Adrian Salbuchi is a political analyst, author, speaker and radio/TV commentator in Argentina.
Published time: September 03, 2014 08:50
Palestinian men walk on the rubble of their destroyed houses in the Tufah neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City on August 31, 2014.(AFP Photo / Mahmud Hams )
Once again Israel is very much in the news these days, especially after its new bout of aerial bombardment of Gaza.
As if under a knee-jerking hypnotic trance since these raids began in early July, the Western media again went into “poor-little-Israel-is-only-defending-itself” mode.
Anyone daring to say otherwise will feel the full impact of the “A” word: “anti-Semitism!” That dreaded insult is unleashed like a bolt from Zion’s “Olympus” upon all who criticize Israel!
Jews are a very tiny group of people: just under 16 million worldwide in a planet where over 7 billion people live and toil. That’s a mere 0.2 percent of the global population; the other 99.8 percent of mankind is a wide assortment of ethnic and religious groups.
That in our day and age any man, woman or child should be attacked or harassed on account of race, creed, nationality, ideology, social or physical characteristics is completely unacceptable. The world needs to come to grips with the age-old tragedy of Jews being so often discriminated and persecuted.
However, continuously crying “Anti-Semitism!” to stifle all criticism of Israel’s seventy years of genocidal attacks on the Palestinians does not and should not work anymore.
If discrimination is what Jews truly fear, then the best way to allay such fears is by promoting greater awareness, understanding and transparency amongst the public, of the highly complex historical, political and social issues driving such discrimination.
Especially considering that the worst discrimination facing mankind today is not so much discrimination by large majorities against specific minorities, but rather brutal discrimination on the part of very powerful and well-organized minorities against the vast majority of us all.
Those powerful minorities that threaten everybody everywhere include “bankster” money-masters, giant media moguls, drug lords and blood-thirsty warmongers embedded inside certain superpower governments. Some call this the establishment, others the banking over-world, or simply, the global power elite.
What’s a “Semite?”
Considering Israel and Zionists brand millions of people around the world
“Anti-Semites!” we should start by asking what then is a “Semite”. Sites like
My Jewish Learning explain this as follows:
“the name Semite comes from Shem, the eldest of the three sons of Noah…While Shem and his sons are of biblical antiquity, the Semite is of much more recent origin, dating from eighteenth century Europe… In medieval times… similarities between Hebrew and Arabic were perceived in studies of grammar and lexicography. It was at this time that the two protagonists – the Semite and the Aryan – came into existence. Both are myths… Both originated in the same way and suffered the same misuses, mostly indeed at the same hands. Both names have their origins in scholarship and refer to language. Both date from the great development of comparative philology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries”.
Arabs are therefore also “Semites”, in which case shouldn’t we be saying that the worst, most racist and murderous episodes of genocidal “Anti-Semitism” in today’s world is the anti-Semitism unleashed by American, British, European and Israeli elites against “Semitic” Arabs throughout the Middle East?
Take a good look at Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Bush, Tony Blair, David Cameron, John Kerry, Benjamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman, Moshe Feiglin, Ayelet Shaker: all are directly responsible for the murder of untold millions of “Semitic” Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, Libyans and other Arabs…
If my memory serves me right, in his day Mr. Hitler made extensive use of the term “Aryan” to describe his “master race,” however since the end of World War II this has been pretty much dropped… Isn’t it time we also dropped “Aryan’s” twin brother, “Semite”?
Palestinian women look at the shattered remains of a building complex that was destroyed by fighting between Hamas Militants and Israel on August 29, 2014 in the northern Gaza Strip city of Beit Hanun.(AFP Photo / Roberto Schmidt)
Setting the record straight
Engineered confusion is a key component in PsyWar, as Israel’s very effective spook agency Mossad aptly indicates in its motto: “By deceit shalt thou wage war.” If I may paraphrase Saddam Hussein, “Anti-Semitism” is probably the “mother of all global and historical deceits!”
Let’s therefore clearly define four very distinct and separate categories which will help to clarify and introduce transparency into the ongoing debates over Zionism, Israel and the behavior of both; even if pro-Israel militants go to extremes trying to confuse and roll them up into one sole, and thus false, category:
1. Judaism: a millenary religion. Being non-evangelical, Judaism is socially un-intrusive; no Jew will ever knock on your door on a Sunday morning to try to convert you to the faith of Moses.
2. Jewish People: a very tiny (0.2% of world population), globally-dispersed ethnic group with common cultural, social and religious characteristics, whose members hold a wide variety of ideological and political beliefs.
3. Zionism: a nationalist, racist, political ideology founded in 1897 by Theodore Herzl. Zionism operates through a very powerful and intricate global network of lobbies, think-tanks and pressure groups, all loyally aligned to one overriding priority: the interests and goals of the State of Israel;
4. Israel: a sovereign Nation-State imposed on Palestine in 1948 through force and terrorism.
Powerful Zionist organizations illegitimately claim to speak on behalf of all Jewry. This too is false, for there are legions of anti-Zionist Jews who do not primarily identify with Israel, often rejecting its extreme nationalist policies: Argentine musician Daniel Barenboim, US academic Norman Finkelstein, Israeli writers Israel Shahak, Ilán Pappé, Yakov Rabkin and many others, including anti-Zionist rabbi groups like Neture Karta. Zionists leaders brand such of their lot as “self-hating Jews” (sic!).
In short, stating that opposition to Zionism is “Anti-Semitism” is an outright lie.
