How Anti-Zionism Became Antisemitism

History provides an unambiguous definition of antisemitism, yet its meaning has been distorted for ideological ends.

Just like “racism,” “antisemitism” is a term that political factions use to slander their enemies for saying things they don’t like. It has reached the point where congress and the White House are trying to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to suppress speech and intimidate people who have dissenting political opinions. The government is deporting people, companies are firing employees, and schools are silencing students on the basis of so-called “antisemitism.” If we are going to understand antisemitism as more than a hollow political weapon, but instead a pernicious bigotry to oppose, it’s imperative that our society develops a firm understanding of the history of the term “antisemitism” and its lesser known corollary, “semitism.”

“Semites” are a racial category first constructed in the 18th century of people whose ancestors lived in regions that spoke “Semitic” languages, including Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic. Discussions about the history of “antisemitism” today tend to be anachronistic in the sense that they suggest that “antisemitism” can be observed in the disparagement of Jews and Judaism that goes back thousands of years. A prime example is the common description of Antisemitism as “the world’s oldest hatred.”

Humans have been hating each other, as individuals and part of a collective, for all sorts of reasons far before Jews even existed. Ancient Israel itself was mythologically formed, according to the Tanakh (the Jewish bible), through a genocidal hatred of various people of Canaan:

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God. — Deuteronomy 20:10

Furthermore, the use of the term “anti-Semitic” only came into existence in the 19th century, and early included a reference to all “Semites,” not just “Semitic Jews.” The earliest usage of “anti-Semitic” seems to be found in a 1860 criticism by Moritz Steinschneider of Ernest Renan’s article “New considerations on the general character of the Semitic peoples, and in particular on their tendency towards monotheism.” Steinschneider criticized Renan’s “anti-Semitic prejudices” in regard to Renan’s analysis of the religions that came from Semitic people, including Islam and Judaism. Only after the term was adopted by German ethno-nationalists who used it specifically for Jews did it become popularly associated only with hatred toward Jews based on a conceived Jewish race. Antisemitism is in fact one of the world’s youngest hatreds.

The history of antisemitism is intimately tied to the erroneous belief that Jews are a “race.” Due to imagined characteristics of a Jewish race, German ethno-nationalists, such as Wilhelm Marr, argued that Jews wouldn’t be able to assimilate into German society even if they did renounce Judaism, as religion wasn’t their issue. In his 1879 pamphlet, The Victory of Judaism over Germanism: Viewed from a Nonreligious Point of View, Marr wrote:

I may have erred. It might be that Semitism and Germanism will enter a political social peace. I just don’t believe in such a peace. I only believe what I see: our social, political subjugation by you. But instead of boastfully rattling the chains as is done by many, I admit that we have been fettered “hand and foot”, “heart and soul” — from palace to hovel.

We can count him as the originator of the terms “anti-Semite” and “Semitism” and identified himself as an antisemite. He literally established the “League of Anti-Semites.” His hostility to Jews wasn’t simply due to his dislike of their religion, it was due to his bigotry about their imaginary “Semitic” racial characteristics—aka “Semitism.”

The Jew had no homeland. With each passing day he became more estranged from his former native land and memories of it became merely symbolic. Nature had denied him the gift to blend with other people, to assimilate.

“Semitism” is a pseudo-scientific abstraction representing the characteristics that Jews have by nature, according to Marr, not by culture; not by religion—they are characteristics passed on through biological ancestry. Marr attributed character traits to “Semites,” who he equated with Jews.

Within the agricultural Germanic lands the Semitic craftiness and its practical business sense provoked a reaction against the Jews.

Before the 19th century, there was usually less of a racial tinge to the hostility toward Jews. It was most commonly driven by religious and cultural hostility, which could often be relieved if a Jew converted. Some of the Palestinians starving in Gaza are probably descendants of “Semitic” people who converted to Islam or Christianity from Judaism. The antisemites of the 19th and 20th century thought Jews could not convert though because they didn’t recognize Jews as a religious group, but a race. That erroneous notion was explicitly expressed by Adolph Hitler in his 1925 book Mein Kampf:

From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, where as in reality they are a race?

