What Constitutes Antisemitism?
I tried in my earlier piece to give a rough working definition of what does or doesn’t constitute antisemitic discourse. I gave a link to that story above, but there’s something better, more authoritative, and more concise (although being more concise than me is not a tough thing to do). It’s a document produced by the European Monitoring Commission on Racism and Xenophobia, a panel set up by the European Union. I’ve copied the full text of their March 2005 document, “A Working Definition of Antisemitism,” here. Some of these points, stripped of historical context, may seem bizarre. But remember the racist RNC ad; it was designed to look race-neutral when stripped of context but is patently not neutral when placed in the context in which it actually appears. Similarly, there are some forms of “anti-Zionist” rhetoric which look neutral on the antisemitism issue until they are examined in their historical context. The central historical backbone of antisemitic rhetoric (outside the churc