People fighting Zionism might be called “Anti-Zionists”, and people fighting Israeli crimes in Palestine could be called “Anti-Israelis”. But not anti-Semites. Anti-Zionists and Anti-Israelis have nothing to say about Judaism as a religion, or Jews as a global ethnic group.
The author of this article is an Argentinean of Italian stock. Yet when confronted with today’s many critics of Argentina and Italy, he would never dare to scream: “Anti-Argentinism!” or “Anti-Italianism!” – much less “Anti-Catholicism!” – at them.
No, no… It’s time for all Jews to grow up and behave like responsible adults and citizens.
If every time Israel and Zionists perpetrate the unspeakable upon their foes, the Western media and governments allow them to hide behind the “A”-Word, then a point will be reached when this irresponsible attitude will no longer be tolerated. That’s when global reactions may get nasty.
Especially considering that Zionist organizations are so inextricably bound together with global bankers, media, and governments, wielding huge influence over the internal and external affairs of countries housing significant Jewish populations like the US, UK, France, Germany, Ukraine, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico.
In truly democratic countries, citizens have an inalienable right to respectfully criticize and unmask the genocidal policies of any state sponsoring and carrying out ethnic cleansing and State terrorism, as Israel does.
This includes the inalienable right to openly debate Zionist policies and the excessive influence wielded by its lobbies, shock groups and smear organizations like AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) and ADL (Anti-Defamation League) in the US, and OSA (Argentine Zionist Organization) and DAIA (Delegation of Israeli Associations in Argentina) in the author´s native Argentina, which have politically harassed him for many years.
AFP Photo / Roberto Schmidt
Are all Jews ‘Semites’?
Sephardic (Semitic) Jews in Israel and the West are a minority, which is notable since they are the ones who can claim probable descent from Old Testament Hebrews.
Most Jews in Israel, the US, Britain, Europe and Argentina, for instance, are of Ashkenazim origin, and here lies a key factor of far-reaching political consequence.
Ashkenazim Jews descend from the Khazars, a Euro-Asiatic Caucasian people who in the 7th to 9th centuries built a magnificent decentralized confederation of Nomadic tribes ruled by a king generically called the “Khagan”.
The 8th Century saw them threatened with assimilation by two powerful neighboring political, military and cultural empires: the Christian Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium, and the Islamic Caliphate in Baghdad.
Accordingly, in 740AD the wise Khazar kings made a portentous, unprecedented and revolutionary decision: they warded off unwanted Christian and Muslim pressure and influence by converting en masse to Judaism.
Centuries went by, the Khazar Empire saw its twilight; Byzantium fell; Islam became dominant in that region, and nomadic Khazars discretely settled into present-day Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, Poland, reaching Central and Western Europe through Romania and Germany; especially their larger cities. Wherever the Khazar/Ashkenazim went, they carried Moses’s faith with them.
In short, Ashkenazim Jews – mostly blond or red-head, light-eyed, white-skinned -are not related to the Hebrews and Israelites of the Bible. They have little or no “Semitic” blood in their veins, and thus no genuine historical or ethnic claim to the Holy Land of Palestine.
This was explained by researcher Arthur Koestler in his 1977 book “The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage”. In 2009, University of Tel Aviv historian Shlomo Sand published “The Invention of the Jewish People” which claimed that the very concept of “one people” is an outright invention: “There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened – hence there was no return.”
Sand rejected most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the Exodus from Egypt. “It’s all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel.”
He adds that “The first Jews of Ashkenazi (Germany) did not come from the Land of Israel and did not reach Eastern Europe from Germany, but became Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus.” Sand added that Zionists’ need to devise a shared ethnicity and historical continuity produced a long series of inventions and fictions, along with an invocation of racist theses. Some he said were concocted in the minds of those who conceived the Zionist movement, while others were offered as the findings of genetic studies conducted in Israel.
Combating ‘Anti-Semitism’
In 2004, the Bush Administration set up a special State Department office to “monitor and combat ‘Anti-Semitism’ worldwide.”
Its first task was to define what
“Anti-Semitism” is. Unable to draft its own
definition, it resorted to a “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism by the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia”, which states:
“Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
It then gives a series of “examples of Anti-Semitism” such as “accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust… accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide than to the interest of their own nations… Demonizing Israel, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis… Blaming Israel for all inter-religious or political tensions…”
Why all the convoluted logic? Why all the layers upon layers of engineered confusion?
Would it not be better to abide by the more transparent view stated by Zionism’s and Israel’s Founding Father, Theodor Herzl, who in his 1898 watershed book The Jewish State explained that “the Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews…”
Why not call things by their true names as suggested in the four categories above, and address them individually? Any real discrimination would then become glaringly obvious!
Let Zionism and Israel openly defend themselves for what they are, and stop hiding behind all the Jewish people and the religion of Moses.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian 
This much is credited with a fair amount of certainty. On 8/1/13 Steven Sotloff, born and raised in Florida, checked into Room 303 of the Hotel Istanbul in the small border town of Kilis in southern Turkey. Three days later on 8/4/13, shortly after checking out of the hotel and heading to the border to take the Kilis-Aleppos highway south into Syria, Mr. Sotloff and his “fixer” were abducted at a check point manned by unknown jihadists.
Dr. Franklin Lamb is Director of the Sabra Shatila Foundation. Contact him at: fplamb@sabrashatila.org. He is working with the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign in Lebanon on drafting legislation which, after 62 years, would, if adopted by Lebanon’s Cabinet and Parliament grant the right to work and to own a home to Lebanon’s Palestinian Refugees. One part of the PCRC legislative project is its online Petition which can be viewed and signed at: petitiononline.com/ssfpcrc/petition.html.