The “Jewish question” that haunted Europe in the 19th and early 20th century was generally about whether Jews could and would integrate into European societies after emancipation. Antisemites answered that question by saying Jews could not integrate because Jews were—by inherited biological nature—incapable of integrating into non-Jewish nations. They proposed expulsion or extermination. For example, one of the most influential antisemitic philosophers, Eugen Dühring, in his 1881 book, The Jewish Question, a racial, moral and cultural question with a world-historic answer, was explicit about the racial characteristics of Jews as a subset of the “Semitic” race:

However, the basic understanding which sees in the Jew not a religion but a racial tribe is already breaking through decisively. Only, it is still, to a certain degree, distorted by the mixture of religion in it. But it lies in the interest of a noble mankind, thus of a true humanity and culture, that this obscurantism of religion, which has up to now covered and protected the worst characteristics of the Jews with its darkness, be fully removed so that the Jew may be revealed to us in his natural and inalienable constitution. Then the cultural characteristics developed from the racial nature can also be understood and measured; indeed even the religion will then get, not merely as a mirror of some characteristics, but independently, an evaluation which indeed diverges very much from that which the priests on the one hand and the religious instructors on the other have made popular in terms of ways of judgement. It is however neither feasible nor beneficial to substitute, regularly and everywhere, a name with an old, well-known ring to it with a new way of characterisation. One may therefore say in brief - when one means the race - Jew’, and not, rather, Semite’. The Jews are a definite small tribe of the Semitic race and not this entire race itself, to which, for example, once even the Phoenicians, remembered from destroyed Carthage, belonged. Arab- Bedouins are not of Jewish origin, but indeed Semites. The Jews are, on the other hand, the most vicious minting of the entire Semitic race into a nationality especially dangerous to nations.

Self-identified antisemites and the creators of antisemitism (as a self-conscious movement, not an abstraction invented by scholars in the future) distinguished their philosophy as being about supposed Jewish racial traits. And they made concerted effort to distinguish it from previous religious antipathy and conceptualizations, even suggesting that religion obscures the truth.

According to Adolf Hitler, the “intellectual pioneer” of Nazism was Theodor Fritsch. After the electoral success of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party Hitler described Fritsch’s “Handbook of the Jewish Question” as “relevant for the anti-Semitic movement.” Many leading Nazis including Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels referred to and cited the manual. The “handbook” was originally titled Antisemiten-Katechismus, or “Antisemite’s Catechism.” In the 1893 edition¹ there is a question and answer section; the first two questions are pertinent to the topic of this essay:

1) What is meant by antisemitism?

“Anti” means “against,” and “Semitism” refers to the nature of the Semitic race. Antisemitism therefore means opposition to Semitism. Since the Semitic race in Europe is represented almost exclusively by the Jews, we understand “Semites” in the narrower sense to mean the Jews. Thus, in our case, “antisemite” means “opponent of the Jews.”

2) How is it possible that in our enlightened age Jews are still persecuted because of their religion?

No one thinks of opposing the Jews because of their religion. No one seeks to disturb their worship; it enjoys the most careful protection from all classes — including the antisemites.

…As the name itself indicates, antisemitism is directed against the “Semites,” that is, against a race, not against a religion. If the antisemites were fighting against the religion of the Jews, they would have to call themselves “anti-Israelites.” It therefore betrays a poor understanding of language when someone connects antisemitism with “religion.”

Given that Fritsch was considered by the leaders of Nazis to be the “intellectual pioneer” of Nazism, everyone should probably consider his definition of antisemitism to be crucial to understanding it. Their conception of Jews as a subsection of a “Semitic race” is irrational, but their conception of themselves as a hater of that superstitious abstraction, while contemptible, is entirely intellectually comprehensible. And for the sake of historicity, intellectual integrity, and the profound moral difference between antipathy based on “race” (a pseudoscientific immutable inherited property) and “religion” (a choice which reflects personality and character), that is the definition and understanding which should be used.

Consider this fascinating passage from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica:

ANTI-SEMITISM. In the political struggles of the concluding quarter of the 19th century an important part was played by a religious, political and social agitation against the Jews, known as “Anti-Semitism.” The origins of this remarkable movement already threaten to become obscured by legend. The Jews contend that anti-Semitism is a mere atavistic revival of the Jew-hatred of the middle ages. The extreme section of the anti-Semites, who have given the movement its quasi-scientific name, declare that it is a racial struggle—an incident of the eternal conflict between Europe and Asia—and that the anti-Semites are engaged in an effort to prevent what is called the Aryan race from being subjugated by a Semitic immigration, and to save Aryan ideals from being modified by an alien and demoralizing oriental Anschauung.

