March 31, 2008
The Holy Bible : Rife with Anti-Semitism?
Has the author of this article actually ever, ya know, read the Bible?:
Passages from the [Qu'ran] that rail hatefully against Jews have, unfortunately, long been misused as propaganda. That is tragic, as it is tragic that similar anti-Semitic passages are just as common in the Bible.Unless the author is saying that Old Testament exhortations to war against Israel's neighbors are necessarily "anti-semitic," I'm at a loss to understand what this author means. The Qu'ran exhorts Muslims to undertake violence against Jews as Jews. The Old Testament contains exhortations to the Israelites to fight for Israel and against Israel's enemies--who, true enough, were generally "semitic," as were the ancient Israelites.
I suppose an exhortation to Semitic Individual A to fight Semitic Individual B can be considered "anti-Semitic" to the extent that B is semitic and the exhortation is "anti-B."
Using that definition of "anti-semitic," the state of Israel, which is in conflict with its Arab neghbors, is an "anti-semitic" country. Of course, to use the term in this way robs it of meaning. "Anti-semitic" has traditionally been applied as a perjorative against non-semitic individuals and groups who have negative atitudes toward or take action against semitic people for no other reason than that those people are semitic. Under this definition of "anti-semitic," the term describes something to be condemned. Under a definition of "anti-semitic" broad enough to encompass the Old Testament, the word becomes nothing more than a neutral adjective, in the same way that an overly-broad definition of "racism" becomes similarly meaningless.
