I’m a Semite. Apparently That Makes Me Antisemitic.
In October 2023 I was still adapting to life in France — the language, the culture, the rhythms of a completely different world. I was yearning to belong, to build a community, to make friends, to find my place inside a new and unfamiliar family. It was exciting. I wanted it genuinely. I have always believed there is something remarkable about changing your life completely — starting from scratch with maturity and desire rather than desperation.
Then another catastrophic, horrific event unfolded in the Middle East. And for me, it was just another day. I had lived in a war zone long enough that nothing surprised me anymore. Bad treatment, killing of innocents, stolen lands — that was the background noise of the world I came from. Sad, but true. Normal, in the most devastating sense of the word.
So watching it unfold from a Western country and hearing the range of judgments and opinions around me was actually interesting. People sharing their points of view — that felt like a right, regardless of where anyone comes from or what they do. Where I come from, sharing an opinion is normal. You debate, someone makes a stronger point or doesn’t, and then life continues. You don’t lose people over it. You don’t fight to a point of no return.
I genuinely thought humans across the globe operated the same way.
Then I shared my opinion with a Jewish friend — and life stopped.
Yes, I had Jewish friends in France. Me, the Muslim. I even had a Jewish boss and Jewish clients. Over the years I had learned clearly that people are people, that coexistence is not only possible but natural, and that different points of view are not a threat. But during one single debate, a sudden accusation came — antisemite — and it landed like a knife to the chest. I stopped. I had to listen. I had to check.
I had been called things before. My Christian friends jokingly called me an extremist. My husband, laughing, called me a terrorist for being Lebanese. I was called racist over opinions about Asian culture, despite the fact that Asia was always one of my favourite places on earth. I had been called many things, always lightly, always in a context that didn’t shake me. Nothing had ever made me feel genuinely threatened the way that one word did.
Here is the thing — with my political studies background, that word had never really existed in my vocabulary. I had no real framework for it before that accusation. So I lost that friend that day over a word I didn’t fully understand yet, went home, and researched it.
By its modern definition, I understood what I had been accused of. But when I looked at the true origin and meaning of the word, I was genuinely baffled. How could I be antisemitic when I am a Semite myself? Even for those Lebanese who like to believe we descended from somewhere above the region with no Arab history and no precedents — we are still Semites. Linguistically, historically, geographically. That is simply a fact.
So that day I gained one word and lost one friend, and walked away in a state of quiet shock at how the West sees and categorises things — and how efficiently stupid that categorisation can be. Throwing around words absorbed from a system they don’t even fully believe in themselves, reducing an entire person, their history, their education, their lived experience, to a single label. No opinion, no historical context, no facts could penetrate the conditioning they had already gone through.
From that point on I started hiding. I became one of them — afraid to speak, afraid to express, swallowed by the exact same system of fear they all live inside. And from that moment I hated who I was becoming. Just like they do, deep down. But when you live inside those societies long enough, fear becomes stronger than freedom. Liberty gets redefined as the right to be naked rather than the right to have a voice.
And what is actually wrong with having an opinion on racism? Are certain people so untouchable that even naming an injustice puts you above your station? Ironically, that word — antisemitism — has become the primary tool of Zionists, used as a weapon against the very Semites they themselves oppress. They weaponise it against the people it was originally meant to describe. That sentence should not make sense. And yet here we are.
Fighting over vocabulary instead of fighting for history, culture, and everything that actually matters. The world has become a theatre of illiteracy and manufactured stupidity — and it is the product of one system. A system that deserves only one name: destruction.