The beautiful thing about this world is our ability to interact with people from a variety of differing colours, creeds, religious orientations, cultural norms, standards of education and so on. It truly allows one to appreciate the vast differences between us all. However it doesn't take a genius to notice differences, but it takes talent to spot the similarities we all share.
I was born in the UK surrounded by Caucasian atheists. This was quite a variant from my cultural heritage, an African Arab from a Muslim background. Whilst I was younger it was difficult to remain faithful to my heritage whilst at the same time trying to 'fit in' with society, a problem that I know a lot of people in a similar position to mine face. At sixteen this all changed, I matured a lot quicker than expected. The reason being I moved back to Sudan.
This experience was a reality check in its own right. Imagine living life a certain way, growing up surrounded by sex, drugs and loud music (rock and roll is dead); no one bothers you, or cares about what you do; and most of all the general populace is well educated. Then imagine being taken out of such a nice and cozy life and thrown into the fifth worst city in the world to live based on standard of living and quality of utilities.
The purpose of this blog is to allow me to share with you all what it is like to have lived and experienced 2 very different cultures, (3 if you include my current nation of residence, the UAE), what this has allowed me to learn, and how this has shaped my outlook of the world as a whole. Topics discussed will vary from sports to politics and everything in between. I will inform you in the labels what each post is relative to, but be aware that I will discuss matters that are both trivial and extremely controversial. Anyone who follows this blog from now on and wishes to have an input, please don’t hesitate to contact me and I will do my best to allow you to have an input. Please keep any comments clean relative to any specific posts, no anti-Semitism (in both senses of the matter considering the fact that Palestinians are Semitic), no racism of any sort and no insulting other commentators, we are all entitled to an opinion, so please respect those of others.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The mind of a Sudanese expat
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What does it mean to say, ‘Palestinians are Semitic’?
ReplyDeleteOf course Palestinians speak a Semitic language, as do some 5 million Hebrew speaking Israeli Jews, 25million Amharic speakers and millions of others. But that would not be a useful definition. For one thing, it excludes the majority of the world’s Jews, who do not speak Semitic languages and have historically been the principal targets of anti-Semitism, as promoted by Wilhelm Marr. More importantly, there is no form of racist oppression of the group comprising speakers of Semitic languages, or their putative descendants, as such. Sure, Arabs suffer oppression as Arabs, and to a much lesser extent, Jews may be the victims of occasional racist violence, and some of those who hate and oppress Arabs may also hate Jews. But they hate Arabs and Jews not because of their ‘Semitic heritage’ but because they are Arabs or Jews.
Furthermore, it suggests that there is some ‘real’ race of Semites, who really inherited our semitic racial traits from common ancestors. But since we know that race is not a salient biological category in describing human populations, the only viable definition of ‘race’ has to be as a group oppressed as such by racism.
We don’t really need a separate term for racism directed against Jews, and you may feel that ‘antisemitism’ is a stupid or inappropriate term for Jew hatred, but it was not the Jews, but the anti-Semites themselves, who coined the term and it has stuck and that’s what we’ve got.
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ReplyDeleteThe term is coined to Jews, being anti Semitic is being racist to Jews, but by definition a Semite is a descendent of someone speaking a Semitic language. Your right in the sense that it has been termed as a racist slur by others, but it is Jews that commonly refer to themselves as Semites and Zionists who commonly refer to anyone who disagrees with them as anti-Semites. You’re again right in saying that I think the term is inappropriate, and for that reason I am not referring to it in its commonly used sense, but in the manner in which the term is meant to be used. An anti Semite is anyone racist towards any group of people speaking a Semitic language. As such Arabic, just like Hebrew, is a Semitic language, and terms of racism aimed at Palestinians (or any other Arabs for that matter) are anti-Semitic by definition.
ReplyDeleteI have long argued with friends and acquaintances that racism is racism no matter what and fancy terms such as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are pointless as they all result in the same hate. But I am not in charge of the language used in general by the worlds English speaking population, all I can do is use the language in the correct manner. Hence in my opinion, by definition of the terms, anti-Semitism refers not only to racism towards Jews (many of whom aren’t Semitic as their mother tongues are not Hebrew or any other Semitic language), but also to Arabs.