Quite prescient, as the origins of the movement have indeed become obscured by legend. And the “atavistic” definitions of antisemitism that we can see in modern dictionaries and hear from Zionists have become ubiquitous to the point where there are political activists attempting to make atavistic definitions law. Let us examine two of those definitions. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.” From dictionary.com: “discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews.” These definitions neglect to distinguish antipathy toward Jews on the basis of race as opposed to other motivations, such as religion, culture, or politics.

Before the passage from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica was published, some Jews (and Christians) had already begun to cultivate the conception of antisemitism as an old and eternal hatred that the world had against them, not racial in character, but abstract and infinite in form and expression, a metaphysical chameleon that follows them wherever and whenever. Just a few years before Britannica’s, the Jewish Encyclopedia’s discussion of “anti-Semitism” did in fact acknowledge its modern creation:

The term “Anti-Semitism” has its origin in the ethnological theory that the Jews, as Semites, are entirely different from the Aryan, or Indo-European, populations and can never be amalgamated with them. The word implies that the Jews are not opposed on account of their religion, but on account of their racial characteristics.

But further down the entry, under the heading, The Old Hatred of the Jews, it encourages a “wider” interpretation—an eternal and religious, interpretation:

While the term Anti-Semitism should be restricted in its use to the modern movements against the Jews, in its wider sense it may be said to include the persecution of the Jews at all times and among all nations as professors of a separate religion or as a people having a distinct nationality. Its history begins with the period of the Book of Esther, when the charge was first made that the Jews are a “people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from all people; neither keep they the king’s laws; therefore it is not for the king’s profit to suffer them” (Esth. iii. 8).

This passage simultaneously suggests the term “should be restricted” but then creates a “wider sense” that includes “all times and among all nations.” But not even that captures the full history of antisemitism according to the Jewish Encyclopedia; it actually begins, not with Wilhelm Marr, but the Book of Esther—a Jewish mythological tract. The Jewish Encyclopedia reconceptualized antisemitism into a timeless theological archetype—having nothing to do with race—based on a Jewish theological construct of an eternally hostile external world bent on destroying Yahweh’s “treasured possession.” That theological construct is perhaps best expressed in a traditional Jewish liturgical poem, the Vehi Sheamda:

“And it is this that has stood for our fathers and for us. For not just one alone has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation, they rise against us to destroy us. And the Holy One, Blessed be He, saves us from their hand.”

The poem is traditionally spoken during the Jewish Passover holiday, commonly set to melody or song. It can be found in a variety of arrangements, including even hip hop. “The world hates Jews” is a fundamental motif of Jewish mythology, and antisemitism was reconceptualized as the manifestation of it, regardless of the distinct nature of the hatred. That motif can be observed in the enslavement by the Pharaoh, the attack by Amalekites, Purim, the Babylonian Exile, the Book of Judges, Hanukkah, and the destruction of the second Temple.

It was such a reconceptualization of antisemitism that functioned in a dialectic with Zionism. Theodore Herzl, generally identified as the primary founder of modern Zionism, wrote in his journals that it was his reading of Dühring’s book that inspired his messianic passion to establish a “Jewish state”:

When did I actually begin to concern myself with the Jewish Question? Probably ever since it arose; certainly from the time that I read Dühring’s book. In one of my old notebooks, now packed away somewhere in Vienna, are my first observations on Dühring’s book and on the Question. At that time I still had no newspaper as an outlet for my writings—it was, I believe, in 1881 or 1882; but I know that even today I repeatedly say some of the things that I wrote down then. As the years went on, the Jewish Question bored into me and gnawed at me, tormented me and made me very miserable. In fact, I kept coming back to it whenever my own personal experiences—joys and sorrows—permitted me to rise to broader considerations.

