The definition of anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving on planet Earth, once again.

Maybe it's about time we understood where the term originated.

It was predictable when I wrote a recent column about why Barack Obama is not-so-latently anti-Semitic that I would be challenged on the use of the word. It happens every time.

Some wise guy literalist will always point out that Semites are all the people of the Middle East. As an Arab-American, I am more than familiar with this assertion, I assure you.

They cite the standard dictionary definition of Semitic: "designating or of the Semites or their languages, - n. a major group of African and Asian languages, including Hebrew, Arabic etc."

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Let's begin by exploring where the term was invented – Germany in the late 19th century. It was coined as a scientific-sounding word for Judenhass, or Jew hatred.

It has meant this and only this ever since.

Jew hatred was on the rise in the late 19th century throughout Europe – nowhere more strongly, however, than in Prussia where a nationalistic historian by the name of Heinrich von Treitschke did his best to promote it. The term always meant Jew-hatred, as opposed to hatred of other Semitic peoples.

Von Treitschke served as an inspiration to German Jew-haters, and the term was widely used in written form – always pertaining to Jews alone. It was a term used almost exclusively by Jew haters themselves.

For instance, after the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, German propaganda minister Josef Goebbels announced: "The German people is anti-Semitic. It has no desire to have its rights restricted or to be provoked in the future by parasites of the Jewish race."

It's further worth noting that Adolf Hitler had no acrimony toward those who spoke other Semitic languages, or other descendants of the biblical Shem. He funded a battalion of Arab Nazi recruits for the grand mufti of Jerusalem as you will learn in the spectacularly well-documented book, "The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism." No two ideologies did more to incubate the plague anti-Jewish terrorist hate than Nazism and Communism, the latter well-documented in Ion Mihai Pacepa's masterpiece "Disinformation."

Only after World War II did the term "anti-Semitism" become widely used by those who viewed it negatively.

Am I nitpicking?

Yes and no.

I want to explain that anti-Semitism, despite the literal meaning, has never been used to hatefully condemn all those speaking Semitic languages, as one might suspect.

So I use it, occasionally, in the way the term has always been used – by both Jews and Jew-haters.

Yet, on the other hand, I must say I have a certain appreciation for those who challenge its use – as more of a euphemism for the more direct and hideous "Jew-hatred."

So I use both – interchangeably.

But "Jew-hatred" is more to the point. It doesn't beat around the bush. It doesn't soft-pedal the true evil that lurks behind this age-old condition. It hits it right between the eyes.

And it is not lost on me that many, if not most, of the practitioners of this disease are either "Semitic" themselves, in the literal sense of the word, or sympathetic to the dominant religion of today's "Semites."

No matter what you call it – anti-Semitism or Jew-hatred – it's a virulent pandemic in the world today.

The worst of the anti-Semites today – whether they call themselves Hamas or Hezbollah or ISIS or al-Qaida or the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade – make no bones about who it is they hate. They may arm themselves as suicide bombers, but it is not out of self-loathing. It's motivated by the worst kind of malevolence – the kind that suggests there's no room in this world for both the Jews and the Jew-haters.

That's why there's no accommodating them in "peace talks" and negotiations and land swaps.

Their goal is simple – one they shared with Hitler and Haman: The total eradication of the Jews from planet Earth.

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