Do not try your abused and outmoded "anti-Semitism" on me. It had no rhyme nor reason to begin with: Arabs and several other Middle Eastern folks are Semites, not only those who speak Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic, but many Afro-Asiatic people constitute that group. Muslims cannot be "anti-Semitic": either their mother tongue or the language they pray in is "Semitic." Were the tens of thousands of people who were protesting Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to weaken the country’s judicial system, consisting not only of the left-wing and pro-Palestinian groups and Arab parties but more than them, the mainstream center- and center-right parties, anti-Semitic, too?

Zionism was a religious ideal for many centuries of the exiled Jewish people to keep their religious (and national) identity. But it was the banner that gave strength and motivation not only to the Jews who were suppressed and excluded from the society in Europe long before they adopted it; Zionism was the banner of Christian Crusaders as well. From Crusaders, British Colonialism, and from them its heirs in the Anglosphere, that is, Australia, the United States, Canada and New Zealand inherited it not as an ideal derived from Biblical stories but as an ideology to shape the modern age.

Not only in the hands of Hitler in the 20th century but also in Spain, Poland and France, in those countries where the beacons of human rights and civilized modernization shone, Jews had been subjected to beatings, murders and expulsions for many centuries. Muslim empires in Spain and Anatolia cuddled and cradled Jews from the cavemen of Europe. But Zion, the shining star of David over Jerusalem, had always been the beacon inviting Jews back to the holy lands. It was wholly and entirely religious: promises of "freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel. It had nothing to do with the supremacist ideas of those fringe parties that slowly replaced the democratic and secular ideal of a homeland of all beliefs as it has been for many millennia. The idea of that joint homeland of Arabs, Jews, Aramaic and other folks in the "Land of the Philistines," in short, "The Jewish Zionism," had been inspired by Christian Zionism.

According to several historians, among them Noam Chomsky, an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism and social criticism, Christian Zionism put the word into the modern linguistics of Jewish Zionism. In other words, it was not Theodore Herzl who asked Arthur James Balfour, first Earl of Balfour, also known as Lord Balfour, a British statesman and Conservative politician who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 to 1905, to put this "ideal into law" and declare it to the whole world. Still, it worked the other way round: Lord Balfour put the words in Jewish mouths.

Eschatologically speaking, Biblical Israel should be re-established so that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ could be realized. One hundred years before the Balfour Declaration, President John Adams wrote, "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation." (But Adams believed that Jews would gradually become Christians!)

Two birds with one stone

The British were killing two birds with the Balfour Declaration: They were finding a solution to their age-old Jewish problem to the satisfaction of Jews; they were providing a homeland to the Jews. At the same time, they were dismembering the rival Ottoman Empire so that Bible-thumper U.S. President Woodrow Wilson would immediately buy it, own the role of its undertaker and finalize it.

Thanks to the colonialist roots, Christian Zionism, and with the help of nationalist Jews, the Jewish version of it has not been any less bloody. Yet, 120 years ago, when Theodor Herzl flared the idea of creating a homeland for Jews based on their "religious and ethnic identity," that is, Judaism and Semitism, he, in no writing or speech, defended Zion as an exclusionary ideology; he never said Israel would give only Jews their own state.

His presentation to Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II was no different than his predecessors: Moses Hess', 1862, "A social and religious association in Palestine for Jews"; Leo Pinsker, 1881, "An emancipation from raising antisemitism in Europe in an organization out of their reach, wherever it could be, preferably in East Africa." Herzl formulated those recipes as "an ideology for the creation of a particularly Jewish state in its Biblical homeland."

The British (first with the help of the French and later the Americans) had to eliminate the "Ottoman Question" before tackling the "Jewish Problem." Remember: in 1917, when Britain issued the "Balfour Declaration" to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the Europeans were still looking for a solution to what they had been calling "The Jewish Question," and they were ready to acquiesce Hitler’s inhuman formula under the disguise of "Peace in or Times." Yes, Hitler killed 6 million Jews with the cooperation of the French, Polish and other Europeans and under the watchful eyes of the British and the Americans.

Today, neither the Jewish prayer that "May our eyes behold your return to Zion" nor Herzl’s Zionism returning to Palestine has anything to do with religion. How could the killing of almost 4,000 babies and little children, 7,000 innocent men and women, be related to any religion? As a political ideology that constitutes justification for the occupation of other people’s lands and houses, the current version of Zionism has created its own hyper-reality: Arab Palestinians, in general, and Hamas, in particular, commit atrocities that include mass murder, rape and kidnapping.

The ill-gotten and poorly thought-out Oct. 7 Shabbat Raid of Hamas added fuel to this narrative. According to The New York Times, "The Oct. 7 assault on Israel and a surge in acts of antisemitism have awakened a repressed horror in Jewish populations across the continent." What surge of anti-Semitism? Arabs who are Semitic themselves are now becoming anti-Semitic? The Daily Beast, of all beasts, drags Russian President Vladimir Putin to "the new wave of antisemitism" simply because they did not condemn a door sign somebody put in a hotel in Khasavyurt, in the Russian republic of Dagestan!

No, no! What the NYT and their ilk are trying to do is to add new flames to their Zionist ideology; thus, it would go to the very end: ethnic cleansing of Palestine: A Palestine without Palestinians. Of course, they know very well that the Russian president does not follow the door signs forbidding entrance to Jews in a country that is twice as large as the U.S.

Reality of ideologies

Ideologies work that way: They create their own reality to create their dominance over the reality of others. Ideologies appear natural; they seem to be common sense and thus are often invisible and elude criticism. That is how the mass media in the U.S. and its social media extensions function as a means of generating false consciousness. The U.S., European and Israeli media expect that the entire world should join them in condemnation of Hamas and Islamic Jihad because of what they did in the Oct. 7 massacres.

Their ideology closed their eyes to the fact that what Israel has been doing since then, with the help of the U.S. and EU, upended world public opinion. The inhumanity of the Israeli armed forces, the crimes against humanity Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his accomplices, U.S. President Biden, U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and unelected EU commissioners, committed are so gross that the world does not only say that the Oct. 7 had not happened in a vacuum, but it says Hamas had a point in its actions against Netanyahu government.

Ideologies work that way. They make you act in a manner that you lose your deserving cause. In your rapaciousness, you take the mask off; people see who you really are: a murderous Zionist seeking to complete its colonization.