The solution to the “Jewish Question” by antisemites and Zionists was symbiotic. Antisemites believed that Jews ought to be expelled from European nations because they could never assimilate, while Zionists believed Jews ought to establish their own sovereign state because they would never be able to assimilate. For the antisemites, Jews could not assimilate because of the racial nature of Jews; for the Zionists, Jews could not assimilate because of an eternal inevitable enmity from non-Jews. The notion of Jews as a race, foundational to antisemitism, is also foundational to Zionism. Thus, leading Zionists such as Max Nordau, cofounder of the Zionist Organization with Theodore Herzl, often spoke of Jews racially:

Before the emancipation the Jew was a stranger among the peoples, but he did not for a moment think of making a stand against his fate. He felt himself as belonging to a race of his own, which had nothing in common with the other people of the country…

This is the history of Israel at the end of the 19th century. To sum it up in a word: The majority of the Jews are a race of accursed beggars. More industrious and more able than the average European, not to speak at all of the inert Asiatic and African, the Jew is condemned to the most extreme pauperism, because he is not allowed to use his powers freely.

Many leading Zionists expressed ideas suggesting that Jews were racially superior to other conceived racial groups. Zionists, despite feeling understandably threatened by antisemites, were not generally opponents of a racial conception of Jews—they simply disputed the specific racial traits that antisemites prescribed. Like the Nazis, many Zionists supported eugenics. Arthur Ruppin, who between 1933 and 1935 was the head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, had this to say about the Jewish immigrant population of Palestine in 1911:

Let a question be touched upon here that is also of importance: the question of whether there is not a possibility to work towards maintaining the purity of the Jewish race in Palestine. Since we want to fully develop precisely what is Jewish in us in Palestine, it would naturally be desirable if only “racial Jews” came to Palestine. But a direct influence on the selection of immigrants according to their greater or lesser approximation to the Jewish racial type is practically unfeasible. Nevertheless, it can be foreseen that the immigrants will generally be more strongly Jewish than the Jews in Europe, because it is likely that those in whom Jewishness is most pronounced, physically and spiritually, will be most repelled by their non-Jewish environment in Europe and will therefore feel most drawn to the Jewish community in Palestine.

During the early 20th century, numerous racial tribalist ideologies were booming. Impious Jews who no longer believed the supernaturalist myths of their religious forebears, often embraced a quasi-naturalist myth of a Jewish race. Given the racialist mythology that exists in the foundational stories of the Tanakh, like that of Abraham and his “seed,” this shouldn’t be a surprise. The Tanakh contains passages that explicitly rebuke members of the tribe for having wives and children outside the mythological race:

After these things had been done, the officials approached me and said, ‘The people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. For they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons. Thus the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands, and in this faithlessness the officials and leaders have led the way.’ When I heard this, I tore my garment and my mantle, and pulled hair from my head and beard, and sat appalled. — Ezra 9:1-2

And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? For we have forsaken thy commandments, which thou didst command by thy servants the prophets, saying, “The land which you are entering, to take possession of it, is a land unclean with the pollutions of the peoples of the lands, with their abominations which have filled it from end to end with their uncleanness. Therefore give not your daughters to their sons, neither take their daughters for your sons, and never seek their peace or prosperity, that you may be strong, and eat the good of the land, and leave it for an inheritance to your children for ever.” — Ezra 9:10-13

Ruppin, in wanting to “purify” the Jews in Palestine sounded a lot like Ezra. Zionists didn’t ultimately need the 19th century “race science” to inspire their eugenicist ideals; they had Judaism. Ruppin wasn’t just a theorist though, he was in charge of the immigration operation for Jews to Palestine between 1933-1935, and his views played a role in it. As documented by the Jewish publication, The Forward:

As head of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency for Israel), [Ruppin] put his purity schemes into practice, arguing that Ethiopian Jews should not be permitted to immigrate, because “they have no blood connection,” and arguing that Yemenite Jews should be brought only for menial labor.

Despite some Jews obsessing over trying to demonstrate a racial unity among Jews, because anyone can convert to Judaism, and people did and do continue to convert, there can logically be no racial unity to it. No one can convert to a race. “Complicating” Jewish identity into something more than a religious identity is an ancient Jewish (and sometimes Christian²) tradition that is still alive and well today. But it isn’t complicated, it’s just superstitious racecraft.

