Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul says the occasion is wrong to proclaim a sovereign Palestinian state, and that such a decision would send a "wrong signal”.

  • acargitz@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    No. Arabic is a semitic language, in the sense that German is an indoeuropean language, but in modern times, that’s the extent of the similarity between the words and it that has nothing further to do with antisemitism as a word of its own. “Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).”

    See also the Wikipedia article on Semitic people:

    Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East, including Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping “Semitic languages” in linguistics. […] In archaeology, the term is sometimes used informally as “a kind of shorthand” for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples. The use of the term as a racial category is considered obsolete.