Throughout history there have been at least three sorts of anti-semitic thought, one that condemns ethnic Jews, one that condemns religious Jews, one that condemns both ethnic and religious Jews. Antisemitism of the middle sort is very much a part of Eastern Christianity which has long viewed contemporary Judaism as an explicit rejection of Jesus being the Christ. But were a Jew to convert religiously, without losing any of their ethnicity, they would no longer be a religious Jew. This is a different form of antisemitism than the sort that views being ethnic Jew as somehow being a lesser human being regardless of religious belief.

But, to make things even more confusing, it just so happens that (1) in the English language we generally use "Jew" to describe both ethnicity and religion and (2) there are few ethnicities outside of the Jewish people that are religiously Jewish. So both forms of antisemitism are frequently conflated. Admittedly, it is true that a fair argument could be made that Asiatic Jews, African Jews and European Jews are all really different ethnicities. Yet all these groups claim to have a common ethnic heritage as descendants of Abraham. That is to say, all claim to be ethnically Jewish.

The same isn't true for Islam. Islam has never been an ethnically based religion. Rather, from the start, it was intended to bring various ethnicities together in a union that shared ethnicity cannot provide. Turks, Malaysians, Indonesians, Chinese, Persians and Arabs that are Muslim will not claim a common ethnic heritage in the way that Jews do.

While there are some people that equate Islam with an ethnicity, usually being Arabic, I'm not convince that this view is all that widespread. There were Arabic rite Churches in the US that were firebombed after 9/11. And there was that American nutcase that shot a Coptic Christian and a Sikh seeking revence against Muslims after 9/11. But then one has to posit that being Indian, Copt, or Arabic all have a common ethnicity or that Sikhism, Coptic Christianity, and Islam all have a common religiosity in order to make the case that being anti-islamic is the same as being antisemitic.

It's almost as if some people are lazy and ignorant and actively look for ways to distinguish "us" from "them" and just kind of bullshit their way along making up reasons to hate those outside of their "tribe." In that sense, the two isms are very similar. But in that view, just about any form of bigotry falls under the same rubric. And it seems to me that falling back on that commonality doesn't really explain the full phenomena of antisemitism and antiislamism.

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Kindness is an act of rebellion.

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