In order to understand that word it is necessary to de-construct it and to understand its origin and history.

The first question that arises is who exactly is a Semite? Go to the Oxford English dictionary and you get “Originally: a member of any of the peoples mentioned in Genesis 10:21–31 as descended from Shem, one of the sons of Noah, traditionally interpreted as including the Hebrews, Aramaeans, Assyrians, and Arabs. Subsequently also: a member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language.”

That seems pretty clear and so you move on to the next question which is what are the Semitic languages? It turns out, according to Wikipedia that, “The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltise, Modern South Arabian and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Gottingen School of History, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three son of Noah in the Book of Genesis.”

That also seems pretty clear and definitive, but raises an immediate question in terms of the way in which the word antisemitism operates in the West today. Again referring to Wikipedia that usage in the West is defined “As hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews.” The German word “antisemitisch” was first used in 1860 by the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907) in the phrase “antisemitische Vorurteile” (antisemitic prejudices). Steinschneider used this phrase to characterise the French philosopher Ernest Renan’s false ideas about how Semitic races were inferior to Aryan Races.

The questions that the foregoing raise is why was the definition of Semites developed in the West by Ashkenazi Jewish intellectuals confined only to Jews to the exclusion of other Semitic peoples, who incidentally vastly outnumber the worldwide Jewish population? What was the reason for excluding the other races who are also descended from the biblical Shem? It appears that it was simply a convenience for those who developed the term as a response to Renan’s idea that all such Semitic peoples were inferior to the Christian Aryans of Europe. So as a response to the evident falsity of that belief about the superiority of the Aryan race, the term was coined to refer to a hatred of all Semitic races, but then became focused only on Ashkenazi Jews of Europe.

The logical conclusion from these facts is that antisemitism related to hatred of, or assumptions of superiority over, all Semitic peoples, including the vast Arabic-speaking world. That has certainly been reflected in the practice of the Aryan West for at least the last 500 years, with respect to all Semitic peoples, as well as much of the vast bulk of humanity who are native speakers of no Semitic language. The Ashkenazi Jews, who had suffered discrimination, violence and exclusion from the Aryan Europeans for millennia, thus appropriated the term antisemitism solely to such actions against them to the exclusion of all other Semitic peoples. In logic, such a term as is used in the West is illogical and inaccurate unless it is applied to all Semitic peoples.

If it is simply anti-Jewism, then that is what it should be more accurately called as to do otherwise assumes away the real attitudes of the Aryan West towards the vast bulk of the Semitic peoples, who on current practices they appear to despise far more than they do the Jews. This is reflected in their constant attempts to colonise and eliminate them over the last few centuries. The problem is that since the Holocaust of six million Ashkenazi Jews, along with a further 11 million people of other racial, social and political groups despised by the Aryan supremacist Nazis, antisemitism has progressively been weaponised. The focus on the fate of the six million European Jews over the fate of that other 11 million, is a way of using the collective guilt of the Europeans to ensure it is used to favour the interests of the Jews specifically over those other groups. It has been one of the most successful propaganda strategies ever devised. No similar odium has been attributed to the Nazis for that other 11 million, whose existence is largely unknown to most in the West.

That collective guilt of the West for the depredations they allowed practically without demur to be carried out on the European Jews has enabled the Zionists around the world to achieve a “get out of jail free” card for any obscenity or atrocity they themselves carry out against other semitic races. The West then facilitates and enables, through its control of much of the media space around the world, the use of the label they have assisted Israel to weaponise, to prevent criticism of any action of Israel no matter however bloodthirsty and inhumane. The genocide being carried out on the Palestinians today and the illegal invasions of Syria, Lebanon and Iran are just the latest examples of a strategy that has been in place since 1947, with the active support of the guilt-ridden West which seems determined to make the Arab Semites responsible for the West’s own past moral political and legal failures.

That strategy has been a highly successful one, both for the Zionists and the West while ever the postwar superpower was a part of the West. The problem they now face is that the world geopolitical order is undergoing an increasingly rapid change as that superpower enters a period of accelerating military, economic and political decline in its ability to command the world. Multipolarity poses an existential challenge to Israel’s strategy as those newly emerging poles do not suffer the guilt of the West and increasingly recognise Israel as simply a US proxy in the Middle East that is de-stabilising the world through its brutality and barbarism.

That problem is confounded by the emergence of a media order which fundamentally undermines the strict control of the information space which has been a characteristic of the control the West has exercised over world public opinion and perceptions. Control is slipping away as the explosion of social media has rendered the informal censorship that the Western mainstream media has been able to exercise, as set out so eloquently by George Orwell in his unpublished preface to Animal Farm as impossible, recent efforts to the contrary notwithstanding.

This means that as those other poles of power and influence emerge and take up their rightful places in a new geopolitical world order, the capacity of the tiny Israel tail to wag the ageing US dog as it has for the last 80 years, becomes increasingly irrelevant as that dog is no longer dominant. Unless the West recognises the moral and ethical vacuity of its unquestioning support for the atrocities of Israel, the best the Palestinians can hope for is that these other emerging poles will bring this ongoing human catastrophe to an end regardless of the barking of the US dog.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.