I think you misunderstand my comment. I mean “Semitic” itself is an pseudo-scientific, outdated, and perhaps racist term (other than it’s usage in linguistics). It comes from the late 19th ~ early 20th century trend of linking linguistic groupings with race/physical characteristics without any reasonable scientific justification, in order to discriminate – Semitic was used in opposition to “Aryan” and sometimes “Caucasian” (equally pseudoscientific and racist usages of those terms) and was primarily part of the language of the predecessors of Nazism. You could of course guess how anti-semitism underwent semantic narrowing to specifically being discrimination against Jews based on that.
Generally the term “Semitic” shouldn’t be used as a racial or ethnic categorization of Arabs/Jews/etc. just as “Aryan” shouldn’t be used in its Nazi sense or “Caucasian” shouldn’t be used to mean "light-skinned people from the near-Mediterranean world. But more relevantly “anti-semitic” no longer is synonymous with “bigotry against Semites”, due to semantic drift it specifically means “bigotry against Jews”.
There are approximately 330 million Semitic people in the world. Around 15.7 milllion (around 4.8%) of them are Jewish.
If the common usage of “anti-semitic” excludes the vast majority of Semitic people, it’s an outdated, racist term.
We should either drop it from our vocabulary or use it in an inclusive way.
I think you misunderstand my comment. I mean “Semitic” itself is an pseudo-scientific, outdated, and perhaps racist term (other than it’s usage in linguistics). It comes from the late 19th ~ early 20th century trend of linking linguistic groupings with race/physical characteristics without any reasonable scientific justification, in order to discriminate – Semitic was used in opposition to “Aryan” and sometimes “Caucasian” (equally pseudoscientific and racist usages of those terms) and was primarily part of the language of the predecessors of Nazism. You could of course guess how anti-semitism underwent semantic narrowing to specifically being discrimination against Jews based on that.
Generally the term “Semitic” shouldn’t be used as a racial or ethnic categorization of Arabs/Jews/etc. just as “Aryan” shouldn’t be used in its Nazi sense or “Caucasian” shouldn’t be used to mean "light-skinned people from the near-Mediterranean world. But more relevantly “anti-semitic” no longer is synonymous with “bigotry against Semites”, due to semantic drift it specifically means “bigotry against Jews”.