapped, gay, whatever person walked into your office, it would be thought rude to whip out your cell phone and snap a photo for curiosity’s sake. I maintain it would be acceptable for a person to take a snapshot of Ms Allen and perhaps make a witty remark.
It’s not just differentness compared to the overall majority, but differentness as compared to individual majorities. And often in their calls of bigotry of others people can be bigots themselves.
When anti-bigotry is the norm, people will simply be prejudiced against the bigots. I doubt we’ll escape from it any time soon.
I’m not sure I follow this idea. Are you suggesting that, at some point in the future, the pendulum will swing back so that left-handedness will become unacceptable and drunk driving will become OK again?
Antisemitism is the prejudice against or hostility toward Jews as a group. That Arabs are Semites is irrelevant.
There was a thread about this recently.
Acceptable by whom? I maintain that it’s not acceptable to whip out a camera to take a picture of a stranger because they’re freakishly tall. Not any more than taking a picture of a stranger because they hold a record for being the blackest, fattest, most handicapped, etc. person.
Interesting. The Wikipedia link in that thread appears to affirm that the term “antisemitism” has always referred to Jews only (Marr, 1880)… yet the earlier term “antisemitic” referred to all Semitic races (Steinschneider, 1860).
So while anti-Arab feeling is not antisemitism, it is antisemitic.
More to the point, Persians are not Arabs, and are not Semites. Somehow all this started with Persians.
Anti-Semitism means bigotry against Jews, and only Jews, plain and simple. Any other interpretation of this is either ill-informed, or an attempt to lead people down the garden path. You can argue semantics all you want, but it’s like saying that someone who’s the children of white South African parents should be identified as an “African-American.”
I was going to pick ‘Rich people’ as the answer, myself.
Not left handedness. You go to far.
Well, yeah. They’d be “African,” obviously.
They’d be “South African.” Africa is a huge continent. If someone who looked like Matthew McConnaghy went around calling himself an African-American and insisting that others identify him as such, he would be a laughingstock.
There’s the minute technicalities of language, and then there’s how the majority of people actually interpret that language. The latter is what’s more important.
No. But things that are considered unacceptable now will probably be acceptable in 50 years. And things that are acceptable now may not be. It won’t necessarily be the SAME things, but it will be a shift. And the thing is, we can’t tell right now what will and will not be acceptable. If you’d asked the average person-on-the-street in 1960 if someday homosexuality would be mostly accepted, they’d laugh at you (or have you arrested). For all we know right now, it may be acceptable in 50 years to hit-and-run as long as the victim is a homeless person. Or it may go the other direction and it will be considered acceptable among the impoverished majority to kill and eat the rich, who have gathered in their heavily defended walled communities for safety.
Maybe you don’t want to argue semantics. But the rest of us don’t have to listen to your anti-semantic bigotry.
The thread left the track, flipped over and began to burn.
Thank you for your comments. I am heading to bed.
I blame the Persians.
No offense but I think the premise of the thread was somewhat flawed to begin with. Bigotry means making fun of or disliking a large group of people. There isn’t a large group of seven-foot-seven women. Making fun of one such woman might be in very poor taste, but bigotry it isn’t.
Yep. Bet that there’s someone in here defending it before the second page.
Terrifel, language should be used to communicate clearly and honestly. I don’t care what you want to call it, what you’re really doing is using language to communicate *unclearly *and dishonestly. It’s really that simple.
*You *know what those words have come to mean, which is far more relevant than what they *used *to mean, or what their decontextualized components mean. You’re practicing Newspeak.