Zionist organizations, like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), disparage people for believing what they label “antisemitic tropes”. The list of beliefs the ADL finds racist includes that “Jews have too much control and influence on Wall Street” and “Jews in business go out of their way to hire other Jews.” It includes those ideas as “tropes” because they resemble beliefs or assertions made by antisemites about Jews, but it excludes the foundational trope of antisemites: that Jews are a race. It probably doesn’t include that “trope,” which contributed to the genocide of Jews and non-Jews, because the ADL itself embraces it. Often people try to use “ethnicity” and “ethnic group” as a way to smuggle in race without actually using the word race. For example, here we see the ADL defining racism as connected with “ethnicity”:

Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.

And here is Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the ADL, calling Jews an ethnic group.

Let’s be clear that the Jews, again, are complicated. And a lot of this doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes that we use today to think about difference. Yes, they are a religion. They are also an ethnic group.

“Ethnic pride” has long been a way for racial tribalists to express and hold onto pride about their race—aka conceived biological lineage or ancestry—while using a slightly different rhetoric that is less taboo. The rhetoric of ethnicity has functioned as a way for racial tribalists to essentially conceal racial judgments and theory without using the language of race. In their usage, it functions identically as the term “race”: establishing inclusion in a group based on biological ancestry. Ironically, even by the definition of racism by the ADL itself the state of Israel is racist because it gives “favorable treatment and evaluations” to Jews.

Israel currently gives special rights to Jewish citizens. As written in its Nation State Laws:

1 — Basic principles

A. The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.

B. The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.

C. The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

Israel also gives Jews particular privileges over property. As documented by Human Rights Watch:

The Israeli state directly controls 93 percent of the land in the country, including occupied East Jerusalem. A government agency, the Israel Land Authority (ILA), manages and allocates these state lands. Almost half the members of its governing body belong to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose explicit mandate is to develop and lease land for Jews and not any other segment of the population. The fund owns 13 percent of Israel’s land, which the state is mandated to use “for the purpose of settling Jews.”

Israel also gives Jews the exclusive right, globally, to immigrate—the “law of return.” It does not give this right to the survivors of the hundreds of thousands of people who were violently terrorized out of their homes in 1948—the Nakba.

The “law of return” includes both converts to Judaism and children of parents who are/were Jews. Which means that a “Jew” who doesn’t have any significant pious appreciation of the Tanakh, nor any recent ancestry in Palestine, has a right to “return” to Israel while the people who were coerced from their homes by militant Zionists and their descendants do not. According to Israeli law, American Jews born in Brooklyn, such as billionaire Jerry Seinfeld, have a greater right to live in Israel than the refugees in the West Bank who were violently coerced from their homes.

Jerry Seinfeld with an IDF soldier.

Ironically, many Muslims and Jews share common biological ancestry, especially Arab Muslims in Palestine and Mizrahi Jews (Arab/Middle Eastern Jews). And many Ashkenazi Jews(aka European Jews) are genetically closer to Italian Christians than Mizrahi Jews.

Our results, primarily from the detailed analysis of the four major haplogroup K and N1b founders, but corroborated with the remaining Ashkenazi mtDNAs, suggest that most Ashkenazi maternal lineages trace their ancestry to prehistoric Europe… Overall, it seems that at least 80% of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry is due to the assimilation of mtDNAs indigenous to Europe, most likely through conversion.

If Israel wants to use ancient blood-logic to give Jerry Seinfeld a right to return to Israel because a minority of his ancestors are presumed to have lived in ancient Judea, why shouldn’t millions of Palestinians be given the right who possibly are more likely than Jerry Seinfeld to have ancestors who lived in ancient Palestine or Judea?

It makes no more sense to conceptualize Jews as a race than it makes sense to conceptualize Christians as race. It doesn’t matter that many Jewish groups have been relatively more endogamous than some other religious groups; there has nonetheless been a significant amount of conversion and intermating among Jews and non-Jews. Other than the genetic evidence, the Maccabees were documented forcefully converting the Idumeans, and there’s a strong case that a substantial factor in the population growth of Jews in the Roman Empire was voluntary conversion. These days the amount of interreligious marriage among Jews is greater than many other religions, such as Mormons and Muslims. From a pew study:

The 2020 survey also finds that 58% of all married Jews say they have a Jewish spouse, while 42% say they are married to a non-Jew. That overall intermarriage rate has not changed much in the last seven years. In the 2013 study, 56% of all married Jewish respondents said their spouse was Jewish, while 44% said they were married to someone who was not Jewish. …

Previous Pew Research Center surveys have found that compared with Jews, larger shares of Mormons (85%) and Muslims (87%) in the United States are married to someone with the same religion.

