Ask Lemmy

Yes.
Now that it's been redefined to include any criticism of Israel, as if all Jews are Israeli; People don't care about it as much.

It's because the heritage foundation started using it to attack Palestine supporters. including Jewish ones.

I mean we are at a point that if you don't support a genocide you are being called antisemitic.

It's been weaponized and it's being used as a shield. Of course it's going to lose its meaning.

Wasn't that obvious when people that say they don't tolerate genocide, without even mentioning israel, are automatically labeled as antisemites?

The "antisemitism" brand is just a way to keep playing victim. They sow both fabricated AND real antisemitism.

The fabricated one is used to blow numbers out of proportion. The real antisemitism is used by individual example.

In the end, Israel is the self-made innocent.

Probably. Over the years, I've noticed that some words just seem to catch on amongst people on social media, and it's like their meaning expands and it gets diluted over time. Words like "Nazi", "trauma", and "gaslight" used to carry more weight in the past too.

I suppose it doesn't only happen with negative words like those though. I remember when the word "literally" lost its meaning too

It is a real world example of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

I think the sympathy capital stored away for the Jewish people generated by the atrocities of World War II has not only been cashed in, it's been squandered on political buffoonery, bad wars, and worst of all, it's been utilized to fuel a genocide which is as evil as what the Jewish people survived in Germany.

I highly recommend The Hundred Years War on Palestine.

The current genocide issue predates WWII.

Not just its punch, it's lost its meaning.

People use it as a shortcut to shut a conversation down.

TikTok showed Americans what was happening for like 6 months and all the Zionist propaganda lost its punch. And European Jews are not Semites (while Palestinians are) but that's a different convo, lol.

That’s the point. They’ve cheapen the word so much that has no meaning whatsoever.

Might make more sense to just call someone a racist instead at this point

That and many other terms like it have gone through a lot of concept creep. People just keep stretching the label to include more and more things, which makes it lose its clear definition. That then incentivizes fights where one person uses the loose version and the other sticks to the strict one, so we can't even agree on what's going on in the world anymore.

There's a whole list of terms like that. They've been so mis- and overused that the moment I see someone using them unironically, my eyes just glaze over and all I hear is "Booo! I don't like this."

Yup

In short, yes.

Its not just lost its punch, its almost gone around to being a badge of honor at this point.

Not really the meat of your question, but in my opinion it already lost its punch at its creation, given its etymology. I wish we would have hit the reset button and clarify that when "Semites" and "antisemite" refer to only Jews, it's only in the historical context of Nazi Germany. Sometimes I wonder, if I should simply use antisemitism for the hatred against Palestine, too, and that without any context or explanation.

Are you antisemite?

Has the word antisemite lost it's punch?

Is isn't punch.

It lost its meaning when a bunch of Europeans claimed "semitic language" meant the same as "semitic ethnicity".

It's a Middle Eastern ethnic group, older even than the term Caucasian.

A bunch of European saying it's antisemitic to call them out for committing genocide against actual semitic people never made any sense. Except to make people numb to actual antisemitism , like people are now.

It's damn near the same as trump's:

I'm not a puppet, you're the puppet!

The far right all over live to blame people for what they're actually doing so people go numb to it.