OT a riff on censorship, semitism, and God stories

[Joseph Tracy]

The attempt to silence certain speech in Europe and the US, as though people cannot sort pizza gate from watergate for themselves, keeps getting weirder and seems with students protesting what is happen to the people of Gaza to have become a game of wack-a-mole that would like to silence the majority that Congress supposedly represents. The Bill of Rights seems irrelevant to both parties. The latest law wants to silence criticism of Israel and further nail down the attempt to make something called anti semitism illegal. I dislike hate and appeals to demonizing any group, but let’s face ti. In America hate is a way of life, particularly in politics and it gets tricky to sort out who it is ok to hate or criticize and why.





WHAT IS SEMITISM AND HOW CAN YOU HAVE ANTI_SEMITISM WITHOUT SEMITISM?

Ah, words. With all the talk about ‘anti-semitism’ does anyone else but me wonder what the heck is semitism? For that mattter, can anyone agree on what is americanism, is there such a definable thing? I guess we can all thank God, the presumed master storyteller of one of our Abrahamic storytelling traditions, for providing a nominal explanation, by re-writing the Mesopotamian flood myth and including all those cute animals. Which brings up the question does Yaweh like animals or does the word mean wanted dead or alive. Interesting that they ( And God said let us make man in our image, after our likeness, male and female…) made so many more animals than Humans. Or was it the unmentioned Mrs God?

Anyway, Noah and his un-named wife along with Shem Ham and Japheth and their un-named wives built an ark to survive the great calamitous flood and repopulate the world. This all happened well before Mother’s Day when it first  began to be publicly acknowledged that everyone has a mother and that Mothers too have names, faces, ideas even. Why does Yahweh only ever talk to men I wonder? Do ‘they’ hate mothers, and Mother’s Day? Should a law be passed? Anyway the theory of the ancient wise guys, with claims of full endorsement by Yahweh is that the major people groups of the world, the black Africans, the west Asians, and the Europeans were fathered and I assume mothered by Ham, Shem and Japheth and their un-named wives. Apparently Yahweh is located in such an orbit in the heavens that 'they' can only see half the earth and so East Asians and the people of 2 other continents get no mention. Anyway among Bible reading Europeans, Shem, over time, as a people descriptor became semites, or semitic peoples, and the term also describes regional languages as semitic languages and thus the word semite Included for many centuries in various languages basically everyone from Arabs to Phoenicians to Canaanites, Akkadians, etc. and yes, surprise, surprise, Palestinians and Jews( Hebrew is a Canaanite language).


A few years ago you could still find references to semitic peoples online without the warning that it is an “archaic” term. So is Adam, Eros, Chaos, Ma, cloth . But nowhere will you find the word semitism. Apparently semitic peoples don’t get the ‘ism’ thing, don’t feel the necessity of actively believing in themselves or practicing whatever being from that part of the world might cause people to practice. So semitism never became a named thing and it wasn’t until the early woke-ist racial identity theories of the 1800s that Zionists theorized an ethnic identity mostly for non religious Jews. Jew itself is an interesting term, because what happened to the 11 other tribes of Israel and how do you actually know your ancestry is from the tribe of Judah? Anyway The Zionists skipped right past any coherent idea of Jew or semite, past semitism and invented the term anti-semitism to define their enemies.

The end result  over a century later is that criticizing or even hating almost any semitic people is ok with the exception of Israeli Zionists. My final question in the face of the peculiar mass slaughter that is supposed to clarify who is or isn’t the right kind of semitic is why oh why does the one who made the stars, the waters, the plants and animals need armies of hit men to solve a real estate dispute?