Still, Zionists have been trying to locate “Jewish genes” for decades now, engaging in pseudo-scientific race research, yet have repeatedly failed: not only because the science doesn’t support the notion of a Jewish race, but fundamentally because it is an irrational quest. Bringing up science that shows some of the Jewish population shares ancestral biological descent is logically irrelevant. No one can convert to a race.

Besides being a common practice and seemingly theological reflex of lots of Jews since antisemites appeared on the world stage, the attempt to expand the definition of antisemitism beyond what it was originally established as has been a product of statecraft and priestcraft. Gradually after the state of Israel was formed there were increasing political efforts to equate the disparagement of Zionism with antisemitism. That effort has taken place in Israel, Europe, and the United States, carried out by Zionist scholars and political elite of the Israeli state. However, every “working definition” or “proposal” by Zionists, such as the IHRA definition that Zionists now are trying to enforce in the U.S., is complete garbage. For example, the first draft proposed by scholarly “experts” from the American Jewish Committee (AJC):

Antisemitism is hatred toward Jews because they are Jews and is directed toward the Jewish religion and Jews individually or collectively. More recently, antisemitism has been manifested in the demonization of the State of Israel.

It is embarrassing scholarship when the definition that the “scholars” provide of antisemitism is precisely what antisemites explicitly said it wasn’t: “directed toward the Jewish religion.” That explicit distinction was also directly substantiated by the 1935 Nazi Nuremberg Racial Laws defining Jews through a racialized framework of ancestry, not religion.

Let’s recall what the Antisemitic Handbook would have to say about the AJC definition:

As the name itself indicates, antisemitism is directed against the “Semites,” that is, against a race, not against a religion. If the antisemites were fighting against the religion of the Jews, they would have to call themselves “anti-Israelites.” It therefore betrays a poor understanding of language when someone connects antisemitism with “religion.”

It isn’t complicated: there doesn’t need to be committees of Zionists designing “working definitions” of antisemitism: it was explicitly, clearly, and coherently defined by antisemites themselves. Definitions like the IHRA’s are political and religious activism posing as objective scholarship.

The political reason why Zionists manipulate the definition of antisemitism is simple: after the Nazi Holocaust, the term “antisemitism” has become associated with one of history’s most heinous atrocities and one of the most understandably hated political cults that has ever appeared on the world stage. That moral association is socially lethal in most of the world now. If Zionists can morally taint anyone with such an association for criticizing their ideology, military actions, history, or spiritual mission, people become afraid of saying or doing anything that could lead the label to be applied to them, justified or not. Ironically, in the name of “fighting hate,” people who now “fight antisemitism” are often prolific spreaders of hatred by framing people who disparage Zionism or Judaism as antisemites. According to the ADL’s own “antisemitic” incident tracking, 58% of all “incidents” in 2024 contained “elements related to Israel or Zionism,” which includes expressing “conspiracy theories about ‘Zionist media’ manipulation” and suggesting a Jew has dual loyalty toward Israel. This implies that it’s “antisemitic” to suggest that it’s part of a Zionist effort to control media when Zionist billionaire Larry Ellison acquires CBS and TikTok with the public approval of Benjamin Netanyahu, who described how these assets will serve as a “weapon” for controlling the political narrative around Palestine.

The ADL claims to be dedicated to “fighting hate,” but simultaneously frames people as “antisemitic” for making reasonable inferences about Zionist political activities. Organizations such as Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism.org publish political blacklists of individuals who they believe are guilty of “antisemitism” and “hate.” StopAntisemitism.org cites the IHRA definition for deciding who gets included on their site. Children’s show host Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Accurso, has expressed sympathy for Palestinian children harmed by the famine in Gaza while also expressing sympathy for Israeli children kidnapped by Hamas. She also raised thousands of dollars for a Save the Children fund for kids in Gaza, Congo, Sudan, and Ukraine. But, for expressing opposition to what she believes is a genocide and sharing information StopAntisemitism.org believes is false, they listed her as “antisemite of the week” for the first week of April 2025 and wrote an open letter to Pam Bondi demanding an investigation into whether Ms. Rachel is operating as a foreign agent.

Canary Mission is largely funded by wealthy Zionist dark money donors, has ties to the Israeli government, and is led by Israeli Rabbi Jonathan Jack Ian Bash. The individuals on their lists are doxxed with photos, other identifying information, and a dossier of their supposed sins—often speech that’s hostile toward Israel. The consequence of being on the blacklist could include career destruction or violent threats. The Trump administration has used Canary Mission for identifying immigrants and visitors that it has tried to deport.

Nothing to see here folks. If you do see something, based on the IHRA definition of antisemitism you are probably antisemitic, and if you say anything about it, you could be put on a public blacklist that fanatical Zionists and governments monitor. Being a Jewish organization like Jewish Voice For Peace won’t even provide exemption from being put on a blacklist.

The most explicit declaration of the Zionist intent to manipulate the definition of antisemitism was from Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, who in 1973 wrote in the American Jewish Congress Bi-weekly a description of the framework that Zionists have now largely approached their critics with for the past 50 years:

One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism. The old classic anti-Semitism declared that equal rights belong to all individuals within the society, except the Jews. The new anti-Semitism says that the right to establish and maintain an independent national sovereign state is the prerogative of all nations, so long as they happen not to be Jewish.

The “new anti-Semitism” became a Zionist “trope.” He of course first defines the “old anti-Semitism” inadequately and unlike the “old” antisemitism, that is actual antisemitism, the “new” has nothing to do with “Semitism.” But it does have everything to do with leveraging the hatred the world has toward Nazis to slander those who disparage Zionism.

As the decades pass, the Zionist “task” to politically manipulate the “Gentile world” to feel that disparaging Zionism is equivalent to antisemitism has only grown. They have now succeeded at passing motions in the United States Congress that equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and establishing the IHRA definition of antisemitism across many U.S. institutions.

As of July 1, 2024, a total of 1,242 entities globally have adopted or endorsed the definition. The 1,242 entities include national and local governments, NGOs, universities, athletic clubs, and corporations. …

271 of the 533 non-federal government adoptions occurred in the UK, with 132 in the U.S., including 95 localities and 37 states, representing nearly three-quarters of U.S. states.

Unfortunately, there is a great danger that can come from such irrational declarations of antisemitism, other than the obvious desecration of the spirit of the First Amendment and instilling fear of criticizing a religion or foreign government. I believe Zionists are right: antisemitism is on the rise; but it’s primarily on the rise because of what Zionists are doing—and because there has been so little effort to explain clearly and distinctively what Semitism is. Rather than challenging and disparaging the racialization of Jews that is at the foundation of antisemitism, most Zionists and their supporters have enabled such a racialization by “complicating” Jewish identity; rather than accepting Jews as a religious group alongside Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Scientologists, they insist that Jews “are something more”—something special. That something special is ancestry. They do the same thing as antisemites, but in reverse.

They are semitists, but instead of conceiving the “Jewish race” they imagine to exist as a cursed race, they see it as a blessed race, and their philosemitism can lead the most zealous of them to see all disparagement of Jews, Judaism, or Israel as a sinister racist plot to destroy the “holy seed.” Love can be blinding, just as much as hatred. For example, John Hagee, the founder of Christians United For Israel (CUFI), the largest Christian Zionist lobby group in the United States, is a fervent philosemite. In a recent sermon he preached about how the “seed” of Abraham and the “descendants” of Jacob—the “Jewish people”—were promised the land of Palestine forever. His sermon conceptualizes Jews through a racial nationalist lens: a biological lineage that was chosen by Yahweh, a “real estate agent” of earth, to “conquer” and rule Palestine. But it isn’t just Palestine:

There are 38 different passages in the Bible that give the borders of Israel. God promised the Jewish people these lands. One half of modern-day Egypt, all of Israel, all of Lebanon, all of Syria, all of Jordan, all of Kuwait, and three fourths of Saudi Arabia.

He suggests it’s a divine duty for Christians to give support for Israel during their current war: “antisemitism never sleeps.” He says, those who bless Israel—defined as the modern state—will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. He asks his audience:

…what has been your treatment of the Jewish people? Remember, Israel is God’s firstborn son. They are the apple of his eye. What have you done literally done to bless the Jewish people?

Of course, the state of Israel appreciates the work of philosemites like Hagee. He boasts about a letter of gratitude from Netanyahu in his sermon. And billionaire Zionist Miriam Adelson, who lobbied for anti-Zionism to be defined as antisemitism, in a speech given to CUFI, praised the Christian audience for the blind nature of their loyalty to Israel:

Christian United for Israel is about putting faith into action… you fine men and women bravely and consistently stand up for Israel and the Jewish people without hesitation without calculation you do it because it is the right thing to do. Because it is the Christian thing to do. Because your souls also pine to Zion. And friends, never has this been clearer to me and to many of my fellow Israelis and Jews than over the past 9 and a half months.

In response to their unhesitating and uncalculated support for Israel, the philosemites have inspired great antipathy toward Israel. And as that antipathy has grown, it has become more socially acceptable and antisemites have become more bold. They’re willing to speak about what others will not; they speak, for example, about the Talmud, which describes Jesus as boiling in shit in the afterlife. But rather than simply making a religious critique, they incorporate a racialist framework. They provide the only conduit for anti-Judaism, because other prominent voices critical of religion, the ones typically comfortable with anti-Christianity, anti-Islam, anti-Buddhism, anti-Hinduism, or anti-Scientology, fear the reputational consequences of speaking out (or are themselves Zionists³).

I find antisemitism detestable. The notion that a person should be judged and classified as racially “Jewish” because they had ancestors who were Jewish is as contemptible to me as the notion that a person should be judged and classified as a “Nazi” because they had Nazi ancestors. I do not want to see antisemitism grow, nor do I want to see philosemitism grow. I want them both to fade into obscurity.

@allday_mma_365

A post shared by All Day MMA on Instagram: "Jake Shields gets into a heated argument with a guy at the airport over Israel 🇮🇱

*not sure why it says UFC champ either. He was a strike force champ

#ufc #mma #jiujitsu #jiujitsulifestyle #wrestling #muaythai #kickboxing #boxing #boxingtraining #knockout #fightnight #fightnights #fights #sportsbetting #sportsbettingadvice #sportsbettingtips #sportsbettingpicks #ufcbetting #sportsgambling #freesportspicks"

“You [Jews] are the ugliest people ever.” — Jake Shields

When Jake Shields calls Jews physically ugly it is a clear proof of racial enmity toward Jews (antisemitism) because Jews, as a religious tribe with a relatively diverse ancestry, do not have any universal physiognomy; only in a racial ideology like Semitism do they share a common and distinct physiognomy. People like Jake Shields and Nick Fuentes will continue to grow in popularity as long as other prominent voices mostly deny some of the things that they say that are actually true, partially true, and disturbing. If prominent people don’t point to radical Jewish rabbis as a valid, although not universal, product of Judaism—a religious choice—then antisemites pointing to the radical Jewish rabbis as products of race (semitism), an immutable universal property, will be what people find. And if people who don’t actually try to fully practice the religion of the Torah nonetheless stay devoted to the religious tribe and continue to identify as “Jews” or “Jewish” based on a solidarity with people who they believe have a particular ancestral lineage⁴, it’s going to reinforce the erroneous notion that Jews are a “racial tribe,” a pillar of antisemitism.

1. Interestingly, despite its historical significance, I could find no English translation of Antisemiten-Katechismus, so I built an app to translate it. A full online translation of the book can be found here.

2. One instance of what can be conceptualized as racism by Christians prior to 19th and 20th century antisemitism was limpieza de sangre (“cleanliness of blood”) laws established by the Portuguese and Spanish Christian Empires between the 15th and 18th centuries that discriminated against Muslim, Romani, Jewish, and Agote converts to Christianity. It was racist in the sense that it was discrimination against people based strictly on their ancestry; however it wasn’t exclusively directed at Jews nor did it have the same ideological framework as antisemitism.

3. For example, Sam Harris.

4. For example, Sam Harris.